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Lecture 1: Meet Your New Best Friend: the Square Root of
Negative One
Grant Franks
June 19, 2019, rev Sept. 9, 2019
Introduction
This is the first of a series of six lectures on algebra. A�er today’s lecture, there will be four more talks
on successive Tuesday evenings, each unpacking a step along the way to the final result that I want to
share with you, Gauss’s demonstration of the Constructibility of the Seventeen-Sided Polygon or
“Heptadecagon.” (The schedule is available on the handouts.) A�erwards, on October 16, there will be
a final Wednesday a�ernoon lecture that very briefly recaps the contents of the Tuesday evening
technical talks and concludes with some reflections on the significance of the square root of negative
one to the foundations of arithmetic and the relation of ordinary experience to mathematics.
This series of talks grew out of a remark that a former dean of the College made to me years ago. This
person, whom I respect and admire greatly, said something I thought was seriously questionable.
“Algebra is boring,” he opined. “Our students love geometry,” he said, “because its beauty strikes
them immediately. But algebra is just a tool, a technique. Nobody wants to spend any class time
studying it. It’s just dull.”
I took those words as a challenge. It didn’t seem plausible that sane people would devote countless
hours of intense intellectual effort to something that is inherently dull, at least without being paid a lot
of money. (Algebraists generally are not highly paid.) Do they really enjoy tedium?
No, they don’t. Algebraic structures have a real beauty, even if it takes a little work to notice and
appreciate it.
For better or for worse, algebraic beauty is invisible beauty, and the taste for it is an acquired taste, like
that for single malt scotch, twelve-tone music or the word-play of Finnegans Wake. My on-again, offagain quest, therefore, for many years has therefore been to find the some entryway into what algebra
has to offer, something more appealing than exercises in factoring polynomials. I wanted to find the
algebraic equivalent of the Pythagorean Theorem, some result that would make someone stand still in
wonder and say, “Whoa! Really?,” as Thomas Hobbes reportedly did when he saw a copy of Euclid
open to proposition 47 of book one. Legend has it that he stood transfixed at a library table for hours
reading the entire first book of the Elements BACKWARD until he arrived at the postulates. That
encounter reportedly made him “in love with geometrie.” (John Aubrey, Brief Lives (c. 1700))
What, then, would make someone “in love with algebra?” If anything could do it, I think it would be
Carl F. Gauss’s construction of the heptadecagon. It’s a beautiful result, and the pathway to it, while
�2 ���
1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
not perfectly smooth, requires only a few hours of preliminary work, not years. Also, for this audience,
it speaks directly to geometrical demonstrations that all St. John’s students have encountered by the
middle of the first semester of their freshman year, namely, the propositions of Book Four of Euclid’s
Elements where we see the construction of regular-sided polygons in circles. Euclid shows how to
construct the equilateral triangle, the square, the pentagon -- that’s a hard one! -- and the hexagon
inside a given circle. Then, without explanation, he skips ahead to the fi�een-gon (Elements IV, 16).
Then he stops. Why? Euclid, characteristically laconic, says nothing.
Two thousand years later, a very young Carl Friedrich Gauss provided the answer.
However, in order reach that result, you need to come to terms with [horror suspense sound effect] the
square root of negative one. [mad scientist laugh sound effect]
ζ5
ζ4
ζ6
ζ3
ζ2
ζ7
ζ
ζ8
-1
ζ9
ζ 10
ζ0
ζ 16
ζ 15
ζ 11
ζ 12
ζ 13
ζ
14
Some people have difficulty accepting this number. They say, for instance, that they are put off by the
fact that it doesn’t exist. Which is ridiculous! You shouldn’t let so trivial a problem prevent you from
embracing this concept, for the square root of negative one, also denoted by the single letter i, is the
gateway to an algebraic realm of amazing results. Through it we come to the Complex Number Field.
This is a spectacular realm where we see hidden machinery that links algebra and trigonometry,
wonderfully expressed in DeMoivre’s formula
(cos θ + i sin θ)n = cos n θ + i sin n θ ;
where we find Euler’s famous identity “ei π = -1,” where all polynomial equations can be completely
decomposed into linear factors and where we hear
the buzzin’ of the bees in the cigarette trees
‘round the soda water fountains!
No, wait. That’s the Big Rock Candy Mountains. Never mind. The Complex Number Field is still an
algebraic paradise. It is here that you must go to find the result that I most want to show you, the
construction of the heptadecagon.
Gauss’s result is not overly complicated, but it does involve several separate stages, so I thought it best
not to try to jam all of it into a single talk. Doing that would generate more confusion than understand-
�1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
���
3
ing. So, all I want to do today is to set up the issue of the square root of negative one by describing how
it first appeared, how it was at first dismissed, and how an algebraic triumph led an Italian algebraist to
reconsider the possibility that it might not be gibberish but an important numerical results.
Start Simple: The Linear Equation
We will be concerned with polynomial formulas and their solutions. The simplest polynomial formula
is an equation in the first degree, that is, one where the variable -- we’ll call it x -- appears only to the
first power:
x - a = 0,
Here “x” is an unknown quantity and “a” is something given. To be more particular, we might have:
x - 3 = 0.
What is x? In this case, x is 3. Is that obvious? You don’t need to do the explicit manipulation of adding
3 to both sides of the equation, although you could:
x-3+3=0+3
x = 3.
Already there are, in fact, subtleties and complexities that could be discussed at length. What are these
quantities “x” and “a”? Are they lengths? areas? numbers? magnitudes? Do we know? Do we care?
Are they particular lengths or numbers? It is possible to imagine a “general” quantity that is nothing in
particular? Even if we cannot imagine it, can we conceive of it? What is a “variable” like x? How is a
variable similar to or different from a “constant term” like a? In a situation in which we don’t know
what “x” and “a” are, are there differences in the manner in which we “don’t know x” and in which we
“don’t know a?” Can we “add the same thing to both sides of an equation” if we have no idea what
those things are?
All these questions are interesting and important. However, I’m going to pass by all of them because
the real concern of this lecture lies further down the road in the direction of more complex equations.
The Next Step: the quadratic, x2 + b x + c = 0
I hope you found the linear equation x - 3 = 0 easy to solve. Things get more complicated quickly.
In the realm of polynomials, the next step in complexity takes us to the quadratic equation:
x2 + b x + c = 0
�4 ���
1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
where “b” and “c” are rational numbers. (Why start with “b” and not “a”? Because the really simple
form is “a x 2 + b x + c = 0” where “a,” “b,” and “c” are all integers. But it is convenient to divide out
the lead term “a” and re-define b and c so that one has a polynomial whose leading coefficient is 1.
Such an expression is called a “monic polynomial.”)
There is a path to solving this equation quickly and reliably. It’s called “completing the square.” I
suspect it may be familiar to many of you. In case it isn’t, I will review it here. Stepping through the
derivation of the quadratic formula will be useful when we turn in a moment to the next step, the cubic.
Consider: what does a “perfect square” polynomial look like in algebra? That is, what do we get when
we multiply a single factor by itself. Try making one:
(x - b)(x - b) = x 2 - 2 b x + b2
That’s what a “perfect square” polynomial looks like, one whose two solutions are both b. If someone
posed that polynomial for us to solve,
x 2 - 2 b x + b2 = 0
life would be easy! We would just take the square root of both sides:
x 2 - 2 b x + b2 =
0 =0
(x - b)2 = 0
x - b =0
x = b.
Sadly, x 2 + b x + c = 0 is not perfect square. Happily, however, we can make it into a perfect square, or
at least get close enough. Look again at the general equation for a perfect square:
x 2 - 2 b x + b2 = 0
Notice the relation between the coefficient of x (- 2 b) and the constant term (b2 ). If you take the
coefficient of x, divide by 2 then square it, you get the constant term. Now look at the equation we
actually have:
x2 + b x + c = 0
�1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
By brute force, let’s make a perfect square. First, subtract c from both sides of the equation, just to
“clear the decks.”
x2 + b x = - c
Take half the middle term ( b2 ) and square it: you get
x2 + b x +
b2
4
b2
4
=
-c =
b2
.
4
Add that to both sides of our equation:
b2 - 4 c
4
Now, on the le�, you have a perfect square: x 2 + b x +
b2
4
2
= x - b2 . This is great! Take the square
root of both sides:
x2 + b x +
b2
4
b2 - 4 c
4
=
On the le�, we have the square root of a perfect square, a situation that we deliberately contrived:
x + b2
2
± x + b2 =
b2 - 4 c
4
=
b2 - 4 c
2
(We need to say “±” because both x +
b
2
and -x +
b
when
2
squared give the same result.)
x =
-b
2
±
b2 - 4 c
2
This is the standard form of the quadratic formula for a monic, quadratic polynomial. Plug in the
coefficients b and c, turn the crank and out pop two values for x.
A Cute Quadratic Trick
Before we go on, however, there’s a clever little trick involving quadratics that I want to show you. It
will be used many times in what follows.
Suppose you have two different factors, (x - a) and (x - b) of a polynomial equation.
(x - a) (x - b) = 0
Multiply and expand:
���
5
�6 ���
1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
x 2 - (a + b) x + a b = 0
Look at the coefficient of x and at the constant term: a + b and a times b. The first is the sum of a and b,
the second is the product, where a and b are the two roots of the polynomial. This observation can
easily be generalized. If we had three terms:
(x - a) (x - b)(x - c)= 0
The expanded version would look like this:
x 3 - (a + b + c) x 2 + (a b + a c + b c) x + a b c = 0
For the fourth degree:
(x - a) (x - b)(x - c)(x - d)= 0
The expanded version would look like this:
x 4 - (a + b + c + d) x 3 + (a b + a c + a d + b c + b d + c d) x 2 + (a b c + a b d + b c d) x + a b c d = 0
Maybe you see where this is going: the first non-zero coefficient is always the sum of all the roots. The
second is the sum of all the roots taken two at a time. The third is the sum of all the roots taken three at a
time. The constant term, when you get to it, is always the product of all the roots. These patterns are
very interesting and very useful. The patterns that you see here can be described by saying that the
coefficients are “symmetric functions” of the roots because, as you can see, each of a, b, c play the
same role in each expression. Exploration of symmetric functions is fascinating, but for us right now it
is beside the point.
Look back at the second degree equation, and particularly at the coefficients of the equation: the
coefficient of x is the sum of the solutions a and b. The constant term, is the product of the solutions a
and b. Pause over that for a second: just looking at the polynomial may not tell us the two solutions
immediately, but even a glance at the coefficients give us the sum and the product of the solutions.
Now, turn that observation inside out. Suppose you have two unknown numbers, call them r1 and r2 .
Suppose further that you don’t know what these two numbers are, but you DO know their sum and their
product. In that case, you can make a quadratic equation that has these two numbers as its solutions:
x 2 - (r1 + r2 ) x + r1 r2 = 0
The solutions of this equation can be found with the quadratic formula:
�1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
(r1 + r2 ) ±
(r1 + r2 )2 - 4 r1 r2
2
���
7
=x
You may say to yourself, “That’s great, Mr. Franks. But how o�en, really, does it happen that I come to
know the sum and the product of two numbers without knowing what those numbers are individually?”
Well, in your daily life, maybe not so o�en. However, in the algebraic journey that lies before us, this
little trick is going to show up more o�en than you may imagine.
What Happens When Things Go Wrong
So far, we have constructed the Quadratic Formula, which solves a general quadratic equation:
x2 + b x + c = 0
x =
⟹
-b
2
±
b2 - 4 c
2
You notice that the solution contains a radical, b2 - 4 c . If the quantity under this radical, which is
called “the discriminant,” is positive, all is well. But if that quantity becomes negative, that is, if 4c is
greater than b2 , then we have a problem.
Here is a graph of the equation y = x 2 + 2 x + c. We have arranged matters so that we can vary the
value of the constant term c:
�
y = x2 + 2 x + c,
b2 - 4 c = , -9.16
10
5
-3
-2
1
-1
2
3
-5
The “solutions” -- that is, the x values where the function equals zero, are given by:
x=
-2 ±
4-4c
2
=
-2 ± 2
2
1- c
= -1 ±
1- c
�8 ���
1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
When c is less than one, the expression is positive and there are two solutions. When c is equal to 1, the
expression under the radical is zero and there is one solution. When it is greater than one, the expression under the radical is less than one and, as you can see graphically, there appears to be no solution.
From this example, we might conclude that the square root of a negative number means “impossible.”
Another Example
Descartes came to this conclusion looking at a slightly different example. He considered the expression:
x=
1 - y2
He could picture this by an illustration like the one below. Consider a semi-circle with radius 1. Draw a
line parallel to the diameter with a variable height, y.
�
������
y
x
So long as y lies between zero and one, the quantity under the radical is positive and there are two
solutions, a negative one and a positive one, indicated by the intersection of the horizontal blue line
with the semicircle. When y reaches the value 1, then the horizontal line is tangent to the semicircle
and there is one solution only. When y is greater than 1, the horizontal line misses the semicircle. It
looks as if then there are no solutions at all.
Tentative conclusion: when a radical contains a negative sign, the formula is meaningless. There is no
solution to the equation, and the expression should be rejected as absurd.
That conclusion was generally accepted before Rafael Bombelli began to work with the cubic equation.
�1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
���
9
The Cubic
The cubic equation poses greater challenges than the quadratic. The quadratic equation is not exactly
simple, but its solution has been known for a long time. Babylonians had techniques that were more or
less equivalent of solving a quadratic equation. Some of Euclid’s geometrical manipulations in Book II
of the Elements also answer questions that are closely analogous to finding the solution of the general
quadratic equation.
By contrast, the solution for the cubic equation was not published until the sixteenth century. The
formula for the cubic is known as “Cardano’s Formula,” named a�er Girolamo Cardano who succeeded
where many others had failed … by stealing it from the man who invented it, Niccolo Tartaglia. Cardano published this formula in his [Cardano’s] book, The Great Art or the Rules of Algebra (1545). Let
this be a lesson to you: if you want to make a name for yourself in mathematics, steal freely and publish early. (This is an example of “Stigler’s Law of Eponomy” which states that no result in science or
mathematics is named a�er the person who first discovered it. See, Tom Lehrer’s song, Lobachevsky.)
Because Cardano’s formula is important, I propose to walk through its derivation here. I am aware,
however, that it is hard to follow a sequence of algebraic steps in a lecture format; that’s why I have
printed copies for anyone who wishes to review the derivation later at her or his leisure. The lecture
will also be posted on some part of the College’s web page. Of course, you are also free (if you wish)
just to accept the result on faith.
One begins, not with the full form of the cubic, but with the “depressed cubic,” a formula that has been
manipulated so that the x 2 term disappears. There is a routine procedure for making this happen, so it
does not limit the generality of the demonstration. (The procedure for “depressing the cubic” is
included as an appendix to the printed version of this lecture for anyone to examine at leisure.) Thus,
we begin with:
x3 + c x + d = 0
We want to know what x is. To solve this equation, Cardano -- or Tartaglia, really -- came up with a
special trick: re-conceive x as divided into two parts, p and q so that
x = p + q.
Imagine, then, a cube whose whole side is x, a length that has been divided into two parts, p and q:
�10 ���
1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
�
We can see that the cube is broken up into
(i) a cube of side p (red);
(ii) a cube of side q (blue); and
(iii) three “slabs” of volume p q (p + q) (yellow, green and purple).
�1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
�
�
Symbolically, we have:
(p + q)3 = p3 + 3 p2 q + 3 p q2 + q3 = 3 p q (p + q) + (p3 + q3 )
or
(p + q)3 - 3 p q (p + q) - p3 - q3 = 0
which gives us:
(p + q)3 + (-3 p q) (p + q) + (- p3 - q3 ) = 0
x3
c
x
Compare this to our depressed cubic:
x3 + c x + d = 0
d
���
11
�12 ���
1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
The two are the same PROVIDED:
-3pq=c
pq=
c
-3
p3 q3 =
and
- (p3 + q3 ) = d
or
and
- (p3 + q3 ) = d
or, cubing the first expression --
- c3
27
(p3 + q3 ) = - d
and
Now look: we have expressions for the the sum and the product of the two quantities, p3 and q3 .
Therefore, we can construct the quadratic equation. (I told you this procedure would be helpful!) I’ll
use “w” as a variable:
w2 - (p3 + q3 ) w + p3 q3 = 0
values we just determined:
which will have p3 and q3 as it solutions. Substitute the
3
w2 + d w - 3c = 0
whose two solutions are:
w=
-d±
c 3
(d)2 + 4 3
2
=
-d±
d 2
c 3
4 2 + 4 3
2
=
-d± 2
d 2
c 3
2 + 3
2
=
-d
2
±
2
d2 + 3c
3
The two solutions of this are p3 and q3 . If we take the cube root of each and add them, we get p + q = x:
x=
3
-d
2
+
2
d2 + 3c
p
3
+
3
-d
2
-
2
d2 + 3c
3
q
That is Cardano’s formula -- the one he stole from Tartaglia -- for solving the cubic equation.
What Happens When Things Go Wrong?
For the Quadratic: Apparent Impossibility
If you have followed so far, we have two formulas, one for second degree (quadratic) equations and
one for third degree (cubic) equations.
The quadratic formula:
�1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
For the equation:
x2 + b x + c = 0
x is given by:
x =
-b
2
���
13
b2 - 4 c
2
±
The cubic formula (“Cardano’s Formula”):
For the equation:
x3 + c x + d = 0
x is given by:
x=
-d
2
3
2
d2 + 3c
+
3
+
-d
2
3
-
2
d2 + 3c
3
This is all very well … except if the coefficients are such that the quantities under the square-root signs
become negative.
We have already seen what happens to the quadratic when the quantity under the radical is negative:
the formula seems to give no answer at all and the expression appears to be meaningless.
A priori, we seem to have no reason to suspect that the cubic will act differently.
But it does.
You Can Use Cardano’s Formula to Solve Cubics
Sometimes, Cardano’s formula works just fine. Consider, just as an example:
0 = x 3 + 6 x + 20
where c = 6 and d = 20
Apply the formula to get:
x=
x=
x=
x=
3
-d
2
3
- 20
2
3
3
+
+
2
d2 + 3c
3
2
20
+ 63
2
-10 +
100 + (2)3
-10 +
108
+
3
+
3
-d
2
3
+
+
-10 -
3
3
2
d2 + 3c
-
- 20
2
-
-10 -
108
3
2
20
+ 63
2
100 + (2)3
3
�14 ���
1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
x=
-10 + 12
3
3 +
3
-10 - 12
3
x = 0.73205 + (-2.73205)
x = -2
… which really is one of the solutions, as you can check. (The other two are imaginary, which you
can find a�er you have factored out (x + 2) from 0 = x 3 + 6 x + 20.
x 3 + 6 x + 20 = (x + 2)(x 2 - 2 x + 10)
You can solve x 2 - 2 x + 10 = 0 with the quadratic formula.)
However, Sometimes Things are Very Weird
But things can also go terribly, terribly wrong. Take another example:
x 3 - 15 x - 4 = 0
Here, c = - 15 and d = - 4. Put the values into Cardano’s Formula:
x=
x=
3
-d
2
3
4
2
2
d2 + 3c
+
3
2
-4
+ -15
2
3
+
x=
3
2+
4 + -125
x=
3
2+
-121
x=
3
2 + 11
-1
+
+
+
3
3
+
3
3
+
3
2-
2-
2
3
-d
2
-
d2 + 3c
4
2
-
-4
+ -15
2
3
3
2
3
4 + -125
-121
2 - 11
-1 .
You have an imaginary quantity in each part of the solution. Does result this mean that the equation
has no solution?
No. It obviously does have a solution. Every cubic has at least one real solution. Just look at the graph
of this formula:
�1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
Plotx3 - 15 x - 4, {x, - 5, 5}, PlotLabel → "y = x3 - 15 x - 4"
y = x3 - 15 x - 4
40
20
-4
2
-2
4
-20
-40
This formula should have three solutions. The solution farthest to the right seems to be +4. If there
were any doubt, you can check and see that one of the solutions is +4.
43 - (15) 4 - 4 = 64 - 60 - 4 = 0 .
If the solution of the equation is +4, why did Cardano’s formula give a result with two expressions
involving the square roots of negative numbers? What went wrong with Cardano’s Formula?
This is the question that confronted sixteenth century student of algebra, Rafael Bombelli.
(Rafael Bombelli, 1525 - 1572)
The short answer is that nothing went wrong. The slightly longer answer is that
2 + 11 -1 + 2 - 11 -1 is in fact equal to four. That is far from obvious, which is why we
should be grateful that Rafael Bombelli was a genius.
3
3
���
15
�16 ���
1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
For it was Bombelli who stared at this formula, aware that one of the answers of the equation should
be 4, and finally figured out how to make some sense of what he saw. It occurred to him -- we do not
know how (although mathematician have reconstructed some plausible guesses) -- that the quantities
2 + 11 -1 and 2 - 11 -1 were in fact cubes of other complex quantities:
2+
and 2 -
-1
-1 .
Try it!
2
-1 = 2 +
2 +
-1 2 +
-1 = 4 + 2
-1 + 2
-1 - 1 = 3 + 4
-1
3
2 +
-1 =
2
2 +
-1 2 +
-1 = 3 + 4
-1 2 +
-1 = 6 + 8
-1 + 3
-1 - 4 = 2 + 11
-1
And:
2
-1 = 2 -
2 -
-1 2 -
-1 = 4 - 2
-1 - 2
-1 - 1 = 3 - 4
-1
3
2 -
-1 =
2 -
2
-1 2 -
-1 = 3 - 4
-1 2 -
-1 = 6 - 8
-1 - 3
-1 - 4 = 2 - 11
-1
With this in hand, the strange result of Cardano’s Formula reduces like this:
x=
3
3
2 + 11
-1
2 +
-1
+
3
+
2 - 11
3
3
2 -
-1 =
3
-1 = 2 +
-1 + 2 -
-1 = 4
The square roots of negative one cancel out and the simple answer appears. This looks like magic,
especially if you have spent hours staring hopelessly at the problem, increasingly convinced that it was
created by the devil to torment incautious humans.
This strange result seems to suggest that the square root of a negative number can form part of a
meaningful formula, provided the imaginary quantities in the expression cancel one another out
before the final solution appears. We still don’t know quite what -1 means, but its appearance no
longer implies instantly that a formula is meaningless. It can participate in the strange morrice-dance
of algebra and lead ultimately to verifiable solutions.
Bombelli’s result, wonderful as it is, is far from fully enlightening. Pleased as we might be that Bombelli
could guess what complex number, when cubed, would give the particular quantity he was looking for,
�1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
���
17
his success doesn’t give us much help in solving other problems. Moreover, it doesn’t give us much
help in figuring out what the square root of negative one is. Do the imaginary numbers have any real
meaning? Or are they bizarre brambles that need to be cleared away by ad hoc trickery? Was Bombelli’s result a lucky accident? Or does it represent something valuable?
All that is the subject of the next lecture.
Appendix 1: How to Depress a Cubic Equation
Grant Franks
August 28, 2019
Begin with the general cubic:
x3 + b x2 + c x + d = 0
For x substitute y - b3 :
3
2
y - b3 + b y - b3 + c y - b3 + d = 0
y3 - b y2 +
b2
3
y-
b3
27
+ b y2 -
2 b2
3
y+
y3 + ( b - b) y2 + c -
b2
y
3
+ 227b -
y3 +
b2
y
3
+ 227b -
…
+c-
b3
9
+ cy -
3
cb
3
+ d = 0
3
cb
3
+ d = 0
cb
3
+d=0
Et voila, a depressed cubic.
For example, suppose you had x 3 + 9 x 2 - 3 x + 2 = 0. Substitute x = y - 93 :
(y - 3)3 + 9 (y - 3)2 - 3 (y - 3) + 2 = 0
(y3 - 9 y2 + 27 t - 27) + (9 y2 - 54 y + 81 ) - (3 y + 9) + 2 = 0
y3 - 24 y + 47 = 0
You can solve this (depressed) equation using Cardano’s formula. Then from the values of y, find the
values of x from the relation:
x = y - b3
which means
x+
b
3
=y
�18 ���
1 Square Root of Negative one.nb
Appendix 2: Lectures in the Series
Wednesday a�ernoon lectures, 3:15 pm in the Junior Common Room
Tuesday evening lectures, 7:30 pm in Room FAB 109
1.
Say Hello to Your New Best Friend: - 1
(Wednesday, September 11)
2.
The Bridge between Algebra and Trigonometry
(Tuesday, September 17)
3.
Constructible Numbers
(Tuesday, September 24)
4.
Building the Pentagon with Algebra
(Tuesday, October 1)
5.
The Heptadecagon (17-gon)
(Tuesday, October 8)
6.
Numbers and Meaning
(Wednesday, October 16)
�
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Reconciling Subjectivity and Substance: Hegel’s Critique of Pure
Personhood
Jonathan Hand, St. John’s College, Santa Fe
A while ago, a friend told me how excited she was, when she got to college, in
first learning about ancient Greece. For her, the Greek polis seemed to embody a world
that had those very things which modern life lacked: a sense of purpose, and connection
to a larger whole. The difficulty of translating “polis” flags the issue. The usual
translation, “city-state,” attempts to capture the fact that political units around the size of
Santa Fe were sovereign countries, with their own armies and foreign policy: citizens
assembled to discuss, not property tax rates or zoning, but issues that bore on the city’s
very existence. The “state” in “city-state” however, is misleading, because it implicitly
presupposes the modern liberal distinction between “state” and “society.” Unlike the
quasi-autonomy domains such art, theatre, the economy, and religion have from politics
and each other in our world, in the ancient world these were all mutually reinforcing parts
of civic life. Socrates was accused of not believing in the city’s gods—but in his defense
he did not, as we would, argue that he had a “right” to his own opinions, that there was
some “private sphere,” such as religion, out of which the government should stay. The
fate of Socrates, however—as well as slavery and the status of women-- gave my friend’s
Hellenophilia a marked ambivalence. When pressed on these issues, she said that despite
showing up the fragmentation, alienation, and aimlessness of the modern world, the polis
was not a world to which we either could or even should want to return. We are all
“individuals” now.
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 1 of 38
�Of course, this ambivalence about “modernity” is hardly unique to my friend: it
has been a fundamental aspect of European civilization at least since 1754, when in his
Discourse on Inequality Rousseau distinguished the ancient “citizen” from the modern
“bourgeois,” to the detriment of the latter. Rousseau gave powerful voice to this
dissatisfaction, but he certainly did not “cause” it: it is an understandable human reaction,
one probably at the root of the feelings—ranging from ambivalence to hostility—that
non-Western countries have about “Westernization,” however understood. Dissatisfaction
with or at least ambivalence about modernity is part of modernity. The attempt to
resolve that ambivalence, and reconcile us to modernity, lies at the center of Hegel’s
thought.
This project of reconciliation is most obvious in the presentation of the modern
“ethical world” in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, first published by Hegel in
1821 on the basis of his Berlin lectures, and expanded by editors after his death to include
additions culled from student lecture notes clarifying various points. However, a
1
concern about modernity as a problem, via a contrast with ancient Greece, runs through
all of Hegel’s work. As a recent biography by Terry Pinkard points out, even before
Hegel reached the age of 20, ancient Greece represented for him, as it did for many
young Germans at the time, a world of lost wholeness.
2
Hegel’s word for the quality the Greek world had that is seemingly lacking in his,
and our, time: substantial. A full understanding of what Hegel means by substance is
well beyond the limits of this lecture: Hegel, in using the Latinate term substanz (as
opposed to a term with German roots), puts himself in relation to a tradition starting with
Citations from the Philosophy of Right are styled “PR” and are by section number in Elements of
the Philosophy of Right, translated by H. Nisbet and edited by Allen Wood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
U.P., 1991). For the Editorial Notes, I use page numbers.
Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge UK: Cambridge U.P., 2000), p. 32.
1
2
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 2 of 38
�Aristotle’s reflections on οὐσια and passing through Spinoza and Kant. However, we
need not be adepts in the history of ontology to understand what Hegel is driving at with
the term in a political or human context. For example, Hegel says in PR §40 that a view
of right that divides the world into “things” and “persons” having “rights” to those
things—the classic “Lockean” view, if you like—“jumbles together rights which
presuppose substantial relations, such as family and state, with those that refer to abstract
personality.” My relations to my sister, or to my country, are more concrete and weightier
(I hope) than my relation to my contractor when I hire him to fix my roof, that lengthy
contract notwithstanding. Indeed that contract is required because there is nothing else
grounding, standing under, sub stance, my relation to my contractor. Our relation, Hegel
calls one of “abstract” personhood, because any two parties could make such a contract,
whomever they happened to be.
Helpful in understanding what Hegel means by “substance” and “substantial” are
his remarks at the beginning of the chapter on Spirit, chapter VI, of the Phenomenology
of Spirit. By “Spirit,” Hegel refers to his claim that all consciousness, all mind, is social
and historical “all the way down”: there is never “mind” without its being Greek mind,
French mind, etc. The first 5 chapters of the Phenomenology are an extended reductio
argument where all other views of consciousness are shown to fail on their own terms.
Hegel begins chapter VI with a section on the Greek world, which he calls “True Spirit.”
In the introduction to the chapter, just prior to that section, he says (¶439) :
3
Citations to the Phenomenology (PhG) are by paragraph number in the translation of A.V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1977). I have occasionally revised these using the bilingual version of the PhG
published on-line by Terry Pinkard in 2010, downloaded October 2014 from
http://terrypinkard.weebly.com/phenomenology-of-spirit-page.html. Since Pinkard has subsequently
published the English part of the translation with Cambridge U.P., the site has been taken down, but as of
3
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 3 of 38
�Spirit, being the substance and the universal, self-identical, and abiding essence,
is the unmoved solid ground and starting-point for the action of all, and it is their
purpose and goal, the in-itself of every self-consciousness expressed in thought.
This substance is equally the universal work produced by the action of all and
each as their unity and identity, for it is the being-for-self, the self, action.”
(Hegel’s italics).
Athens makes Athenians, and Athenians make Athens. For Hegel, the “substantiality” of
the Greek ethical world was something the Greeks experienced immediately, i.e.
without reflection or the giving of reasons. Thus, Hegel claims in the Philosophy of
Right, §147, that to speak of the Greeks as having “faith” or “believing in” their gods
understates their immediate identity with their ethical world:
Faith and trust arise with the emergence of reflection, and they presuppose
representations and distinctions. For example, to believe in pagan religion and to
be a pagan are two different things.
The Greeks did not “believe in” paganism; they were pagans. A nice example of this
immediacy is the character Anytus in Plato’s Meno. When Socrates asks him to whom
one should go to become virtuous, Anytus responds irritably that any Athenian gentleman
would be better (92e) than those who make a living claiming to teach such things, i.e.
sophists. Anytus admits (92b) to never having met a sophist, but for Anytus, virtue is
what virtuous people do. That Anytus is one of Socrates’s accusers in the Apology only
underscores the fact that the well-brought up Athenian as such has no patience with those
who ask what virtue is.
For Hegel, “substance” and “immediacy” are hardly peculiar to the Greek world.
It’s the reverse: Greece is important because it is there that spirit experiences a decisive
crisis or division, a crisis evident in the fate of Socrates, who as “free infinite
personality,” as Hegel describes him, has no place in the Greek ethical world. Rather, for
November 2018, the bilingual version was still available at
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/pinkard-translation-of-phenomenology.pdf.
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 4 of 38
�Hegel, all ethical worlds prior to Rome—what one might call “traditional societies”—
show this immediate, unreflective substantiality. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of
World History, Hegel infamously begins with “the oriental world” (by which he means
China, India, and the Persian Empire) which “has as its inherent and distinctive principle
the Substantial [the Prescriptive] in morality.”
4
In the case of China, Hegel claims the
ethical world rests on the pillars of the Emperor’s absolute authority and the spirit of
family piety. The latter of course appears in many other places—it is what is defended
5
by Antigone in Sophocles’ play of that name.
For Hegel, what was undeveloped in all pre-modern societies, and what modern
society has in spades, is “subjectivity.”
Hegel traces the origins of modern subjectivity
ultimately to Christian inwardness—to one’s personal relation to God—an inwardness he
calls in the Phenomenology the “unhappy consciousness” and which emerged in the
alienated subject of the Roman empire. However, it is only in modern times that
subjectivity comes into its own, as a secular and political principle. In an “Addition”
(p.13) to the preface to PR, Hegel describes his (and I think, our) situation:
The human being does not stop short at the existent, but claims to have within
himself the measure of what is right; he may be subjected to the necessity and
power of external authority, but never in the same way as to natural necessity, for
his inner self always tells him how things ought to be, and he finds within himself
the confirmation or repudiation of what is accepted as valid.
This claim is not made everywhere and always, but it might make it seem that modern
subjectivity is a mere “mentality,” the way we think now. Far from it. To be real, a part
of the modern European spirit, subjectivity has to be embodied, made objective, as it has
now become in the modern “state,” a political form which gives an unprecedented
4
5
Cited from the translation of J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956; first published 1899), p. 111.
Op. cit, pp. 120-1.
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 5 of 38
�autonomy to the economy, religion, and the arts: what we call “society.”
Forerunners,
such as Socrates, were mere anomalies.
Hegel is no simple celebrant of modern subjectivity—quite the contrary. Much
like a Socrates swatting off many and varied forms of sophist pests, Hegel spends much
of his argument, in PR, the Phenomenology, and other places cataloguing and combatting
all the various pathological or at least incomplete forms of subjectivity that are sprouting
in Europe like mushrooms after the rain. Thus, in the Preface to PR, Hegel gets in his
crosshairs one “Herr Fries,” “a leader of this superficial brand of so called philosophers,”
who claims that “truth consists in what wells up from each individual’s heart, emotion,
and enthusiasm in relation to ethical subjects, particularly to the state, government, and
the constitution.” Fries and his young enthusiasts, however, are just one flavor in the
contemporary subjectivity smorgasbord. In the penultimate section in the “Morality”
division of PR, §140, Hegel goes through a series of modern variants of subjectivity to
show just where taking truth to be solely “in oneself” finally leads:
It is not the thing which is excellent, it is I who am master of both law and thing; I
merely play with them as my own caprice, and in this ironic consciousness in
which I let the highest of things perish, I merely enjoy myself. In this shape,
subjectivity is not only empty of all ethical content in the way of rights, duties,
and laws and is accordingly evil (evil, in fact of an inherently wholly universal
kind); in addition, its form is that of subjective emptiness, in that it knows itself as
this emptiness of all content and, in this knowledge knows itself as the absolute.
(PR §140, p. 182)
This concern about what we would call “nihilism,” and what Hegel calls “evil” and
“absolute sophistry” (§140, pp. 182-3), are definitive of Hegel’s entire philosophic
effort: to bring together substance and subject, or as we might say, subjectivity and
objectivity. As Hegel famously says in the Preface to the Phenomenology (¶ 17): “In my
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 6 of 38
�view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns
on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”
How, then, in his political philosophy, does Hegel attempt a reconciliation
between substance and subjectivity? To flesh this out, I shall focus on Hegel’s treatment
of the concept of personhood, Persönlichkeit, a notion whose Latin etymology points to
its roots in Roman law, but which only comes into its own in modern times. First, I shall
compare Hegel’s discussion of personhood in the Phenomenology of Spirit with that in
the first section of the Philosophy of Right, “Abstract Right.” While initially the latter
appears far more positive than the former, the differences are traceable to different
manners of treatment, rather than different evaluations. Secondly, I shall look at the role
personhood plays in Hegel’s presentation of the concrete forms of modern society in the
third, and longest, section of the Philosophy of Right, “Ethical Life.” Hegel confines the
applicability of personhood to only one sphere of our common or ethical world, namely
“civil society,” by which Hegel primarily means the economy, the world of property and
contracts. For Hegel, “civil society” is, crucially, bounded (below and above, as it were)
by two other domains of our common existence, the family and the state, which are
constituted by principles qualitatively different from, and inherently more “substantial”
than, personhood. I shall conclude with a few thoughts about how successful Hegel’s
project is, and what its relevance might be to our world.
The origin and the ground of Personhood—from the
Phenomenology to the Philosophy of Right
In the Phenomenology, Personhood first makes its appearance in a sub-section
entitled “Legal Status,” Rechtszustand, which comes at the end of the first major section
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 7 of 38
�of the Spirit chapter (chapter VI, part A), “True Spirit, the Ethical World” (Die Wahre
Geist, die Sittlichkeit). This first section is largely devoted to ancient Greece because, as
I have said, the polis is Hegel’s model for what Spirit is, namely a social world whose
parts form a whole, and to which the individual has a substantial relation. At the same
time, as the motion of World History shows, Spirit is not static. “Legal Status” (VI.A. c.)
marks the transition from the world of the Greek polis to that of Roman law, from
citizens to subjects administered by a bureaucracy. For Hegel, this transition is not
simply due to the contingent facts of Rome’s military conquest of Greece, or of the scale
of Empire as opposed to that of the Greek city. Rather, the Greek world’s passing is due
to, as it were, natural causes. There is an internal tension in the Greek spirit, a tension
whose playing out leads to its evisceration—a crisis to which, in Hegel’s treatment, the
world of Roman Law is somehow, if unintentionally, responsive, the next phenomenon
in the Phenomenology.
As our seniors know, the center of Hegel’s treatment of the Ethical World in the
Phenomenology is his discussion of Sophocles’ Antigone. I only have time for a very
superficial sketch here. Hegel begins (¶446) by noting that “The simple substance of
Spirit, as consciousness, is divided,” namely between human law and divine law. On the
one hand, there is law as made in the public realm by citizens or rulers, as something
explicit, mediated, and subject to change. On the other hand, there is divine law, which
centers on the family and burial rites, and is something known implicitly and
immediately as unchanging. In the Greek world the human law is a masculine principle,
the divine law feminine. The divine and the human law exist harmoniously until
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 8 of 38
�Antigone acts: she buries, against Creon’s proclamation, her brother Polyneices. To
Creon’s question “And so you dared to transgress these laws,?” she says
Yes, for it was not Zeus who proclaimed these things to me,
Nor was it She, Justice, who dwells with the gods below,
Who defined these laws for human beings;
Nor did I think that such strength was in your
Proclamations, you being mortal, as to be able to
Prevail over the unwritten and steadfast lawful conventions of the gods!
For not as something contemporary or of yesterday, but as everlasting
Do these live, and no one knows from where they appeared.
(Antigone lines 449-457)
6
For Hegel, the play is a tragedy because neither Creon or Antigone are “right.” In a way,
both are, because human and divine law are integral parts of the Greek Spirit, in fact, in a
certain sense, of Spirit generally. In another way, both perspectives are wrong because
incomplete: Hegel notes (¶472) that the play’s dénouement shows
The movement of the ethical powers against each other and of the individualities
calling them into life and action have attained their true end only in so far as both
sides suffer the same destruction.
Creon asserts the superiority of the city over the family, only to lose his son and heir;
Antigone asserts the family’s superiority only to die, as her name suggests, childless.
Sophocles’ play thus represents a moment of growing self-awareness within the Greek
world that there is a problem with its fundamental principles.
In the last paragraph before “Legal Status,” ¶476, Hegel speaks of “this ruin of
the ethical substance,” and concludes with a sentence that suggests why Rome is the
“next” phenomenon after the Greek Spirit and its crisis:
The substance emerges as a formal universality in them, no longer dwelling in
them as a living Spirit; instead, their simple unadulterated individuality has been
shattered into a plurality of multiple points.
Cited from the translation of Peter Ahrensdorf and Thomas Pangle in The Theban Plays (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell, 2014).
6
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 9 of 38
�The key phrase is “formal universality.” Are we most fundamentally citizens, or
family members? The formal universality of law sidesteps this question altogether: as
“persons,” we are all subjects of the law, no matter how we “identify” as individuals.
The Latin etymology of “Person,” which derives from the word for an actor’s mask, is
revealing: in the world of legal status, what matters is not the substance of who we are,
what is under the mask, but our “role,” our rights and obligations under a system of rules.
Hegel’s judgment of this new Roman world is harsh. He begins his discussion of
“Legal Status” this way (¶477):
The universal unity into which the living immediate unity of individuality and
substance withdraws is the soulless (geistlose) community which has ceased to be
the substance—itself unconscious—of individuals, and in which they now have
the value of selves and substances, each possessing a separate being-for-self. The
universal is split into the atoms of absolutely multiple individuals; this lifeless
(gestorbene, having died) Spirit is an equality, in which all count the same, i.e. as
persons (Personen).
This world is “soulless” and “lifeless” because its rules seem artificial and alien
impositions, a taste of which we all get around April 15, courtesy of the IRS. (Hegel may
have more than Rome in his sights here.) It’s this soulless world that produced, as a
response, Christian interiority, i.e. the notion that we all have souls, a “depth” that
transcends any civic or family identity. Hegel explicitly links the discussion of “Legal
Status” to his earlier discussion, in the chapter on Self-Consciousness (IV), of the
movement from Stoicism to Skepticism to the Unhappy Consciousness. The world of
Roman law is profoundly unsatisfying; legal personhood (¶478) “is an abstract
universality because its content is the rigid unyielding self, not the self that is dissolved in
substance.” At the same time, this world is, in its way, an “advance” over Greece (¶479):
Personhood (Persönlichkeit), then, has stepped out of the life of the ethical
substance. It is the independence of consciousness, an independence which has
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 10 of 38
�actual validity (die wirklich geltende Selbstständigkeit). The non-actual thought of
it which came from renouncing the actual world appeared earlier as the Stoical
self-consciousness.
It’s one thing to be independent or free in thought, as the Stoic asserts; with Roman law
come the beginnings of an actual or embodied independence, one we will come to know
as rights. As we shall see, however, for Hegel our status as “bearers of rights” is hardly
the full story of what we are.
One aspect of Hegel’s discussion in the Phenomenology which reappears in the
Philosophy of Right is that personhood is fundamentally an “economic” understanding of
the self. It is worth quoting ¶480 of the PhG at some length:
For what counts as absolute, essential being is self-consciousness as the sheer
empty unit of the person…This empty unit of the person is, therefore, in its reality
a contingent existence, and essentially a process that comes to no lasting result.
Like Skepticism, the formalism of legal right is thus by its very nature without a
peculiar content of its own; it finds before it a manifold existence in the form of
‘possession’ and, as Skepticism did, stamps it with the same abstract universality,
whereby it is called ‘property.’…The actual content or the specific character of
what is mine—whether it be an external possession, or also the inner riches or
poverty of spirit and character—is not contained in this empty form, and does not
concern it.
Persons, qua persons, assert “This is mine” about an indifferent, purely “personal” “this.”
Your possessions may show the worst possible taste, but they are still yours. The law, by
protecting property, makes the assertion of “mine”—unlike the illusory because selfcontradictory claim of the Skeptic that all truth is relative, just “my truth”-- “recognized
and actual” (¶480). From Hegel’s description, one is tempted to call personhood an
essentially Hobbesian view of the self, both because of the undetermined nature of the
good that bare “persons” pursue, and because its pursuit being “without lasting result”
recalls the “restless search for power after power ending only in death” that Hobbes says
characterizes the natural state of selves trying to preserve themselves, namely war. As
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 11 of 38
�we shall see, in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel calls “civil society” the aspect of
difference, i.e. of opposition, in the modern Ethical world-- the jostling, competing selves
of the economy are the Hobbesian aspect of society, the domesticated version of his state
of war.
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel treats personhood and the larger question of
“Right” in a different mode: not phenomenologically and historically, but conceptually or
“logically.” The first sentence of the “Introduction” reads “The subject-matter of the
philosophical science of right is the Idea of right—the concept of right and its
actualization.” (§1). Through the book’s three main sections—“Abstract Right,”
“Morality,” and “Ethical Life” (Sittlichkeit, from Sitte, customs or habits), the
development of the concept moves from the most abstract or immediate notion of right to
the most concrete and reflective, right as embodied in an actual social world. [Another
way of seeing the book’s three main divisions: a movement from Locke to Kant to
Aristotle]. Following in the path of the distinction between nature and freedom opened
up by Rousseau, and deepened by Kant, “right” for Hegel is not found in nature but is the
result of freedom, of being asserted and developed by human beings. For Hegel,
however, freedom is not just an “ideal,” the will of the Kantian moral agent who acts out
of pure principle or duty rather than natural or physical motives such as desire or fear.
Rather, freedom is something actual, embodied in the various historical worlds produced
by Spirit. Hegel says (§4):
The basis of right is the realm of spirit in general and its precise location and point
of departure is the will; the will is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance
and destiny, and the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom, the world
of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature.
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 12 of 38
�In this account, personhood comes at the very beginning, “right’s” first word, as it
were. In the first sentence of the last section of the Introduction (§33), Hegel says:
In accordance with the stages in the development of the Idea of the will which is
free in and for itself, the will is [to begin with] immediate; its concept is therefore
abstract, as that of personality, and its existence is an immediate external thing;
the sphere of abstract or formal right.
What this means, I hope, will become clearer from what follows. Hegel begins the next
section, “Abstract Right” (§34), with the following doozy:
The will which is free in and for itself, as it is in its abstract concept, is in the
determinate condition of immediacy. Accordingly, in contrast with reality, it is its
own negative actuality, whose reference to itself is purely abstract.
Why “negative,” you ask? Take the barest assertion of the self, of the will: “I want an
apple.” By not just wanting an apple, as any other animal might, but saying “I” want it, I
distinguish the “I” from my desires. I am not my desire for the apple, or any other desire
I might have. Freedom begins with an act of selfhood that is a negation or distinction,
namely the distinction between the self and its empirical contents. This bare self, as
“abstract” or contentless, is the same for you as it is for me (and in asserting it, I know it
to be so): it is universal. Thus Hegel can say (§35):
The universality of this will which is free for itself is formal universality, i.e. the
will’s self-consciousness (but otherwise contentless) and simple reference to itself
in its individuality; to this extent, the subject is a person. It is inherent in
personality that, as this person, I am completely determined in all respects (in my
inner arbitrary will, drive, and desire, as well as in my relation to my immediate
external existence), and that I am finite, yet totally pure self-reference, and thus
know myself in my finitude as infinite, universal, and free…Personality begins
only at that point where the subject has...a consciousness of itself as a completely
abstract ‘I’ in which all concrete limitation and validity are negated and
invalidated.
In the “Addition” to §35, the point is made more simply:
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 13 of 38
�The person is essentially different from the subject, for the subject is only the
possibility of personality, since any living thing whatever is a subject. A person is
therefore a subject which is aware of this subjectivity.
With this self-awareness, by saying “I,” human beings, as persons, even surpass nature.
The addition continues:
As this person, I know myself as free in myself, and I can abstract from
everything…And yet as this person, I am something wholly determinate.
Personality is thus at the same time the sublime and the wholly ordinary; it
contains this unity of the infinite and the utterly finite, of the determinate
boundary and the completely unbounded. The supreme achievement of the person
is to support this contradiction, which nothing in the natural realm contains or
could endure.
To sum up: in §35, Hegel explicates personhood as subjectivity’s reflection,
turning back upon, itself. What does this reflexivity have to do with “right”? What
Hegel says in §36 seems a leap:
Personality contains in general the capacity for right and constitutes the concept
and the (itself abstact) basis of abstract and formal right. The commandment of
right is therefore: be a person and respect others as persons.
It is hard to see how we get to a notion of right, to a commandment, unless we start from
a notion of personhood as legal status, yet this is precisely what Hegel has not done here.
7
A simple thought experiment might help. When I go into my yard, my neighbor’s dog
barks. One might say, he’s defending his yard. The critical point, though, is that he is not
saying it. If he could, he’d be a person. And, as soon as a hypothetical talking dog said
“This is my yard,” in effect saying “I”, he would also have to admit that I am also an “I.”
In other words, in asserting “mine” he has to admit “yours,” as in “That is your yard,”
and stop barking. (Of course, if he could talk, he might dispute exactly where the
See Friedrike Schick, “The concept of the person in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Rev. Fac. Direito
UFMG, Belo Horizonte, n. 66, pp. 177 - 200, jan./jun. 2015. Found online (October 2018) at
https://www.direito.ufmg.br/revista/index.php/revista/article/download/1685/1601.
7
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�property line is, but that is beside the point). To my great frustration, I cannot explain this
to him. Dogs—despite what some people imagine—are not people.
In other words, in the reflexive act of distinguishing myself from my desire—“I
want an apple”—I am asserting an ownership of that desire: it’s my desire. From there,
it’s a very short step to say—it’s my apple—especially if I worked to get it, or as Locke
would say, mixed my labor with it. For Hegel, it’s only really my apple when I sell it—
i.e. when someone else recognizes it as mine by paying for it. The “commandment” of
§36—“be a person and respect others as persons” sounds like a Kantian moral
imperative, but it isn’t. The form of “right” that goes with personhood is purely formal: it
isa bare assertion of rights which contains no positive content or duty beyond respecting
the rights of others. It’s my apple—whether I eat it, or smash it in the street, is up to
me—my right to it leaves me free for various possibilities, free from you. Thus Hegel
says (§38):
With reference to concrete action and to moral and ethical relations, abstract right
is only a possibility as compared with rest of their content, and the determination
of right is therefore only a permission or warrant. For the same reason of its
abstractness, the necessity of this right is limited to the negative—not to violate
personality and what ensues from personality.
The “negative” character of abstract right makes its subject matter clear: property. Don’t
touch! Property is the way that persons—the most elementary form of selfhood—make
their selfhood objective or real. Hegel makes this clear (§40):
Right is primarily that immediate existence freedom gives itself in an immediate
way, (a) as possession, which is property…(b)A person, in distinguishing himself
from himself, relates himself to another person, and indeed it is only as owners of
property that the two have existence for each other. Their identity in themselves
acquires existence through the transference of the property of the one to other by
common will and with due respect to the rights of both—that is, by contract.
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�When you hear the phrase “It’s ok, they are two consenting adults,” you know you are on
the terrain of personhood.
Thus, while starting from a different point, and proceeding in a different manner
than he did in the Phenomenology, Hegel, in his presentation of personhood in the
Philosophy of Right, arrives at the same place: self-atoms asserting their rights. At the
same time, the practice of slavery shows that the Roman version of personhood is, from
the larger perspective of the concept, defective (§40): “But as for what is called the right
of persons in Roman law, it regards a human being as a person only if he enjoys a certain
status…hence in Roman law even personality itself, as opposed to slavery, is merely an
estate [Stand] or condition [Zustand].” Personhood is, as such, universal. Moreover, by
making only the male head of the family a “person,” and by making his authority over
them a matter of personal rights or ownership, Roman law also distorted the family:
…the content of the right of the so-called right of persons in Roman law is
concerned with family relationships….The right of persons in Roman law is
therefore not the right of the person as such, but no more than the right of the
particular person; it will later be shown that the substantial basis of family
relationships is rather the surrender of personality. (§40)
These things noted, it is still true that there is a profound connection between the
discussion of personhood in the Phenomenology and in the Philosophy of Right. In the
former, personhood appears as a soulless and abstract world, with the death of the Greek
Ethical life; in the latter, personhood, if in a more perfect form, is still in its inherent
abstraction insufficiently substantial to constitute the whole of the modern form of
Sittlichkeit. It is to that which we now turn.
The boundaries of personhood in modern Sittlichkeit
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�For Hegel, right—to be actual, rather than a mere form or ideal—must be
embodied in institutions and practices: “Ethical substance…is the actual spirit of a family
and a people” (PR §156). Furthermore, conceptually, or when thought through,
Sittlichkeit has as three different aspects or, in Hegel’s terminology, “moments”:
A. immediate or natural ethical spirit—the family. This substantiality passes over
into loss of unity, division, and the point of view of relativity, and is thus
B. civil society, i.e. an association of members as self-sufficient individuals in
what is therefore a formal universality, occasioned by their needs and by the legal
constitution as a means of security for persons and property, and by an external
order for their particular and common interests. This external state
C. withdraws and comes to a focus in the end and actuality of the substantial
universal and of the public life which is dedicated to this—i.e. in the constitution
of the state. (PR §157).
The important point here is that, in the ethical world, “civil society” is bounded—both
“below” and “above” as it were—by two other realms which have different principles,
and are inherently more substantial. “Personhood” doesn’t fit neatly into any of the
three, but it seems closest to the “formal universality” of civil society that protects private
property. (This is complicated because Hegel also includes in “civil society” what we
would call the “welfare state,” the government’s moderation of the effects of unfettered
“capitalism” or the pursuit of self-interest). The affinity between the universal notion of
the “person” and economics explains a curious remark of Hegel’s: he says that it is only
in the context of the “system of needs,” the economy, that he will refer to “human
beings.” (PR §190). The implication, I think, is that the family and the state are more
“concrete” realms than civil society. This is particularly true of the family, which is not
made up of mere “human beings” but of husbands and wives, mothers and fathers,
parents and children, brothers and sisters. It is true of the state is well, which is composed
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�in one way of the various social classes (farmers, craft and tradesmen, bureaucrats) and in
another way of citizens and rulers.
For Hegel, ethical life “begins,” not historically but conceptually, with the family,
because its connections seem immediate or “just there,” facts. Immediacy is inherently an
aspect of consciousness, as it always, in the first instance, confronts an “object,”
something “just there.” Immediacy is thus also, as Hegel’s treatment shows, an inherent
aspect or “moment” of ethicality. Hegel says in the Phenomenology (¶460) that the
community’s human law “possesses” “in the divine law its power and authentication:”
by “divine” Hegel means here what Antigone means, law as not made by somebody but
“just there,” a fact, immediate. We have the sense that it is wrong to break a contract,
more so a law, but for Hegel these senses of “wrongness” rest on a more primordial sense
of right and wrong, one that is immediate and unreflective, even unconscious, that lives
in the family. Upon reflection, this immediacy may prove illusory, the family’s form
depending on civic customs such as the incest taboo, spousal monogamy, etc. (This
dependence is what Antigone cannot see). However, one might say that the family’s
“ethicality” is one that is experienced as immediacy, and this is connected, paradoxically,
to the fact that the family emerges from something that for Hegel is not, strictly speaking,
“ethical” at all, feeling (PR §158):
The family, as the immediate substantiality of spirit, has its determination in the
spirit’s feeling of its own unity, which is love. Thus, the disposition [appropriate
to the family] is to have self-consciousness of one’s individuality within this unity
as essentiality which has being in and for oneself, so that one is present in it not as
an independent person but as a member.
In the “Addition” to §158, Hegel usefully explains:
Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am
not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the
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�renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the
unity of myself with another and of the other with me… Love is therefore the
most intense contradiction; the understanding cannot resolve it…[it] is both the
production and the resolution of this contradiction. As its resolution, it is ethical
unity.
Now, this all sounds very exalted—what could be more “ethical” than knowing
myself as the unity of myself with another? Indeed, such knowledge is the very task of
Spirit, the implicit telos of consciousness itself in its desire to make the “object” its own
by grasping it, com-prehending. Yet, Hegel also says here that “love is a feeling, that is,
ethical life in its natural form, ” which means that strictly speaking, love can only be an
image or prefiguration of the ethical. As he makes clear both here and in the
Phenomenology, in the family love is inherently bound up with nature, such as the
parents’ sexual desires for each other, and their affection for their children. Only
Spirit—freedom made actual—is ethical, not nature (PhG ¶451):
However, although the Family is immediately determined as an ethical being, it is
within itself an ethical entity only in so far as it is not the natural relation of its
members, or in so far as their connection is the immediate connection of separate
actual individuals…it is only as a spiritual entity that it is ethical.
In his indispensable commentary on the Phenomenology, Peter Kalkavage gives a
simple example of this dictum: “As a natural father, I am fond of my children. As their
ethical father, I must see that they are properly cared for and educated.”
8
Now, this
might make it seem that Hegel is taking a Kantian position, i.e. that the duty to one’s
children is ethical only in so far as it is motivated purely by the idea of duty as opposed to
feeling. Yet—and this is a long story—Hegel’s entire practical philosophy is an extended
critique of this Kantian view. Put simply, that critique has two related strands: the test of
the categorical imperative is too “formal” to generate any specific content, and all action,
8
The Logic of Desire (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2007), p. 242.
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�for Hegel, has an element of passion (see especially PhG ¶622). Implicitly referring to
Kant, in PR §124 Hegel says “it is an empty assertion of the abstract understanding…to
take the view that, in volition, objective and subjective ends are mutually exclusive.” In
this same section, as well as in the Phenomenology (which Hegel cites here in PR), and
in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel is critical of those who,
having the “morality of valets,” (as in the saying, “no man is a hero to his valet de
chambre”) would deprecate the actions of great men as unheroic because impure,
containing an element of passion or interest.
9
Like Aristotle, Hegel maintains that feelings can be shaped or habituated by
custom or habits (Sitte), but not simply transcended. As Robert Pippin has pointed out,
unlike for Kant, for Hegel spirit or freedom is not a different order of causality than
nature, but rather a mode of self-relation, via a purposive taking up of, a reflective stance
towards, nature. Pace Kant, for Hegel practical reason is inherently impure, which is
10
why in developing the concept of Right, the Philosophy of Right moves from “Morality”
to “Ethical Life.” For Hegel, feeling is as it were only the “matter” of action or our
connections with each other; ethicality or spirit gives this matter form or principle. This
PhG ¶665 with Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, pp. 31-2.
Robert Pippin, “Naturalness and Mindedness,” European Journal of Philosophy 7:2 (1999), pp.
194-212. See esp. p. 207: “Kant’s dualism may not be metaphysical but it is strict; the realms of nature and
spirit are either/or, never both/and, while for Hegel, spirit is, as we shall see, a kind of achievement which
some natural beings are capable of, and so there can be a continuity between natural and spiritual
dimensions.” Pippin points out (pp. 198-9) that, for Hegel, a proto-form of Spirit is present in other
animals: “In the Encyclopaedia passages that describe the ‘transition’ [between nature and spirit], Hegel’s
position is that some sentient creatures do not merely embody their natures, in the way a stone or planet or
an insect might be said simply to be what it is. Some come to be in some sort of relation to their
immediately felt or experienced dispositions, sensations and inclinations…Such creatures do not, say, just
register threatening stimuli; they experience what is taken to be a threat, take up the threat ‘in a way’,
fearfully, feelingly. Feelings thus in Hegel’s language are said to be ‘modes of negativity’ – or nonidentity: a mode of self-relation within an experience, not merely (although certainly also) being in a
state…Soul [as in Aristotle, the principle of all animal life] is said by Hegel to be what it is in its
‘sublation’ of (cancelling the independence of while yet preserving) nature, not in ‘being’ other than
nature.”
9
10
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�formation of nature through custom and habit, Hegel calls culture, Bildung, from Bild,
image or form, similar to the Greek eidos (see PR §20 with §151, 187).
11
Locutions such as “ethical immediacy” or “ethical life in its natural form” might
seem merely self-contradictory, but they are not, or rather they are more than that: they
are paradoxical. As Rousseau answered those who accused him of self-contradiction, the
contraction is “not in me, but in things.” [cite?] For Hegel, the ‘understanding’ (Verstand)
may balk, but ‘reason’ (Vernunft) or “speculation” can grasp unity within contradiction,
identity within difference, paradox.
The paradoxical role of “nature” in ethical immediacy—as both origin and
something surpassed—is evident in Hegel’s discussion of marriage. He begins thus (PR
§161):
Marriage, as the immediate ethical relationship, contains first the moment of
natural vitality; and since it is a substantial relationship, this involves life in its
totality, namely as the actuality of the species [Gattung] and its process.
The translator, H. Nisbet, notes here “In this context of marriage and the family, the word
Gattung (genus, species) carries with it strong overtones of the closely related word
From Hegel’s discussion of Antigone in the Phenomenology, however, one might have the
impression that his view shades ultimately into Kant’s. Since “the ethical is intrinsically universal,” (¶451),
the only ethicality that belongs solely to the family is the duty of burial, a duty towards all of its members.
Burial is a “spiritual” act because it asserts and preserves an individuality by protecting the body from the
ravages of nature, i.e. from becoming mere indifferent food for birds and dogs, “at the mercy of every
lower irrational individuality.” (¶452). Through this act, the individual becomes, in the family’s memory,
a daimon, a protective spirit. Hegel says “this last duty thus constitutes the perfect divine law…every other
relationship…which does not remain simply one of love but is ethical belongs to human law…” (¶453).
For example, the duty to provide for one’s wife and children is enforced by human, civic, ordinance. For
her opposing a spiritual act, burial, to nature, and because, allegedly, siblings “do not desire each other,”
Antigone is for Hegel the paradigm of the family’s ethicality. However, despite her love for Polyneices not
being tinged with “desire,” she is not a Kantian moral agent: she does not act from the dictates of “pure
practical reason.” On the contrary: “the feminine, in the form of the sister, has the highest intuitive
awareness of what is ethical.” (¶457; Hegel’s italics). Moreover, she doesn’t risk death by insisting that all
of the unburied, other women’s brothers, be buried—she asserts no duty to them. She buries her brother,
whose individual loss is “irreparable” (¶473; Hegel cites here Antigone ln. 910). She is very much in the
realm of immediacy, of feeling, of particularity—although one might also say that with her, and in the
divine law, that realm—the family—surpasses itself (the etymology of her name—“against generation”—
suggests as much). Indeed Spirit is self-surpassing, the self-surpassing of nature by culture’s formative
power.
11
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�Begattung (mating, copulation).” Simply put: but for the “facts of life,” i.e. the fact that
human beings reproduce sexually, they never would have come up with the ethical form
that is marriage. That’s not the end of the story, however. §161 continues:
But, secondly, in self-consciousness, the union of the natural sexes, which was
merely inward (or had being in itself) and whose existence was for this reason
merely external, is transformed into a spiritual union, into self-conscious love.
This looks like, but is not, romanticism. Hegel merely argues that, once humans no longer
just have desires, but become selves aware of having desires because aware of other
selves, the nature and object of desire changes. Human lovers look into each other’s
eyes; unlike animals, they desire to be desired. Hegel here follows Rousseau: the
acquisition of self-consciousness means that the road back to simple animality is forever
blocked. Viewed from the perspective of the self, desire as purely animal is “merely
external.”
What Hegel calls the “immediate concept” (§160) of the family’s ethicality,
marriage, seems to emerge from a space somewhere between desire and contract (§162):
The subjective origin of marriage may lie to a greater extent in the particular
inclination of the two persons who enter this relationship, or in the foresight and
initiative of parents, etc. But its objective origin is the free consent of the persons
concerned, and in particular their consent to constitute a single person and to give
up their individual personalities within this union. In this respect, their union is a
self-limitation, but since they attain their substantial self-consciousness within it,
it is in fact their liberation.
Three points bear fleshing out. First, the contrast here between subjective and objective
recalls that between subject and substance; Hegel says here that as an “objective
determination,” marriage is an “ethical duty, ” but that aspect coexists with its subjective
aspect. More pointedly, Hegel makes it clear that “ethical” or spiritual does not mean
separate from the sexual; those who understand these as separate are limited by a
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�“monastic attitude,” asserting “what is falsely called Platonic love” “which mistakenly
views the moment of natural life [Lebendigkeit, lit. livingness] as “utterly negative.”
(§163). Marriage is the result of this combination of subjective and objective, a (§163)
“consciousness of this union as a substantial end, and hence in love, trust, and the sharing
of the whole of individual existence.”
Secondly, the contrast between the subjective and objective side of marriage is,
as it were, recapitulated within the subjective or “external” side, where, it seems, Hegel
tries to find a middle. At one “extreme,” that of a low “level of development [Bildung] of
reflective thought,” marriages were arranged. But, “At the other extreme, it is the mutual
inclination of the two persons.” In the “Addition” to §162, this contrast of “extremes” is
sharpened:
Among those peoples who hold the female sex in little respect, the parents arrange
marriages arbitrarily, without consulting the individuals concerned; the latter
accept this arrangement, since the particularity of feeling [Empfindung] makes no
claims for itself as yet…In modern times, on the other hand, the subjective origin
[of marriage], the “state of being in love” is regarded as the only important factor.
Here, it is imagined that each must wait until his hour has struck, and that one can
only give one’s love only to a specific individual.
Hegel’s tone here shows his typical ambivalence about “modern times,” as does this
remark in the body of §162, which highlights Hegel’s concern about the problematic
status of Sittlichkeit in modernity:
But in those modern dramas and other artistic presentations in which love
between the sexes is the basic interest, we encounter a pervasive element of
frostiness which is brought into the heat of passion such works portray by the total
contingency associated with it. For the whole interest is represented as resting
solely upon these particular individuals. This may well be of infinite importance
for them, but it is of no such importance in itself.
What does Hegel mean by “contingency”? Harry might never have met Sally.
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
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�While not an advocate of arranged marriage, Hegel seems worried that the
pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. This concern about the contemporary
primacy given to love and feeling shows up in his remarks about divorce in the Addition
to §163:
Since marriage contains the moment of feeling [Empfindung], it is not absolute
but unstable, and it has within it the possibility of dissolution. But all legislations
must make such dissolution as difficult as possible and uphold the right of ethics
against caprice.
For Hegel, divorce should be hard; to dissolve a union that is Sittlich, ethical, the fact that
“we are no longer in love” should not suffice (and until recently, it didn’t). The
“objective” side of marriage is also the reason it is traditionally held in a church, but this
aspect is far older than Christianity (§163):
…viewed in a shape appropriate to representational thought, this spirit has been
venerated as the Penates etc.; and in general it is in this spirit that the religious
character of marriage and the family, i.e. piety, is embodied. [The translator’s
endnote, p. 438, informs us that “In Roman religion, the penates were the spirits
of the cupboard (penus); together with the lares (spirits of the hearth), they were
worshiped as guardians of the house.”]
We are now mostly unsure about why marriage is held in a church, and often use words
such as “commitment” when speaking its basis, both signs of the advance of
Persönlichkeit.
Third, the phrase “free consent of the persons involved” makes it sound like
Hegel views marriage is a contract—and it is, but of a most peculiar kind, one that
surpasses itself because it is substantial (§162):
For the precise nature of marriage is to begin from the point of view of contract—
i.e. that of individual personality as a self-sufficient unit—in order to supersede it
[ihn aufzuheben]. That identification of personalities whereby the family is a
single person and its members are its accidents...is the ethical spirit.
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�“Accidents,” since Aristotle, are the qualities which inhere in substances; Hegel cites here
the definition of “substance” in his Encyclopedia. Criticizing a more purely contractual
understanding of marriage, Hegel calls Kant out by name (§161, Addition):
Formerly…[marriage] was considered only in its physical aspect or natural
character. It was accordingly regarded only as a sexual relationship, and its other
determinations remained completely inaccessible. But it is equally crude to
interpret marriage merely as a civil contract, a notion [Vorstellung] which is still
to be found even in Kant…and is thus debased to a contract entitling the parties
concerned to use another.
By “crude,” Hegel refers to Kant’s notorious view that marriage is a contract giving the
parties the use and enjoyment of each other’s sexual organs. Sentimentalism, however, is
not an adequate response. Hegel goes on:
A third and equally unacceptable notion is that which equates marriage with love;
for love, as a feeling, is open in all respects to contingency, and this is a shape
which the ethical may not assume.
For Hegel, one key (and now controversial) aspect of marriage that makes it
substantial—more than a contract between a party of the first part, and a party of the
second part—is that it is, as a whole rather than a mere aggregate, internally
differentiated. Marriage is between two people with essentially different, and
complementary, characteristics: namely a man and a woman. To be fully actual, their
substantial unity depends, for Hegel, on a third thing: the issue of a child (§173,
addition). However, for Hegel, what we now call “gender” is far from being a simple
natural fact: it is part of spirit. As we saw in the section on “True Spirit” in the
Phenomenology:
“simple substance…equally exhibits in its own self the nature of consciousness,
that is, to create distinctions within itself…It thus splits up into distinct ethical
substances, into a human and divine law. Similarly, the self-consciousness
confronting the substance assigns to itself according to its essence, wesen, (Miller
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�has “nature”), one of these powers-- teilt sich nach seinem Wesen der einen dieser
Mächte zu. (¶445).
What does this last obscure sentence mean? What is this assigning (zuteilen), and what is
its basis, “according to its essence”? The subsequent discussion makes some of this a
little more clear: the assignment is gender. When the young man leaves the family, the
realm of ethical immediacy, for the public or political world (¶459):
He passes from the divine law, in whose sphere he had lived, over to the human
law. But the sister becomes, or the wife remains, the head of the household and
the guardian of the divine law. In this way, the two sexes overcome their [merely]
natural being and appear in their ethical significance, as diverse beings who share
between them the two distinctions belonging to the ethical substance. These two
universal beings of the ethical world have, therefore, their specific individuality in
naturally distinct self-consciousnesses…the ethical Spirit is the immediate unity
of the substance with self-consciousness—an immediacy which appears,
therefore, both from the side of reality, and of difference, as the existence of a
natural difference.
Contemporary commentators tend to seize on the “appears” (erscheinen) in that
last sentence, and argue that what Hegel means by “nature” and “natural difference” are
simply what the individuals in a particular historical-spiritual world take to be such—it is
their mistaken view that their relations are based on some immediate available truth. This
view, while having some truth, and consistent with contemporary sensibilities, sidesteps
too neatly a very vexed question: how Hegel understands the status of nature.
12
Erscheinen, appearance, is not scheinen, mere deceptive seeming; the phenomena of the
Phenomenology are appearances (from φαινω, appear), one sided to be sure, of the truth.
Admittedly, gender, appearing immediately in spirit as an essential or simple natural
difference, oversimplifies: “This moment loses both the indeterminateness which it still
had there, and the contingent diversity of aptitudes and capacities.” (¶459). Still, retail is
See the critical remarks about Robert Pippin’s claim (op. cit., p. 204) that in Hegel there is “no
missing ontology” [of nature] in Raoni Padui, From the Transcendental to the Ontological: Hegel,
Heidegger, and the Legacy of Transcendental Idealism (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2012), pp. 224-5.
12
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�one thing, wholesale another; if society makes men and women more different than they
are by nature, where there is a “contingent diversity of aptitudes and capacities,” for
Hegel they are still by nature, on the whole, different. While “nature” appears
differently in different historical-spiritual worlds, these appearances are all appearances
of something. Times change, but nature persists as the “matter” somehow conditioning
the forms Spirit takes in the practical world.
13
Thus, for Hegel, it seems that nature or sex has as it were a continuing
gravitational pull on the differences that Spirit posits within itself, namely gender. In
speaking of gender as “assigned,” Hegel is the ancestor of contemporary feminism; in
maintaining the mysterious persistence of nature, he is its public enemy number one. The
persistence of nature is implicit in how closely the conceptual treatment of the family in
This claim, about the persistence of nature in conditioning spirit, admittedly, seems to contradict
the central claim of Hegel’s Science of Logic, that the Concept, as self-grounding, gets its content entirely
from itself. See the discussion in Padui, op. cit., pp. 224-37, especially pp. 234: “The coherence of this
account relies on understanding the development of nature into the realm of freedom as nature’s own selfovercoming, and it is this aspect that is most difficult to fully comprehend, let alone accept. The selfdetermination present within the sphere of Geist can only be absolute if it can somehow ‘shed’ its
conditionality vis-à-vis its natural conditions, as Hegel himself saw extremely clearly.” The position I am
attributing to Hegel here is closer to what Padui identifies as Schelling’s critique of Hegel, wherein
Schelling insists, contra Hegel, on nature’s “pre-categorical” or “noumenal” reality (Padui, p. 237), as a
reality prior to Spirit. In the phrase quoted above, “the indeterminateness which it still had there” in PhG
¶459 refers, I would surmise, to nature in this pre-categorical sense.
However, it seems to me, that by referring to an “absolute” “self-determination within the sphere
of Geist,” Padui mistakes the relation between the Logic and the Phenomenology, between the eternal
movement of the Concept depicted in the former, and the necessarily time-bound nature of Spirit depicted
in the latter. Even though, as the Phenomenology attempts to show, that it is only in the “last” stage of
Spirit, that of Hegel’s own time, that philosophy can become sophia (see PhG, Preface, esp. ¶‘s 5, 19, 37),
and the philosopher achieve “absolute knowing” or “science,” still: absolute knowing is a thinking of
thinking which is also a thinking of being and is identical to what the Logic poetically and somewhat
misleadingly (if taken literally) calls “God as he is in his eternal essence, before the creation of nature and
of a finite spirit” –this thinking is not, strictly speaking, a human thinking or a form of Geist. See the
discussion in pp. 423-51 in Kalkavage, Logic of Desire, cited supra, as well as Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and
Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology, translated by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston Illinois:
Northwestern U.P., 1974), pp. 581ff, esp. the quote from the Logic on p. 582. Thus, the “ethical” is not
part of the Concept’s self-motion: God’s thinking, the Logic, is beyond Good and Evil. As not embodied, it
is not conditioned by nature or the basis of an actual social world. Hegel thus preserves the PlatonicAristotelian priority of theory to practice. However, there is still a problem: if nature is the “other” of the
Concept, the divine Logos, then, in order to be truly “other,” nature would have to be not totally
comprehended by the Logos: contrary to Hegel’s explicit teaching: the real is not “absolutely” rational.
13
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 27 of 38
�the Philosophy of Right tracks the more “historical” discussion of Antigone in the
Phenomenology. In the former, Hegel cites the latter explicitly (§166). The difference
between the husband and wife in the Philosophy of Right is not identical with the tragic
antithesis between Creon and Antigone. But: the modern difference is not totally different
from ancient difference: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Here is how Hegel
sets out what are now called the “roles” of man and woman in the family (§166):
Man therefore has his actual substantial life in the state, in science, etc., and
otherwise in work and struggle with external world and with himself, so that it is
only through his division that he fights his way to self-sufficient unity with
himself. In the family, he has a peaceful intuition of this unity, and an emotive
and subjective ethical life. Woman, however, has her substantial vocation in the
family, and her ethical disposition consists in this [family] piety.
This description seems now both like ancient history and only yesterday; how much of
this, too, will pass is the question of the hour. Hegel in effect places the entire burden of
there even being a sphere of ethical immediacy distinct from civil society entirely upon
women. Without Penelope’s fidelity, Odysseus would have no home to which to return.
If the family provides a kind of “floor” underlying the impersonal relations of
“persons” that characterize civil society, the state—the third division of “Ethical Life—is
the ceiling, Sittlichkeit’s architechtonic principle and guiding end. What Hegel means
by the state is a huge topic; I limit myself to a few brief remarks. First, contra Locke, for
Hegel the state should not be understood as a contract made between individuals in a
“state of nature” for the securing of their rights against each other (§77; cf. §187, 194).
A “state of nature” does not and cannot exist because the individual is “already by nature
a citizen” (§77, addition). Put more precisely, “individuality” as a reality depends upon a
certain kind of political order, namely a modern one, in which state and society are
distinct (§182, addition):
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 28 of 38
�Civil society is the [stage of] difference which intervenes between the family and
the state, even if its full development occurs later than that of the state; for as
difference it presupposes the state, which it must have before it as a self-sufficient
entity in order to subsist itself. Besides, the creation of civil society belongs to the
modern world, which for the first time allows all determinations of the Idea to
attain their rights. If the state is represented as a unity of different persons, as a
unity which is merely a community [of interests], this applies only to the
determination of civil society.
Secondly, the state’s higher unity, which encompasses the moments of immediate
unity (the family) and difference (civil society, the “economy”) is not, for Hegel, based
upon feeling, love, or any “family-like” notion such as common descent or ethnicity. The
state, for Hegel, has a rational basis. To be affirmed, it must be understood, which is why
Hegel thinks that most people will find themselves not in it, but in the family, their
profession, and/or in religion (see §§201, 255, 270). The constitution and the laws are the
self-conscious articulation and ground of what we in fact always are, members of a
whole, or spirit.
Thirdly, the state for Hegel is necessarily one of many states. On the question of
universality, there is a fundamental divide between theory and practice (§209):
It is part of education, of thinking as consciousness of the individual in the form
of universality, that I am apprehended as a universal person, in which [respect]
all are identical. A human being counts as such because he is a human being, not
because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, etc. This
consciousness, which is the aim of thought, is of infinite importance, and it is
inadequate only if it adopts a fixed position—for example, as cosmopolitanism, in
opposition to the concrete life of the state.
Hegel rejects cosmopolitanism, the view that “I am a citizen of the world,” because the
state, as Right made actual, concrete, or embodied, contains logically an element of
particularity. But, Hegel goes further than that, maintaining that “war should not be
14
Strictly speaking, ‘individuality’. See §259, addition: “The state as actual is essentially an
individual state, and beyond that a particular state. Individuality should be distinguished from particularity;
14
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 29 of 38
�regarded as an absolute evil and as a purely external contingency” (§324). This limited
praise of war forms part of his critique of classical liberal social contract theory (§324):
It is a grave miscalculation if the state, when it requires this sacrifice, is simply
equated with civil society, and if its ultimate end is seen merely as the security of
the life and property of individuals. For this security cannot be achieved by the
sacrifice of what is supposed to be secured.
In his remarks on war in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel develops a thought that he
had stated in the Phenomenology (¶475):
For the community is a nation, is itself an individuality, and essentially is only
such for itself by other individualities being for it, by excluding them from itself
and knowing itself to be independent of them. The negative side of the
community, suppressing the isolation of individuals within it, but spontaneously
active in an outward direction, finds its weapons in individuality. War is the Spirit
and the form in which the essential moment of the ethical substance, the absolute
freedom of the ethical self from every existential form, is present in its actual and
authentic existence.
War is certainly an assertion of a state’s “individuality,” and reigns in the atomizing
tendencies of civil society, but what does Hegel think is “ethical” about that? It turns out
that for Hegel what gives war an “ethical” aspect is the sacrifice of life and property
which war requires. These goods, as “finite” and “transient” are contingent, subject to
necessity, to nature. “But,” Hegel claims (§324), “in the ethical essence (i.e. the state)
nature is deprived of this power, and necessity is elevated to a work of freedom, to
something ethical in character.”
The analysis of war in PR §324 parallels his analysis of burial in the
Phenomenology, and culminates with a dig at Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace”:
War is that condition in which the vanity of temporal things and temporal
goods—which tends at other times to be merely a pious phrase—takes on serious
significance, and it is accordingly the moment in which the ideality of the
particular attains its right and becomes actuality. The higher significance of war is
it is a moment within the very Idea of the State, whereas particularity belongs to history.” There is no
logical derivation of a particular national character, such as Frenchness.
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 30 of 38
�that, through its agency (as I have put it on another occasion), ‘the ethical health
of nations is preserved in their indifference towards the permanence of finite
determinacies, just as the movement of the winds preserves the sea from that
stagnation which a lasting, not to say perpetual, peace would produce among
nations.’
In the “addition,” Kant is mentioned explicitly:
Kant proposed a league of sovereigns to settle disputes between states…But the
state is an individual, and negation is an essential moment of individuality. Thus,
even if a number of states join together as a family, this league, in its
individuality, must generate opposition, and create an enemy.
Here, Hegel also argues that in a condition of peace, the “particularities” of civil society
become “rigid and ossified.” War is in effect part of the “life cycle” of the body politic,
occasionally necessary for it to be a body at all: “the unity of the body is essential to the
health, and if its parts grow internally hard, the result is death.”
Conclusion: Where are we now?
In the animated montage of the opening credits of the TV series Madmen, an
office and its furnishings dissolve, and a man, in silhouette, falls between the concrete
canyons of Manhattan skyscrapers. This sense of groundlessness, of lack of substance, is
the theme of the show. Not only is the identity of the main protagonist, Donald Draper,
based on a lie; in almost all of the marriages depicted, infidelity and divorce are rampant,
as self-atoms fly off on their centrifugal paths to go bump in the night. The show is set in
the advertising world of the 1960’s, but its popularity suggests that it hits a contemporary
nerve. This current sense of a lack of substance is hardly confined to the United States.
One sees it, for example, in the works of the French novelist Michel Houellebeq, whose
“elementary particles” are, likewise, descendants of the same atomicity that Hegel found
in ancient Rome. Given how far we are from the vision of Sittlichkeit Hegel lays out in
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 31 of 38
�the Philosophy of Right, it might very well seem that his project of reconciling
subjectivity and substance is a colossal failure.
It might, however, be a very instructive failure. In the past, Hegel was often
vilified by superficial commentators as a source of both extreme left and right, of
Marxism and fascism. Contemporary scholars now see Hegel as a man of the center, a
friendly corrector of liberalism, not its enemy. Yet, we seem to living in a time where, as
Yeats put it in “The Second Coming,” the “center cannot hold.” At the moment, the
politics of the United States and other western countries seems to be caught, once again,
in a gyre of ever-widening partisanship. A re-consideration of Hegel’s thought might
prove useful in identifying just who the two main parties are. In section 125 of the Gay
Science, Nietzsche announces, through the mad man, the death of God. What we in the
West are seeing today—and perhaps have been seeing ever since World War I-- is the
death of Hegel, where the two sides of the political world divide up the body between
them.
For those left of center, what is most congenial in Hegel are the regulatory and
welfare aspects of his state over civil society (PR §§240-245). Poverty, Hegel notes, is a
particularly intractable problem in modern society, the unfortunate result of the workings
of the economy, of individuals pursuing their interests; therefore, “public conditions
should be regarded as all the more perfect” (§242) to the degree that the alleviation of
poverty is not left to individual charity but becomes a matter of state concern. Where
today’s left parts company with Hegel are issues of family, gender, and marriage on the
one hand, and nationalism and war on the other. What unites these positions is a
rejection of the confines in which Hegel had placed “personhood.” Thus, changing a
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 32 of 38
�definition several thousand years old, marriage is no longer exclusively between a man
and a woman, but between two persons. Similarly, in recent protests against
immigration restrictions and enforcement, one hears the rubric “no human being is
illegal.” All are persons. Taken to its logical conclusion, such an idea would require the
elimination of the nation-state—a goal which, in its way, the E.U. has been pursing.
In politics, as in physics, Newton’s third law of motion holds: for every activist,
there is an equal and opposite reactionary. The contemporary right looks, unsurprisingly,
like a photographic negative of the left. Civil society, or the economy, is where many on
the right insist on the rights of abstract personhood (including those of fictitious or legal
persons, namely corporations): they are impatient with taxation, redistribution, and
regulation. As far as questions of the family, marriage, and gender, the situation with
respect to “personhood” is the opposite. True, few on the right would go as far as Hegel
does and relegate women to the private sphere. At the same time, these citizens—about
one half of the country-- are not exactly happy warriors in the battle against the enemy
named by their liberal brethren: “gender stereotypes,” along with its evil siblings
“hetero-normativity,” and “patriarchy.” In a mostly inchoate way, they believe or rather
feel that not all the old understandings and definitions of man and woman should be
junked; it’s as if, resisting the tide, they whisper to each other “Vive la différance!”
Expel nature with a pitchfork, they wink, it always returns.
To this persistent muttering and foot dragging, those on the other side of the fence
shout back that this allegedly essential dichotomy of man and woman is “socially
constructed,” insubstantial: it is an “ideology,” a smoke screen blown to mask and
hence uphold a “hierarchy.” All essentialism is, essentially, bad. On the issue of gender,
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 33 of 38
�the left would thus appear to be the party of fluidity, of Heraclitus’ panta rhe, everything
flows. Yet, even here, Parmenides—substance—makes an appearance. Those
undergoing “gender reassignment”—for whom liberals are supposed to be sympathetic-often elect onerous medical procedures to give themselves the body that corresponds,
whatever that might mean, to their gender “identity.” Gender in this case is not fluid or
“insubstantial” at all but a cold hard fact, one that is extremely personal—a fact that
demands, in some cases, corrective medical action. The antinomy between left and right
on the question of gender—fluidity versus fixity-- is thus contained, in different form,
within the left.
As Hegel often argues, each opposing partial view, as an abstraction, contains,
but does not resolve, both opposites. To the old feminist rallying cry “biology is not
destiny,” there appears to be an addendum: the destiny can be fulfilled only in so far as
the biology can be changed. Persons should be free to choose their gender, people say,
but this claim leaves the basis of freedom unclear: are we free because as persons we are
indeterminate, capable of being whatever we choose, or are we free because, as fully
determined, we have to express what we are? For Hegel, as we have seen, “personhood”
as such mysteriously contains this duality. “Person” is at once the most universal and
public, and particular and private, of attributes. We assert our rights saying “I am a
person too!” and refuse to answer questions saying “that’s personal.” As persons, we
should be complete, wholes, like individually wrapped Kraft singles. It’s been nearly
half a century since some feminist proclaimed that “A woman without a man is like a fish
without a bicycle.” Yet, when Harry finally comes together with Sally, there’s hardly a
dry eye in the house.
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 34 of 38
�However, it is on the questions of the state, and of citizenship, where the
difference between left and right on personhood really becomes clear and distinct. In
accord with Hegel’s critique of cosmopolitanism, those on the right are unapologetic in
maintaining that America should pursue its national self-interest, even as neo and paleo
cons go at each other’s throats in arguing about how to do so. In some cases, true, such
“nationalism” slides into an ethnic or racial nationalism, going beyond the rational or
strictly political confines in which Hegel had placed the state’s self-assertion. The recent
fracas about a “crisis at the border” makes the continental divide manifest. Is the crisis
primarily a “humanitarian” crisis—too many people without adequate food and medical
attention—or is the fundamental problem that too many people, including a small
percentage but significant number of really bad people, are entering the country without
permission? You can choose your media outlet, because the media no longer mediates.
In the cacophony of the parties—of the parts—one wonders, where is the whole?
Is there a whole, a unum e pluribus? Can a center be found? Or are we headed back to
Rome, to a substance-less “legality” attempting to contain, by sheer force, the warring
factions and isolated atoms? Hegel, if not answering these questions, helps us think
about them. His questions—What is a modern society? What is a modern society?—are
still ours.
J. Hand Hegel Person Lecture
Given September 6 2019
Page 35 of 38
�
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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Reconciling subjectivity and substance : Hegel's critique of pure personhood
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Transcript of a lecture given on September 6, 2019 by Jonathan Hand as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831
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SF_HandJ_Reconciling_Subjectivity_and_Substance_Hegel's_Critique_of_Pure_Personhood_2019-09-06
Friday night lecture
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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Returning to Lucretius
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Lucretius Carus, Titus. De rerum natura
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Nail, LecN2
Friday night lecture
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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On teachers and students : Heidegger in America
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Transcript of a lecture given on September 21, 2018 by Michael Gillespie as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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2018-09-21
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Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976
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Gillespie, Lec. G555
Friday night lecture
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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The (Plato's) Cave, and the cave beneath the cave, in Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit
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Transcript of a lecture given on October 10, 2014 by Jonathan Hand as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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2014-10-10
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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. Phänomenologie des Geistes
Philosophy, Ancient
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English
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24004304
Friday night lecture
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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31 pages
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Recognizing Odysseus
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Transcript of a lecture given on February 1, 2019 by Margaret Kirby as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Kirby, Margaret Anne, 1956-
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2019-02-01
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Homer. Odyssey
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English
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Kirby, M. Recognizing Odysseus
Friday night lecture
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Truths about quantum mechanics
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Transcript of a lecture given on November 30, 2018 by Bernhardt Trout as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concern Series.
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Trout, B. Truths about Quantum Mechanics
Friday night lecture
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A Ran1ble on Fern Hill
Jonathan Tuck
Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
A Lecture Given at
St. John's College
Santa Fe, New Mexico
April 8, 1994
�I
A Ramble on Fern Hill
I want to do several things at once: To give a partial reading of "Fern Hill," by
Dylan Thomas, and to catch myself in the act of giving such a reading in order to reflect
on what it means to give a reading. When I say "give a reading," I do not mean only
that I want to read the poem aloud-- although I do want to do that too-- but to give an
analysis, an interpretation, an exegesis. It's interesting that the lit. crit. locution "to give
a reading" should mean this: almost as if to read the poem is to analyze it, or to analyze
it is only to read it. But I think there's a particular appropriateness to this locution when
applied to a lyric poem:
Whatever "lyric" means--and in our day it seems to mean
nothing more than a pretty short poem-- its etymology
suggests that we should be
thinking of an utterance which is to be sung, and even accompanied by music. If the
poem comes first to our ear, not our eye, it remains there in some way even through
every act of cutting it up and surrounding it with commentary. The concrete presence
of the sung or spoken poem unifies and holds together all the discursive particularities in
an interpretation. When we interpret at length, we distance ourselves from this presence,
but only temporarily: for in my experience there is no such thing as ruining a poem by
analysing it. We cannot "murder to dissect"; the poem is resurrected each time we read
it again.
But if our act of interpreting has been fruitful, it is not the same poem now;
�2
this new presence holds together more particulars, more complexities, more internal
articulations. So the purpose of interpreting the poem is to be able to read it again, and
also to come to know part of it for the first time. It is in this sense that I intend to "give
a reading" of "Fern Hill," and to watch myself closely in order to see how I do it.
In teaching lyric poems, I have found that certain students are aware of having a
certain kind of "blind spot" (actually, it would be better to say a "deaf spot") when it
.comes to the appreciation of poetry. They are genuinely puzzled by what others find to
interest themselves in while reading a great lyric poem; and they are alarmed at having
to try to write anything substantive about it. I cannot aspire to opening blind eyes or deaf
ears; but I hope to try to give some practical counsel to such people about possible ways
to open up what has been a closed-off area for them. They may not be able to find the
same immediate appeal in poems that other readers do, but I would like them to see how
a poem can be discussible.
Why do I choose "Fern Hill" as the specimen for this how-to-do-it demonstration?
Certainly not because it is an "easy" poem; in fact, an easy poem, whatever that is,
would be exactly the wrong kind for a demonstration. My motive for choosing "Fern
Hill" is alarmingly simple:
I believe that it is the greatest lyric poem in the English
language-- at least among those I am aware of-- and I have a kind of evangelistic zeal to
share it with others and to display it as the greatest. But what on earth can I mean by
the preposterous claim that "Fern Hill" is the greatest English lyric poem? It seems clear
that I have yet another task: To think about what makes a poem good, or great. It is not
�3
that I want you to agree with me in my evaluation of "Fern Hill"; but perhaps what
makes this poem great for me is what may make some other lyric poem great for you.
In the process, I want to show that "Fern Hill"'s relation to the theme of time is not
accidental but is part of what makes the poem so good; that all poetry, or at least
certainly all lyric poetry, is concerned with time because time is one of the conditions
within which it comes to light. And this presupposes that poems are characte1istically
about poetry, whatever else they are also about. This reflexive property of poems gives
a clue to what kinds of things to look for in analysis, in "giving a reading": instances
where the theme of the poem is somehow mirrored in the poem's form, so that in the
course of being about something else, the poem can also be about itself. This is a \Vay
of poems' being about poetry that is I think more substantive than the less interesting
sense in which each poem necessarily redefines the possibilities of the form, genre or
tradition within which it is working.
In the course of "giving a reading," I am reviving into the present an entity which
has two kinds of temporal extension: (1) First: At every "performance" of the poem,
every reading-through of it, whether silent or aloud, I am reminding myself of the poem's
emergence through time-- not only in the way that every spoken language does (since
only one sound can be spoken at a time) but also in the special way that poems, by their
rhythm and measurement of time units, formalize and almost spatialize
repetition-- that raw temporality of language.
-- through
(2) Second: The other form of temporal
�4
extension is the endurance through several different renditions or performances of the
"same" poem-- the several often spread out over years, decades or centuries. It is in this
way that a poem can be a monument more enduring than brass or stone, as Horace and
many others claim. Clearly, it is problematic how these several performances "belong"
to the "same" poem-- in somewhat the same way that the relation of a given production
or performance to the Shakespearean text, or of a playing of a symphony to its notated
form on paper, are also problematic. One might ask what sort of existence the "poem"
has when it is not being "performed." Is it only potential? And why, strangely, does it
show signs of having changed for us when it reemerges into actuality at our next reading?
But instead of addressing these issues, I think we should make actual the particular
poem we are to look at.
It follows from what I've said, as well as from all of my
experience with poetry that the right way to approach a poem, whether by oneself or in
the company of a class, is to read it aloud initially--perhaps several times; and then, after
talking about it or thinking about it, to read it aloud again, to "put it back together
again." (This seems comparable to the actions of analysis & synthesis in mathematical
proof.)
Here,then, is my first practical counsel to those who find poetry hard to enjoy:
The lyric poem, in particular, does not exist until it is read aloud, preferably several
times. It is better still if you can memorize it and recite it aloud from memory--though
this may come only after many oral readings . Now , in approaching "Fern Hill," there's
a special condition which does not exist in approaching a poem by Donne or Keats or
Shakespeare-- namely that we have a recording of Thomas himself reading his poem.
�5
Should I read it myself, or play his version? And if both, when shall I do which?
It seems dramatically right to start with Thomas 's reading, which, like the printed
version on the page, is part of the "received" form of the poem as it comes to us. But
then if time permitted, I should really read it aloud myself, as each of you should: Only
in this way would the poem begin to become ours, to sound on our inner ear as we
proceed to think about it. Then after analyzing it and in some way making it more fully
"mine," I should read it aloud myself at the end. The hope is that the second reading
aloud will contain or embody much of what is gained or learned in the intervening
analysis-- contain or embody both for me the reader and for those co-readers to whom
I am reading. Choosing this order reflects a literary-theoretical allegiance of my own,
in favor of appropriating the artwork, making it new and making it mine, rather than
trying as an archaeologist to arrive at the author's intention. So that is what I will plan
to do, and here is Dylan Thomas's reading of "Fern Hill":
Fern Hill
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
5
�6
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
�7
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land .
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
50
Dylan Thomas
(1914-1953)
Though it's not always best for an analysis to start at the first line, or the first word, and
proceed diachronically through the text, in this case I will do so, almost in despair: There is
so much richness, so many logical starting places that lead straight into the heart of the poem.
The poem's first two \Vords are "Now as." Each is ambiguous, and there is some connection
in their ambiguities. "Now" may be sheerly a temporal indicator , in which case we must think
of the poem as referring to the present time in which it is spoken by its speaker. There's a
difficulty here, though, since the first line goes on to refer to the past: "Now as I was young
and easy." But we might still think that the purpose of the initial "Now" is somehow to recreate
or reenact the past, real or imagined, that is portrayed in most of the poem. The innocence of
that past is perhaps regainable in some vicarious way; and it is true that one of the effects of the
poem seems to be to make us feel the experience of Thomas's innocent childhood visits to his
aunt's farm at Fernhill. But the other possible meaning of" now" is almost exactly opposite to
this one:
It may be a transitional particle, used to introduce an antithetical idea, as in the
following imaginary statement: "As an adult I know and feel my mortality and my fallen state.
�8
Now when I was a boy, I never did; I thought I would live forever." The "Now" in the poem's
first line gives the utterance that is the poem a very concrete conversational context: Breaking
away from the thought of how he thinks and feels at present, the speaker turns his attention to
his childhood, as specifically opposed to the present. In this reading of "Now", the poem is a
statement of the finality of loss, rather than an evocation of paradise regained. Of course the
poem as a whole is both.
My point is that the one word "now" holds together these two
possibilities, containing in a small compass many of the largest themes and issues in the whole
poem.
We find a similar phenomenon when we look at the poem's second word, "as."
What
among many possibilities does "as" mean here? Even as I ask the question, I am unable to
forget that the word "as" recurs in the poem, especially in constructions implying comparison
or similitude: "happy as the grass was green"; "singing as the farm was home"; "the hay fields
high as the house"; "fire green as grass"; "happy as the heart was long."
If similes and
metaphors are the essence of poetry, transforming our vision by pointing out correspondences
between the world we know and some imagined, invisible one, then our consideration of the
power of "as" becomes a kind of referendum on the power of poetry. Can it in fact transform
our vision as it claims? Does "as I was young and easy" mean "at the time when I was young
and easy"? or "because I was young and easy"? or "in the same way that I was young and
easy"? or "to the same degree that I was young and easy"? or "as long, and only as long. as
I was young and easy"? It is clear that each of these variant readings produces a different sense
of the power of time and of the power of imagination to triumph over time. "Happy as the grass
�9
was green" sounds comfy and proverbial, like "happy as the day is long" or "happy as a clam."
(Actually, neither of those similes will bear much scrutiny either, will they?) Taken in this
simple-minded or innocent way, the speaker means that he was happy to the same degree that
the grass was green. Comparisons like this usually make use of a vehicle of comparison that
is supposed to be unproblematic:
"strong as an ox" means very strong because an ox by its
nature is very strong. Grass is very green, but the grass by its very nature does not stay green
forever; is it in the nature of things that the speaker will not stay happy forever? Only if "happy
as the grass was green" also means happy in the same way that the grass was green, naturally,
unreflectively-- and temporarily. Because the greenness of the grass is implicitly localized in
time, it may seem diminished: That which doesn't stay green might seem to be less green, or
only apparently green. Was the speaker less happy than he thought he was, only apparently
happy? In this way the vehicle of the simile-- the thing used for purposes of comparison--makes
more complex our notion of the tenor of the simile, the thing being compared to something.
One of our readings of the ambiguous word "as" leads us to other readings: happy at the time
when the grass was green, and only at that time; happy as long as the grass was green.
An
additional complication enters when, in the next stanza, it is not the grass but the child that is
green: "as I was green and carefree." Here "green" must be able to mean not only "young,
fresh" but also "inexperienced, raw, naive"-- as in the expression "greenhorn." At this point
the tenor and the vehicle of our original simile have collapsed into each other: The child and the
grass come together in their greenness, and perhaps we remember the words of the First Epistle
General of Peter:
�10
For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of
man is as the flower of grass. The grass withereth,
and the flower thereof falleth away:
But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.
(I Peter 1:24-25)
We have been noticing ambiguities in the words "Now" and "as."
I induce from this
another practical precept for the poetry-blind: Seek out ambiguities and try to spell them out
patiently and deliberately, almost literal-mindedly. Because the language of poetry has a kind
of life of its own, the natural lexical range of a word is brought into play whenever that word
is used. It is especially fruitful when the ambiguous readings even seem to contradict each other
more or less directly:
Seeing the meaning as problematic makes it possible to connect
alternative meanings to different ways of feeling. I think I am assuming that language may not
always be ambiguous, but feelings almost always are; so that complexities in the language may
bring it closer to the reality of our feelings.
Another precept for the uninitiated reader of
poems: Look hard for repetitions of the same word, or the same image, or the same sound.
In our case, we segued into the poem's second use of "as" from considering its first use. Part
of the formality of a poem, part of its architecture, is the use of repetition; even the ideas of
meter and rhyme presuppose this. But repetition is never pure, as Heraclitus and Kierkegaard
remind us; it is always a re-evocation, containing both sameness and difference. Hence one of
the activities of reading a poem is comparing and contrasting. Jumping back and forth in a
poem to compare and contrast usages of the same word or image, holding them up together, is
a way of treating the poem as a simultaneous structure rather than merely a flowing-in-time.
�11
But noticing differences is a reminder that pure repetition is impossible because the poem exists
in time. This kind of comparing and contrasting is the very theme of "Fern Hill": The speaker
juxtaposes scenes from his past with his present altered condition, and poses the question of
whether he can renew or retain his youth somehow-- perhaps through poetry itself? For this
reason "Fern Hill" is extraordinarily concentrated and unified; it almost seems like pure lyricism
because it both is and is about the very things that constitute the "lyric moment."
Let us take our own advice and go on looking for other usages of the word "as."
When
we next meet a comparable phrase, in the third stanza, "fire green as grass" makes little obvious
sense; fire is not typically green. The fire seems to be there in order to continue the catalogue
of the elements, begun in "air/ And playing, lovely and watery." The earth would seem to be
absent from this list, except that it is present everywhere, not only in the "grass" but in the
fields, the pebbles in the streams, and in the whole subject at hand:
"it was all ... " The lower
element of earth is transformed into higher elements: the flowing water, emblematic of time's
motion; air, which by a pun is also song, the "tunes from the chimneys"; and fire, highest and
simplest, connected with warmth and light.
We still don't see how the fire can be green;
perhaps the peat or coal used in that part of Wales burns with a greenish flame? Or perhaps
"green" here means "new" or "young" or "innocent," like the childhood of the narrator-- in the
case of fire, "closer to the time of Creation," and therefore more elemental. (This might also
help us to account for the "whinnying green stable" in line 35).
Or perhaps the problematic
fact that fire normall y lacks greenness makes the simile into a "dissimile," of the same negative
form as that famous slogan, "A woman needs a man as a fish needs a bicycle"; and if so,
�12
perhaps this problematic form of the simile is meant to cast doubt on other uses of the word
"as."
Let's look at some more: The hay fields were of course not as high as the house, except
to the child's innocent eye, which makes things so only by the imperatives of desire:
"My
wishes raced through the house high hay." Listening to the sounds at the end of that line, we
realize that the comparison between the hay and the house has gone from measurement into a
pure exclamation of joy. Like the child's seeing, the poem's sounding has the power simply to
enact its wishes.
Parallel to "happy as the grass was green," in the second stanza, is the more
peculiar "singing as the farm was home." It is peculiar because we would normally think that
the farm either is or isn't home; unlike the greenness of grass, the farm's identity as home does
not admit of quantification, which seems to eliminate some of our possible ambiguous readings.
But if we are told that the farm was not, in fact, home to Thomas-- he visited there during the
summers-- the eliminated variant reading comes back in a more sinister form: The boy was
singing in the same way, or to the same degree, that the fann was home-- that is, only
temporarily or not at all. Singing has already been attributed to the house: "the lilting house,"
"tunes from the chimneys." It will come again in the poem's last image, another simile:
"I
sang in my chains like the sea." These are "morning songs," with all the poignancy of the pun
hammered home by the word "such."
They are "morning songs" spelled without the "u"
because they belong to youth, both the boy's youth and the youth of the world.
They are
"mourning songs," spelled with the "u" and with the qualifications of "such" and "so few,"
because even our youthful singing is an unknowing presage of our own funeral music. It is
clearly not an accident that the topic of song, like the transforming power of similes, is the
�13
poem's reflexive comment on poetry itself.
It is not only phrases with "as" that are repeated frequently throughout the poem; one of
its most prominent features is the repetition , with crucial variations, of words, images, and even
whole syntactic structures. (The first two stanzas, especially, display a high degree of this
syntactic parallelism.) But moving to smaller units of meaning, it is very noticeable that there
is much repetition of sounds. Thomas is known as a poet for whom flashy sound effects almost
take on a life of their own-- as if abstract patterns of vowel and consonant repetition could make
some kind of musical pleasure for us, regardless of the meanings of the words. But in this poem
at least, I think I can show that the repetitions are purposive, and that they are directly related
to his theme. Look for example at the poem's beginning: "Now as I was young and easy under
the wple boughs." The stressed syllables "I", "eas-", "un-" and "ap-" all alliterate, since any
word beginning with a vowel alliterates with any other. "Boughs" alliterates with the "b" in
"about" and assonates both with "about" and with "house." "House" alliterates with "happy,"
whose first syllable assonates with "grass," which alliterates with "green." The alternating links
of alliteration and assonance form a chaining effect. We see it again at the end of the stanza in
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
The purpose of this chaining of sounds, this singing in chains, is to imitate the "trailing" stream
of the daisies and barley, to connect the various parts of this paradise of sense-stimuli into a
single manifold of sound, or light, or time.
The boy's world has a coherence that came from
�14
innocence, or from his infantile perception of himself as not separated from the objects of his
seeing and hearing. The unity of this world is later reflected in the third and fourth stanzas, in
the poem's use of the word "it" without any obvious antecedent. And within this world, the boy
also has a child's fantasies of omnipotence: It was he who had the trees and leaves trail. This
omnipotence corresponds both to the power Adam and Eve are said to have had over nature
while still in a state of innocence, and also to the power that the poet still has over his little
created world, even in a fallen state. Through playing with patterns of vowels and consonants,
Thomas too "has" the trees and leaves trail. Does this mean that poetry can restore innocence
and conquer Time? But as the last line says, the poet sings in another set of chains, not of his
own making.
It seems clear that sound-effects can be imitative in an almost iconic way. They can act less
directly as well. Notice a pattern of internal rhyme in the first stanza:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple bQJJghs
About the lilting house ...
And again:
Time let me hail and climb.
In each case these internal rhymes act to frame and enclose either a line or a phrase, giving a
sense of secure self-containedness and self-sufficiency. "Time let me hail and climb" is parallel
with the second stanza's "Time let me play and be." The self-enclosed character of the first of
these lines leads us to expect the second to be self-enclosed too-- and it seems to make sense that
�15
way: Time let me play and time let me be-- either let me exist or left me alone. The word
"Golden" thus comes as a shock; we had not expected that the line would be enjambed, even
though "Golden" in the second stanza is parallel with the same word at the same position in the
first stanza. But as it turns out, the two are not syntactically parallel: The first "Golden" is part
of a parenthetical adjectival phrase, modifying "me"; the second "Golden" is a predicate
adjective with "be." This difference throws into relief a difference in meaning: The "Golden"
of the first stanza seems to be unambiguously favorable, while the second "Golden" carries a
hint of another possibility: The speaker is not already golden, a fair-haired lad smiled on by
Fortune and befriended by Time . Rather we see Time letting him be golden. From here it is
not a long jump to another possible meaning of "golden," which certainly comes into play in the
following line: "And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman." Here "golden" suggests
the important difference between spring and harvest time; the latter is still a prosperous,
auspicious time, but it is a time of ripeness and intimations of autumn and encroaching death.
We see this in the way the phrase "green and golden" develops in the fifth stanza:
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.
The pairing of "green and golden" becomes, in the last stanza, explicitly, "green and dying . "
Even in the first moments of childhood, we have started on our journey toward death; as the
Clovm says in As You Like It,
. .. from hour to hour we ripe and ripe
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot
And thereby hangs a tale.
�16
(A YLI, Il.vii.25-27)
As "golden" becomes "dying," as a state of ripeness or of being specially favored-- a "golden
boy"-- turns into its opposite, we remember that "green" also means
Hence "green and dying" comes to mean not just
11
naive or unknowing.
growing and rotting" but
11
unaware of
mortality, and yet mortal. 11 What defines the boy's innocence is not so much a lack of sin as
a lack of knowledge, the knowledge of his own mortality. That knowledge itself is a kind of
dying, as it was for Adam and Eve in the garden.
Now the interplay of the images of color-- green, golden, white with the dew, sky blue,
Iamb white-- is a very conspicuous feature of the poem, one that few readers are likely to miss.
But my specific claim is that the use of the internal rhymes, by setting us up for the prominence
of "Golden" in the second stanza, triggers our awareness of this pattern. And if so, we can
educe two more precepts for the novice analyst of poetry: (1) Listen hard to the sound effects,
and when in doubt, assume they are significant. (2) Look at the ends of lines, to see places
where the Iineation is a way of manipulating our successive responses.
We have seen two
instances of unexpected enjambment, in lines 7-8 and in lines 13-14.
These are the most
conspicuous, but there are others.
But how do we listen to the sounds of poems, and what sort of significance do we listen
for? Apart from phonemic repetitions like alliteration, assonance, consonance and rhyme-- each
of which may make a pattern, whether imitative or abstract, there is the clearly imitative
�17
phenomenon of onomatopoeia, the "making" (poieia) through a word (onoma) of something we
otherwise encounter in the world. We don't see much in this poem of sheerly imitative sound,
like Tennyson's "murmur of innumerable bees." Perhaps the chaining effect I described in the
first stanza can be considered an example. But there is a chronic difficulty in the attempt to read
sound as directly mimetic or imitative. Take the sound pattern of line 12, "In the sun that is
young once onJy." Do the repetition of the "uh" sound and the orthographic and etymological
redundancy of "once only" imitate the persistence through time of a sun that is the same each
day-- truly young once only-- or do these sound effects imitate the periodicity of a series of
several suns, as in line 39's "the sun born over and over"? Or does the sound by its ambiguity
raise for us the same question that the poem raises: How to reconcile continuity with change
and repetition, the enduring infinitude of our desire with the finitude of our lives, with the
passage of time?
Sound repetitions can be local, within a line or a few lines, or they can be the architectonic
by which the form of the poem is defined. Thomas used the unobvious measurement of syllabic
count to define the pattern of his stanzas. He was steered to this choice by the precedent of the
medieval Welsh technique known as cynghanedd ("king' ha neth"), which I will not even attempt
to spell for you; in other words, by a precedent from a language other than English, unearthed
by Thomas in a fit of Celtic historical nostalgia. In "Fern Hill," the six stanzas are of nine
lines each. In the general form of the stanza, the first, second, sixth and seventh lines are of
fourteen syllables each, the third and fifth lines are of nine syllables, and the fourth line is of
six.
(I'm guided here by Thomas's own pronunciation, which renders "fire" in line 22 as a
�18
disyllable, and "blessed" in line 25 as a single syllable.) The last two lines of the stanzas vary,
but in a purposive way: In the first, second and last stanzas the eighth line is seven syllables,
while the ninth line is nine. In the third, fourth and fifth stanzas the eighth line is nine syllables,
while the ninth line is six. In effect, the flip-flopping of the long and short lines defines two
cuts in the poem, after stanza two and after stanza five. On inspection, this seems appropriate,
since the result is to set off the third, fourth and fifth stanzas as a separate part. In these stanzas
we are given a flashback into the particularity of the rhythm of day-night alternation as it then
seemed to the young boy protagonist: In this prui of the poem, the sun is "born over and over,"
"green and golden" can coexist, and there is no double awareness, until the end of the fifth
stanza, that only by Time's mercy does all this happen. In the last stanza we get a return to the
divided perspective of the first two, in which our view of the child's innocence is mediated by
our own and the poet's experience of age and mortality. The cycle of "riding to sleep" and
waking, described in detail in stanzas three and. four, is recapitulated in stanza six from a
different viewpoint: Instead of coming back "like a wanderer white/ with the dew," the farm
in this stanza is "forever fled from the childless land." The slight variation in the forms of the
stanzas makes the change explicit, but almost unnoticeably.
An even more subtle pair of
demarcations in the poem comes from the only two variances in the syllable counts I gave
above. I said that the sixth and seventh lines of each stanza are regularly of fourteen syllables.
But the sixth line of stanza one and the seventh line of stanza six have fifteen syllables each.
There is a kind of logic to these cuts too: The first five lines, which precede the first metrical
variation, can be seen as a kind of introductory or general statement, before we descend into the
�19
specificity of the fairy-tale "once below a time." Similarly, the last three lines are signalled as
a new gesture of summation by the metrical variation in line 52. In these last lines we get a
repeating of several elements from the first two stanzas: "as I was young and easy" from line
1 (although the "Now" disappears); "in the mercy of his means" from line 14; "Time held me"
echoing "Time let me" in lines 4 and 13; "green and dying" echoing "green and golden" from
line 15. It is not only the extra syllable in line 52 that signals this last demarcation: Here alone
we get a departure from the scheme of rhyme, near-rhyme and assonance that has unobtrusively
shaped each stanza. All previous stanzas had the general pattern ABCDDABCD. Here in the
last stanza, the sixth and seventh lines exchange their rhyme-sounds, pointing out a break from
what has gone before. ("Dying," which corresponds with "rising," comes after "means," which
corresponds with "sleep. 11 ) As if in compensation, the vowel sound symbolized by 11 D 11 --"sleep,"
11
fields, 11 11 sea" --is the same in this stanza as that symbolized by "A 11 - - 11 me" and "rnea ns 11 --so that
the first and sixth lines assonate not only with each other, but with lines 4, 5, and 9.
Who on earth would notice these features, except me, the critic busily counting away? Do
you hear them as they go past you? I doubt that even the syllabic regularity of the stanzas
comes out to the casual listener, let alone the variations therefrom.
But are we sure that we
are not affected by what we do not consciously notice? And when we do notice it, doesn't it
make the poem better for us? In a poem of almost limitless coherence, I think the assumption
has to be that nothing happens by accident. If we notice a feature of the poem that seems to
cohere with the others we have noticed, the burden of proof is on the person who seeks to
exclude this insight, to deny that it is part of the poem's meaning. I am arguing that \Ve adopt
�20
the interpretive maxim of St. Augustine that in cases of doubt, we take the reading that conduces
to the reign of charity . Practically speaking, this means that we incline towards the inclusion
of whatever complexities we find, unless they make the poem worse, less coherent, less
concentrated. In the present case, there is a fittingness about the subtlety with which the poem's
formal variations work on us. We are not accustomed to syllabic verse in English; our prosody
is almost universally accentual-syllabic.
Syllabic verse, in our experience, tends to be in
languages like French, where there is a certain uniformity of stress. Our first impression in
listening to Thomas is of strongly marked accents or stresses, which tempts us to try to measure
his verse as purely accentual. But if we start counting stresses, we end up with a stanza pattern
more illusory than real; there are too many variations for us to be able to say with confidence
what the paradigm is. Thomas's poem sings in its syllabic chains, but those chains are so light
that they are almost unfelt. As listeners we are as innocent as the boy depicted in the poem;
time-- or more precisely, the measurement of time in syllabic units-- lets us play and be.
The moral of the story seems to be, "Never read any poem for the first time." In fact,
the experience of a poem's sound grows more specific, more itself, the longer we have listened
to it, memorized it, learned the relation of part to part and of cadence to cadence. My thirty
years of friendship with "Fern Hill" constitute yet another temporal perspective in my reading
of the poem . The poem concerns itself with several different expanses of time: the finite lifespan of the speaker, the cyclical and repetitive time-scheme of nature, the sacred historical time
of creation, pastoral innocence, and fallenness. The first of these is replicated in my life-span
as a reader, and the second in my repeated experience of the poem. The poem as an utterance
�21
takes time to say or to hear; its own elapsed time somehow becomes identified with all of time-making the poem a capacious summation but also isolating it. If all of time is within it, there
is nothing beyond it. In this way the poem reminds me of my essential solitude as a timeconscious being. At any moment I look forward and back and contain an infinity within me;
but metaphysically 1-- we-- live as we die, alone. This reflection might apply equally to all lyric
poems, as a description of the "lyric moment"; it is especially true of "Fern Hill" because there
are no other humans within the poem apart from the speaker of it.
The child's solitude in the poem is qualified only by the presence of personified animals
and other natural beings-- like the "apple towns" -- and by the personified presence of Time. But
of this latter presence, the child is unaware. His solitary consciousness is absolute and selfdetermining; his sense of himself is as ari unmoving, stable point around which the delightful
variety of the world moves. Thus as he falls asleep, the diminishing sound of the owls' hooting
signals their having moved away from him, taking the farm with them. When the child awakes,
it is not that he returns to the farm, but that it returns to him:
like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder.
It is a characteristic of very young children, we are told, that they do not perceive objects as
permanent, perhaps because they do not feel themselves as distinct from, standing over against,
the objects in their environment. But this slightly older child does in one way realize that the
motion is his, not the farm's: He sees himself as riding to sleep. As his account of the farm's
motion makes clear, however, the implication of this phrase is not known to him:
the
�22
implication that sleep is a second death, that in moving through our lives, in aging we are all
"riding to sleep," as we hear in the last stanza.
Yet in the last stanza the question remains:
Did he leave the farm or did the farm leave him-- or both? The persistence of the question is
signalled by the ambiguity of the phrase, "And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless
land."
"Fled" seems to modify "farm," but it is hard in any literal way to imagine the farm
fleeing from the land. It seems possible for "fled" also to modify the subject, the speaker "I."
The ambiguity is reiterated by the difficulty of "fled from the childless land." One would think
that the land is only "childless" because the speaker has fled from it, or because the farm, in
some idealized sense, has fled from it.
Yet it is already the childless land from which the
fleeing takes place . There is a suggestion here that the speaker may have physically tried to
return, found the place sterile and unhomelike, and fled from it in some more literal way. But
if the farm has fled, then he himself is the childless land. In either case, the doubt about who
is in motion suggests that the naive perspective of the child is not entirely lost even in the
imprisoned present time of the speaker's singing in his chains.
This relativity of motion in space-- this uncertainty as to whether he or the farm is moving-is connected with a relativity of motion in time. The child feels time as the streaming past him
of a river of light-- He does not yet know that the light is a \vindfall, that his life is a fragile gift
bestowed by the grace of another. Time is measured only by the motion of the heavenly bodies:
"all the sun Jong," "all the moon long." He himself is not aware of moving in time, of growing
older. And yet the world itself is unmoved: It is perfectly new and unaltered, as at the moment
of Creation:
�23
it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
"That very day" is emphatic: it is the same day, the true day, etymologically, of Creation itself.
But the next words confuse the situation.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
Our first reading is likely to take "so" as inferential" Therefore, it must have been just after
the birth of the simple light, on the first day of Creation. But this makes little sense-- as if we
were discovering now, through a process of reasoning, that the time of his youth was literally
the youth of the world. We cannot be discovering it now, since this was how it seemed to him
then. So we see that we were pronouncing the word wrong, that "so" is to be· stressed: It"
means not "therefore" but "like this." "So it must have been after the birth of the simple light";
the feeling at the remote time of creation must have been similar to the child's felt sense of
newness in the rebirth of the morning.
But this is a very different assertion.
To be like
something is not to be it, its very self: As Wallace Stevens said, "Identity is the vanishing point
of resemblance." If the morning is only like the time of Creation, then the vision of the child
or of the poet is not powerful enough to annihilate time.
We can only speculate on what
creation "must have been" like; that nev-lness and innocence is removed from us. The vagueness
�24
of the phrase, "afier the birth of the simple light" can now be seen as purposive: \Ve are not
told how long after.
Creation itself is implicitly linked with the activity of song. The horses are "spellbound,"
held by magic spells, charms or enchantments. But as the etymologies suggest, "charm" and
"enchantment" are words for singing. If the spell or charm is the creating word of God on the
sixth day, when the animals were made, then the "fields of praise" would refer to God's looking
on his work and finding it good. Like a poet, like Amphion with the walls of Thebes, God
sings the world into being; we might think of the picture of creation in C.S. Lewis's Narnia
tales. In Thomas's poem Creation is linked to music again in the phrase "And the Sabbath rang
slowly/In the pebbles of the holy streams." But if we're tempted to think that all Nature is holy
because it comes good from the hands of the Creator, we need to recall that the omnipotent
being who holds us "in the mercy of his means" is not God here, but Time. The music of
time's "tuneful turning" includes morning songs (without the "u "), songs of newness, innocence
and Creation; but also mourning songs (with the "u"), songs of aging, .experience, evening and
death.
I have not begun to exhaust the resources of the poem in this very partial reading of it. But
the Time which has been letting me play in the fertile fields of "Fern Hill" now hurries me
toward a stopping place, if not a conclusion.
I said that our criterion for the validity of a
particular interpretive insight into any feature of the poem should be, does it make the poem
better for us? But why should it be that a poem improves upon analysis? The implication is that
complexity itself is a poetic virtue, perhaps the distinctive virtue of poetry that is good or great.
�25
In the realm of feeling, verbal complexity is always truer than verbal simplicity, because of the
incommensurability between our feelings and our thoughts. Not only must the additional
complexities I notice make the poem seem better, they must also endure in later readings, to the
point where they now seem native to the poem's core of meaning, not added ornaments found
out by ingenuity and imputed to it.
The complexities of meaning and form that I find must
seem to be relatable to mixtures of feelings that the poem awakens in me.
In this way,
analyzing a poem, "giving a reading" of it, is a kind of introspective psychological exercise,
trying to find things in the form or external content of the poem that correspond to feelings that
I already have. And I impute a kind of causative power to these formal complexities that I find:
I say that they are the reason that my feelings were mixed, though I have only discovered it
now. Complexity is thus interesting to us--it speaks to us of ourselves-- and so it allows a poem
of finite size and scope to go on interesting us as we read and reread it. But the complexity
must not be merely given at the outset: Instead, the poem, to be a good poem, must move
toward greater complexity as we continue to encounter it over and over in time. A great poem
must improve with age, but unlike a wine or a quarterback, it should never peak and decline:
and this very inexhaustibility of poems is an interesting and puzzling phenomenon.
My claim for the particular greatness of "Fern Hill" is thus partly an empirical one, resting
on my continued experience of its ability to grow. "Fern Hill" is not the most complex poem
I have ever read, nor even the most complex that Thomas wrote-- Many of his sonnets,
especially, are notably obscure and even unintelligible on first reading.
But I do claim that
"Fern Hill" has exhibited the most increase in complexity as I continue to read it, unlike
�26
gnomic, riddling poems that remain static once they are deciphered.
But the increase in
complexity is always contained and governed m a mysterious way by the finite sensuous
experience of the spoken text of the poem, as if the moments of its sounding were the congealed
presence to me of ever-increasing intervals of Time itself. The musicality of the poem's surface
does not disappear or cloy as I go on reading; instead it animates, accomodates, and brings into
the foreground a steadily increasing number of complexities and internal articulations.
The
poem deepens although its surface does not change; and the character of its depths is consistent
with that of the surface. Thus it is that we can often recognize the greatness of a great poem
even on first reading, long before we have unpacked it and made it our own. The spoken text
is like the finite sum of an infinite series.
The specific greatness of "Fern Hill" is not however an accidental fact in my autobiography.
This poem addresses itself precisely to the encounter between innocence and experience that
constitutes the successive experiencing of poems and this poem.
Each time we read it, the
poem's theme readdresses the question of how we can connect this reading to our previous ones.
The poem's identity as it subsists in the face of change and age is like my own, making me
identify not only with the time-bound speaker but with the time-bound poem itself. And then
I am brought to reconsider questions like, Who am I now?
Can I ever prescind from my
location in space and time, to consider \Vhere I end and my world begins? Can I distinguish
among successive me's in time, so as to think meaningfully about what I think, feel and see
now, as opposed to \Vhat I remember thinking, feeling and seeing?
How can even these
questions keep their meaning for me, unreconciled as I am to the implacable fact of my own
�27
awaiting death?
************
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
That was T.S. Eliot, in another very great poem which shares its subject with "Fern Hill,"
and with this lecture. All are about time, and it is now about time that I end by reclaiming
"Fern Hill" for myself, as I said I would, by putting it back together, singing it in my chains,
speaking it into being one more time:
Fern Hill
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Go!den in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
5
10
15
�28
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sk.-y gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun -born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
*****************************
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A Ramble of Fern Hill
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Tutors
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Text
Kant’s Grounding of a Dual Metaphysics1
James Carey – 03 07 2017
1. Metaphysics reinterpreted
Prior to Kant, metaphysics was understood as the enquiry into being, into the different
kinds of beings, and into how these beings are, as distinct from how they merely appear. Kant
redefines metaphysics as a priori synthetic knowledge of objects. It is characterized by
universality and necessity. Metaphysics is not derived from experience, which for him is always
bound up with sensation. And yet metaphysics consists of more than mere definitions and what
can be analytically or logically deduced from them. With this redefinition of metaphysics as a
priori synthetic knowledge of objects there comes a new division.
Metaphysics is divided into that of the speculative and that of the practical
employment of pure reason, and is therefore either metaphysics of nature or
metaphysics of morals.2
Kant grounds this dual metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Critique of
Practical Reason, which attempt to show that we have a priori synthetic knowledge pertaining to
both natural science and morality respectively. And Kant develops this dual metaphysics in the
1
A rewritten and expanded version of a lecture first given at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, in 1994, and again in
2017.
2
Critique of Pure Reason A 841, B 869 (emphasis in the original). Passages from this work are cited according to
the first (A) and second (B) edition, the pagination of which is included in the margins of English translations. When
A and B are both cited, the text appears in both editions, When A alone is cited, the text is found only in the first
edition; and when B alone is cited, the text is found only in the second edition. I have made ample of use of Norman
Kemp Smith’s translation of the Critique of Pure Reason, though altering it with some frequency in the interest of
greater literalness. Unless otherwise noted, translations of passages from other works are my own. Passages quoted
or translated directly from the German text are taken from Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, Hamburg: Felix Meiner
Verlag, 1956. Passages from other texts by Kant are taken from Werke in Zehn Banden (edited by Wilhelm
Weischedel, Darmstadt: Wissenchaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981 – Sonderausgabe), hereafter Werke.
1
�Metaphysical Foundation of Natural Science and the Metaphysics of Morals.3 In what follows I
shall attempt to identify the ultimate ground of Kant’s dual metaphysics.
Kant’s task is to give a solution to the problem of how man can have ends, or telē, while
nonetheless dwelling within nature, which according to modern natural science is devoid of ends.
It is by virtue of his reason that man is oriented toward theoretical and practical ends.
Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being has the
ability to act according to the notion of laws, i.e., according to principles, or a
will.4
Man is not just pushed and pulled through life by irresistible forces, or even instincts. He has
immediate and incontestable awareness of himself as an agent. The evidence we have that we
act, that we do things for the sake of ends, that is, with purposes in mind, and that we are not just
acted upon by other things, is immediate, incontestable, and irrefutable by any theory, scientific
or otherwise. No theory of natural science, however much it may contribute to our understanding
of non-human nature, carries, or could carry, as much evidence in its favor as does our
immediate awareness of acting for the sake of ends. We even think—as distinct from freely
associating—for the sake of an end, minimally for subjective clarity and consistency, maximally
for objective knowledge. And we are aware that we have to make some effort to achieve clarity,
consistency, and knowledge. This effort, which we all experience, is immediate evidence of our
teleological constitution. We can speculate or refrain from speculating about the origin of our
3
The Metaphysics of Morals should not be confused with the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Section 2, 412: “Ein jedes Ding der Natur wirkt nach Gesetzen. Nur ein
vernünftiges Wesen hat das Vermögen, nach der Vorstellung der Gesetze d.i. nach Prinzipien zu handeln, oder einen
Willen.” (Emphasis in the original.) Werke, Band 6, 41.
4
2
�teleological constitution, as we wish. But we cannot explain it away.5 Our orientation toward
ends is the genuine “first for us.”
According to Aristotle and his followers, man is at home within a world, within a cosmos
that is itself teleological. Not only plants and animals, but simple bodies at one extreme and stars
at the other, all seem to exhibit teleology, as does the very topology of the cosmos: things have
their proper places, and when displaced from them by force, they return to them by nature.
Enforced motion is virtually defined by Aristotle as motion contrary to nature.6
With the scientific revolution of early modernity, the Aristotelian perspective got
seriously called into question. The distinction between celestial and terrestrial bodies collapsed,
as did the distinction between natural and enforced motion. Modern natural science attempted to
demonstrate that, in the case of inanimate beings, motion can be explained by mechanical or
push-pull, causality alone. And the hope was held open that the motion of animate beings, man
included, could be explained the same way. Natural ends came to be regarded as superfluous
principles. Kant is in general agreement with modern science in its non-teleological account of
non-human human nature. But Kant is in general agreement with Aristotle in his teleological
account of human nature, though the specifics of his account of human nature differ in important
ways from Aristotle’s.
Kant’s metaphysics of nature consists of a body of interrelated a priori synthetic
propositions or judgments. The architectonic propositions pertaining to the metaphysics of nature
are the concern of roughly the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason. I shall focus on only one
5
It is as self-evident as any law of logic that we act for the sake of ends, for pleasure and knowledge among other
things. If modern science cannot make sense of this fact, then modern science needs to restrict the scope of its
claims or revisit its presuppositions, or both.
6
Physics 215a1-4.
3
�of these: “Every event has a cause,” or as Kant also puts it, “All alterations take place in
conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect.” Kant agrees with Hume that the
proposition, “Every event has a cause,” cannot be strictly inferred from experience. We see an
event, A, followed by another event, B. But we do not see A cause B. We see one event happen
after another, to be sure. We see temporal consecution all the time and in recurring patterns. But
we never see temporal connection, no matter how many times we see B followed by A. The
regularity with which B follows A does not permit us to infer, by any known rule of logic, that A
causes B. (And it is for that reason that we sometimes make mistakes in predicting that B will
follow A.) Moreover, even if we could see in a given case that A causes B, we would not be able
to logically infer, given our spatially and temporally limited experience, that whenever A occurs
again it will cause B again, or even be followed by B. We cannot logically infer even that every
time B occurs it must have a cause, much less that everything that has ever happened, is
happening now, or ever will happen, must have a cause. Such a so-called inference is only an
empirical generalization. It lacks any claim to apodicticity inasmuch as it is always colored by
some tincture, however slight, of dubitability.
Because I can think of an event without having to think of its having a cause, I can think
without logical contradiction of its not having a cause at all. And the same is true of an act,
whether construed as event within time or as an act of some other kind.7 I can think, without
logical contradiction, of an act’s not having any cause at all. And so I can also think, without
contradiction, of an event or an act’s being its own cause. There is nothing logically
contradictory about a free act. The stakes, it should be obvious, are rather high regarding what
we can and cannot know about causality.
7
The possibility of an act that does not occur within time, and hence is not an event in the ordinary sense of the
word, will be considered in Section 8, below.
4
�The judgment, “Every event must have a cause,” cannot then be known from experience,
or as Kant says, a posteriori. If it can be known at all, it can be known only a priori, that is,
without relying on experience. But if the judgment, “Every event must have a cause,” is an a
priori judgment, it is not an analytic judgment. There is nothing in the mere concept of an event,
of something that happens, that enables me to logically infer that it must, or even does, have a
cause. (And if I say that to be an event means to have cause, then I am simply begging the
question.) The judgment, “Every event must have cause,” if it is to be a knowable truth, must be
both a priori and synthetic. It can be validated only by a new kind of argument, one that is
neither empirical nor analytic-semantic. Kant calls this new kind of argument “transcendental,”
because it transcends, or prescinds from, all particular content of experience—of sense
experience—relying on none of it, and attempts to exhibit what makes experience possible in the
first place.8
Kant’s well known formulation of the question—“How are a priori synthetic judgments
possible?”—is somewhat misleading. For it could seem to suggest that Kant first assumes the
existence of a priori synthetic judgments, and then tries to show how the mind would have to be
constituted for there to be such judgments.9 But, as the best readers of Kant have pointed out, this
style of argument cannot lead to the conclusion that every event must have a cause, but only to
the conclusion that, if every event must have a cause, and if this proposition is knowable, then the
mind must possess certain cognitive faculties (or cognitive abilities—Erkenntnisvermögen)
8
A 11, B 25; Cf. A 295-296, B 351-353.
In the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that there are a priori synthetic judgments in
mathematics. His argument there serves chiefly as an incentive for seeking such judgments elsewhere. Even if, as
many twentieth century logicians have argued, all judgments of mathematics are analytic and not synthetic, that fact,
by itself, would not undermine Kant’s argument for a priori synthetic judgments functioning as architectonic
propositions for knowledge of nature.
9
5
�whereby it is able to know this.10 Such a procedure would prove neither that every event must
have a cause nor that the mind really does possess faculties enabling it to know this.11 Such a
way of arguing is not fruitless, however. It is in fact the sole procedure of Kant’s Prolegomena.
In that comparatively short and introductory book, Kant says that he “proceeds from that which
is sought, as if it were given, and ascends to the conditions under which alone it is possible.”12
Kant calls this way of proceeding, “analytic” or “regressive.” The way of proceeding in the
Critique of Pure Reason, however, he calls “synthetic or progressive.” Rather than assuming
that every event must have a cause, Kant establishes, or attempts to establish, solely by
considering how the human mind operates, that it really does possess faculties whereby it can
know, indeed constitute, objects and events. He attempts to show that that one of the ways in
which the mind constitutes objects and events is in accordance with the category of cause and
effect—with the result that every event must have a cause. There is a problem, however. In the
Critique of Pure Reason, Kant employs both analytic and synthetic procedures.13 And that leads
some to say, understandably but falsely, that the Critique of Pure Reason presupposes modern
mathematical physics as a body of truth, in order to validate modern mathematical physics as a
body of truth—which is, of course, a fallacy. The deepest stratum of Kant’s argument in the
Critique of Pure Reason does not commit this fallacy. The difficulty is in identifying the deepest
stratum of his argument.
10
In Beyond Good and Evil, § 11 “On the Prejudices of the Philosophers,” Nietzsche has a merry time making fun
of Kant’s use of the word “faculty” (Vermögen).” But Nietzsche’s criticism, such as it is, is not particularly
penetrating. According to Kant, the human mind has the ability (another, less technical sounding, translation of
Vermögen) to be affected; and it also has a quite different ability, namely the ability to think, in particular to judge.
If Kant is right about this, then nothing of importance turns on his naming the former the “faculty of sensibility and
the latter the “faculty of understanding.”
11
See Robert Paul Wolf, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), pp. 44-56.
12
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Preamble § 5 fn.
13
Kant employs both ways of arguing in the Critique of Pure Reason for the sake of thoroughness. The synthetic
procedure only heuristically presupposes the analytic procedure. It does not logically presuppose the analytic
procedure. That is to say, the synthetic procedure does not employ its hypothetically-conditioned result of the
analytic procedure as an actual premise.
6
�This difficulty is greatly augmented by the rugged contours of Kant’s text. The first
edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, was put together in a relatively short
period of time. But Kant developed his main theses over the course of the preceding twelve years
or so. According the prevailing though not universally accepted hypothesis, which has both soft
and hard versions, the Critique of Pure Reason is something of a “patchwork,” including
sentences and paragraphs written at different times during the decade prior to its publication. It is
not hard to find inconsistencies and obscurities in his presentation.14 Moreover, Kant can be
imprecise in his terminology. The word “knowledge” (or “cognition”—Erkenntnis) usually
means the conceptual grasping of a synthesized intuition in a judgment proper, but it sometimes
means only the synthesized intuition itself. In spite of making a rather sharp distinction between
“transcendent” and “transcendental,” Kant occasionally uses the latter when he means the
former. He makes a major distinction between a mere “form of intuition” and a “formal
intuition,” but often uses the one word “intuition” for both. He distinguishes between two kinds
of “synthesis,” but one has to determine from the context which synthesis he has in mind when
he uses this word. Kant also uses the important word “unity” in more than one way. Most
problematically, as we shall see, he sometimes speaks of “the understanding” in distinction from
“the imagination,” but sometimes as including it. The reader who does want to dismiss Kant is
inclined to blame himself for his confusion. But Kant is largely responsible for the confusion. If
he were not saying something of immense significance, the reader would be justified in refusing
to follow him through the “thorny paths of the Critique of Pure Reason.”15
And there is a further problem. Kant made major revisions for the second edition,
published in 1787; and up until his death he continued to refine his thoughts on questions and
14
15
Kant himself acknowledges this. See the Preface to the second edition, B xxxvii-xliv,
B xliii.
7
�problems dealt with Critique of Pure Reason in notes and in other publications, culminating in
the unfinished but rich and wide-ranging Opus Postumum. One cannot call the Critique of Pure
Reason a “snapshot” of Kant’s thinking. It is more like a scrapbook containing photographs
taken over a period of about fifteen years, and not always arranged in chronological order.
But what Kant is getting at has to be considered, if only because of his influence, which
is greater than that of any philosopher since Aristotle. If Kant’s general argument of the Critique
of Pure Reason is sound, he has answered Hume, validating the conception of science as a truly
objective enterprise, while at the same exploding its pretentions to disclose the deepest
foundation of things; and he has destroyed metaphysics as classically conceived. His
speculations stimulated the work of his greatest successors, both when they attempt to develop
his thoughts further and when they react against him.16 Kant is the central figure in modern
philosophy. The contemporary distinction between “analytic philosophy” and “continental
philosophy” can be understood as a distinction between two ways of philosophizing, both
motored in almost opposite directions, by Kantian discoveries or, as the case may be, inventions.
Whether and to what extent Kant is breaking new ground or making things up in the Critique of
Pure Reason can be determined only by attempting to enter into his way of thinking and
suspending judgment on the value of his project until the whole of it is brought as clearly into
16
See Eckart Förster, The Twenty Five Years of Philosophy (translated by Brady Bowman, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2012). Förster treats the revolution in metaphysical thinking that Kant effected in the Critique of
Pure Reason, and the remarkable developments in philosophy that occurred in the aftermath of its publication. In the
opening pages of his book, Förster makes amply clear what Kant meant in his startling claim that “prior to the
development of critical philosophy there had been no philosophy at all.” Förster’s book can be understood as a kind
of justification of the word “The” in its title. One does not have to agree with Kant’s opinion of the prior history of
metaphysical speculation to recognize the massive import of the Critique of Pure Reason and the necessity of
coming to terms with this work for those who take a serious interest in philosophy.
8
�view as possible. Needless to say, what follows is only introductory exposition of the basic
principles of his critical philosophy. 17
2. The two sources of human knowledge
Kant’s distinctive interpretation of the human mind turns on his account of, and his sharp
distinction between, intuitions and judgments. Kant tells us that it is by means intuition that the
mind is in an immediate relation to objects (Gegenstande).18 He thinks that there are only two
ways a mind could be in immediate relation to objects: it could immediately create them or it
could be immediately affected by them. The former is how an infinite, or divine, mind (if there is
such a thing), immediately relates itself to objects. The latter is how our finite, human mind is
immediately related to objects. We are affected by them; and all we know of them immediately is
that we are affected them. A divine mind (should one exist) would have an intellectual intuition,
such that in actively creating things it would know them fully for what they are, not just as they
17
I have reservations of my own about various aspects of Kant’s project. Because it is not possible to take issue with
Kant intelligently without understanding him first, I refrain from expressing my reservations in this introductory
exposition.
18
When Kant speaks of being affected by objects (Gegenstande), at A 19, B34, he is not yet distinguishing between
things-in-themselves and appearances. Sometimes Kant uses “object” (Gegenstand) as equivalent to “thing” (Ding).
And in this sense he will speak both of “things-in-themselves” (e.g., A 26, B 42) and of “objects-in-themselves”
(e.g., A 36, B 52). Kant also uses the word Objekt, which, like Gegenstand, is naturally translated into English as
“object.” For a brief but clear summary of how Kant uses the words Gegenstand and Objekt, see the entry, “object,”
in A Kant Dictionary. Caygill, Howard (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 1995 ( Blackwell Reference Online. 21 July
2007). Compare Kant’s use of Gegenstand and Objekt in the sentence at A 89, B 121 beginning, “Denn da nur
vermittlest….,” with the use of Gegenstand in the sentence that immediately follows and with the definition of
Objekt at B 137. On the basis of these two passages, we can say that when Kant is speaking carefully he uses the
word Gegenstand broadly to name what (unlike a thing-in-itself) is within and present to the mind, though exclusive
of the mind’s own acts (cf. infra, fn. 28.); and that he uses Objekt narrowly to name a Gegenstand that is
conceptually unified. Objekt and Gegenstand are not exactly opposed. For every Objekt is a Gegenstand, though the
reverse is not the case. Kemp Smith translates Gegenstand and Objekt both as “object,” which is an infelicitous
solution to be sure, but one that is not so easy to improve on in an extended translation. In what follows I shall
frequently place an “(o)” or a “(g)” after “object” and its derivatives, when I think something important turns, or
could be thought to turn, on the distinction between Objekt and Gegenstand.
9
�appear but as they are “in themselves.”19 Our intuition, however, is not intellectual but sensible
only. It gives us no access to things as they are “in themselves,” but only to things as they appear
to us.
Early in the Critique of Pure Reason, in the section titled the Transcendental Aesthetic,
Kant argues that space and time are merely subjective conditions of receptivity. They are two
indefinitely extended intra-mental vestibules in which we receive sense data entering from
without. In space, the data are simultaneously given; in time, they are successively given. These
data are not things. In fact, considered by themselves, they are not even appearances. They are
only the matter of appearances. Appearances owe their unity and interconnection to something
other than bare given-ness.
If we abstract from the sensible filling, from the empirical data received within space and
time, two forms of intuition remain; and they are precisely space and time. As forms of our
sensible intuition, they do not pertain to things as they are in themselves. The human mind does
not get space and time from experience because, Kant argues, we would have to receive them as
empirical data—our intuition being, again, only sensible and not intellectual. But if the human
mind received space and time from experience, it would need mental receptacles into which
space and time could be received. Space and time, however, are themselves these very mental
receptacles. And they are nothing more than this—or so Kant argues. Though we can imagine
away all the empirical filling of space and time, such as shapes, colors, and events, we cannot
imagine away space and time themselves. Kant regards this fact as evidence that space and time
belong intrinsically to the human mind, that they are part of its a priori endowment. They are no
19
B 72. Kant speaks both of God’s possessing an intellectual intuition and of his possessing an intuitive
understanding. B 145; cf. B 135. Eckart Förster makes a strong case that, contrary to the common assumption, Kant
did not understand these two to be simply identical. The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 144-152.
10
�more properties of things-in-themselves than the act of judging is. Perhaps things-in-themselves
do exist in some kind spatio-temporal order “in-itself.” Since we cannot know exactly what
things-in- themselves are, we cannot definitively rule this possibility out. But there is no reason,
according to Kant, to think of things-in-themselves as spatially and temporally ordered in any
sense.
These and other arguments go to make up the Metaphysical Exposition of the concepts of
space and time. In the Transcendental Exposition of these concepts he attempts to show that only
as he has interprets them in the Metaphysical Exposition is it possible to have an a priori science
of space and time.20 We understand geometry to be an a priori science of space, inasmuch as it
does not rely on the particular content of experience—we do not need a laboratory and special
equipment, nor do we need to engage in field research, to prove geometrical propositions.21 To
be sure, we do proofs at a blackboard. But these proofs are not experiments. We all “see,”
somehow, that takes it only one proof, illustrated with any isosceles triangle you like, to
establishes that the base angles are equal in all isosceles triangles.22 We “see,” so to speak, that
we do not have to repeat the proof with n number of isosceles triangles, breaking off arbitrarily
when we are more or less satisfied that the evidence thus far is in favor isosceles triangles’
having their base angles equals. This “seeing” on the basis of one example is possible, Kant
argues, because we recognize that space is homogenous in its character, that we shall never find
out anything about any part of space, no matter how far away, no matter how small or large, that
20
Kant does not, as some have thought, infer the a priori character of space from the a priori character of geometry.
Rather, it is only because space is an a priori endowment of the mind that there can be a priori science of it, i.e.,
geometry. See Rolf Peter Horstmann, “Transcendental Idealism and Space,” in Reading Kant—New Perspectives on
Transcendental Arguments and Critical Philosophy, edited by Eva Schaper and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989.
21
The possibility of an a priori science of time is more complicated. What Kant says in the Transcendental
Exposition of Time (B 48-49) is developed at much greater length in the chapter entitled “Analogies of Experience.”
22
Euclid, Elements Bk. 1 Prop..5.
11
�is different from the space that is close by.23 If geometry is an a priori science, then space “as a
whole” is present to, by virtue of being an intrinsic feature of, the human mind. So Kant argues;
and he would challenge anyone who disagrees to show how we can be more confident about the
findings of geometry than about the findings of a manifestly empirical science, such as physics
which, unlike geometry, relies on repeated observations and experiments, arbitrarily broken off
at some point and their findings empirically generalized into putatively necessary and universal
laws of nature.
The innate cognitive faculty that we have been considering Kant calls “sensibility.” It
yields intuitions. The other innate cognitive faculty, which Kant calls the “understanding,” yields
concepts (Begriffe) and judgments (which employ concepts). Sensibility puts us in an immediate
but passive relation to objects (g); the understanding puts us in a mediate but active relation to
objects.24 We have a faculty of understanding because, and only because, our intuition is sensible
and affected by its object. If our intuition were intellectual and creative of its object (as God’s
intellect is, if he exists), we would not need concepts. By means of sensibility, the human mind is
23
It is frequently said that non-Euclidean geometry poses a problem for Kant’s understanding of space, which is
surely Euclidean. Lobachevsky and Riemann develop alternate geometries by denying, in opposite ways, Playfair’s
axiom, which can be construed as a restatement of Euclid’s Fifth Postulate. If Kant had known of Lobachevsky and
Riemann, he would likely have argued that these new geometries, like Euclid’s, also contain a priori synthetic
propositions. For this is all Kant needs to support his claim, in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (and
well in advance of the chapter titled “System of All Principles of Pure Understanding”) that a priori synthetic
judgments are possible, more precisely, that they are actual, in the case of geometrical constructions most obviously.
If certain appearances, met with in the empirical investigation of nature, turn out to be better accounted for by
Lobachevskian or Riemannian geometry than by Euclidean geometry, that would be of very great interest to Kant, to
be sure. And, in that he case, he would definitely have to modify some of his statements about the relation of
geometry to experience. (Consider B 206- 207.) But he would likely deny that such findings require him to abandon
his brief argument, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, that geometry per se consists of a priori synthetic (and
demonstrable) propositions, whatever (non-refutable) postulates it may adopt, or that such findings require him to
abandon his extended argument, in the Second Analogy, that all alterations take place in the conformity with the law
of the connection of cause and effect. The burden would be on Kant’s critics to show otherwise.
24
See Gerhardt Krüger, Philosophie und Moral in der Kantischen Kritik (Tübingen: J.C.B Mohr, 1931), 16-21, on
the “pre-critical” limitation of discursive thinking, or judgment, as such.
12
�affected; by means of the understanding, the human mind acts.25 Sensibility is merely open to
what is given to it; it is the business of the understanding to connect and grasp (or comprehend—
begreifen) what is given to sensibility. 26 And as the counterpart of the passivity of sensibility is
the activity of the understanding, so the counterpart of the receptivity of sensibility is the
spontaneity of the understanding—about which, more later.
We judge by means of concepts. We predicate one concept of another in a categorical
judgment, and we connect two or more judgments, consisting of concepts, with each other in
hypothetical and disjunctive judgments. In the Metaphysical Deduction,27 Kant presents a table
of judgments, from which he derives a table of categories. Categories are concepts, but they are
not empirical concepts. The concept of a dog, for example, is empirical; it is gotten from
experience. Not so, as we have seen, with the concept of cause and effect. This is a nonempirical, or pure, concept. And since we cannot get this concept from experience, or a
posteriori, it is either a spurious concept, as Hume had suggested, or a concept that we possess a
priori, a concept intrinsic to the operation of the human mind necessarily functions. Kant argues
for the latter.
25
And so, according to Kant, though we do not know by creating things, as presumably God (if he exists) does, we
do know by constituting objects (via concepts). In both cases, different as they surely are, knowing is active. It is not
just passively “taking in.”
26
A concept (Begriff) is a kind of grasp (Griff—the English words, “conceive” and “comprehend,” have similar
etymologies.) Kant regards a concept as placing its own imprint on what it grasps, so that what one knows through
concepts is, in part, a product of the mind’s own operation. This is particularly true of pure concepts, i.e., categories.
Kant’s claim that we cannot have knowledge without concepts, and that a concept contributes to knowledge only by
unifying something that would otherwise lack unity, rules out metaphysics as classically conceived, that is, as
knowledge of what is, in itself and independently of the unifying operations of the human mind. Any attempt to
substantively rehabilitate classical metaphysics in the face of Kant’s critique requires developing a clear and
consistent alternative to his account of what a concept is.
27
In the second edition version of the Transcendental Deduction, at B 159, Kant refers to the “Metaphysical
Deduction,” in which he has attempted to prove the a priori origin of the categories. He does not use this expression
as the title of any section of the Critique of Pure Reason, but it is generally agreed that he is referring to Chapter 1 of
the Analytic of Concepts, especially to Sections 2 and 3 of that chapter.
13
�A judgment is not just a string of concepts. It has a coherence, actually a unity.
According to Kant, judgments can be brought under four “heads” (Titel): quantity, quality,
relation, and modality; and each of these is subdivided into three “moments.” There are then
twelve forms of judgment. Each has its own unique unifying function. This unifying function
Kant calls a category.28 Categories are concepts, but they are not empirical concepts. They are
pure concepts that “apply (or extend—gehen) a priori to objects (o).”29 The twelve forms of
judgment are not gotten from experience. They are, rather, intrinsic to the very way we think.
Since the categories are unifying functions in these forms of judgement, the twelve categories
are, like the forms of intuition—space and time—part of the original endowment of the human
mind.
A common criticism of Kant’s table of the categories—more precisely, of his table of
judgments, from which the table of categories is derived—is that he has not demonstrated the
table’s “completeness.” There are two different questions here that are not always kept distinct.
(1) Does the table include too many forms of judgment? And (2) does the table include too few
forms of judgment?
28
A 68, B 93: “By a ‘function’ I mean the unity of the act of ordering different representations under one common
representation.” The German word translated here and elsewhere as “representation” is Vorstellung, literally a
“placing-before.” A more accurate translation would be “presentation.” Kant uses Vorstellung broadly to name
something that is simply present to the mind, which may or may not “represent” something outside the mind. Kant
calls the apperceptive act, “I think,” a Vorstellung (e.g., at B 132; cf. B 157), and it certainly represents nothing
outside the mind. Consider also the distinctively Kantian claim at beginning of § 14 that a certain kind of
Vorstellung, namely a pure concept of the understanding, i.e., a category, is a priori determinate of its object (g) and
not vice versa—something that would be impossible if Vorstellung always meant “representation” in the ordinary
sense the word. (Kant could seem to confuse things at A 320, B 376. But the primary sense of the Latin
repraesentatio, just like praesentatio, is simply a “placing before”, i.e., a “presentation.”) The German word
Vorstellung does not carry with it the sense re-presenting, i.e., presenting again, a sense that in some contexts can be
squeezed out of the English word “representation.” I translate Vorstellung as “representation” with misgivings. But
this is how the word is typically rendered in English translations of Kant’s works (and also in English commentaries
on his works). I am following suit so that passages that I quote can be located without confusion in the text. But the
reader should keep in mind that the word “representation” here and in English translations of Kant’s works is a
broad term that can stand for anything that is present to the mind, however much certain kinds of representations
differ from each other.
29
A 79, B 105.
14
�To show that the table of judgments does not contain too many forms of judgment one
need point to only a single judgment that expresses a quantity, a quality, and relation, and a
modality. Take the judgment, “All dogs are animals.” This judgment has a quantity: universal
(and not, say, particular). It has a quality: affirmative (and not, say, negative). It has a relation:
categorical (and not, say, hypothetical). And it has a modality: necessary. Unlike the quantity,
quality, and relation expressed in the judgment, “All dogs are animals,” the modality is
unexpressed. But it is easy to add it in: “All dogs are necessarily animals.” This is an analytic
judgment. Even though the concepts, dog and animal, derive from experience, they are so closely
connected that being an animal pertains to the very meaning of being a dog: if it is not an animal,
then it is not a dog. This particular judgment and countless others like it contain a quantity, a
quality, a relation, and a modality (even if unexpressed). All four of these characteristics are
embedded in these judgments. Hence the table does not contain too many forms of judgment. No
less than four distinct forms of judgment are identifiable in judgments of the type that we have
just considered.30 Kant’s table of judgments is not excessive.31
Is it, however, deficient? Does it contain too few forms of judgment? This is quite a
different question: and it concerns the “completeness” of the table in the precise sense of the
30
That each of the four general characteristics of judgment exhibits three subtypes (amounting to a total of twelve
forms of judgment) is, I think, easy to see. The only ambiguous case is quality. Kant thinks that the infinite
judgment “A is non-B” is distinct from the negative judgment, “A is not B.” The infinite judgment (unlike the
negative judgment) says that “A” is something, but (unlike the affirmative judgment) it names this “something” only
negatively. And yet, “only negatively,” is somewhat misleading, inasmuch as the whole indefinitely extended class
of “non-B” is predicated of “A.” So the form of “A is non-B” is distinguishable, in transcendental (vs. general)
logic), from both of the other two forms, “A is B” and “A is not B.” Cf. A 71-73, B 97-98.
31
A judgment that might appear to lack one of these characteristics can easily be shown, on reformulation, to
possess it implicitly. The judgment, “John drinks beer,” can be reformulated, somewhat awkwardly but without
essential modification of its sense, as “John is a beer drinker.” This judgment is singular in quantity, negative in
quality, and categorical in relation. Its unexpressed modality is likely assertoric. The one making this judgment
likely intends it neither as apodictic (“John must be a beer drinker”) nor as problematic (“John may be a beer
drinker”). I say “likely” here because, if the modality of a judgment is unexpressed, we can determine what it is with
confidence only by asking the speaker what he intends. But whatever uncertainty we might have regarding what the
modality of a given judgment is does not mean that it lacks a modality. A judgment essentially lacking modality is
not a judgment at all.
15
�word. Does this individual judgment, “All dogs are (necessarily) animals,” according to its form,
exhibit a fifth general characteristic, like quantity, quality, relation, and modality, distinct from
but on a level with these. It is hard, to say the least, to see how it does. What could it be? Still,
one might ask, is there not perhaps some other individual judgment that exhibits a fifth general
characteristic in addition to quantity, quality, relation, and modality? This question obviously
cannot be answered by taking every possible individual judgment and examining it to see if it
happens to exhibit a fifth general characteristic on a level with quantity, quality, relation, and
modality, for there is no limit to the number of possible individual judgments. Kant can
challenge his critic to find a single individual judgment that does exhibit this (ostensibly) fifth
general characteristic. And, in the absence of such a finding, Kant can plausibly argue that his
table is complete: there are only four general characteristics of judgment. Rather than advance
either a definitive argument for his table’s not containing too many forms of judgment (as I have
tried to do in the preceding paragraph) or a plausible argument for his table’s not containing too
few forms of judgment (as I have tried to do in this paragraph) Kant advanced no argument in the
Critique of Pure Reason at all.32 It should be noted, however, that if his table in fact contains too
few forms of judgment, then the derived table of categories contains too few categories as well.
And, in that case nature, as the complex of phenomena governed by a priori laws prescribed to it
by the human understanding,33 would be more, not less, architectonically determined than Kant
thought it was. If that were so, it should go without saying, Kant’s response to Hume would not
be compromised in the least.
32
Kant says that we cannot know exactly why we have twelve and only twelve forms of judgment, and hence twelve
and only twelve categories. See the last sentence of § 21, B 146. He may at some point have entertained the
possibility of deriving these forms from the primordial judgment “I think.” But, as far as I know, he never carried
out such a derivation. In Notes and Fragments (a volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel
Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, edited by Paul Guyer), Note 5854 (p. 300), Kant gives a short
but quite interesting account of why, under each of the four general “titles” of judgments, there must be exactly three
“moments,” no more and no fewer.
33
B 163. Cf. B xix.
16
�3. The question of right (quid juris)
As noted earlier, we have a faculty of understanding, which is to say, a faculty of
concepts, only because our intuition is sensible rather than intellectual. We think, not intuitively,
but discursively only. As Kant says, in a much quoted sentence, “Thoughts without content are
empty. Intuitions without concepts are blind.”34 So, neither (sensible) intuition nor concepts yield
knowledge by themselves. But intuition has a kind of primacy over concepts. To repeat, Kant
argues that the only reason we even have concepts is to make up for the fact that do not have an
intellectual intuition.35 But what is their origin? In the case of empirical concepts, the answer is a
relatively obvious. We derive them from sense experience, via generalization, by attending to
what perceived individuals have in common. We cannot, however, derive pure concepts, or
categories, from experience. This is how Kant describes the relation of categories to intuition in
the Metaphysical Deduction.
The same function that gives unity to the synthesis of various representations in a
judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an
intuition; and this unity, generally expressed, we entitle the pure concept of the
understanding. The same understanding then, indeed through the same operations
by which in concepts, by means of analytical unity, it produced the logical form
34
A 51, B 75. In this sentence, Kant is speaking only of sensible intuitions.
See B 72; A 50-52, B 74-76. According to Kant, the human understanding, is discursive only, not intuitive, as
God’s understanding is, if he exists.
35
17
�of a judgment, also introduces a transcendental content into its representations, by
means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general.36
Kant has argued that we need concepts only because our intuition is merely sensible; and he has
argued that we have not just empirical concepts but pure concepts, the categories, which are
resident a priori in the human understanding, manifesting themselves in the very way we think,
that is, in the very way we judge. If Kant is right on these two points, it follows that the pure
concepts have a relation, an a priori and necessary relation, to intuition. He announces in the
passage just quoted what this relation has to be, if the categories apply to intuitions in such a way
as to yield a priori knowledge of the general structure of human experience, and thereby of the
general structure of nature itself as the sum of all appearances.37 The categories can have this
relation by virtue of their unifying function, which is at work in both the logical forms of
judgment and—he says without yet accounting for the manner in which this happens—in
intuition as well. The account of the manner in which this happens is the task of the
Transcendental Deduction.38
It is striking how sharply Kant distinguishes between the two modes of cognition we have
at our disposal, sensibility and the understanding.
The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only insofar
as they unite (sich vereinigen), can knowledge arise. But that is no reason to
36
A 79, B 105.
B 163-165.
38
A 85, B 117. In the Transcendental Deduction, Kant argues generally that a priori categories are applied with
“right” to what is provided by the senses. In the chapters following the Transcendental Deduction, Kant tries to
show how each of the a priori categories is applied to what is provided by the senses.
37
18
�confound the contribution of either with that of the other; rather it is a strong
reason to carefully separate and distinguish the one from the other.39
It is the very sharpness of this distinction that requires Kant to undertake a Transcendental
Deduction of the categories, which purports to show that the categories of the understanding
apply, with right,40 to whatever is encountered in spatio-temporal sense experience. On the other
hand, it also the very sharpness of the distinction that enables Kant to carry out the
Transcendental Deduction and, among other things, begin to answer Hume by justifying the
claim that the category of cause and effect, though not derived from experience nonetheless
determines experience.41 Put with greatest possible simplicity, Kant’s project in the
Transcendental Aesthetic and in the Transcendental Analytic is to show that and how, in spite of
the sharpness of the distinction between sensibility and the understanding, these two modes of
cognition are nonetheless intimately, and intelligibly, related to each other. His project is to
show that the categories, which are unifying functions in judgments, are at the same time
unifying functions in objects (o). Whatever can be given to us in sense experience, whatever can
enter our receiving rooms of space and time, is subject to the categories. It can be grasped a
priori with respect to its general features, and moreover judged with respect to these features in
fundamental propositions that hold a priori for whatever can be met with in experience. Such is
the accomplishment of the faculty of understanding in relation to the faculty of sensibility. Or so
Kant attempts to show.
39
A 51-52, B 75-76.
A 84-85, B 116-117; cf. B xxxiv-xxxx.
41
I say that Kant begins to answer Hume on the question of causality in the Transcendental Deduction. He
completes his answer to Hume in the Second Analogy of the Chapter entitled “System of All Principles (or
fundamental propositions—Grundsätze) of Pure Understanding.”
40
19
�Let us focus on only one of the judgments and its corresponding category. The
hypothetical judgment, “if p then q,” is one judgment. But it possesses two components. Each of
these components is a proposition, a judgment, and can be considered by itself: I can think the
proposition, “p”, by itself and without a preceding “if”; and I can think the proposition, “q”, by
itself and without a preceding “then.” The complex judgment, “if p then q” unites these two
propositions, and it unites them as ground and consequence.42 This relation is a purely logical
one and does not rely on temporal entities or on time itself. Consider the judgment, “If a triangle
has two sides equal, then the angles subtending them are equal as well.” In this judgment, the
“if” clause names the ground, the “then” clause names the consequent. This relationship is nontemporal, though, of course, we need time to think it through. Our mind moves discursively
through time as it thinks the proposition. But the proposition itself does not move through time.
Such a thing is not even conceivable. Thinking through a proposition occurs rapidly or slowly.
The proposition that is thought through does not itself move rapidly or slowly. It does not move
at all. The proposition retains its identity across multiple acts of thinking about it, acts separated
by intervals when it is not thought about. And it retains its identity for multiple subjects thinking
at the same time and at different times as well.43 These subjects can agree about the truth of the
proposition and its provability, or they can disagree about one or the other of these, or they can
disagree about both.44 But this proposition has to be self-identical, it has to be the same
proposition for multiple subjects, for them to have either meaningful agreement or meaningful
disagreement about its truth and provability.
42
A 73, B 98.
A sentence is bound to a particular language; a proposition is not. For that reason, one and the same proposition
can be expressed in multiple languages, or even reformulated (slightly) in different sentences within the same
language. For example, in the geometrical proposition stated above we can substitute “also” for “as well,” and we
can omit “then”: “If a triangle has two sides equal, the angles subtending them are also equal.” There is a difference
between these two sentences. But the same proposition is expressed in both of them.
44
By “proposition” here, I mean only what is to be proved, not the actual proof itself.
43
20
�To restate the matter for the sake of clarity and emphasis, in the general hypothetical
judgment form, “if p then q,” each of the two component propositions can be considered in
isolation from the other. Neither “p,” taken by itself, nor “q,” taken by itself, need have a
reference to the other, inasmuch as “p” here just stands for a proposition you like, and “q”
likewise.45 Only when they are united in the single hypothetical judgment form do “p” and “q”
refer to each other. Their reference is of ground to consequence. Now a ground according to its
sense is the ground of a consequent, and a consequent according to its sense is the consequent of
a ground. The relation of ground and consequent is the unifying function in the hypothetical
judgment, “if p then q.” We can also express this unifying function as the single, albeit complex,
category of causality and dependence, or of cause and effect.46 It is a single category because it
expresses a relation in which “p” and “q” are united in a special way, not as “p and q,” nor as
“either p or q, but not both,” nor in any way other than “if p then q.” We can say that the
premises are the cause of the conclusion.47 When speaking of a-temporal relation, as in a logical
or geometrical proof, the single category of cause and effect says nothing at all about temporal
causation. In the Second Analogy, however, Kant will try to demonstrate that every event,
everything that happens in time (unlike the conclusion of a proof), has a temporally antecedent
45
There can be false as well as true instantiations of “if p then q.” E.g., “If a lead weight is dropped from the top of
mast in a rapidly sailing ship, then it will land some distance behind the mast.” We can come up with particular
instantiations of “p” and “q” that do have a logical relationship to each other—e.g., where “p” stands for “All men
are animals and all animals are mortal” and “q” stands for “All men are mortal.” But in speaking of the form of the
hypothetical judgment, our concern is only with the general “if… then” relationship, without regard to how “p” or
“q” get instantiated in this or that concrete judgment.
46
At A 73, B 98, prior to identifying the categories, Kant names one of the “relations of thought in judgment” as that
“of ground to consequent” (des Grundes zur Folge). This is the relation of the propositions “p” and “q,”
respectively, in the hypothetical judgment, “if p then q.” At B 112, after he has identified the categories, he equates,
in passing, the relation of cause to effect (der Ursache zur Wirkung, alternatively expressed as Kausalität und
Dependenz), which is one of the categories, with the relation of ground to consequent. It should be kept in mind that
Kant is not yet speaking of the categories as schematized, i.e., as endowed with a temporal significance.
Accordingly, cause and effect, or ground and consequent, need not be thought of as relation holding only within
time. See Section 8, below.
47
Cf. Aristotle, Posteriori Analytics 71b16-33; Metaphysics 1013b 20
21
�cause.48 On the way to the Second Analogy, Kant will try to show that the logical concept of
cause and effect gets endowed with a temporal meaning, as do all the other categories. Showing
that is the task of the Schematism chapter. Kant’s claim is that specifically temporal causation,
like causation of any kind, has an anticipatory logical foundation in the unifying function of the
hypothetical judgment.49
Time is an a priori form of pure sensible intuition, and the logical category of cause and
effect is an a priori category, a pure concept of the understanding. Both are a priori endowments
of the human mind. They seem then to fit together perfectly: whatever enters the a priori
receiving room of time, which the human mind possesses a priori, occurs there as an event or as
a component of an event; and this event is thus subject to the category of cause and effect, which
the human mind also possesses a priori.50
Now this is in fact Kant’s view. And it could seem that he has validated it on the basis of
the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Metaphysical Deduction. And so it could seem that with
the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Metaphysical Deduction, Kant has answered Hume:
everything entering the human mind from without, events included, enter the a priori spatiotemporal receptacle of the human mind are thereby subject to the a priori categories of the same
human mind. But Kant realizes that he has not yet answered Hume. For there was an “analytic”
or “regressive” element in the argument of the Metaphysical Deduction, that requires a
48
See again, A 79, B 105” “The same understanding, through the same operations by which in concepts, by means
of analytic unity, it produced the logical form of judgment…etc.” Note that whereas the judgment, “Every effect
must have a cause,” is analytic, the judgment, “Every event must have a cause,” is (as we have already seen)
synthetic.
49
See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1966), 26-33, for an intriguing argument
that, even if Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy establishes that events are necessarily connected according to a
rule, it still fails to account for the actual experience of causation, this experience being rooted primordially in the
role that our own living and moving bodies play in perception (and not, or not solely, in a schematized category
derived from the form of the hypothetical judgment).
50
A 144, B 183.
22
�“synthetic” or “progressive, supplementation . Granted that we have a priori forms of intuition,
and granted that we have a priori concepts, both of which are necessary for a priori knowledge
of nature (including knowledge that “all alterations take place in conformity with the law of the
connection of cause and effect”), Kant has still not shown that our a priori forms of intuition and
concepts are sufficient for a priori knowledge of nature. For the sharp distinction between
sensibility and the understanding, between sensible intuition and concept, the sustained
elaboration of which is one of Kant’s most impressive achievements, raises a new question of its
own, a question that only Kant could have raised: by what right do we apply a category, an a
priori concept of the understanding, to what is found in our a priori forms of intuition, space and
time?51 It is a tribute to Kant’s intelligence that he realized that this question cannot be
adequately answered just by noting that the faculties of the understanding and sensibility, even as
he has so carefully described them, are faculties of one and the same mind. And it is a tribute to
Kant’s honesty that he did not gloss over the awkward fact that his account raises the question of
the unity of human mind in its cognitive functioning—a question that few, if any, other thinkers
before Kant raised, and none with his sharpness of focus and intensity of concentration. Kant
realized that the human mind might be originally cleft in such a way that a perfect fit between its
two parts was impossible. The question of right (quid juris), that is, the question by what right
can a pure concept of the understanding be applied to what is present in sensibility, is the
question of the Transcendental Deduction. The Metaphysical Deduction purported to
demonstrate that we have, in the very way that the human mind is articulated, what is necessary
for a priori knowledge of the general structure of nature. The Transcendental Deduction will
51
The legitimacy of applying empirical concepts to appearances, which are in space and time, is not essentially
problematic, since empirical concepts are derived, by way of generalization, from spatio-temporal experience to
begin with. Because, for Kant, the categories are not derived from appearances, the legitimacy of their application to
appearances is a special problem, a specifically Kantian problem.
23
�attempt to demonstrate also that we have, in the very way that the human mind operates, what is
sufficient for a priori knowledge of the general structure of nature. Since Kant conceded that the
first edition version of the Deduction was insufficiently clear,52 I shall limit my remarks in the
following to what is going on (some of it) in the second edition version.
4. The Structure of the Transcendental Deduction
The two versions of Transcendental Deduction are the most widely contested texts in the
history of philosophy, with the exception of Aristotle’s De Anima 3.5, to which the
Transcendental Deduction is not entirely unrelated, both texts dealing with what is necessarily
and irreducibly active in the mind. Though Kant attempted to clear up obscurities that he thought
marred the first edition version of the Transcendental Deduction, the second edition itself is not
free of obscurity. Certain terms are used without the qualification that the reader has to supply by
attending to the context not just in light of what has already been said elsewhere but even in light
of what will be said only later in the Deduction. The text is replete with side observations that,
though they are always of considerable interest, can cause the reader to lose the thread of the
argument. Assertions are made early on that do not get fully justified until later on. Most
strikingly, at the end of § 20 we have what appears to be an announcement that the Deduction
has been successfully brought to a conclusion—“Consequently, the manifold of a given intuition
is necessarily subject to the categories”—only to discover, in § 21 ff., that we have hardly
reached the halfway point of the argument. And the Deduction includes, near the end, what
52
In what follows, when I use the abbreviated expression, “Deduction,” by itself, I am referring to the
Transcendental Deduction only, not to the Metaphysical Deduction, and only to the version in the second edition of
the Critique of Pure Reason.
24
�appears to be an overstatement that, assuming it is not a simple mistake, cries out to be brought
into some kind of agreement with what Kant says a few pages earlier in the Deduction.
Here is what I take to be the structure of the Transcendental Deduction in the second
edition:
The first section, § 15, is introductory and speaks of combination in its general character.
Kant argues here that any analysis of what is present to the mind, of our representations, always
presupposes synthesis.
The next three sections, §§ 16-20, comprise the first half of the Deduction. This half can
be subdivided into two stages. In the first stage, §§ 16-17, Kant gives an account of
apperception—self-consciousness in the act “I think” 53—as such. In the second stage, §§ 18-20,
he argues that objectivity (o) is constituted by apperception—though it is in the first stage, in the
second paragraph of § 17, that Kant says what he means by an object (o) in the context of the
Deduction. In § 20, Kant concludes the first half of the Deduction by arguing that all sensible
intuitions are subject to the categories. But he realizes that the Deduction is not finished at this
point because he has not yet fully accounted for the synthetic character of sensible intuition
itself, which is a presupposition, not a consequence, of the explicit application of categories to
intuition in a judgment.
§ 21 is the bridge from the first to the second half of the Deduction
§§ 22-26 comprise the second half of the Deduction. This half too can be subdivided into
stages. In the first stage, §§ 22-23, Kant argues that the categories yield no knowledge of things53
By apperception, Kant means self-consciousness (B 68). By transcendental apperception, he means consciousness
of self as engaged in the act “I think,” and as thereby constitutive of all a priori knowledge, even (as we shall see) of
objectivity itself. Empirical apperception is consciousness of self as having particular memories, inclinations,
aspirations, etc. Unlike transcendental apperception, empirical apperception varies from individual to individual.
25
�in-themselves, and yet that they extend to objects (g) of sensible intuition in general, that is to
any intuition, be it like or unlike ours, that is receptive and not active (or intellectual, as God’s is,
if he exists). In the second stage, the first three paragraphs of § 24, Kant introduces the
imagination, barely even alluded to up to this point in the Deduction, though silently
presupposed all along; and here he distinguishes between two a priori syntheses, figurative and
intellectual. The remainder of § 24 through the whole of § 25 arrests the development of the
second half of the Deduction. This passage could be called a “digression,” did not the
observations made in it have such a massive bearing, not only on the chief claims of the Critique
of Pure Reason, but on the whole of Kant’s mature philosophy.54 The third stage (proper) of the
second half of the Deduction, § 26, continues from where the third paragraph of § 24 left off.
Here Kant completes the Deduction by arguing that the categories apply to our sensible
intuition, hence to whatever data enter into it from without, hence to whatever can be perceived,
and that they are therefore valid a priori for all possible objects (g) of experience.
§ 27 states the “Outcome” of the Transcendental Deduction, and argues briefly against
two alternative ways of construing the relation between experience and categories.
5. The Transcendental Deduction §§15-20
54
Kant begins this passage with, “This is a suitable place for explaining the paradox…etc.” I think that it is, in fact,
not a suitable place, and that he should have treated this paradox after § 26. Still, this passage does speak to
questions that, even as early as § 16, will likely have occurred to an intelligent reader. Kant may have placed it
where he did in order to forestall objections to the winding up of his argument in § 26 (which is entitled
“Transcendental Deduction of the Universally Possible Use in Experience of the Pure Concepts of the
Understanding”). The passage in § 24 beginning, “This is a suitable place…etc.,” and the whole of § 25 looks like
an insert. I suspect that Kant originally ended § 24 after the first three paragraphs and the section now given as § 26
followed immediately as § 25. Hence the reference in the note at B 136 to § 25, when the more obvious reference
would be to § 26.
26
�Kant holds that all synthesis of what is present to the mind is performed by the
understanding which, construed broadly, is the faculty of combination. We are not, according to
Kant, originally given wholes—whether single individuals, Gestalten, eidē, or any other kind of
organized wholes—but only manifolds of discontinuous and unconnected discreta.55 Because
sensibility, considered independently of the synthetic contribution of the understanding, is
nothing more than a passive faculty of receptivity, it cannot combine. It can only “take in.”
Lacking spatial and temporal continuity, sense data are not yet appearances but, again, the matter
of appearances. Appearances owe their form to the synthetic operation of the mind.
Analysis, according to Kant, presupposes synthesis. The human mind can know
something about its objects by analyzing them only because it has originally synthesized them.56
In breaking down an empirical object into its constituent parts in order to understand how it is, as
we tellingly say, “put together,” the mind aims, or should aim, at following up this analysis with
a recombination of the parts back into a whole. In such recombining, the mind recapitulates and
makes explicit to itself its own prior activity. The synthesis that follows analysis is always, for
Kant, a re-synthesis. The power of the human understanding consists, then, less in taking things
apart than in putting them together in the first place.
Synthesis, regarded as mere putting together, does not by itself does result in knowledge.
For knowledge, what has been merely put together must be conceptually unified. In the
Metaphysical Deduction Kant said,
55
How broad this claim is becomes clear only in the second half of the Transcendental Deduction. See especially B
160, note.
56
This claim has been disputed at length and in numerous studies by Aron Gurwitsch, both on phenomenological
grounds and in light of the empirical findings of gestalt psychologists such as Kurt Kofka and Wolfgang Köhler. See
especially Gurwitsch’s Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press,
1966), 3-68, 175-286.
27
�By means of analysis different representations are brought under one concept—a
procedure (Geschäft) with which general logic deals. What transcendental logic
[in the Transcendental Analytic], on the other hand, teaches is how we bring to
concepts not representations [merely] but the pure synthesis of representations.57
It is through the pure concepts of the understanding, the categories, that this pure synthesis of
representations gets unified. That which bestows conceptual unity on the pure synthesis of
representations is the thinking subject, the ego. The ego bestows this unity in a self-conscious act
that Kant calls transcendental apperception, expressed in the fundamental proposition
(Grundsatz), “I think,” which, Kant says, is “the highest [proposition] in the whole sphere of
human knowledge.”58
It should be obvious that we do not, and cannot, infer the fundamental proposition, “I
think,” from the assumed validity of Newtonian science or from anything else. As an act, the “I
think” is originally present, and I can attend to thematically as long as I exist. As an act,
regardless of what it acts upon, that is, regardless of what content, representation, or object (g),
the “I think,” in an act of attention, is actually directed to at any given moment, it is abiding and
unchanging throughout consciousness. Otherwise I would not know, it would not even occur to
me, that I have thought, and can think, of different things at different times; or even that I who
am thinking the middle of this sentence is the same I that thought the beginning of it. I am a
priori conscious of the act, “I think,” as self-identical regardless of what I happen to think
about.59 The act, “I think,” does not depend on the particular content of empirical thinking,
57
A 78, B 104 (emphasis in the original). Kant speaks frequently of bringing something already synthesized to
concepts or to the unity of apperception..
58
B 135.
59
A 108: “This very transcendental unity of apperception makes out of all possible appearances, which can always
be together in one experience, a connection of all these representations according to laws. For this unity of
28
�which may undergo all kinds of changes. I am a priori self-conscious. I am conscious of myself
as doing, as putting together representations in various ways.60 And that means that even at the
level of speculative reason, quite apart from practical (i.e., moral) reason, I am conscious of
myself as an agent. Human thinking is not just a matter of passively gazing at bits and pieces of
mental data as they happen to float by in time. Rather, human thinking is active. It does not
create; but it does synthesize.61
That I think is self-evident. The question about the act, “I think,” concerns not its
existence its scope. Kant says:
It must be possible for the “I think” to accompany all my representations for
otherwise something would be represented in me (in mir vorgestellt) that could
not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would
be impossible, or at least would be nothing for me (für mich nichts).
This single sentence deserves more scrutiny than can be given here.62 I limit myself to a few
observations. (1) By representations, Kant means broadly whatever is present to the mind: its
acts, objects, appearances, sense data, even fictions and fantasies. (2) Kant says that it must be
possible for the “I think” to accompany all my representations; he does not say that the “I think”
consciousness would be impossible, if the mind in cognition (Erkenntnis) of the manifold could not become
conscious of the identity of the function whereby it synthetically combines it in one cognition.”
60
For an alternative account see Aron Gurwitsch, “A Non-egological Conception of Consciousness,” in Studies in
Phenomenology and Psychology, 287-300.
61
As we shall see in Section 9, below, though I am conscious that I think, and of course that I am, I do not know
exactly what I am. I am conscious that the act, “I think,” has a unifying effect. (A proposition or judgment
constituted by thought has a unity, of subject and predicate in the simplest case: it is one judgment, not two.) So I do
know that I am a unifying agent. But I do not know that this unifying agent that I am—“in myself,” apart from this
act and apart from how I merely appear to myself—is itself an indissoluble unity. Or so Kant argues.
62
This sentence was considered in detail by Dieter Henrich in a course on the Critique of Pure Reason given at
Columbia University in the spring of 1972. See also his article, “The Proof Structure of Kant’s’ Transcendental
Deduction” (Kant on Pure Reason, edited by Ralph C.S. Walker, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 77.
29
�does accompany all my representations.63 For the “I think” to accompany a representation, that
representation must be actually thought about, that is, it must be homed in on, or targeted, in a
focused act of attention and conceptually grasped in a judgment. There are many representations
that are mine, that are present in my spatial and temporal field of view, but which I do not attend
to, such as colors and shapes at the periphery of my vision, or barely audible noises, such as the
sound of an air conditioner that, strangely enough, I seem to become aware of only when it goes
off. (Another example: distinctive odors in a certain building that one never noticed until
returning to it after having been away for some time.) What Kant is claiming is that it must
possible for me to think about, to think about coherently with categories, or to judge, any
particular representation that I have, though by no means all of them at once. The “I think” need
not, or rather cannot, accompany all my representations. I might never have thought about the
sound of the air conditioner, had it not gone off and ceased to make a sound. The “I think”
cannot even accompany all the representations it has at any given moment. I cannot think about
Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, and at the same time think about the background noise in this
room, the ambient temperature, all the different colors and shapes in it, the texture of the pencil I
am holding, etc., even though all these representations are present—as a twentieth century
philosopher will say—at the margin of my field of consciousness, though not as the theme of my
consciousness.64 What Kant is claiming in this sentence is only that I can think about any of
these representations simply by attending to them.65 (3) Kant concludes this sentence with a
63
Cf. A 116: “For in me [representations]…must be at least capable [!] of being so connected….etc.”
Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964.
65
See B 134: “The thought: these representations given in intuition one and all belong to me, means…that I unite
them in one consciousness, or can at least unite them therein….[O]nly insofar as I can grasp the manifold of the
representations in one consciousness, do I call them (nenne ich dieselben) one and all mine.” (Emphasis added in the
translation.) That I can unite representations given in intuition is sufficient to establish that the manifold
representations in an intuition are subject to (or stand under--stehen unter) the categories. Even representations of
mine that are not accompanied by the “I think” are nonetheless subject to the categories. B 136: “[I]nsofar as [the
manifold representations of intuition] must be capable [!] of being combined (müssen verbunden werden können) in
64
30
�reason justifying the first part of it: “for otherwise something would be represented in me that
could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be
impossible.” By this Kant means that something present in the mind that nonetheless could not
be thought about would impossible. But (4!) he ends the sentence with striking qualification, “or
at least would be nothing for me.”
Kant does not think that the oddity of something’s being “in me” but nonetheless
“nothing for me” can be dismissed out of hand. Such a thing is conceivable, again, in light of his
earlier and sharp distinction—a distinction that has to be, certainly not abandoned, but modified,
something Kant has not yet done but will do shortly—between sensibility and the
understanding.66 The qualification “or at least would be nothing for me,” points to one of the
principal tasks of the Transcendental Deduction: to show that whatever is in me, in particular,
whatever is in my spatio-temporal receiving room, really can become something for me, by
being accompanied by the “I think”—which, for Kant, is just a different way of saying that
whatever is in space and time really is subject to the categories.67
In the Metaphysical Deduction, Kant had argued that the categories are unifying
functions in judgment. In the Transcendental Deduction, he states the relation between judgment
and the apperceptive act, “I think.”
[A] judgment is nothing more than the manner of bringing given cognitions to the
objective (o) unity of apperception. 68
one consciousness, they are subject to [the conditions of the original-synthetic unity of apperception].” (Emphasis in
the original.)
66
Henrich “The Proof Structure of Kant’s’ Transcendental Deduction,” p. 77.
67
Cf. A 90. B 123; A 116.
68
B 141. The word translated here as “cognitions,” Erkenntnisse, Kemp Smith translates as “modes of knowledge,”
since “knowledges,” in the plural, does not accord with English usage. A cognition need not take the form of a
31
�Every individual judgment can be reformulated, without any sacrifice to its essential meaning, by
employing the copula “is” (or “are” in the case of subjects expressed in the plural) which
connects subject with predicate.69 The copula “is,” Kant says, is used
in order to distinguish the objective (o) unity of given representations from the
subjective. It indicates their reference (Beziehung) to original apperception and its
necessary unity….Only in this way does there arise… a judgment, that is, a
relation (Verhältnis) that is objectively (o) valid.70
Kant has given objectivity a new meaning. It does not mean things as they are in themselves and
independent of whatever relation they have to our cognitive faculties. Nor does objectivity mean
what all subjects may happen to agree upon, for all subjects may get something wrong, say,
judging (long ago) that things resting on the surface of the earth would necessarily fly off it if the
earth were spinning about its axis. Kant distinguishes objects (o) both from merely subjective
representations and from things-in-themselves. He defines an object and explicates his definition
of it thus.
Object (o) is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is
united (vereinigt). Now all unification of representations demands unity of
proposition. Kant explicitly speaks of intuition as a cognition (A 19,B 33); and an intuition, pure or empirical, is not
a proposition. When he speaks in the above passage of given cognitions, I understand him to be thinking of
intuitions. For given cognitions can be brought to the unity of apperception only if they preexist being brought to the
unity of apperception. See the passages quoted at the end fn. 79, infra.
69
See fn. 31, supra. The judgment “Bodies of different weights fall with the same speed in a vacuum,” can be
reformulated as “Bodies of different weights are in the class of bodies of that fall with the same speed in a vacuum.”
Such reformulations are certainly odd-sounding. Still, they can be made while perfectly preserving the essential
meaning of the original sentence. Judgments are not, according to Kant, all categorical. Hypothetical and disjunctive
judgements cannot be reduced to categorical judgments. See B 141. But their component judgments, or propositions,
can be formulated, or reformulated, by employing the copula “is.” For example the general hypothetical judgment,
“If p then q,” can be reformulated, depending on the content of the judgments “p” and “q,” along the lines of “If A is
B, then A is C,” where each these two judgments is categorical.
70
B 141-142.
32
�consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently unity of consciousness is
that which alone constitutes (ausmacht) the reference (Beziehung) of
representations to an object (g), and therefore their objective (o) validity.71
My consciousness has a dimension, one might say, that is peculiar to me as distinct from you,
hence subjective in the usual sense of the word. But my consciousness also has a dimension that
is not peculiar to me but is common to all of us—and it is consciousness in this latter sense that
constitutes objects (o), and thereby objectivity itself. Kant distinguishes within consciousness
between the empirical ego and the transcendental ego. The empirical ego differs essentially from
subject to subject: my upbringing, antipathies, inclinations, etc., vs. yours. The transcendental
ego does not differ essentially from subject to subject. Though “instantiated” in multiple thinking
human beings, the transcendental ego is essentially the same in all of them. The intersubjective
agreement that can be achieved in mathematics and the sciences—an agreement that is quite
remarkable, indeed astonishing, when you think about it—Kant accounts for by reference to
transcendental ego; and in the same way he accounts for agreement about ordinary objects of
experience as well. It is because you and I constitute objects in the same way, by means of the
same categories and within the same space and time, that we can agree on what we have
constituted. As a consequence, I can say not only that, to use Kant’s example, “If I support a
body, I feel an impression of heaviness (einen Druck der Schwere),” but that “It, the body, is
heavy.”72 So, though we have knowledge only of appearances within the mind, we nonetheless
can distinguish between what is merely subjective in these appearances, what holds for you but
not necessarily for me, and what is objective in them, what necessarily holds for both of us—
71
B 137 (emphasis in the original). When Kant uses Gegenstand the second sentence in this passage, he surely
seems to mean that special kind of Gegenstand that is an Objekt. One cannot fault Kemp Smith too harshly for
translating both terms as “object,” not only for reasons of style but also because Kant himself does not always use
these terms precisely.
72
B 142.
33
�objectivity being (to repeat) constituted by the subject not in its private and empirical functioning
but in its common and transcendental functioning. As a consequence, science can be a common
enterprise and an objective one too, without pretending to transcend appearances and determine
what is in-itself.73
In concluding the first half of the Deduction, Kant says that “all sensible intuitions are
subject to the categories.”
[T]that act of understanding… by which the manifold of given representations (be
they intuitions or concepts) is brought under one apperception, is the logical
function of judgment....The categories are nothing other than these functions of
judging, insofar as the manifold of a given intuition is determined in view of them
(in Ansehung ihrer).74
The first half of the Transcendental Deduction has at its conclusion that the manifold in a given
intuition—an already synthesized intuition, it must be emphasized 75—is necessarily subject to
73
And so Kant can say that “the proud name of an ontology, which ps to give, in systematic doctrinal form,
synthetic a priori knowledge of things in general…must give place to a mere Analytic of the pure understanding.” A
247, B 303.
74
B 143.
75
See § 20. “Also steht auch das Mannigfaltige in einer gegebnenen Anschauung notwendig unter Kategorien.” Two
sentences earlier Kant writes, “Also ist alles Mannigfaltige, sofern es in Einer empirische Anschauung gegeben ist,
in Ansehung einer der logischen Funtionen zu urteilen bestimmt, durch die es nämlich zu einem Bewusstsein
überhaupt gebracht wird. Henrich notes that, whereas the German word “einer” can be translated as the indefinite
article, “a” or “an,” it can also be translated as “one.” It is, in fact, cognate with Einheit (unity). Henrich interprets
the peculiar capitalization of Einer as a hint from Kant that what he has in mind here is the “inner unity” of the
intuition. (“The Proof Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” 70.) This seems right to me. We must keep in
mind, however, that Kant had another word at his disposal. He could have used vereinigt (unified), also cognate with
Einheit. But he has used vereinigt earlier and with emphasis, in his definition of an object (o): “Objekt aber ist das,
in dessen Begriff das Mannigfaltige einer gegebenen Anschauung vereinigt ist” (§ 17, at B 137). In that sentence he
was speaking of the unity effected by the apperceptive act, “I think.” In § 20, on the other hand, he is speaking of a
unity presupposed by the apperceptive act: “All the manifold, insofar (!) as it is given in Einer empirical
intuition…etc.” (Note the expression, gebracht wird, which is used twice in § 20.) Since Kant has spoken earlier,
and twice in this very section also, of the “unity” (“Einheit”) of apperception, he needs to distinguish the unity that
characterizes the intuition, qua intuition, from the unity of apperception. His way of doing this in § 20 is by
capitalizing “Einer” when speaking of the former. In the concluding sentence of § 20, he does not resort to the
artificial capitalization of “einer” But he expects the reader to keep in mind what the previous capitalization of the
34
�(steht unter) the categories.76 The prior synthesis of the manifold of intuition can be brought to
the unity of apperception in a judgment. But the scope of this prior synthesis has to be
determined in order to rule out the worrisome possibility that some datum of sensibility might be
in me but nothing for me. The first half of the Deduction proceeded on the assumption that
whatever is in me, that whatever happens to be in my spatial and temporal forms of intuition,
really can be something for me. This assumption, it turns out, is equivalent to the assumption that
the pure manifold of sensible intuition provided by sensibility has already been synthesized into
a formal intuition.77 A formal intuition can then be conceptually grasped (begriffen) in an act of
judgment, which employs concepts (Begriffe). The second half of the Transcendental Deduction
aims at validating this assumption.
6. The Transcendental Deduction §§21-24 (first three paragraphs), § 26.
I must apologize in advance for belaboring certain points in this section. My hope is that
the overkill, though inelegant, will contribute to clarity.
The important passage from the Metaphysical Deduction that I quoted in Section 3 above,
bears requoting here.
words was intended to convey. Consider the first sentence of § 21; the note to that sentence; the second sentence of
§ 21, where he capitalizes “Einer” again; and the entire note in § 26, at B 160, beginning “Der Raum, als
Gegenstand vorgestellt….”
76
The expressions “stehen unter” in the title of § 20 and “steht unter” in the concluding sentence of § 20, do not
mean that all sensible intuitions are united in a judgment employing categories, but only that any and every sensible
intuition, because it has been antecedently synthesized by the imagination can be united by category application-which occurs when the synthesis already accomplished by the imagination is subsequently brought to concepts (A
79, B 104) in the act, “I think.”
77
On “formal intuition” vs. mere “form of intuition” (the latter is all that sensibility considered by itself contains),
see again B 160, note. We shall return to this distinction shortly.
35
�The same function that gives unity to the synthesis of various representations in a
judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an
intuition; and this unity, in its most general expression, we entitle the pure concept
of the understanding. The same understanding, through the same operations by
which in concepts, by means of analytical unity, it produced the logical form of a
judgment, also introduces a transcendental content into its representations, by
means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general.78
As I noted, this passage claims that the categories, derived a priori not from intuition but from
the understanding, can through their unifying function be applied to sensible intuition and make
knowledge possible. On the basis of the first half of the Transcendental Deduction, we can begin
to appreciate Kant’s earlier statement, here in the Metaphysical Deduction, that the category
“gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition.” The unity effected
by the category, is itself a synthesis. But it presupposes a synthesis, which in this passage from
the Metaphysical Deduction Kant calls a “mere” (blossen) synthesis, presumably because it
produces only contiguous unity of temporal and spatial representations. But once synthesized at
this level, these representations can be accompanied by the “I think,” in a synthesis that is
anything but “mere,” for it produces conceptual unity. As Kant put the matter at the end of § 16,
I am conscious to myself a priori of a necessary synthesis [of representations],
which is called the original synthetic unity of apperception, under which all
78
A 79, B 105.
36
�representations that are given to me must stand, but under which they must also
be brought by means of a synthesis.79
The first synthesis mentioned in this sentence can be called a “higher-order synthesis.” It is the
chief theme of the first half of the Deduction. The second synthesis mentioned in this sentence is
a “lower-order synthesis.” It is the chief theme of the second half of the Deduction.
The passage from the Metaphysical Deduction that I have now quoted twice ends with a
curious formulation that is easy to overlook, given all the other interesting things Kant says
there. In speaking of “intuition in general,” Kant is clearly speaking of sensible, not intellectual,
intuition which, to repeat, we do not possess. But he is not speaking exclusively of our sensible
intuition. By sensible intuition in general, Kant means neither an intellectual intuition nor our
special sensible intuition, that is, our spatio-temporal sensible intuition. If there are other finite
but thinking beings, then they too possess a merely sensible intuition; but it need not be a spatiotemporal sensible intuition.80 We cannot know what alternative form(s) of sensible intuition
other finite thinking beings would possess, or even if there are such beings (angels?), like us in
possessing sensible intuition, but unlike us in possessing a sensible intuition different from ours.
79
“[I]ch mir einer notwendigen Synthesis [gegenbenen Vorstellungen] a priori bewusst bin, welche die
ursprünglische synthetische Einhiet der Apperzeption heisst, unter der alle mir gegenben Vorstelungen stehen, aber
unter die sie auch durch eine Synthesis gebracht werden müssen.” B 135-36. Cf. Jonathan Bennet (Kant’s Analytic,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, 112) points out that Norman Kemp Smith inserts the word “first”
into his translation of the concluding clause: “…but under which they have also first to be brought by means of a
synthesis.” Kemp Smith’s translation is indeed inaccurate, but as an interpretation it is on target. See the use of
“first” (erste) at A 78, B 104; and especially at B 152: “die erste Anwendung…,” a formulation that we shall
consider further in what follows. Regarding the formulation in quoted text above, “but under which they must also
be brought by means of a synthesis,” consider A 78, B 103: “[T]o bring this synthesis [accomplished by the
imagination] to concepts is a function that belongs to the understanding,” and A 78, B 104”: “What transcendental
logic teaches is how we bring to concepts…the pure synthesis of representations.” (Emphasis in the original in both
these sentences.)
80
As forms of sensible intuition, space and time allow for manifolds to be given simultaneously and successively.
But there is no reason in principle why manifolds could not be given some other way than simultaneously and
successively, though we cannot imagine, i.e., form an image of, other modes of receptivity besides these two. There
is no analytic connection between the concept of receptivity and the concepts of spatiality and temporality.
37
�Kant is not just indulging his fancy by entertaining the possibility of a sensible intuition
other than ours. The notion of a sensible intuition in general plays an important role in the
argument of the second half of the Deduction. 81 These are the points Kant wishes to make: (1)
The categories of their very nature have a relation to sensible intuition. (2) There is no reason to
think that our sensible intuition is the only sensible intuition that is possible. (3) Because the
categories are not derived from our sensible intuition, they are in their application not restricted
to our sensible intuition, though this application is of no cognitive use to us. (4) And so, since the
categories do not of their very nature refer to our specifically spatio-temporal intuition, it is
possible to think, without contradiction, of a-spatial and a-temporal things, though by means of
the categories we can know nothing of them.82 Finally (5), on this interpretation of the broad
scope of category application, the locus of the categories in the a priori forms of judgment is
reasserted. If the categories of their own nature had a relation only to our specifically spatiotemporal intuition, one might suspect, falsely, that they were somehow derived from spatiotemporal intuition, as empirical judgments are derived from experience. If, per impossibile, the
81
See B 148: “The pure concepts of the understanding are free from this limitation [i.e., restriction to spatiotemporal objects] and extend to objects (g) of intuition in general, be [the intuition] similar to ours or not, if only it
be sensible.” Cf. B 146: “space and time are the only forms of our [!] possible intuition”; B 150: first sentence of §
24; B 159: first two sentences of § 26—note the distinction here between “objects (g) of a [sensible] intuition in
general” and “whatever objects (g) may present themselves to our [!] senses” (emphasis in the original); B 161: note
the formulation “combination of the manifold of a given [= sensible] intuition in general ” in relation to the
formulation “…in so far as the combination is applied to our [!] sensible intuition” (both emphases in the original);
and B 72 (in a part of the Transcendental Aesthetic that appears only in the second edition.) In § 20, which
concludes the first half of the Deduction, Kant says that all sensible intuitions as subject to the categories. The full
force of this sentence does not become clear until the first paragraph of § 23. John Wetlaufer, in an important but
underappreciated article, “On the Transcendental Deduction: Some Problems of Interpretation and Elements of a
New Reading” (Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 5:1, 1975, 113–131), places appropriate emphasis on Kant’s
distinction between our sensible intuition and a sensible intuition in general (126-127).
82
If we had other forms of sensible intuition, in addition to, or even instead of, space and time, their manifolds too
would be subject to the categories. We would still not in any way know things-in-themselves by means of the
categories. For things-in-themselves, according to Kant, cannot be given in any sensible intuition, be it like or unlike
ours. Knowledge by means of the categories is limited to what can be antecedently given to sensible intuition. What
is given to sensible intuition—vs. what is produced, or created, by intellectual intuition—are not things (inthemselves) but mere representations (Vorstellungen) of things. These representations, mere pointillistic sense data
prior to the syntheses carried out by the faculty of spontaneity, are not extra-mental things but only the effects that
extra-mental things produce on our (finite) mind. These representations are, however, worked up by the
understanding via its categories into that law-governed whole of phenomena that goes by the name of “nature.”
38
�categories were derived from the forms of intuition that characterize our passive faculty of
sensibility, they could not play the role Kant assigns to them in our active faculty of the
understanding.
Having spoken in §§ 22-23 of the relation of categories to sensible intuition in general,
Kant turns in § 24 to the relation of categories to our sensible intuition. Here he distinguishes
between (1) the original synthetic unity of apperception, the “I think,” which constitutes what I
have called the “higher-order” order synthesis and which Kant calls “intellectual,” and (2) the
“lower-order” synthesis, which he calls “figurative.”83 The latter synthesis is accomplished by
the imagination, more precisely, by what Kant calls the productive imagination, which is also a
priori and hence is distinct from the reproductive imagination, the latter being subject to
empirical laws of association and not a priori.84 The productive imagination is responsible for
the original synthesis of the pure a priori manifold of space and time. As a result of this original
synthesis, any empirical manifold, any data entering space and time from outside the mind, gets
synthesized as a matter of course.
Though the Transcendental Aesthetic spoke of the a priori forms of intuition, space and
time, as though they were originally present to us as already unified, the question of how they
come to possess unity was temporarily suppressed. It resurfaces in the second half of the
Transcendental Deduction. According to Kant, even the mere togetherness of points in empty
space or of moments in empty time is a product of the synthetic activity of the understanding,
construed not narrowly as judgment solely but broadly as combination in general.85
83
B 151.
B 152.
85
For some places where Kant speaks of manifold of pure or a priori intuition (as distinct from a manifold of
empirical or a posteriori intuition, i.e., a manifold of sense data), see A 77, B 103; A 78-79, B 104; A 99-100; B
130; B 140; B 150; B 160, note.; cf. B 202-203.
84
39
�Combination, then, takes two distinct forms: what is accomplished by the productive imagination
and what is accomplished by apperception. Time itself undergoes the synthesis of the productive
imagination, without which it would be only a manifold of moments. It would not be one
continuously flowing time. The synthesis of time is not an accomplishment of sensibility, for this
faculty is, again, only passive. Synthesis, or combination, however, is active; and “all
combination—whether we become (werden) conscious of it or not, whether it is a combination
of the manifold of intuition, or of various concepts…is an act of the understanding.” And yet, to
repeat, the original synthesis of time is not an act of judgment, an apperceptive synthesis, but a
synthesis that precedes this. In what is the most helpful footnote in the Transcendental
Deduction, Kant writes.
Space represented as object (g) (as we need to do in geometry) contains more than
more form of intuition, [it also contains] combination (Zusammenfassung) of the
manifold, given according to the form of sensibility, in an intuitive representation,
so that the form of intuition gives only a manifold, the formal intuition gives unity
of representation. In the Aesthetic I have reckoned this unity as belonging merely
to sensibility, in order to note that it precedes any concept, although, as a matter
of fact, it presupposes as syntheses that does not belong to the senses but through
which all concepts of space and time first become possible. For since by its means
(in that the understanding determines sensibility) space and time are first given as
intuitions, the unity (Einheit) of this a priori intuition belongs to space and time,
and not to the concept of the understanding. 86
86
B 160, note.. Why Kant says in this context that the understanding, and not the imagination, determines sensibility
we shall consider below.
40
�The a priori synthesis of time, as the form of inner sense, is eo ipso the a priori synthesis of
space, as form of outer space. For whatever I am conscious of as being in space, I am also
conscious of as being in time, if only as enduring motionless against the flow of time. In this
way, the a priori synthesis of time affects whatever material or empirical content is received a
posteriori in space and time from sources outside the mind. This “figurative synthesis,” Kant
also calls “the transcendental synthesis of the imagination.”
Immediately after identifying the figurative synthesis and the transcendental synthesis of
the imagination, Kant writes, “Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object (g)
that is not itself present.”87 Imagination can do this in fantasy, of course, and it has an especially
important role to play in artistic production.88 But it also does this in the recollection, memory,
retention, anticipation, and expectation of such things as colors, sounds, and actual objects of
experience. This is the work of the empirical or reproductive synthesis of the imagination. But
the imagination, as transcendental and productive, retains the past moments of pure time
themselves in intuition, prior to and independently of the particular empirical content of what
happens to be met with in time. Similarly, the imagination functioning at this a priori level also
anticipates the future moments of pure time themselves in intuition. This synthesis accomplished
by the productive imagination makes what is in one sense “absent”—the “no-longer” and the
“not-yet”—in another most peculiar sense “present” or, perhaps better, “quasi-present”89
Without this foundational transcendental synthesis of the imagination, a thoroughgoing empirical
and reproductive synthesis of sense data given from without not be possible. Without the
transcendental synthesis of the imagination, the manifold of pure intuition itself would be only a
87
B 151 “Einbildungskraft ist das Vermögen, einen Gegenstand auch ohne dessen Gegenwart in der Anschauung
vorzustellen.” (Emphasis in the original.)
88
Kant also speaks of the imagination as productive, not only in artistic production, but in even in a judgment of
taste. Critique of Judgment, “General Remark” following § 22.
89
The imagination accomplishes these syntheses in what Husserl will later call “retention” and “protention.”
41
�manifold of unconnected points in space and time, a manifold of pure discreta. But, one might
object, we cannot imagine unconnected points in space and time. Exactly! We cannot do such a
thing, Kant would reply, because to imagine points in space and time is precisely to combine
them. Pure, or empty, space and time, considered apart from the transcendental synthesis of the
imagination, are forms of intuition only. The points of pure space and time are originally
unconnected because they belong to a faculty of the mind, sensibility, that is, considered by
itself, simply passive and receptive. As formal intuitions, however, space and time can be
analyzed. They can be divided indefinitely into smaller and smaller elements. And that means,
for Kant, that they were originally synthesized. These formal intuitions, as synthesized wholes,
owe the unity they possess to the transcendental synthesis of the imagination. The members,
elements, or data of the manifold, pure or empirical, that is synthesized by the imagination are
side by side contiguously in space and they succeed one another contiguously in time. But they
are not just somehow stuck together. The effect of the synthesis accomplished by the imagination
is that each element of the synthesized manifold refers, or “points,” from within outward and
beyond itself, to other spatially and temporally contiguous elements.90 At every moment of my
mental life, I am retaining past moments and anticipating future moments. As retained and
anticipated, these moments are both present and not present, though in two different senses of
“present,” in different senses that we are manifestly aware of in temporal consciousness. These
difference between the immediate presence of “the now,” and the imagined presence of the “no
longer” and the “not yet,” we can describe, since we all recognize it. But we cannot explicate the
difference between these two senses of “present” beyond attending to it and describing it.
90
Compare Hegel, Encyclopedia - Philosophy of Nature §§ 255-259..
42
�To illustrate with a few examples from experience: In the middle of listening to a piece of
music, say, a simple melody, I retain what I have just heard and I anticipate what I am about to
hear.91 When listening to a symphony, I retain, depending on the capacity of my tonal memory,
what I have already heard, and I anticipate what I am about to hear. Even when I anticipate
incorrectly and get a surprise, the surprise is effective because there was an immediately
preceding anticipation that went “unfulfilled” (as Husserl will say). Without that anticipation, no
surprise would be possible. In watching a leaf fall, I am aware of its falling by means of my
imagination’s making what is absent, the immediate past and the immediate future, present or
quasi-present. When turning my head and looking about this room, I retain what I have just seen
and I anticipate what I am about to see. Even when staring fixedly at an immobile object, say, a
painting, my awareness that it is not moving is made possible by seeing that it is now what and
where it was a moment ago, or even an hour ago.
To return from the empirical to the a priori, Kant says that the transcendental synthesis of
the imagination is
an action (Wirkung) of the understanding [!] on sensibility; and is its first
application (and thereby the ground of all its other applications) to the objects (g)
of our possible intuition.92
91
This happens even at first note of the melody. It is by retaining in imagination the absence of a prior note that I
hear this one as the first note, as the beginning. And at the last note of the melody, something comparable happens. I
anticipate the absence of a following note, especially if the melody is tonal and the last note is the tonic.
92
B 152. The use of the expression “first application,” to say nothing of “ground,” in this passage should remove
any doubt one might have that the transcendental synthesis of the imagination precedes and conditions the a priori
apperceptive synthesis, as well all a posteriori synthesis of empirical representations or data. Already in the
Aesthetic Kant has said, at B 67, “that which, as representation, can precede (vorhergehen) any and every act of
thinking, is intuition”—a formulation that takes on considerable weight in light of the note at B 160-161. Consider A
79, B 104. “The concepts…give unity (Einheit) to this pure synthesis [i.e., the synthesis of the imagination].” Kant
virtually defines thinking (Denken) as “the act (Handlung) of bringing the synthesis of a manifold, given to the
understanding from elsewhere in intuition, to the unity of apperception.” B 145. In a note to the Preface of the
43
�So the imagination is not a third distinct faculty situated between the distinct faculties of
sensibility and the understanding, as certain passages in the first edition of the Transcendental
Deduction have mislead some to think.93 The imagination is the understanding itself—but qua
acting on what is available to it from sensibility, at the transcendental level by acting on the
manifolds of pure temporal and spatial discreta. By connecting these discreta, the imagination
bestows unity on space and time. It turns them from forms of intuition into formal intuitions, and
thereby makes possible a priori sciences of them, geometry most obviously.94 But it also makes
possible an a priori science of the architectonic propositions of nature in general.
Without the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, our a priori forms of intuition
would be, strange to say, porous, like a net. All sensory data entering the mind from without
would be, by virtue of entering it, in me. But those data that did not caught in fabric of the net,
that slipped through the gaps in it, could become nothing for me. By virtue of the transcendental
synthesis of the imagination, there are no “gaps” in our forms of intuitions. They are formal,
which is to say unified, intuitions. They are not porous.
Kant understands the figurative synthesis of the imagination to be, qua synthesis, an
expression of the spontaneity of the human understanding, which he says is responsible for
whatever synthetic features our representations exhibit—and these features are synthetic because
they can be analyzed, or broken down into smaller parts. The understanding as spontaneity is at
second edition, where Kant is speaking of his Refutation of Idealism, he distinguishes between “empirical
consciousness” and “intellectual consciousness;” and he says that the latter precedes (vorangeht) consciousness of a
relation to something outside me. He is speaking there of the priority of apperception to consciousness of anything
empirical whatsoever.
93
Consider A 124, where a pure imagination is said to be “one of the fundamental [!] faculties of the human soul.”
94
Arithmetic also makes use of space. I count two spatial objects, e.g., two fingers ( B 15-16). But I could in
principle count any discrete spatial objects. Because counting does not rely on any particular spatial object and its
particular features, arithmetic is also an a priori science.
44
�work, and it is at work on two levels. But it is not compelled to be at work at all. It is at work by
virtue of what it is. Kant says,
It is one and the same spontaneity that, in the one case, under the name (unter den
Namen) of the imagination, and in the other, under the name of the understanding,
brings combination to the manifold of intuition.95
Though the vast majority of my representations are never attended to by the “I think” in a
specifically intellectual synthesis, they are all effected by the figurative synthesis.96 The
intellectual synthesis that takes place in the apperceptive act, “I think,” is the accomplishment of
the faculty of spontaneity’s judging, under the “name” of the understanding, this or that item
within the figurative synthesis that has already been accomplished by the same faculty of
spontaneity, under the “name” of the imagination. What the faculty of spontaneity accomplishes
in the figurative synthesis is the preparation of the entirety of sensibility, both its intrinsic, a
priori, and pure manifold of intuition, and its contingent, a posteriori and empirical filling, for
explicit category application in the intellectual synthesis that occurs when the “I think”
accompanies a particular representation in a judgment.97 The figurative synthesis is in fact
performed with reference to a possible, hence subsequent, intellectual synthesis, whether or not
the latter synthesis is actually performed in the case of a given empirical representation,
95
B 162, note b (emphasis added). Cf. B 153: “The understanding, under the title (unter der Benennung) of a
transcendental synthesis of the imagination….” Compare B 152: “[The imagination’s] synthesis is an exercise
(Ausübung) of spontaneity….Imagination is spontaneity.”
96
By “representations” here, I exclude the elemental and unconnected manifold data of intuition, since prior to the
figurative synthesis of the imagination, we are not even marginally, much less thematically, conscious of them. We
are not and cannot be conscious of mere discreta, certainly not of unconnected points in pure, empty space and
unconnected moments in pure, empty time, for consciousness is essentially synthetic. As for empirical discreta, such
as separate and small points of color in space and separate and brief sounds in time, these are still synthetically
connected to the stretches of space and time that surround them. It is that very connection to the surrounding space
and time that enables us to be conscious of distinct points of color as separate from each other and of intermittently
occurring sounds as separate from each other.
97
Compare Aristotle, De Anima, 431b3: “ta men oun eidē to noētikon en tois phantasmasi noei…”
45
�synthesized by the imagination. It is the intimate relationship between these two syntheses that
enables Kant to understand them as two operations of one and the same spontaneity.
Had Kant treated the imagination as a third faculty of the human mind, situated between
and distinct from both sensibility and the understanding, he would have had to show not only
that and how the faculty of the imagination is related to a faculty of sensibility distinct it—which
is difficult enough to show, but which he does show in §§ 24 and 26—he would also have had to
show that and how the faculty of the understanding is related to a faculty of the imagination
ostensibly distinct from it. Kant’s understanding of the human mind as irreducibly two-fold—as
sensibility and the understanding—generates for him the formidable task of showing that, and
how, these two heterogeneous cognitive faculties can fit together so as to yield knowledge
(albeit of what is in space and time only). If he understood the human mind as irreducibly threefold—the faculty of sensibility and the faculty of understanding, and also, between these two, a
separate faculty of imagination—his task would have been impossible to fulfill. By construing
the synthesis of the imagination and the synthesis of apperception as two teleologically related
accomplishments—a lower-order synthesis for the sake of a higher-order synthesis—of “one and
the same faculty of spontaneity,” Kant is disburdened of this impossible task.
But, one might ask, has he not thereby made things too easy for himself. I think not.
There is nothing contradictory about one faculty functioning at two levels. A comparison might
help here. It is by one and the same “faculty” that I both pick up a hammer and subsequently
hammer a nail with it. I cannot do the latter without doing the former, though I can do the former
without doing the latter. And yet I am doing, with one and the same “faculty,” both things. What
is distinctive about the figurative synthesis of the productive imagination and the subsequent
46
�intellectual synthesis of apperception is that both are “doings,” unlike sensibility which is a
passive and receptive “being done to,” only.
The combination that allows for human knowledge, as distinct from sensation merely,
requires a priori the following: (1) a given manifold, a plethora of discrete “pointillistic” data,
which is the original content of sensibility; (2) a putting together of these data, side by side and
one after the other, which is accomplished by the imagination; and (3) an expressly conceptual
unifying of this togetherness, which is accomplished by the “I think” in an act of judgment. The
bare “given-ness” of the manifold, whether pure or empirical, is all that sensibility by itself
provides. The putting together, simultaneously and successively, of the manifold, and the
subsequent conceptual unifying of what has been put together, are the two different syntheses
accomplished by one faculty of combination, that is, of spontaneity, or the understanding
construed broadly. The first synthesis is for the sake of the latter synthesis.
I noted earlier that the second edition version of the Deduction contains what appears to
be an overstatement. It occurs in the concluding paragraph of § 26.
As mere representations, [appearances] are subject to (stehen unter) no law of
connection (Verknüpfung) save what the connecting faculty (das verknüpfnede
Vermögen) prescribes. Now it is imagination that connects the manifold of
sensible intuition; and imagination is dependent for the unity (Einheit) of its
intellectual [!] synthesis upon the understanding, and for the manifoldness of its
apprehension upon sensibility. All possible perception is thus dependent upon
synthesis of apprehension, and this empirical synthesis in turn upon
transcendental synthesis, and therefore upon the categories. Consequently, all
47
�possible perceptions, and therefore everything that can [!] come to empirical
consciousness, that is, all appearances of nature must, so far as their connection is
concerned, be subject to the categories.98
In this passage, Kant is emphasizing the dependency of all that we can be conscious of a
posteriori, on the categories. What is surprising is his speaking of an intellectual synthesis
accomplished by the imagination. For, as we have seen, a few pages earlier he identified the
transcendental synthesis of the imagination with figurative synthesis, and he contrasted it with
intellectual synthesis: “the intellectual synthesis…is carried out by the understanding alone
without aid of the imagination.”99 Kant also glossed “figurative synthesis” with the Latin
“synthesis speciosa”—and the word speiciosa (from specio—to see or look at) has a reference to
sight.100 In the above passage, Kant is arguing that perception is dependent upon the categories
by way of being conditioned by the unity accomplished a priori by the productive synthesis of
the imagination, which of course conditions everything than can be given to us in space and time,
sights most obviously, but perceptions of any kind. But how can Kant speak of an intellectual
synthesis of the imagination?
To address this question, let us return to the empirical example from § 19 that we briefly
considered earlier. I can say, “If I support a body, I feel an impression of heaviness.” According
98
B164. By consciousness (Bewusstsein), Kant typically means not just any awareness, however so vague or
“marginal,” but the apperceptive act in its reference to an already synthesized intuition. Hence when Kant writes
here, “everything that can come to empirical consciousness,” he is thinking of anything that be a matter of
experience. And by “experience” he typically means not just any awareness but empirical cognition (B 161, 166,
218). Kant uses “can” here as he used “must be able to” in the first sentence of § 16 (which I commented on earlier),
and with the same import.
99
B 152.
100
In the Metaphysical Deduction, at A 78, B 103, Kant wrote of the imagination that it is “a blind, but
indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are
scarcely ever conscious.” This sentence, though preserved in the second edition, was part of the first edition, as was
the passage at A 79, B 105 where Kant spoke of a “mere” synthesis. As Kant explicates the performance of the
imagination in the second edition, it turns out that its synthesis is not exactly “blind” after all. And its synthesis is
“mere” only in the sense that it is not a judgment.
48
�to Kant, this formulation possesses only subjective validity. It says something about me, about
what I feel. But if I employ the copula “is,” I make a judgment, and it possesses objective
validity.
To say, “The body is heavy,” is not merely to state that the two representations
have always been conjoined in my perception, however often that perception is
repeated; what we are asserting is that they are combined in the object, whatever
the state of the subject may be.101
The two representations are “body” and “heavy.” Each of these two representations, taken by
itself, is a synthesis of a manifold. These representations are not a mere multiplicity of sense
data. They are perceptual representations, apprehended through sight and touch; and, as Kant has
said, even perception is subject to the categories. So the perceptions of both “body” and “heavy”
are subject to the categories; but neither the individual body, seen as extended, nor its particular
heaviness, felt as pressure, is an object (o), strictly so called. One can say that each of these is an
object in the sense of a Gegenstand. But because neither of them, in the two perceptions
achieved by the synthesis of the imagination, is yet judged, neither is yet an object in the sense of
an Objekt.102 For if they were objects in this latter sense, then concepts would be used in the
synthesis of them that is accomplished by the imagination.103 Kant has said, however,
101
B 142 (emphasis in the original).
In this connection see B 234 – A 191, B 236, where Kant distinguishes between loose and strict use of the word,
Objekt.
103
B 137.
102
49
�Concepts are based on the spontaneity of thinking (Denkens)….The only use the
understanding can make of concepts is to judge by means of them…. Thinking is
cognition (Erkenntnis) through concepts.104
Perceiving is not thinking; it is not judging. Still, what the imagination has synthesized—in this
case body and heaviness—has a reference, according to its very sense, to a possible judgment. It
is in this sense, and only in this sense, that each of these two representations of perception is
subject to the categories. But when these two representations are actually brought to concepts in
a judgment, something new emerges, not merely two representations, even two Gegenstände, a
seen body and a felt heaviness, but an Objekt, in which the two representations are combined,
indeed unified, in the apperceptive act, I think. This empirical judgment, “The body is heavy,” is,
to be sure, not deducible from what is accomplished at the a priori level. It presupposes
experience. But though a posteriori, the judgment is made possible by, and must conform to,
what is accomplished at the a priori level.
The above passages shed should make more understandable the implication of the first
sentence of § 16 that, though not every one of my representations, even when construed as
having an inner unity produced by synthesis of the imagination, is in fact accompanied by the “I
think,” it can be accompanied by it. The inner unity of space and of time, which they possess by
being elevated from mere forms of intuitions to formal intuitions, is a unity that, Kant says,
“precedes any concept.” But, he also says, “it presupposes a synthesis,” by means of which “the
understanding determines sensibility.”105 One might have expected him to say that, in this
synthesis, “the imagination determines sensibility.” But he is using the term, “understanding,”
104
105
A 68-69, B 93-94.
B 160, note.
50
�broadly, as spontaneity and combination of any kind and at any level. He uses the term
“understanding” broadly this way not only in second edition of the Transcendental Deduction,
but in the first edition as well:
The unity of apperception in reference (or relation, Beziehung) to the synthesis of
the imagination is the understanding, and this same unity, with respect
(beziehungsweise) to the transcendental synthesis of imagination, [is] the pure
understanding.106
This sentence is actually a definition of the faculty of understanding, broadly construed, which is
so far from being a faculty distinct from the imagination that it said here to be precisely the
reference of the “I think” to what the imagination, by synthesizing the manifold of intuition,
offers to it, originally at the a priori level, and subsequently at the empirical level.107 Since there
would be no productive synthesis of the imagination at all without its having a necessary relation
to a possible judgment, the inner unity of a formal intuition, which is accomplished by the
productive synthesis of the imagination, is said to depend upon the categories.108 The figurative
106
A 119 (emphasis in the original). Compare the sentence occurring at A 118: “Thus the transcendental unity of
apperception refers itself (bezieht sich) to the pure synthesis of imagination.” In an unpublished fragment, Kant
writes, “The unity of apperception in relation to the faculty of imagination is the understanding.” Notes and
Fragments (translated by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005—from the series, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.), 258. Immediately following
this sentence, Kant has written the one word, “Rules,” after which he expatiates further along the lines of the second
clause quoted in the text above.
107
The distinction between or “originally” and “subsequently,” or between a priori and a posteriori, should not be
taken in a literally temporal sense, as though there was some time when a priori operations alone took place, after
which empirical operations followed. Kant’s distinction between a priori and a posteriori should be understood only
in terms of what in cognition is, respectively, “founding” and “founded,” or between what the human mind supplies
out of its own resources and what is supplied to it from without. “[T]he impressions of the senses supplying the first
stimulus, the whole faculty of knowledge opens out to them (in Ansehung ihrer), and experience is brought into
existence” (A 86). “In the order of time…no knowledge in us precedes experience, and with experience all our
knowledge begins. But though all our knowledge begins with experience it does not follow that it all arises out of
experience.” (B 1—emphasis in the original.)
108
B 144 note: “[T]he unity of intuition, whereby an object (g) is given…always includes in itself a synthesis of the
manifold given for an intuition, and already contains the reference (Beziehung) of this manifold to the unity of
apperception.” (Emphasis added.). In § 24, Kant can speak of the understanding both as determining inner sense and
51
�synthesis and the intellectual synthesis are as intimately connected as is possible without being
simply identical.109 It is for this reason, I think, that Kant momentarily, and in opposition to what
he has said earlier, speaks of an intellectual synthesis of the imagination. The imagination would
not be what it is without its intrinsic reference to the unity of apperception.
The Transcendental Deduction, with all its twists and turns, returns in § 26 to the claim
made in § 15 that
all combination—whether we become conscious of it or not, whether it is a
combination of the manifold of intuition, or of various concepts…is an act of the
understanding. To this act the general name “synthesis” may be assigned….110
as thinking (i.e., judging): B 150: “the understanding, as spontaneity, is able to determine (bestimmen) inner sense
through the manifold of given representations in conformity with (gemäss) the synthetic unity of apperception, and
thus [so] to think synthetic unity of the apperception of the manifold of a priori sensible intuition….” And yet, in the
same section, at B 152, he can assign the first of these two but intimately related operations to the imagination: The,
the synthesis of the imagination “.insofar as it is an exercise of spontaneity… is able to determine sense a priori in
respect of its form in conformity with the unity of apperception….[I]ts synthesis of intuition, conforming as it does
to categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of imagination.” (Emphasis in the original.) That the manifold
representations of intuition must be capable of being combined in one consciousness, and that they thereby subject
to the conditions of the original-synthetic unity of apperception (B 136), whether are not they are attended to in an
act of judgment, is the reason why Kant can call the synthesis of the imagination both “figurative” and, in his
apparent overstatement, “intellectual.” Without this intrinsic reference of the imagination to the synthetic unity of
apperception the former would provide us with, at most, a mere “rhapsody of perceptions” (A156, B 195). Since for
Kant, the categories extend to objects (g) of a sensible intuition in general (B 148, 159, discussed in Section 6,
above), one might raise the question of whether those (hypothetically entertained) thinking and finite beings
different from us and possessing forms of sensible intuition different from ours would also need imagination to
synthesize the manifold of their sensible intuition prior to judgment. The answer is that they would definitiely need
imagination. But, no more for them than for us, would they need or even have an imagination independent of the
understanding. The imagination, as Kant makes amply clear, especially in the second edition version of the
Transcendental Deduction, is so to speak part and parcel of the understanding. For the very purpose of the
understanding, in the case of being whose intuition is only sensible, is to connect and unify what sensibility, taken
by itself, can only receive. From the great mass of data present in sensibility, but already synthesized figuratively by
the imagination, the “I think” selectively attends to, or “accompanies,” this or that representation, thereby
synthesizing it intellectually in a judgment.
109
John Wetlaufer speaks of the manifold in an intuition (synthesized by the imagination) as possessing a kind of
“pre-predicative unity.” (“On the Transcendental Deduction: Some Problems of Interpretation and Elements of a
New Reading,” 124). That’s sound right. But one could go a bit further and say that, for Kant, the manifold in an
intuition synthesized by the imagination possesses a “proto-predicative unity.” For it does not just precede
predication (or judgment); it has an intrinsic, anticipatory, and prefigured reference to a possible predication.
110
§ 15 B 130 (emphasis added). In this sentence, Kant writes, in reference to the manifold of intuition, “sinnlichen
oder nicht sinnlichen.” Because our understanding does not combine the manifold of an intellectual intuition, it has
52
�That, and how,111 one faculty—call it “synthesis in general,”112 “combination in general,”
“spontaneity” simply, or “understanding” broadly—accomplishes two distinct but intimately
related a priori syntheses is what Kant attempts to show in the Transcendental Deduction. The
validity of the argument of the Transcendental Deduction, which is progressive and synthetic
throughout, stands or falls with the success or failure of this attempt.
Representations synthesized in me virtue of the productive synthesis of the imagination,
which conditions all reproductive and empirical syntheses of the imagination, are not just in me.
Every representation, synthesized in me by virtue of the faculty of spontaneity “under the title of
the imagination,” can become an object (o) synthesized for me by virtue of the faculty of
spontaneity “under the title of the understanding.” And this is just what happens when I turn my
attention to something already synthesized by the imagination. From the fact that a
representation has been synthesized by the imagination it follows that it is, as Kant says, subject
to the categories, a formulation that means this much, but, as far as I can see, not more than this:
it is possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany it. This is what the Transcendental Deduction has
purportedly demonstrated. And so it can now be said, at the end of the Transcendental
Deduction, simply and without a qualifying clause:
It must be possible for the “I think” to accompany all my representations.
been proposed that this phrase be emended to “empirischen oder nicht empirischen.” It is conceivable, though just
barely, that Kant was thinking momentarily of an intuitive understanding—cf. supra fn. 19—which might well
combine, or rather create and order, the manifold of a “nicht sinnlichen” intuition. Yet in the continuation of the
sentence Kant speaks about how we represent things to ourselves. But whatever we are to make of the phrase,
“sinnlichen oder nicht sinnlichen,” Kant’s general claim in § 15 is clear, though controversial: whatever we can
analyze into parts, we ourselves have previously synthesized into wholes.
111
With, however, more to be said about “how” in the Schematism chapter.
112
Even in the first edition, Kant ties the imagination to conceptual unifying, i.e., to judgment, as two moments or
stages of synthesis, broadly construed. Cf., e.g., A 77-78, B103: “By synthesis in its most general sense, I mean the
act (Handlung) of putting different representations together and [!] of grasping what is manifold in them in one
cognition….[S]ynthesis is that which gathers (sammelt) the elements for cognition and [!] unites (vereinigt) them
into (zu) a certain content.”
53
�Period.
There can be only one source of unity, even if it is effective at two levels. I have emphasized the
productive synthesis of the imagination as “first”—following Kant: “the understanding’s first
application and the ground of all its other applications.” Kant may have thought that there was
never a time when an imaginative synthesis was occurring without apperception taking place.
Apperception is always directed to something synthesized. But, to repeat, not all that gets
synthesized by the imagination gets “apperceived.” The synthesis of the imagination includes
vastly more than does the synthesis of apperception.
It should be noted that the Transcendental Deduction does not depend on the specific
table of categories that Kant presents earlier in the Transcendental Analytic. Its conclusion
therefore holds whether or not the table is complete. But Kant has argued that the category of
ground and consequent is embedded in the hypothetical judgment—if p then q—as its unifying
function. It makes no sense to claim that we received this form of judgment from experience. It
is simply one of the ways in which the human mind thinks and must think. To the objection that
we cannot be so confident that how we humans think applies to things “outside” the mind, Kant
would respond, “Right on!” The categories apply only to appearances which, as such, are in
space and time, hence “inside” the mind.113 An appearance, as a distinct from a thing-in- itself,
exists only within, or as coordinated with, the human mind. So Kant grants, or rather insists on,
the inapplicability of the human mind’s categories to things “outside,” or beyond, or existing
independently of, the human mind, to things-in-themselves as distinct from appearances. But it is
113
I put “outside” and “inside” in quotations here, because these terms have spatial connotations, and space itself is,
for Kant, “inside” the mind. In the “Refutation of Idealism” (B 274-279), Kant sets out to prove “the existence of
objects (g) in space [!] outside me” (emphasis added). Contrary to what is occasionally said, he does not attempt in
the “Refutation of Idealism” to prove the existence of things-in-themselves in space outside me. For the latter are not
in space at all.
54
�the application of categories to intra-mental appearances that elevates them to objects (o), to
rule-governed features of an objective, hence inter-subjectively accessible, world of spatiotemporal experience, or nature.
The Transcendental Deduction does not purport to show in detail how the categories
apply to objects of experience. To answer the question of “how” more adequately, and that
means with reference to the table presented in the Metaphysical Deduction, Kant needs the
following “Schematism” chapter, the task of which is to show how each of the categories get
endowed with a temporal meaning. Nor does the Transcendental Deduction demonstrate the
individual a priori principles, or fundamental propositions (Grundsätze), among which is the a
priori synthetic judgment, “Every event has a cause.” These fundamental propositions need their
own proofs, and supplying them is the task of the chapter Principles” chapter, which purports to
demonstrate that these fundamental propositions are true and hold for nature as such, that is, that
they are true regardless of the particular empirical findings of natural science.114 These
propositions are not proven by, nor do they immediately follow from, the Transcendental
Deduction’s preparatory proof that the categories can be applied with right to appearances.
What the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic (the latter being only
first part of the Transcendental Logic) together purport to show is there are a priori synthetic
judgments, demonstratively true, and serving as general architectonic laws of nature, laws to
which special empirical laws—discovered a posteriori through experience—must conform, but
from which they cannot be derived, either by logical deduction or in any other way.115 Kant’s
114
See A.C. Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen & Co., Second
Edition, 1950), 134-135 for a helpful table coordinating in detail the various forms of judgment, categories,
schemata, and fundamental propositions.
115
B 163-165. If properly empirical laws were somehow deducible in their particularity from the architectonic laws
of nature, from the fundamental propositions treated in the “Principles” chapter, they too would be a priori and not
55
�grounding of natural science does not go so far as to endow specific empirical laws of nature
with the certainty that can hold only for a priori laws. But—assuming it is successful—this
grounding does demonstrate (1) that there must be causes for all events in nature, causes distinct
from and preceding the events themselves, (2) that these causes are also events in nature and
depend on further causes, which are also events, and (3) that the natural scientist who is engaged
in searching for causes is engaged in an objective enterprise. This is the advance that Kant has
made over Hume’s skepticism; and the modesty of this advance, given the extraordinary
complex and extended argumentation that Kant has to employ, can only deepen our respect for
the penetration of Hume’s insight into the problem of causality.
7. Reason and the Unconditioned
The Transcendental Analytic, with reliance on the Transcendental Aesthetic, aims at
demonstrating a set of a priori synthetic judgments that hold for everything that appears or can
appear to human mind. These are the fundamental propositions of a metaphysics of nature. The
The Transcendental Dialectic, aims at showing that the most venerable arguments of classical
metaphysics, arguments pertaining to things, not just as they appear to the human mind, but as
they are in themselves, are irremediably flawed. Such are the arguments advanced on behalf of
the immortality of the soul and arguments advanced on behalf of the existence of God. Such also
are the arguments advanced for the limited or unlimited extent of the world in space and time,
and arguments for and against freedom of the will. These last two, and arguments relating to
empirical at all. That empirical laws of nature in their particularity and interconnectedness are not constituted, or
even anticipated, a priori is, for Kant, a source of “a marked pleasure, even of admiration (Bewunderung),” as they
should be for all of us. Critique of Judgment, Introduction, VI (Werke Band 8, 261). Kant realizes that, even on his
interpretation of the human mind, there are limits to what it constitutes in the phenomenal realm (to say nothing of
the noumenal realm).
56
�them, generate, Kant tries to show, antinomies—or opposed conclusions—by logically valid
proofs that are nonetheless unsound because they assume without warrant that space and time,
and the sum of appearances in space and time called nature, have an existence independent from
our minds. A solution to the antinomies, Kant holds, is possible only if we make the distinction
between nature, as the sum of appearances in space and time, and things-in-themselves. The
existence of the Antinomies is not deduced from the argument of first part of the Critique, but is
met with, Kant argues, in the investigation of nature itself. The existence of the Antinomies
serves, then, as an independent confirmation of the argument of the first part of the Critique.
That argument can, however, be appealed to in working out a solution to the Antinomies.
According to Kant, the inconclusive proofs and contradictory conclusions that have
marred the history of metaphysics have arisen from the attempts of speculative reason to
comprehend what he calls “the Unconditioned,” that is, an ultimate uncaused cause or ground of
all that, on inspection, presents itself as conditioned. Kant maintains that we set out in quest for
the Unconditioned, not because of a mere psychological need, be it hubris, insecurity, fear of the
death, unwillingness to gaze into the abyss, or what have you, but because this quest is
demanded—Kant even says commanded—by reason itself.116 Dialectical illusion arises
unavoidably only to the extent that reason seeks its fulfillment, its telos, in a theoretical
apprehension of the Unconditioned. In the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant suggests
that reason might find its telos, the Unconditioned, not in theoria but in praxis, in the realm of
human willing and action. Turning this suggestion into a demonstration is initiated in the
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and is completed in the Critique of Practical Reason.
116
B xx; A 296, B 353.
57
�In the latter work, Kant attempts to show that reason can legislate an unconditional moral
law, a law expressing to us humans not what is, unconditionally, but what ought to be,
unconditionally. The word “ought”—when used in reference to human action—expresses an
imperative addressed to a rational being, who by virtue of his sensuous (or animal) nature, is
inclined to disobey it.
This [practical] rule … is, for a being in whom reason is not the sole determining
ground of the will [but who has inclinations that can be opposed to reason], an
imperative, that is, a rule that is designated by an “ought” (ein Sollen), which
expresses the objective (o) necessity of the act, and signifies that if reason entirely
determined the will the act would inevitably happen according to the rule.117
Kant agrees with Hume that “the ought” cannot be derived from “the is”—unless, of course, we
already endow “the is” with a moral character. But, that “the ought” cannot be derived from “the
is” does not mean that it is irrational. Quite the opposite. The “ought” is derived from the
conditional “would.” What I, a rational being encumbered by sensuous inclinations, ought to do
is what a rational being unencumbered by sensuous inclinations would do.118
117
Critique of Practical Reason. Book 1, Chapter 1, 1, Definition, Remark (Werke, Band 6, 126). Inclinations for
Kant pertain to the senses and feelings, to what he calls the lower faculty of desire. The higher faculty of desire is
practical reason itself. See ibid. Chapter 1, Theorem 2, Remark 1 (129-133).
118
Though Kant defines obligation with reference to what a purely rational being, i.e., God, would do, he does not
derive the moral law from religious belief. Quite the opposite: “Even the Holy One of the Gospel must first be
compared with our ideal of moral perfection before he is recognized as such.” Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals. Second Section, (James Ellington translation, Indianapolis IN: Hackett, 1981, 21); Werke, Band VI, 36.
Leo Strauss, who is generally worlds away from Kant in his understanding of morality, agrees with him that
morality does not come from religious belief. Quite the opposite: “One has not to be naturally pious, he has merely
to have a passionate interest in genuine morality, in order to long with all his heart for revelation: moral man as such
is the potential [!] believer.” The Law of Reason in the Kuzari (in Persecution and the Art of Writing, Glencoe IL:
The Free Press, 1952), 140. Kant would add that, since the moral law cannot issue from religion, even less from
experience, it can only issue from reason itself.
58
�Acting rationally means, minimally, not acting inconsistently. Acting inconsistently
means acting in opposition to what he calls the categorical imperative. 119 Kant gives several
formulations of the categorical imperative. I shall focus here on the formulation that is, in my
opinion, the clearest and least vulnerable to criticism.
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the
person of another, always as an end [that is, as possessing intrinsic worth] and
never as a means, or instrument, merely [that is, as possessing worth only for
someone else.].120
Kant holds that every rational being must think of himself as an end. It is not possible for a
rational being, Kant says, to think of himself as mere means—as, we sometimes say, merely a
“doormat” for others to wipe their feet on. If I think that you have slighted me, I say naturally
something along the lines of, “Treat me like a human being.” I do not naturally say, “Treat me
like a person who lives three hundred miles north of here,” or “Treat me like a music lover,” or
“Treat me like a hunter.” I can say these latter things to be sure, and in certain very odd contexts
they may be exactly the right things to say.” But it is much more natural to say “Treat me like a
human being.” Now a human being is a rational animal. And since I do not mean, “Treat me like
an animal,” when I say “Treat me like a human being,” I must mean by this expression, “Treat
me like a rational being.”121 We insist on being treated as rational beings because we
immediately recognize that rationality, which is constitutive of our humanity, has intrinsic worth.
119
Kant also calls the categorical imperative the moral law, more precisely, the moral law as it holds for a rational,
but nonetheless finite being. An infinite rational being, or God (if he exists), acts according to the moral law. But the
moral law does not address him in the form of an imperative, since, unlike finite rational beings, he has no
inclination to act against it.
120
Werke, Band 6, 61: “Handle so, dass du die Menschheit, sowohl in deiner Person, als in der Person eines jeden
andern, jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, niemals bloss als Mittel brauchest.” Consider Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-2 q. 64
art. 2, ad 3: “man is naturally free and existing for himself” (homo est naturaliter liber et propter seipsum existens,).
121
I mean something similar when I say, “Treat me like an adult.” We understand an adult to have reached, as we
say, the age of reason and to be, as we also say, responsible for his actions.
59
�Reason has intrinsic worth because through it we humans, unlike irrationals animals, are oriented
to the Unconditioned.
Now, any reason I can give for why you should treat me as an end, and not a means
merely, is at the same time a reason that you can give for why I should treat you as an end and
not as a means merely.122 Reason, as such, ignores what is private about us, and speaks only to
what we have in common. If you are an end, and I treat you as a means merely, I am treating you
as something you are not. I am acting irrationally. For me to treat you as means merely is as
irrational as treating an automobile as a washing machine, or a shoe as a pencil. In fact, it is
much more irrational. For in these amusing cases, I would only be treating one thing as another
thing. But in treating you as a mere means, I am now treating a person as a thing;123 and that is
not so amusing. It is reason itself commands us not to act irrationally and opposition to the
categorical imperative, just as it commands us not to think irrationally and in opposition to the
principle of non-contradiction.124
122
If you say that you do not regard yourself as an end but as a means merely, I cannot prove that you are wrong,
though I can doubt that you are telling the truth. If, however, I come to think that you are telling the truth and really
do regard yourself as a means merely, then I have to be wary of the implications of how you regard yourself for how
you will treat me. Still, your regarding yourself as a mere means does not entitle me to treat you as a mere means,
not if I think you are mistaken in how you regard yourself. Should one assert, circumspectly and sotto voce of
course, that, though some human beings (the wise few?) are ends, others (the unwise many?) are means merely, i.e.,
that they are only things and not persons, Kant would respond that, until and unless a rigorous argument is advanced
on behalf of this assertion, it does not merit serious consideration. For it is too much at odds with how we actually
encounter and interact with others, especially with how we require them to treat us. We cannot reasonably require
those we treat as mere things to treat us as something other than mere things, or reasonably expect, or even hope,
that they will do so.
123
Consider Boethius’s definition of person, “A person is an individual substance of a rational nature,” and Thomas
Aquinas’s defense of this definition in Summa Theologiae 1, q. 29, art. 1. Boethius’ definition is elegant. An
individual substance of a non-rational nature is only a thing. A universal substance of a rational nature is only a
concept, such as a genus or a species. Compare Kant’s definition, which is in basic agreement with Boethius’s. “A
person is a subject whose acts admit of imputation. Moral personality is nothing other than the freedom of a rational
being under moral laws.” Metaphysics of Morals, Introduction IV “Preliminary Concepts.”
124
The categorical imperative (especially in the formulation considered above) causes, or should cause, the
phenomenal world itself to look differently that it would without it. See the striking formulation in the Critique of
Practical Reason, On the Deduction of the Fundamental Propositions of Pure Practical Reason: “This law is to
procure for the sensible world, as a sensible nature (regarding what pertains to rational beings), the form of an
intelligible, that is, of a supersensible, nature, though without interrupting the mechanism of the former.” (Dieses
60
�Kant understands the categorical imperative to be constituted by reason itself, which
precisely qua reason frames its propositions in the language of universals. This is true of
ordinary political legislation too; and it is true of speculative reason in all its ventures as well.
Because reason is not private but common, we can reason together, about both practical matters
and speculative matters. Reason has, we might say, “a mind of its own.” We can ignore reason,
to be sure. But doing so will lead to error, to falsity in speculation and to immorality in action.
There is a striking parallelism in the accounts of our relationship to others in the first and
second Critiques. Just as, in the Critique of Pure Reason, the possibility of intersubjective
agreement in theoretical matters is founded upon an objectivity made possible by distinguishing
between the empirical ego and the transcendental ego, so, in the Critique of Practical Reason,
the recognition of others as ends in themselves with respect to whom I have obligations is
founded on consciousness of the moral law as an expression of the ego, not as a bundle of
subjective inclinations, but as rational will articulating objective law. And just as the self that
knows by constituting objectivity differs in no essential way from other human knowers, so the
self that acts morally differs in no essential way from other human actors.125 The Critique of
Pure Reason grounds a metaphysics of nature, and the Critique of Practical Reason grounds a
metaphysics of morals. The dual metaphysics that emerges from these two critiques is an account
of human nature that harmonizes the modern conception of nature, the world of appearances
Gesetz soll der Sinnenwelt, als einer sinnliche Natur (was die vernünftigen Wesen betrifft), die Form einer
Verstandeswelt, d.i., einer übersinnlichen Natur verschaffen, ohne doch jener ihrem Mechanism Abbruch zu tun.
Werke, Band 6, 156.) Kant is saying here that, though we know (through the argument of the Transcendental
Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason) that all appearances in space and time, including the bodies of human
beings, are governed by thoroughgoing determinism, our consciousness of the moral law actually makes human
beings appear as persons, and not as spatio-temporal objects merely.
125
There are, of course, many empirical egos. But there are just as many transcendental egos, or—perhaps it would
be better to say—just as many instantiations of the transcendental ego, although in the rules of their proper operation
they do not differ from one another.
61
�standing under architectonic laws prescribed a priori by the human understanding, with the with
the ancient and medieval conception of man as teleological.
The Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason could seem to rule out the
very freedom that the Critique of Practical Reason presupposes. Such a thing would be
catastrophic for reason, for it would then be in conflict with itself. Kant attempts to solve this
problem by arguing that we human beings are members of two worlds, the world as it appears,
which (Kant argues) can be known to be exhibit thoroughgoing determinism, and the world as it
is “in itself,” which (Kant also argues) can be thought, without the slightest contradiction, to
have room for freedom. Both metaphysics are rooted ultimately in the consciousness that the ego
has of itself, as a synthesizing agent in the act of knowing and as a rationally autonomous agent
in the act of willing, the former characterized by spontaneity, the latter by freedom. 126 We have
already considered something of what Kant means by spontaneity, but we need to take a closer
look at it.
8. Empirical character and intelligible character
It is sometimes is sometimes said that, according to Kant, everything of which we are
conscious is subject to time. Whereas this is true of what we know in the strict sense of that
word, it is not true of what we are only conscious of. Knowledge always requires an intuition
adequate to the thing known.
126
In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (concluding note to Part 1), Kant equates freedom with
spontaneity.
62
�In whatever manner and by whatever means a cognition may refer (beziehen) to
objects (g), intuition is that through which it immediately refers to them, and to
which all thought as a means is directed… Thought must…refer ultimately to
intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility because in no other way can an
object (g) be given to us.127
It is clear that in this passage, as in others that we have considered, Kant is concerned with how
objects are known, with how they are constituted. But what of the subject that engages in the act
of constituting objects? I do not mean here the empirical ego, with its particular perceptions,
feelings, memories, anticipations, hopes, fears, pleasures, pains, longings and the like, all of
which go into distinguishing you from me. For Kant, just as much as for Hume, the ego
understood this way is only a process of transitory perceptions and feelings. By the subject
engaged in the act of constituting objects I am speaking of the transcendental ego.
In his solution to the Third Antinomy, Kant does not base his argument for the possibility
of freedom on our consciousness of the moral law, for the latter does not get thematically treated
until the Critique of Practical Reason. In the solution to the Third Antimony, Kant argues for a
freedom that is presupposed by, but not yet identified with, properly moral freedom—a
“freedom-from,” one might call it, not yet identified with “freedom-for.” Kant says,
We should, therefore, in a subject belonging to the sensible world have, first, an
empirical character, whereby its actions (Handlungen) as appearances, stand in
thoroughgoing connection with other appearances in accordance with unvarying
laws of nature. And since these actions can be derived from the other
127
A 19, B 33.
63
�appearances, they constitute together with them a single series in the order of
nature.128
The “empirical character” of the subject is what makes it an empirical ago. Its actions are
appearances in time, and these are connected with other appearances, forming “a single
series in the order of nature.” In this sense the empirical ego or subject is entirely subject
to the principle of cause and effect. It is not free. But, Kant continues:
Secondly, we should also have to allow the subject an intelligible character, by
which it is indeed the cause of those same actions as appearances, but which does
not itself stand under any conditions of sensibility, and is not itself appearance.
We can entitle the former [i.e., the empirical character of the subject] the
character of such a thing as (or in) appearance, the latter [i.e., the intelligible
character of the subject] its character as thing-in-itself.
Now this acting subject would not, in its intelligible character, stand under any
conditions of time, for time is only the condition of appearances, not of things-inthemselves. In this subject [as a thing-in-itself], no action would begin or cease;
and it would not, therefore, have to conform to the law of the determination of all
that is alterable in time: that everything that happens must have its cause in the
appearances that precede it. In its causality [as a thing-in-itself], so far as it is
intellectual (intellektuell), it would not have a place in the series of those
128
A 539, B 567 ff.
64
�empirical conditions through which the event is rendered necessary in the world
of sense.129
Kant argues that the thing-in-itself can be consistently thought of as both free, because it is not in
time and thereby not subject to the schematized category of cause and effect, and yet also as a
cause, because without the thing-in-itself there would be no appearances (appearances being, for
Kant, appearances of something that does not itself appear). For these reasons the thing-in-itself
can be consistently thought of as a free cause, even a free will.
Kant removes the will from the phenomenal realm and lodges it in the noumenal realm of
things-in-themselves. But he also argues that the subject as thinking, and not only as willing,
must be thought of as thing-in-itself, and equally free from the thoroughgoing determinism of
nature.
Man is one of the appearances of the sensible world, and in so far one of the
natural causes, whose causality must stand under empirical laws. Like all other
things in nature he must have an empirical character. This character we observe
(bemerken) through the powers and faculties which he reveals in his actions. In
lifeless or merely animal nature we find no basis for thinking that any faculty is
conditioned otherwise than in a merely sensible manner. Man however, who
knows (kennt) all the rest of nature through the sense, cognizes himself (erkennt
129
Ibid., cont. Kemp Smith mistranslates intellektuell as “intelligible.” His note 3 (p. 468) suggests that he does not
understand exactly what is going on in this particular passage. The subject has an intelligible character, insofar as it
can be thought, and must be thought, apart from the data of sense-experience. But its activity is an intellectual (vs.
phenomenal) causality—not identical to an intellectual (i.e., divine) intuition, but imaging it, one might say.
65
�sich selbst) through pure apperception; and this indeed in inner acts and inner
determinations which he cannot reckon as impressions of the senses.130
Kant’s claim here that man “cognizes himself through pure apperception” is striking. For “pure
apperception” clearly means non-empirical apperception. Pure apperception is the act of the
transcendental ego. So this particular thing-in-itself, the transcendental ego, can be in some sense
known, or cognized, after all. But how is this possible if all concepts, pure as well as empirical,
have meaning and yield knowledge only of objects of possible experience,131 that is, knowledge
of what can be given to us from without—however our much our faculty of understanding in its
syntheses contributes to making what is given objective? Kant answers, more precisely he gives
us the means to answer, this question in the apparent digression from the argument of
Transcendental Deduction that I referred to earlier.
9. Transcendental Deduction, § 24 (last five paragraphs) - § 25.
The passages dealing with the intelligible vs. the empirical character of the ego that I
have quoted above occur in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Like most of what
occurs in the first edition, these passages are included in the second edition as well. In rewriting
the Transcendental Deduction for the second edition, Kant elaborates further on his conception
of the transcendental ego as active in thinking, not just in willing.
[The understanding’s] synthesis, therefore, if the synthesis be considered by itself
alone is nothing but the unity of the act, of which as an act, it is conscious to
130
A 546, B 574.
Kant claims at B 147 that even mathematical concepts yield knowledge only insofar as they can be applied to
empirical intuition. Cf. A 156, B 195.
131
66
�itself, even without sensibility, but through which it is yet able to determine
sensibility.132
When Kant says here, “if the synthesis be viewed by itself,” he means if it be considered
independently of exactly what it synthesizes. The unity of the act is the unity of the “I think.”
Thought is an act. It is, to be sure “empty”, without a corresponding intuition, for then it has no
content, it has nothing to synthetically grasp, that is, to conceptualize.133 It is for this reason that,
when Kant says that the understanding is conscious to itself of the unity of its act “even apart
from sensibility,” I understand him to mean that the act of the understanding can be isolated from
the particular content of sensibility that it is able to determine through its acts.134 Still, this selfconsciousness, as Kant elaborates it in the second edition of Transcendental Deduction, is not
knowledge strictly so-called.
[I]n the transcendental synthesis of the manifold of representations in
general, and therefore in the synthetic original unity of apperception, I am
132
B 153. Kemp Smith glosses “without sensibility” as “without the aid of sensibility.” The consciousness “I think”
is not consciousness of a manifold merely but rather consciousness of an act, albeit an act of synthesizing a
manifold. I interpret Kant to be arguing, not that the “I think” could occur even without any manifold, pure or
empirical, to synthesize, but only that self-consciousness, as occurring in the apperceptive act, does not rely on any
particular manifold given through sensibility, not even on the pure manifolds of the forms of sensible intuition that
are peculiar to us. Still, some form of sensible intuition must be given for the “I think” to be the act of synthesis that
Kant holds it to be. B 133; 135.
133
See B 422, note, concluding sentence.
134
See B 135. “The fundamental proposition of the necessary unity of apperception (the ‘I think’)…reveals the
necessity of a synthesis of the manifold given in intuition, without which the thoroughgoing identity of selfconsciousness cannot be thought” (emphasis added). What is at issue here is the identity of self-consciousness, its
identity over time, as distinct from the manifold of representations, which vary over time. Identity of selfconsciousness over time surely presupposes the unity of its act: the former is a consequence of the latter, not vice
versa.
67
�conscious (bewusst) of myself, not as I appear to myself, not as I am in
myself, but only that I am.135
Note the absence of the apophantic “as” in transcendental apperception. In transcendental
apperception I am conscious of myself, neither as I appear not as I am, but only that I am.136
Indeed, Kant has said earlier in the Deduction,
This fundamental proposition of the necessary unity of apperception is…an
identical, and therefore analytic proposition.137
The fundamental proposition is the very “I think” that can accompany all my representations.
The predicate “think” is analytically contained in the concept of the subject “I.” The ego is
conscious of itself in thinking, and thinking is, according to Kant, an act. The contradictory of
any analytic proposition is one that cannot be thought without contradiction, and the proposition
“I think” is no exception. The proposition, “I do not think,” is a proposition that I cannot think
without contradiction. But as an analytic proposition, or judgment, the “I think,” does not extend
my knowledge. The predicate only explicates what is already thought that in the subject.138
This representation [i.e., the original synthetic unity of apperception – the “I
think] is a thought, not an intuition. Now in order to know ourselves, there is
required in addition to (or beyond—ausser) the act of thought, which brings the
manifold of every possible intuition to the unity of apperception, a determinate
135
B 157. Consider the distinction Kant makes, in the Preface to second edition between “intellectual consciousness
of my existence” [which I possess] and “determination of my existence through intellectual intuition [which I do not
possess].” B xi (emphasis in the original).
136
There is a curious parallel between what Kant says here about the transcendental ego and what Thomas Aquinas
repeatedly says about God: we can know that he exists, but we cannot know his essence.
137
B 135.
138
Kant calls analytic judgments “explicative,” and synthetic judgments “ampliative.” Only the predicates in the
latter add something beyond what is already thought (even if confusedly thought) in the concept of the subject. A 7,
B 11.
68
�mode of intuition, whereby this manifold is given; it therefore follows that
although my own existence is not indeed appearance (still less illusion), the
determination of my existence can take place only in conformity with the form of
inner sense [i.e., time]….Accordingly I have no knowledge of myself as I am but
merely as I appear to myself. The consciousness of self is very far from being
knowledge of the self….I exist as intelligence, which is conscious solely of its
power of combination (Verbindungsvermögen); but in respect of the manifold
which it has to combine I am subject to a limiting condition (entitled inner sense),
namely, that this combination can be made intuitable only according to relations
of time, which lie entirely outside the concepts of the understanding strictly
regarded (eigentlichen Verstandesbegriffen).139
Mere consciousness of self is not genuine knowledge of self because it lacks the appropriate
intuition. By means of sensible, temporal intuition I can know myself as I appear. The
consciousness that “I am,” however, is not the consciousness of myself as just appearing
(whatever that might mean), but as being, as existing, unequivocally. But to this selfconsciousness I have no corresponding intuition, no intellectual intuition, that would enable me
to determine in what manner I exist, i.e., what I am in addition to that I am. Nonetheless mere
consciousness of self, though not knowledge properly so called, is not insignificant.
The “I think” expresses the act of determining my existence. Existence is already
given thereby, but the mode in which I am to determine this existence, that is, the
manifold belonging to it, is not thereby given.140
139
140
B 157 – B 159.
B 158, note.
69
�Kant emphasizes again that in the “I think,” existence is thereby given. “I think” (hence “I exist’)
is an analytic, indeed an identical proposition.”141
…since I do not have another self-intuition which gives the determining in me (I
am conscious only of the spontaneity of it) prior to the act of determination, as
time does in the case of determinable, I cannot determine my existence as that of a
self-active being.142
Note again that knowledge is the determination of what something is, determination through
concepts and intuition. “I cannot [in the “I think” of transcendental apperception] determine my
existence as a self-active being.” A self-active being would be active in the strongest sense of the
expression. It would be able act in relation to itself and not only in relation to what is given to it.
A self-active being would be would be self-determining or morally free. But, according to Kant,
consciousness of my synthetic, productive, and determining activity in relation to what is other
than me (a manifold of intuition, pure or empirical, to be united; or even diverse concepts to be
connected) is not conscious of self-determination. Whether I—as I am “in-myself”—am morally
free or not, or for that matter, immortal or mortal, remains unknown.
[All] that I can do is to represent to myself the spontaneity of my thought, that is
[the spontaneity] of the determination [or, more precisely, the spontaneity of the
act of determination]; and my existence is still only determinable, sensibly, that
is, as the existence of an appearance.” (Emphasis added).
141
Compare B 420-425 (from the Paralogisms) with B 131-135 and B 155-159 (both from the Transcendental
Deduction). If we take these passages together it looks as though a fourth possibility not explored in the Introduction
to the Critique of Pure Reason, and tempting to dismiss as nonsensical, is taken seriously by Kant. “I think” is an
analytic, but nonetheless empirical, proposition (or judgment). Only by making this claim, strange though it sounds,
can Kant both accomplish the task Transcendental Deduction and rule out the possibility of a proof for the
immortality of the soul. This matter requires further exploration, which, however, will not be undertaken here.
142
Ibid.
70
�To this Kant adds a qualification.
But it is owing to this spontaneity [of my thought] that I entitle myself an
intelligence.143
It is only consciousness of the spontaneity of thought that (assuming he did not change his mind
on this point) Kant must have been thinking of when, in the solution to the Second Antinomy, he
said that man “cognizes himself through pure apperception.”
We are now in a position to respond to one of the most common criticisms of the Critique
of Pure Reason, namely, that Kant applies the categories to the things-in-themselves, which
transcend any possible experience, by saying that they exist, even that they are causes. But in
doing so he violates his express claim that the categories, existence and cause among them, apply
only to objects of experience.
Kant cannot be rescued from this criticism solely by repeating his observation that the
categories can be used to think, though not to know, things-in-themselves. For we must really
know, and not just think, that at least one a-spatial, a-temporal thing-in-itself really does exist in
order to be able to say that our spatial, temporal experience is of appearances only and not of
things as they are in-themselves. The whole argument of the Critique of Pure Reason depends on
our knowing at least this much. Nor can Kant be rescued from the charge of applying the
categories to things that transcends any possible experience solely by saying that it is the unschematized categories, the categories without temporal meaning, that he applies to things-in-
143
Ibid.
71
�themselves. For Kant also teaches that, without this temporal meaning, the categories yield not
even the slightest knowledge of objects.144.
Of objects. But what does this say about the relation of categories to the subject, to the
ego itself? Here we note a curiosity: though Kant uses the expression “things-in-themselves,” in
the plural, to name the unknowable that lies behind appearances, he also frequently uses the
expression “the thing-in-itself,” in the singular, to name the same unknowable that lies behind
appearances. As far as I know, the only individual thing-in-itself that Kant ever says that we
know exists, the only thing that he says we know is not just a spatio-temporal appearance, is the
transcendental ego itself.145 Now, in transcendental apperception I am conscious that I am, but I
do not know what I am, for this self-consciousness lacks the intuition that would elevate it to
knowledge properly so called, to a knowledge that would determine my existence, to a
knowledge of what I am. And yet the consciousness that I am is surely, in some circumscribed
sense of the word, knowledge that I am. This knowledge that I am is highly restricted in that 1) it
is not knowledge of an object at all, but of the subject; and 2) it is expressed in the analytic
proposition “I think,”146 which as analytic does count as an extension of our knowledge. The
existence, then, and not just the appearance, of the knowing subject is self-evident, precisely
because “I think” is an analytic judgment. My existence is given with, is in fact identical with,
144
A 146, B 185: “The schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding are thus the true and sole conditions
under which these concepts obtain relation to objects (o) and so possess significance (or meaning—Bedeutung).”
(Emphasis in the original.) See the sentence that at the end of B 150.
145
The other candidate for a thing-in-itself, not construable as an appearance only, would be God. However, Kant
argues at great length in the section of Critique of Pure Reason called “The Ideal of Pure Reason,” that we do not
and cannot know that God exists. But he also argues there and elsewhere that we can think, without contradiction,
that God exists. And more than that. He argues in the Critique of Practical Reason (Book II, Chapter II, sections 46; Werke, Band 6, 252-264) that we must postulate that God exists (and also that the soul is immortal) in order to
make sense to ourselves of how the highest good—according to Kant, happiness in proportion to moral worth—
which ought to be, could be.
146
B 135; 407.
72
�my thinking.147 Consequently, it is self-evident that at least one thing-in itself exists, namely, the
ego that which is that is engaged in thinking. This self-evident knowledge is sufficient to ground
the distinction between appearances and the thing-in-itself that the argument of the book turns
on. Two questions arise. Does this distinction itself entail an illegitimate application of the
category of existence? And when we say that the ego as thing-in-itself is a transcendental cause
of appearances, does this amount to an illegitimate application of the category of causality?
No. For the issue of legitimate vs. illegitimate category application (in relation to
knowing, as distinct from thinking merely) always concerns application of the categories to
objects, legitimately to objects of a possible experience and illegitimately to objects that
transcend any possible experience. In fact, even when these categories are employed in speaking
about the subject, they are not applied to the subject.148 Rather, the subject—in a way that Kant,
unlike his greatest successors, seems to have thought does not admit of further explication—is
itself the origin of the categories.149 We must remember that the categories are functions of unity
in judgments, and that the table of categories is derived from the table of judgments. A judgment
expresses the “I think” and the different forms of judgment express the different ways in which I
think. Accordingly the categories are originally, though, so to speak, only latently, present
“within” the “I think.” In saying that the “I think” discloses my existence to me, and even the
causality of my thought as regards the constitution of objects, these two categories are not
applied at all, for there is nothing genuinely distinct from them, like an intuition, to which they
could be applied. The fundamental proposition “I think,” even “I think” actively and not
passively, is explicative only, not ampliative. Because the proposition is analytic, the predicate,
147
B 422, note.
B 131; B 408-409; 422, and note.
149
The subject, unlike an object, is surely not constituted as existing by applying the category of existence to it. For
all category application presupposes an existing subject to perform it.
148
73
�“think,” adds nothing to the subject, “I,” but only makes explicit what already thought in this
subject.150
When categories are applied to an object, the application extends them beyond their
origin in the subject. When the categories are employed with reference to the knowing subject,
they remain where they are: they come with the subject, originally. The existence and the
causality (in constituting objects) of the transcendental subject, and the unity of its act, are
evident in self-consciousness. In fact, not only is it a mistake to say that the categories are
applied to the subject, to the ego that thinks; when one uses expressions like “existence,”
“causality,” and “unity” with reference to the “I think,” it is a mistake even to call then
“categories,” which are, after all, only “concepts of an object [g] in general.”
[T]he concept of combination (Verbindung) contains, besides the concept of the
manifold and of its synthesis, also the concept of the unity of the manifold.
Combination is representation of the synthetic unity of the manifold. The
representation of this unity cannot, therefore, arise out of the combination. Rather,
it is what, by adding itself to the representation of the manifold, first makes
possible the concept of the combination. This unity, which precedes a priori all
concepts of combination, is not the category [!] of unity (§ 10); for all categories
are grounded in logical functions of judgment, and in these functions
combination, and therefore unity of given concepts is already thought. Thus the
150
I cannot, for example, infer from the proposition, “I think,” not even from the “I think” understood as existent
and actively constituting objects in categorial syntheses, the proposition, “I am a simple substance” (and hence, by
virtue of being simple that I cannot be de-composed, i.e. that I am naturally immortal). For the latter is a synthetic
judgment that goes outside of the subject “I” and appends to it a predicate “simple substance” that is not thought in
the subject. On other hand, and as already noted several times, the proposition, “I think,” is analytic. The concept of
the subject, “I,” contains within itself the predicate “think”—and thinking, as Kant understands it, is essentially
active, constitutive of objects, even causative of them qua objects.
74
�category already presupposes combination. We must therefore seek yet higher for
this unity (as qualitative, § 12), namely in that which itself contains the ground of
the unity of diverse concepts in judgments, and therefore of the possibility of the
understanding, even as regards its logical employment.151
The question of how Kant can apply the categories to things-in-themselves resolves into the
question of how the thinking subject can know that he is and not simply that he appears. Kant’s
answer is that it is immediately evident that the thinking subject is self-conscious and, moreover,
can it direct itself to its own faculties and operation. The transcendental ego’s recognition that it
exists as thinking, and thereby as active, even causative (of combination), and that its act
possesses unity, is—instead of category application to something given from without—
reflection, a self-relation that is inward and original, even originating.
One may not be fully satisfied with this answer to the question of how Kant can employ
the terms “existence,” “causality,” and “unity” when speaking of the thing-in-itself that is the
transcendental ego. But it is, I submit, Kant’s answer, indeed, the only possible answer that can
be given in Kantian terms. And it bears serious consideration, touching as it does and the
overarching question that will occur to the thoughtful reader of the First Critique: “How is a
Critique of Pure Reason Possible?”152 However that question is to be answered adequately, or
even adequately addressed, Kant was surely not deaf to it. He did not, as is commonly alleged,
thoughtlessly violate his own rules of category application any more than he naively assumed the
validity of Newtonian science in order to prove the validity of Newtonian science. He did not
spend the decade in which he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason in a stupor.
151
B 128. B 129-131.
The part of the First Critique that includes Kant’s treatment of the “I think,” he calls the “Transcendental
Analytic.” It consists, he says, in the dissection (Zergliederung) of all our a priori knowledge into the elements of
the pure understanding (Verstaneserkenntnis). A 64, B 89.
152
75
�In conclusion I draw attention to a most interesting parallel and opposition between the
self-consciousness of transcendental apperception and the consciousness of the moral law,
between the a priori analytic proposition, “I think,” and the a priori synthetic proposition, “I am
obliged” (to act such that the maxim of my will could always hold at the same as principle
establishing universal law). The predicate “think” is analytically contained in the concept of the
ego. But the predicate “am obliged etc.” is not analytically contained in concept of the ego; it is
synthetically connected to the concept of the ego by an act of practical reason, which thereby
makes the consciousness of the moral law “a fact of reason,” even “the sole fact of reason.” 153
The analytic proposition, “I think,” expresses the spontaneity of the understanding; the a priori
synthetic proposition “I am obliged…” expresses the freedom of the will. In both propositions
the ego is conscious of itself as active.154 The conception of the ego as active, in both thinking
and willing, is the ultimate ground of Kant’s dual metaphysics, of nature and of morals.
153
B 135; Critique of Practical Reason § 7 (Werke, Band 6, 141-142). Needless to say, the fact of reason is not what
gets called “a brute fact.” A fact of reason is something made (factum) by reason.
154
The general parallelisms within the dual metaphysics that Kant attempts to ground are striking. Speculative
Reason: The argument of the Prolegomena moves “regressively” from taking the existence of natural science
properly so called—which Hume had called into question—as given, without a rigorously justifying argument, to
the point of departure for the Critique of Pure Reason. The latter then moves “progressively” by arguing rigorously
from what Kant attempts to show pertains to the very nature of speculative reason to a justification of what was
merely assumed in the Prolegomena—thereby answering Hume. The Prolegomena is not an essential part of Kant’s
speculative philosophy, but only an introduction to it, starting from what is commonly taken for granted. The
Critique of Pure Reason, however, grounds an a priori science of nature, explicated in the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science, which in turn grounds empirical natural science (which for Kant is,
paradigmatically, physics, since he holds, controversially, that there is only so much science in given field of inquiry
as there is mathematics in it). Practical Reason: The argument of the Groundwork moves “regressively” from taking
the existence of free choice and duty (which the “eudaemonists” had called into question) as given, without a
rigorously justifying argument, to the point of departure for the Critique of Practical Reason. The latter work then
moves “progressively” by arguing rigorously from what Kant thinks pertains to the very nature of practical reason to
a justification of what was merely assumed in the Groundwork (thereby answering the “eudaemonists,” and also
Hume, who says: “Reason is, and ought [!] only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other
office but to serve and obey them.” A Treatise of Human Nature, II, iii, 3). The Groundwork is not an essential part
of Kant’s practical philosophy, but only an introduction to it, starting from what is commonly taken for granted. The
Critique of Practical Reason, however, grounds an a priori science of morals, explicated in the Metaphysics of
Morals (consisting of a “Doctrine of Right” and a “Doctrine of Virtue”),which in turn grounds an empirical moral
science, explicated in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.
Publication dates of the above works:
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; second edition: 1787)
76
�Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783)
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786)
Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
Metaphysics of Morals (1797)
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)
Publication dates of three other late, and major works.
Critique of Judgment (1790); Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason (1793), Opus Postumum (1804).
77
�
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“We Shall Be Monsters”: Frankenstein and the Ugliness of Enlightenment
[F]or a person who is altogether ugly in appearance,
or of poor birth, or solitary and childless cannot
really be characterized as happy.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1099b1-5.
I hate books.
Rousseau, Emile, CW 13:331.
�Two hundred years ago, in January 1818, the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was
published anonymously in London [F 311, 334].1 Over the next two centuries Shelley’s
“hideous progeny” [F 173] grew to mythic size, siring offspring in film and print, birthing the
science fiction genre, and updating the story of Prometheus, which cautions us about the dangers
of science and technology, of ambitious philanthropy, and of ‘playing god.’
Here is a sketch of Shelley’s story. A young chemistry student named Victor
Frankenstein makes and animates a monster.2 Horrified by his work, he abandons it, and the
monster flees. A few months later, Frankenstein is called home by the murder of his youngest
brother. He returns to see a household servant accused, tried, condemned, and executed for the
crime; but he suspects that the monster is the real murderer. During a hike in the Alps, his
suspicion is confirmed: the monster confronts him, tells his story, and demands that Frankenstein
build him a companion.
To Frankenstein the monster’s demand at first seems just, despite his crime.
Frankenstein travels to England to do research and gather his materials. After several months, he
nearly completes an artificial woman; but at the last moment he tears his work to pieces, fearing
she will birth a species of monsters to war on humanity. Seeing this betrayal, the monster vows
revenge and departs, leaving Frankenstein to return home. During his return he discovers that
his friend Henry Clerval has also been murdered; he is accused of the crime and tried, but
acquitted. Home at last, Frankenstein prepares to marry his childhood companion Elizabeth
Lavenza, promising to share with her his dreadful secret once they are wed. The night of his
wedding, he sends Elizabeth away in order to confront and fight the monster. But he has
misunderstood the monster’s vow: he hears two terrible screams, and Elizabeth is dead.
Frankenstein vows revenge, and pursues the monster north.
1
�Victor Frankenstein tells this story to an explorer named Robert Walton, whom he meets
on the ice of the Arctic Ocean. Walton records the details, reporting some of them in letters to
his sister in London. Though Frankenstein is close to catching the monster when Walton finds
him, he is also near death. He is too weak to continue his pursuit, and once he has told his story
he dies on Walton’s ship. Soon afterward, Walton finds the monster crouching over
Frankenstein’s corpse. They speak briefly, then the monster exits the ship and disappears.
Walton sails for London, bringing the story of Frankenstein and his monster back to society.
Many monsters have been assembled from the materials Frankenstein furnishes. Mine is
animated by what strikes me as Mary Shelley’s chief question in the novel: is enlightenment
good? This monster’s homogeneous parts are ugliness, solitude, reading, science, ambition,
philanthropy, beauty, family, and nature. To learn how to mix these materials, I will trace the
four enlightenments depicted in Shelley’s novel: those of the monster, of Frankenstein, of
Walton, and of Shelley herself. These enlightenments make up the four proper parts of this
lecture, parts neither proportionate in size, nor ordered as in the novel. I mean to build this
monster from the inside out.
Part One: The Enlightenment of the Monster
Enlightenment makes the monster a monster. So he tells Frankenstein on the alpine sea
of ice. Abandoned by his maker, lacking other guidance, he is at first shaped only by his
confused sensations. When he sees light, he closes his eyes; when he sees darkness, he feels
pain, and opens his eyes again. When he wakes in Frankenstein’s apartment, he feels cold, and
grabs some clothes to cover himself. When he feels hot, he hides in a forest. Then there is
hunger, which leads to berries, thirst, which leads to a stream, and fatigue, which leads to sleep.
2
�At night, the dark and cold return, and he weeps in pain. But then he sees moonlight, feels
pleasure, and wonders. All this happens mechanically in response to sensations. The monster’s
mind is empty of distinct ideas [F 68].
But soon, distinct ideas follow his distinct sensations. The monster finds a fire that some
travelers have abandoned. Its warmth is pleasant, but it burns when he touches it [compare CW
2: 12 note *]. He learns to feed the fire, to fan it to life, and to cook nuts and roots over it [F 69].
But food is scarce, so he must abandon his fire to forage. This brings him to a shepherd’s hut.
The shepherd, seeing the monster, shrieks and flees, leaving behind his breakfast and another
fire. The monster remembers this hut as a kind of paradise;3 but hunger forces him to leave it
too. He comes to a village, where signs of food draw him into a cottage. The terrified villagers
assemble to repel him with a hail of missiles [F 70].
Now the monster suffers the first of three accidents. He hides in a hovel, improving it so
that it shelters and conceals him, like the shepherd’s hut. But this hovel happens to adjoin an
inhabited cottage. This guarantees the monster a source of food and water; but it also allows him
to observe the cottagers unseen [F 71-72]: a blind old man, a young man, and a young girl. They
seem kind, sad, and poor, and their relations give him “sensations of a peculiar and overpowering
nature… a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced, either from
hunger or cold, warmth or food” [F 72]. This experience of beauty stops the monster from
stealing their food; instead, he gathers wood for them while they sleep. He becomes an invisible
family member. Noticing his benefactions, they call him “wonderful,” and “a good spirit” [F 77;
compare 65].
The monster also listens to his cottagers, and learns that they can communicate pleasure
and pain through speech. Observing with care, he begins to acquire this “godlike science”: the
3
�old man is “father,” the young girl “Agatha” or “sister,” and the young man “son,” “brother,” or
“Felix” [F 75]. But he also contrasts “the perfect forms” of his cottagers, “their grace, beauty,
and delicate complexions,” with his own ugliness, which he first sees in a pool of water.
Terrified by his own looks, the monster begins to call himself ‘monster’ [F 76].4
This, the monster tells Frankenstein, is the less moving part of his story, explaining how
he became what he once was [F 77] – namely, good. His survival and flourishing do not require
him to harm others: he is a vegetarian who will not steal food from those worse off [F 99].5 He
admires beauty and benevolence, wants to imitate them, and wants to be admired in return. The
more moving part of his story, which tells how he became what he now is [F 77], begins when
he learns how to read.
One day, a beautiful woman comes to the cottage. The monster hears that her name is
Safie, a form of Sophie. At the very middle of the novel, then, Sophie comes to the abode of
Felix and Agatha, that is, wisdom comes to the happy and the good. This moment is the peak of
the monster’s life. Since Safie can neither speak nor write the cottagers’ language, Felix teaches
her, and the monster listens in. He boasts to Frankenstein that he improved more rapidly than
she did: he is a quicker study than wisdom herself [F 79]. Felix’s lessons are readings from a
book of history, Volney’s Ruins of Empires,6 followed by explanations. The monster wonders at
the many stories of murder, and at humankind’s need for laws and governments. Vice and
bloodshed disgust him, and when he hears of the fate of the native Americans, he feels sorrow [F
80]. He learns about “the strange system of human society” [F 80], based on property, social
standing, and inequality. He learns about male and female, about the birth and growth of
children, and about family. Since Felix and Agatha are brother and sister, and the old man is
their father, it takes Safie’s arrival to teach the monster about sex.7
4
�These lessons make the monster reflect. He lacks both social rank and riches, the only
possessions human beings esteem. He admires beauty, but he is “hideously deformed and
loathsome” [F 80]. He may not even be human; he has yet to see anyone like him. He has no
family, and remembers nothing of his previous life. “I can not describe to you the agony that
these reflections inflicted on me,” he says. “I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased
with knowledge,” and knowledge “clings to the mind… like lichen on a rock” [F 81]. He wishes
he could shake off thought and feeling, and return to his life of sensations in the woods. But he
knows only death can release him from his sorrow: a fate he fears and does not understand.
Now a second accident befalls the monster.8 While seeking food and wood in the forest,
he finds copies of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s
Sorrows of Werther, all in the language he can read. He studies these books, taking each for a
“true history” [F 87]. Reading Goethe, he judges Werther a divine being with a deep and honest
character, wonders at his suicide for love, weeps at his death, and shares his opinions without
understanding his fate.9 This book throws the monster into “despondency and gloom” [F 86],
and renews his sorrowful reflections.10 Reading Plutarch, he finds “the histories of the first
founders of the ancient republics,” and learns “high thoughts,” and “to admire and love the
heroes of past ages” [F 86]. He prefers the peaceful lawgivers Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus to the
violent founders Romulus and Theseus, but only by accident. Had he first observed humanity in
the form of a young soldier, rather than of his cottagers, the monster tells Frankenstein, “I should
have been imbued with different sensations” [F 87].11 But reading Paradise Lost moves the
monster most strongly, because it depicts situations similar to his own. Like Adam, the monster
sees himself “apparently united by no link to any other being in existence” [F 87]; though unlike
Adam, “no Eve soothed my sorrows, or shared my thoughts” [F 88]. Like Satan, he envies the
5
�happiness of his cottagers [F 87]. About Eve’s fall, the situation that most resembles his own,
the monster is silent.
The monster also deciphers the journal pages he finds in a pocket of the clothes he
grabbed from Frankenstein’s apartment [F 87; compare 68]. They detail his “accursed origin,”
the “disgusting circumstances” that made his “odious and loathsome person” [F 88].
Frankenstein’s notes also make the monster think of Adam and Satan. “God in pity made man
beautiful and alluring, after his own image,” he tells his maker, “but my form is a filthy type of
your’s, more horrid from its very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to
admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested” [F 88].
Having tasted, through his reading, from the tree of knowledge, the monster quickly falls.
He wants to become a visible member of his cottagers’ family, so he decides to reveal himself to
them [F 85]. Since his “unnatural hideousness” causes the horror he inspires, while his voice,
“although harsh, [has] nothing terrible in it” [F 89; compare 69],12 he plans to address himself
first to the blind old man. He hopes the old man will defend him to the other cottagers, convey
his admiration for them, and provoke their compassion, despite his looks [F 88]. When the old
man is alone, the monster knocks, enters, and speaks with him. He argues sincerely that he is a
victim of injustice, and throws himself on the old man’s mercy, just as the cottagers come home.
Seeing the monster, Agatha faints, Safie flees, Felix attacks, and the monster retreats to his hovel
[F 91]. This reception makes the monster rage and despair. He declares “everlasting war against
the human species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me, and sent me forth to this
insupportable misery” [F 92]. To open hostilities he burns the cottagers’ home, and sets off to
find Frankenstein, to demand pity and justice [F 94].13
6
�Now the monster suffers a third accident. Arriving in Frankenstein’s home town, and
pondering how to address his creator, he meets a small child. He thinks, “this little creature [is]
unprejudiced, and [has] lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity” [F 96]. If
he can educate the child to be his friend, he will not be alone. He seizes the child, who screams,
calls him “monster,” and threatens punishment from his father, “Monsieur Frankenstein” [F 9697]. Hearing the name of his maker, the monster makes the child his first victim. He grasps his
throat, and William Frankenstein is dead. When the monster finds a locket on William’s body,
he slips it unseen into the pocket of a nearby girl [F 97]. Soon enough this girl, Justine Moritz, is
executed for the murder of Frankenstein’s brother [F 44-58].14
This concludes the more moving part of the monster’s story. Here he first refers to his
own “malignity” [F 97]. These murders, he thinks, have completed his fall from goodness to
wickedness. But while the hated name ‘Frankenstein’ provokes him to murder, he continues to
hope for his maker’s pity and justice. The monster’s mere thought of Frankenstein is not enough
to explain William’s murder. A contributing cause must be William’s revulsion at the monster’s
ugliness, which shows the monster that the horror he inspires is not learned, but natural.15 And
while the monster claims that “the lessons of Felix, and the sanguinary laws of man” [F 97]
taught him how to frame Justine Moritz, the portrait of Frankenstein’s beautiful mother inside the
locket teaches us why he frames her. He is ugly; the smiles of beautiful women are not for him.
He is by nature cut off from human society.
Concluding his story, the monster thus demands of Frankenstein, “create a female for
me” [F 98]. He insists it is Frankenstein’s duty to comply, since a creator has a duty to make his
creation happy; if Frankenstein does not comply, he will slaughter the rest of his family, as well
as “thousands of others” [F 66].16 Frankenstein’s choice, he says, will determine whether he
7
�remains wicked, or returns to his original goodness [F 66]. He sees these possibilities in terms of
Paradise Lost: “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from
joy for no misdeed” [F 66]. Despite his fall, he is silent again about the resemblance of his story
to Eve’s. He can be Adam or Satan; he sees no third possibility.17
Frankenstein agrees with the monster about his duty [F 67].18 But if he makes a female
monster, he worries, “their joint wickedness might desolate the world” [F 98]. To reassure him,
the monster promises he and his mate will quit human society. “It is true, we shall be monsters,
cut off from all the world,” he says, “but on that account we shall be more attached to one
another” [F 99].19 His words move Frankenstein to compassion, and he consents to make the
monster a companion. He believes the monster’s claim that his wickedness is due only to his
solitude [F 100].20 For his part, the monster does not touch Frankenstein’s family again until
Frankenstein changes his mind, and destroys his second creation [F 115-116].21 Then the
monster vows revenge, resumes killing, and drags Frankenstein to his death [F 152-154].
He kills because he is wicked, the monster claims; he is wicked because he is alone;22 and
he is alone because Frankenstein did not make him a companion. But he is also alone because he
is ugly. Can a companion be made for him? Human beings naturally find him ugly [F 98], he
thinks; he even finds himself ugly [F 76]. As Frankenstein realizes later, even a companion
created for the monster will likely find him ugly [F 114];23 and worse, soon we will see that such
a companion will likely also be ugly.24 The monster’s hope for a companion is due to seeing
himself as Adam in Paradise Lost, just as his later pursuit of revenge is due to seeing himself as
Satan.25 His reading has hidden other possibilities, and this will ruin his life. The monster is
alone, and must be alone, not by Frankenstein’s choice, but simply because he is ugly.26 But
why is he ugly?
8
�Part Two: The Enlightenment of Victor Frankenstein
Enlightenment also makes Frankenstein a monster. So he tells Walton aboard ship on the
sea of ice. “No youth could have passed more happily than mine” [F 20], he says. His parents
are tender, his father as indulgent and as little dictatorial as possible [F 19, 105]. Yet his family
is strangely constituted. Victor’s mother Caroline is the daughter of a friend of his father
Alphonse [F 19]. Caroline marries him after her father’s early death, so she is much younger
than her husband. Victor is the eldest of his brothers: he is an only child until age six [F 19],
when his brother Ernest is born. When Victor turns seventeen, his youngest brother William is
still an infant [F 24]. Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor’s cousin, is the only child close to his age. She
joined the family when Victor was four, because her mother – Alphonse’s sister – had died, and
her father had remarried. Victor and Elizabeth grow up together, first as playmates, then as
friends. His mother Caroline intends them to marry [F 19]. Victor’s practice of calling his
family his ‘friends’ perhaps results from the differences in age this accidental family embraces
[F 147].27
Alphonse Frankenstein is old, and has put politics before family [F 18]. But now that his
family is started, he has retired, to direct his children’s education [F 19, 24]. He is thus the cause
of the first accident to befall Victor. One rainy day, the thirteen year-old Victor finds a volume
of Cornelius Agrippa, a sixteenth-century writer on alchemy and other subjects.28 The theory of
chemistry and the other “wonderful facts” he finds in its pages dazzle him. But when tells his
father, Alphonse replies, “Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon
this; it is sad trash” [F 21]. Had his father instead explained patiently how Agrippa’s system had
been refuted and replaced by a more rational and powerful modern chemistry, Victor thinks, he
9
�would have thrown the book aside. Finding his father’s judgment to be ignorant, he instead
acquires and reads Agrippa’s complete works, followed by those of Paracelsus and Albertus
Magnus [F 22].29
As Victor tells it, his father’s carelessness gave his ideas “the fatal impulse that led to my
ruin” and made natural philosophy “the genius that has regulated my fate” [F 21]. The projects
of these authors – raising ghosts and devils, and finding the elixir of life [F 22] – become his
projects, and emulation combines with “bright visions of extensive usefulness” [F 21] to power
his studies. Books like Agrippa’s appeal to him not only because they teach that materials have
occult properties, but also because their teachings are esoteric, “treasures known to few besides
myself” [F 22]. Their projects are private, but Victor’s successes will be public: “what glory
would attend the discovery,” he fantasizes, “if I could banish disease from the human frame, and
render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!” [F 22].
Later events loosen Victor’s attachment to his alchemical writers. He studies distillation,
steam, the air-pump, and electricity, and his alchemical writers lose credit with him for their
ignorance of these phenomena [F 22-23]. His father sends him to lectures on natural philosophy
at the local school, but a second accident keeps Victor from all but the last few, and from
understanding even these [F 23]. Victor’s home schooling ends with him disgusted with natural
philosophy, and occupied instead with mathematics, German, and Greek [F 23].30 He does not
learn a modern chemical system to replace that of his alchemical writers. Then, when he is about
to leave for university at age seventeen, Victor’s mother Caroline dies from a scarlet fever
contracted from Elizabeth [F 24-25].31 Losing his mother to death, “that most irreparable evil”
[F 25], likely returned his thoughts to the alchemical pursuit of immortality.
10
�A final accident befalls Victor when he arrives at the University of Ingolstadt.32 Away
from his family, alone in a “solitary apartment,” unable to make new friends, he pursues his
ardent desire for knowledge [F 26]. He makes only two new acquaintances outside his
childhood circle: Professors Krempe and Waldman.33 When Victor meets Krempe, and
confesses his interest in alchemy, Krempe calls his reading “nonsense,” and says he must begin
his studies anew, since “these fancies… are a thousand years old” [F 26].34 He fails to interest
Victor in modern natural philosophy, however, because he says it means to annihilate the
alchemists’ visions of immortality and power – the very visions that interest Victor [F 27]. But
when Victor meets Waldman, he shows no contempt for Agrippa, and defends the alchemists as
the founders of modern philosophy. Charmed, Victor heeds Waldman’s argument that modern
science has traded the miraculous visions of alchemy for the “new and almost unlimited powers”
promised by scientists like Harvey and Boyle [F 27-28]. Waldman defeats Victor’s prejudice
against modern chemistry, and Victor decides to study under Waldman and Krempe [F 28], The
day he met these professors, Victor tells Walton, “decided my future destiny,” since “natural
philosophy, and particularly chemistry… became nearly my sole occupation” [F 29]. It did not
hurt, Victor adds, that Waldman had a benevolent aspect and sweet voice, since it was also
Krempe’s “repulsive countenance” that deterred Victor from taking his advice [F 29 and 27].
Victor’s sensitivity to beauty has terrible consequences when, at age nineteen [F 19] – nearly
Mary Shelley’s age when she begins to write Frankenstein35 – he begins to build his monster.
The desire to end disease interests Victor in the principle of life, and in physiology,
anatomy, and the causes of decay. An “almost supernatural enthusiasm” [F 30] drives his
solitary studies, which require dissections and vivisections [F 32]. His enthusiasm is almost
supernatural because his father was careful to keep supernatural horrors from entering the young
11
�Victor’s mind [F 30]. He is not averse to his work because he fears divine punishment. Instead,
his aversion is natural: he finds his continual occupation with dead things to be ugly. But at last,
after “examining and analyzing all the minutiæ of causation” involved in death and birth, he is
suddenly enlightened [F 30].36 He finds a secret reserved for him alone: “the cause of generation
and life,” which gives him the power of “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” [F 30 and
32].37
Since his newfound power is general – he could animate a worm or a human being –
Victor must decide how to use it. He resolves to animate a being like himself. Even if the result
of his first try is not perfect, he reasons, like any other invention it could be the basis for future
improvements [F 31]. The only constraint on his choice is practical: since working on minute
parts will slow him down, he further resolves “to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to
say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large” [F 31 and 32; see also 13 and 65]. The
reasons for his haste are not clear. Perhaps he fears that another will animate a lifeless being
before he does – though the novel gives us no evidence that others are pursuing his project. To
gather materials, Victor frequents “charnel houses,” the “dissecting room,” and the “slaughterhouse” [F 32]. If he succeeds in animating his lifeless construct, he hopes that he might learn
how to reanimate the dead – something as yet he cannot do [F 32].
Despite later depictions, this construct cannot be an assembly of corpse parts animated by
electricity.38 No human corpse could furnish proper parts – hands, feet, heart – proportionate to
an eight-foot humanoid. If Victor cannot reanimate a dead human being, furthermore, he likely
also cannot reanimate their proper parts. It is more likely that the monster is built out of
homogeneous parts – bone, muscle, skin – harvested from human and animal corpses – hence the
need to visit the slaughter-house – and shaped into proper parts proportionate to the whole. The
12
�monster later tells Victor, “thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior
to thine; my joints more supple” [F 66]. When he compares himself to humans, the monster
judges, “I was more agile than they, and could subsist on coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat
and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded their’s” [F 80; see also 89]. So
Victor fails to make a being like himself; instead, he makes a being in many ways better than
himself. He also intends this being to reproduce. Anticipating the completion of his project, he
exults: “[a] new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent
natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so
completely as I should deserve their’s” [F 32].39 Either Victor already plans to make his being a
female companion, or he intends it to reproduce with human females. This mention of the
gratitude he expects from his creations is the only thought he reports about their mental lives.40
Victor’s concern with beauty extends to his creation. “His limbs were in proportion,” he
tells Walton, “and I had selected his features as beautiful” [F 34]. But as soon as he animates his
being, his enthusiasm for his project dissipates, and he sees the monster as horribly ugly. Victor
catalogs his “dull yellow eye,” “watery [and] clouded,” “his shriveled complexion, and straight
black lips,” and his “yellow skin [that] scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries
beneath” [F 34; see also 126].41 The problem is not just that Victor failed to harvest enough
skin. The monster is ugly especially because of the contrast his ugly parts make with others that
on their own are beautiful: his “hair… of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly
whiteness” [F 34]. He is so ugly that, “unable to endure [his] aspect” [F 34], Victor abandons
him almost at first sight. “I had gazed upon him while unfinished,” Victor tells Walton; “he was
ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing
such as even Dante could not have conceived” [F 35; see also 48]. Perhaps Victor hoped that
13
�motion would beautify his monster’s matter, making a ‘he’ out of an ‘it,’ rather than the reverse.
Only after seeing him move does Victor first call his work ‘monster’ [F 35].
The monster’s unintended ugliness is an image of Victor’s enlightenment. His
combination of marvelous alchemical projects and powerful modern techniques is stitched
together with the hope that form and matter can be separated from one another, and so too beauty
and life, and ugliness and death. He hopes to shape the ugly leavings of charnel houses,
dissecting rooms, and slaughter-houses into a beautiful living being. But this hope is suggested
by a truth of metabolism: by eating we make ourselves out of dead materials. Frankenstein’s
accidental reading makes for an accidental enlightenment, which makes an ugly monster, which
will ruin Frankenstein’s life.
Once the monster begins to move, Frankenstein begins to fall. He soon flees his
laboratory. When he collects himself enough to return, the monster is gone [F 35 and 37].42 He
does not see the monster again until he returns home after his brother William’s murder [F 48];
he does not speak with the monster until they are alone together later on the Alpine sea of ice [F
65]. Then, Frankenstein tries to kill his monster, presuming him guilty of William’s murder [F
65-66 and 60].43 But the monster persuades Frankenstein to hear his story, and to make him a
female companion.
This new project does not rekindle Frankenstein’s “almost supernatural enthusiasm” [F
30]. Instead, he is possessed by “a kind of insanity” that shows him “continually about me a
multitude of filthy animals inflicting on me incessant torture” [F 101], as if he were undergoing,
rather than conducting, his vivisections.44 Collecting his materials, he tells Walton, “was to me
like the torture of single drops of water continually falling on the head” [F 109]. Constructing
the female monster is a “horrible and irksome task,” a “filthy process.” “During my first
14
�experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment,” he
reports; “my mind was intently fixed on the sequel of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the
horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the
work of my hands” [F 113].45
Qualms about his promise accompany Frankenstein’s disgust. It is “probable,” he thinks,
that a female monster will think and reason; but what will be her character? If the male monster
became wicked, a female one “might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate,
and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness” [F 114] – something, he implies, the
male monster does not do. While the male monster swore to quit human society, a female one
might not keep a promise made before her creation [F 114].46 Even if she is good, a female
monster might not provide the male the companionship he seeks. Frankenstein assumes she will
turn out ugly; so the male monster might find his own ugliness more abhorrent in female form,
while the female might turn from him in disgust to the superior beauty of man.47 This fresh
insult to the male monster might return him to human society [F 114]. But if the monsters can
stand one another, their intercourse will quickly produce children; thus “a race of devils would
be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a
condition precarious and full of terror” [F 114]. Without knowing exactly how his monsters
reproduce,48 we cannot know whether Frankenstein imagines a species terrifying for its ugliness,
or its superiority, or both.
This last reflection shows Frankenstein the wickedness of his promise. Earlier he had
dreamed of the blessings of mankind and of a new species [F 32]; now, he tells Walton, “I
shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not
hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole human race” [F
15
�114-115 and 118]. Overcome by disgust and doubt, Frankenstein looks up from his gore-strewn
workbench to see the monster watching him. The monster grins. Frankenstein sees in this only
“malice and treachery,” and tears the female monster to pieces [F 115; compare 35].
Once his Eve is destroyed, for the monster only the path of Satan remains. “I shall be
with you on your wedding-night,” he swears [F 116], and departs. Hearing this, Frankenstein
also thinks of Adam and Eve: “the apple was already eaten, and the angel’s arm bared to drive
me from all hope” [F 131]. He expects to be banished from the paradise of marriage and family
on the eve of his wedding to Elizabeth Lavenza; he expects to die then by the monster’s hand.
Instead, the monster first kills his friend Henry Clerval, then, on the wedding-night in question,
Elizabeth herself. Soon after, Alphonse Frankenstein dies from sorrow [F 137]. Now
Frankenstein too compares himself to Satan, “the archangel who aspired to omnipotence” [F
147]. The monster’s reading has possessed Frankenstein as well. Revenge, he tells Walton,
became “the devouring and only passion of my soul” [F 139]. Urged on by the monster,
Frankenstein pursues him across Europe and north to the arctic sea of ice,49 where Robert Walton
first meets the monster and his shadow.
Part Three: The Enlightenment of Robert Walton
Enlightenment nearly makes Robert Walton a monster. After an accident kills his father
while Walton is still a child, his uncle raises him. By neglecting his education, this uncle leaves
Walton free for solitary readings of tales of discovery, the only books in his uncle’s library.
Young Walton loves above all tales of voyages to the Pacific over the North Pole. He reads
them day and night. Poetry distracts him briefly from his youthful dreams of discovery, but then
a second accident – inheriting a cousin’s fortune – returns him to his projects of exploration, and
16
�equips him to pursue them [F 8]. Walton does not say whether this second accident was his
cousin’s death. But death shapes his family and his education, as it did Frankenstein’s.
Walton writes all this in letters to his sister, where he calls his self-education an evil.
“Now I am twenty-eight, and in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen,” he
laments. “It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and
magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping,” or proportion [F 10]. Walton’s
circumstances, like Frankenstein’s, have made him an imaginative and extravagant projector.
But while Frankenstein had Clerval to regulate his mind, failed to confide in him, and lost him to
his monster, Walton lacks such a friend, and feels this lack acutely [F 10 and 16].50
To Walton, the North Pole is “the region of beauty and delight” where “the sun is forever
visible” [F 7] – a land of both literal and figurative enlightenment. “What may not be expected
in a country of eternal light?” [F 7], he wonders: certainly new discoveries in geography and
physics. “[Y]ou cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the
last generation,” he writes his sister, “by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries,
to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the
magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine” [F 8]. To
these philanthropic ambitions Walton adds a personal one: to be the first human to reach the
pole. “I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before
visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man” [F 7]. Walton’s public
and private motives recall the combination that moved Frankenstein to pursue the principle of
life.51
To pursue his project, Walton learns seamanship by day; by night, he studies
mathematics, medicine, and the physical sciences of naval use. He inures his body to hardship.52
17
�Then he travels to northern Russia, to a city named Archangel – he too is living in Paradise Lost
– where he hires a ship, assembles a crew, and sails north into the sea of ice [F 8]. He reassures
his sister by letter: “you know me sufficiently to confide in my prudence and considerateness
wherever the safety of others is committed to my care” [F 11]. “I will not rashly encounter
danger,” Walton promises; “I will be cool, persevering, and prudent” [F 12]. Despite his
promise, many of his men will die [F 149].
Walton is also ready to risk his own life. His sister will be happy, even if he dies in the
north, because she has a husband and “lovely children” [F 148]. Walton himself does not want a
family, but a friend. With no one to share his joy at success, to temper his dejection at failure, to
amend his faults, to supply proportion to his projects, when a third accident crosses his path with
the monster’s and Frankenstein’s, and he takes the latter aboard, he is eager to regard
Frankenstein as a friend. As Walton tells his sister, “I have found a man who, before his spirit
had been broken by misery, I should have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my
heart” [F 15].
Though Frankenstein approves of Walton’s desire, he declines to reciprocate, explaining,
“I have lost every thing, and cannot begin life anew” [F 16; see also 147]. Yet Frankenstein does
call Walton “my friend” [F 17], he helps him by suggesting useful improvements to his plan, and
he rallies his sailors when their fear of death makes them demand that Walton sail for home [F
149].53 But the chief help he gives Walton is to tell his story. “You seek for knowledge and
wisdom, as I once did,” he says, “and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may
not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been” [F 17]. His story will provide Walton “a view of
nature, which may enlarge your faculties and understanding,” concerning “powers and
occurrences, such as you have been accustomed to believe impossible” [F 17].54 When Walton
18
�presses Frankenstein to share the secret of the monster’s animation, Frankenstein rebuffs Walton
for his “senseless curiosity.”55 “[L]earn my miseries,” Frankenstein tells him, “and do not seek
to increase your own” [F 146]. His tale completed, Frankenstein corrects and augments
Walton’s notes, especially of his conversations with the monster, and shows him Felix and
Safie’s letters, received from the hand of the monster himself [F 146; see also 83].56
Perhaps Frankenstein’s final hope is to win glory and benefit mankind by making his
story public. But the meaning of his story is ambiguous. Walton, for example, does not learn
from him to give up on enlightenment, perhaps because of Frankenstein’s conclusion. “During
these last days,” he says, “I have been occupied in examining my past conduct; nor do I find it
blameable” [F 151]. He does implore Walton to “[s]eek happiness in tranquility, and avoid
ambition, even… the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and
discoveries” [F 152]. But then he recants: “[y]et why do I say this? I have myself been blasted
in these hopes, yet another may succeed” [F 151].
‘Succeed’ is Victor’s last word, one worthy of his name. His last request is that Walton
catch and kill the monster, though he does not insist that Walton do so at the cost of his ship and
crew. But Walton turns home. So did Victor succeed or fail? Even after hearing Frankenstein’s
story, Walton tells his sister, “I had rather die, than return shamefully, – my purpose unfulfilled”
[F 150]. Frankenstein’s last words do not change his mind. Instead, his crew compels Walton to
return.57 Nor does he fulfill Frankenstein’s last request, though he has his chance when the
monster boards his ship to see Frankenstein’s corpse. “Never did I behold a vision so horrible as
his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness” [F 152], Walton writes his sister; but
despite the monster’s ugliness Walton listens to him, and seems persuaded by his promise: “I
shall… seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and
19
�consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and
unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been” [F 155]. The monster means
to extinguish his light at the pole, by becoming a light at the pole. Not the monster’s ugliness but
Frankenstein’s corpse angers Walton [F 154]. He lets the monster escape without trying to kill
him [F 156]. Walton does not kill the monster, nor does he kill himself and his crew in his quest
for the pole. But only the rebellion of his crew spares him the latter.58 Maybe the monster finds
the pole in his place.
Part Four: The Enlightenment of Mary Shelley
Did enlightenment make Mary Shelley a monster? She pursued it with a vengeance. As
the daughter of two famous writers, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and the lover and
later wife of a third, Percy Shelley, she set herself an intense program of reading and writing,
beginning at age seventeen, if not earlier. Starting with biographies, novels, and her parents’
books, later adding history and philosophy, she recorded each book she and Percy read, day by
day and year by year, in her journal. Thirty-six books in the latter half of 1814, seventy-four in
1815, sixty-five in 1816, seventy-one in 1817 – all told she read well more than two hundred
books in her late teens and early twenties, in the four years preceding the publication of
Frankenstein.59 She read the Iliad, the Bible, the Aeneid, Plutarch’s Lives, Tacitus’ Annals, the
Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s plays, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost – twice – and Gulliver’s
Travels [J 48-49, 73, and 89-90]. Here is a typical journal entry, from Saturday, November 17,
1816: “Draw, write; read Locke and Curtius. [Percy] Shelley reads Plutarch and Locke; he reads
“Paradise Lost” aloud in the evening. I work” [J 68]. At this point Mary’s second child is
eleven months old [F 333].
20
�Shelley herself tells us that Frankenstein is a warning about the dangers posed by science
and technology, ambitious philanthropy, and especially ‘playing god.’ In her preface to the third,
1831 edition of the novel, she writes of Frankenstein’s success in animating his monster,
“supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous
mechanism of the Creator of the world” [F 172]. But in the first, 1818 edition, the supremely
frightful thing is the monster’s ugliness. Perhaps marking this shift in emphasis, the frontispiece
of the 1831 edition depicts a monster who, though goggling at his reflection in a mirror, looks
positively beautiful. No character in the novel means to ‘play god,’ nor displays a lasting
concern with doing so. Frankenstein and his monster mostly see themselves as Adam or as
Satan. Theological claims that god’s providence is better than man’s, or that imitating his
providence is hubris or sin, are notably absent.
Instead, Frankenstein is more secular, personal, even autobiographical than Shelley’s
1831 preface suggests. Its foreground concerns are with the monster’s ugliness, the perils of
solitary reading, the mundane risks of philanthropic ambition, the loss of the family, and the
meaning of nature. The novel is a Paradise Lost without God, a Prometheus Bound without
Zeus. The monster, Frankenstein, and Walton are all shadows of Shelley herself,60 and they
repeat the novel’s fundamental question: is enlightenment good, or does it make us ugly
monsters, cut off from family and nature?
We have plenty of evidence that Shelley finds enlightenment to be costly. Take the
monster: he is attracted to family life and sensitive to the beauties of nature, but his extreme
ugliness cuts him off from both [F 77]. Were it not for his enlightenment, especially by
Paradise Lost, he might have seen a possibility for his life other than retirement with a mate, or
war with his maker. Solitary contemplation, masked social activity in person or in writing,61 and
21
�scientific inquiry do not occur to him. He does not consider a life of exploration, though his
build would suit him, more than any other reasoning being, to such a life. Though he may be
smarter than his maker, he does not build a wife or a child for himself. Take Frankenstein: he is
also attracted to and suited to family and nature. But his enlightenment, at the hands of the
alchemists and the modern chemists, makes him an ugly monster, and cuts him off from family
and nature [F 43-44], before dragging him to death across the sea of ice. And take Walton: he
longs for and is suited to friendship, if not to family, but his enlightenment through books about
voyages of discovery has sent him and his crew to risk their lives at the edge of the world. These
three neglect the rule Frankenstein proposes to Walton: if your study “has the tendency to
weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy
can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human
mind” [F 33].62 Percy Shelley, writing as the anonymous author, endorses this rule in his
preface, claiming that the chief concern of the novel is “limited to the avoiding [sic] the
enervating effects of the novels of the present day,63 and to the exhibition of the amiableness of
domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue” [F 5-6]. At the book’s center is a
family of the good, the happy, and the wise – but the monster scares them away and burns down
their home.
Still, we have Frankenstein’s first name, Victor, and his last words, “another may
succeed” [F 152]; we have Walton, the audience of the story we are reading, who is deflected
from the pole not by Frankenstein’s tale, nor by Frankenstein’s death, nor by his own interview
with the monster, but by the near-mutiny of his sailors. Perhaps had he and his sailors all been
monsters, he would have succeeded. Perhaps these details indicate that Shelley herself doubted
“the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue.” Perhaps
22
�enlightenment shows us the truth about the family and nature, by showing us the extent to which
death and chance, not life and providence, makes our families, nature, and us. Perhaps
enlightenment reveals our world not as an amiable home, but as monstrous.64 When
Frankenstein, hiking alone in the Alps, considers the “awful majesty” of the mountains, the
“wonderful and stupendous scene” of the “sea, or rather the vast river of ice,” he calls out to the
“[w]andering spirits” of the place. The spirit that answers his call is the monster [F 65 and 77].
Another lie Percy Shelly tells in his preface is, “[t]he opinions which naturally spring
from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always
in my own conviction; nor is any inference to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing
any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind” [F 6]. He, and perhaps Shelley herself, could fear
a reader’s inference of prejudice against the theological doctrine of Milton, given the damage
Paradise Lost does to Frankenstein, and above all to his monster. But a philosophical doctrine is
also being judged throughout the novel, even though its author’s name is not mentioned.
Consider: Victor Frankenstein is a Genevan who makes a “man born big and strong” [CW 13:
162, see also 189-190], but fails to educate him adequately. This being is born into a state of
nature, and perfected by circumstances; he claims that he was naturally good, but society has
made him wicked; he begins life as a savage, is mistaken for a savage [F 13], and wishes to end
his life living as a savage with his mate in South America [F 99]. Consider further: in Shelley’s
time, the park outside Geneva where the monster murders William and frames Justine featured
an obelisk dedicated to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, before which the Genevans murdered their
magistrates during the Revolution.65 Rousseau depicts himself as a modern Prometheus in the
Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, the first public writing of his philosophic career [CW 2:
2 and 179]. In Emile, his best and most important work [CW 5: 480], he mentions “another
23
�Prometheus” who had made a tiny man “by the science of alchemy” [CW 13: 436 note *].66
Rousseau claims in his Confessions to have abandoned five children to a foundling hospital [CW
5: 289, 299-301, 551-552], where they likely died. Later in life, when Shelley writes an
encyclopedia article on Rousseau, she returns repeatedly to the subject of these children [F
545].67 But the monster claims five victims before Frankenstein himself: William, Justine
Moritz, Henry Clerval, Elizabeth Lavenza, and Alphonse Frankenstein. The amiableness of
domestic affection, the excellence of universal virtue, and the beauty of nature are themes of
Rousseau’s novel Julie, or the New Héloïse. Lastly, among the more than two hundred books
that Mary Shelley read in the four years before Frankenstein was published are Rousseau’s
Confessions, Emile, Julie, and The Reveries of the Solitary Walker – and she read all but the last
of these twice [J 47-49, 55, 64, 72-73, 85-86, 89-90].68
Frankenstein is thus a meditation on the doctrine of the modern philosopher who
launched his career by questioning the goodness of enlightenment. Rousseau defended the
amiableness of domestic affection, but abandoned his children. He lauded the excellence of
universal virtue, but sparked the Revolution. “I have seen these contradictions,” Rousseau writes
about his claims in the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, “and they have not rebuffed me”
[CW 2: 4]. Nor is Mary Shelley rebuffed. The ambiguities of her “hideous progeny” suggest she
is willing to pay the price of enlightenment. She pronounces her judgment in the voice of
Frankenstein’s creation: “[w]e shall be monsters.”
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
February 23, 2018
24
�Leftover Materials
This lecture is dedicated to my father, Paul David Black. It was delivered on his birthday, March 2, 2018, at St.
John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thanks to Michael W. Grenke for the invitation to give this lecture.
Thanks to the members of the 2016-2017 Mellon Study Group on Digital Technology for a galvanizing first
discussion of the themes of Frankenstein. Thanks to Lise van Boxel and Brian Wilson, founding members of the
Combat & Classics podcast team, for an animating discussion of the ideas in the lecture. Thanks to my sister,
Katherine Melissa Watson, for her helpful comments on an earlier draft.
The engraving on the lecture’s cover page is Theodore von Holst’s, and was the frontispiece to the 1831 edition of
Frankenstein. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frontispiece_to_Frankenstein_1831.jpg. Retrieved on
February 15, 2018.
1
Citations in the text of this lecture follow these conventions: CW refers to volume and page numbers in JeanJacques Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Edited by Christopher Kelly and Roger D. Masters.
Thirteen Volumes. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990-2010). F refers to page numbers in
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Edited by J. Paul Hunter. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), which
contains the 1818 text. FN refers to part and page numbers in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Frankenstein
Notebooks. Volume IX of Shelley’s Manuscripts, Two Parts. Edited by Charles E. Robinson. (New York: Garland
Publishing, Inc., 1996). J refers to page numbers in Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley’s Journal. Edited by Frederick L.
Jones. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947). L refers to volume and page numbers in Mary Shelley,
The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Edited by Betty T. Bennett. Three Volumes. (Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). PL refers to book and line numbers of Paradise Lost, in the edition John
Milton, Paradise Lost. Second Edition. Edited by Scott Elledge. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993).
2
In calling Frankenstein’s product a ‘monster,’ I am following both Frankenstein’s practice and the monster’s own.
They each give reasons for using this term. They mean by it something so unprecedented in its deformity as to serve
as a warning.
3
He says, “it presented to me then as exquisite and divine a retreat as Pandæmonium appeared to the dæmons of hell
after their sufferings in the lake of fire” [F 70; see PL 1:710-730].
4
“At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became
fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence
and mortification” [F 76].
5
The monster does taste the offal left behind by the travelers who abandoned their fire, finding it “much more
savoury than the berries I gathered from the trees” [F 69]. But he apparently does not begin eating meat because of
this experience. In the only case where he kills for food, he does so to feed Frankenstein [F 142]. See also Marilyn
Butler, “Frankenstein and Radical Science” [F 311]. Since the monster was not born and did not grow, it is not
entirely clear why he needs to eat. But Rousseau would endorse his vegetarianism [CW 13: 184-186 and 297-299],
which might be obscurely connected with his construction: since he is made out of dead flesh, perhaps he does not
want to add to his substance by consuming dead flesh.
6
Constantin François Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, Les Ruines, ou Meditations sur les Revolutions des Empires,
1791. Published in English as Constantin-François Chasseboeuf, Marquis de Volney, The Ruins: or a Survey of the
Revolutions of Empires. Third Edition. London: J. Johnson, 1796. It is available in the Liberty Fund’s Online
Library of Liberty at http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1706. Retrieved on February 2, 2018. There is no record in her
journal of Mary Shelley having read this work.
7
The connection between sex and a woman named Sophie is a theme of Book Five of Rousseau’s Emile.
25
�8
Prior to relating this accident, the monster tells Frankenstein the history of his cottagers, which “could not fail to
impress itself deeply” on his mind [F 81]. This is so much that case that the monster makes copies of letters Safie
exchanged with Felix, letters which testify to the truth of their story, in order to offer them to Frankenstein to “prove
the truth of my tale” [F 83]. Yet it is not clear what the monster learns from the history of the cottagers that is
different from what he learns from Safie and Felix’s readings and discussion of Volney. Perhaps the former history
teaches the same lessons as the latter, but is more striking because the monster can see the participants in the flesh.
9
When suicide later occurs to the monster as an alternative to demanding a mate from Frankenstein or taking
revenge on him, he rules it out, claiming that life is dear to him, despite his misery [F 66]. Yet once it is clear he
will not have a companion, and once Frankenstein is dead, the monster claims that he will commit suicide [F 155].
10
One new element appears in these reflections after reading Werther: the monster tries to infer his origin and
purpose from his physical constitution. “My person was hideous,” he reflects, “and my stature gigantic: what did
this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually
recurred, but I was unable to solve them” [F 86]. So far as I can tell, the monster makes no progress in this new line
of inquiry. It seems that his other readings closed off this line of thinking for him.
11
Here we see the damage done by Frankenstein’s abandonment of the monster. Had he overcome his disgust and
stayed to educate his product, Frankenstein might have imbued the monster with scientific and philanthropic
ambitions.
12
This contrast is the basis of the only joke I have found in Frankenstein. When the monster confronts Victor
Frankenstein to tell his story, he repeatedly demands that Frankenstein listen to him [F 66-67], likely because he
knows that his speech is more attractive than his looks. Frankenstein responds, “relieve me from the sight of your
detested form” [F 67]. “Thus I relieve thee, my creator,” the monster intones, while placing his massive hands in
front of Frankenstein’s eyes. Enraged, Frankenstein flings them away. This was not the time for a joke.
13
The monster’s halfheartedness in seeking revenge is suggested by several details. He tells Frankenstein he could
have torn Felix “limb from limb, as the lion rends the antelope” [F 91], or destroyed the cottage and the cottagers,
glutting himself “with their shrieks and misery” [F 92] – but he does neither of these things, though he could have.
In addition, consider this episode that occurs on the road to Geneva. On an especially fine spring day, he sees a
young girl fall in a river, and leaps in to save her from drowning. He is trying to revive her when one of the locals
approaches him and snatches the child away. When the monster tries to follow, the man shoots him with his gun [F
95]. This bald ingratitude makes the monster renew his vow of “eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind” [F
96], but even this renewed vow does not prevent the monster from imagining that he might befriend William
Frankenstein when he first encounters him in Geneva.
14
The story of Justine Moritz’s fate includes an anticipation of the question the monster means his story to answer.
Ernest Frankenstein, the elder of Victor’s two younger brothers, asks “who would credit that Justine Moritz, who
was so amiable, and fond of all the family, could all at once become so extremely wicked?” [F 50; see also 54-55].
No one should credit such a miraculous change, though, since Justine is not guilty of the murder for which she is
accused. But Justine is beautiful [F 52]. The monster, who is ugly, is guilty of the murder; the question becomes
how he, being benevolent and fond of all his cottagers, could become so extremely wicked. Reflecting on Justine
Moritz’s execution, Elizabeth Lavenza says, “men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood” [F 61].
15
In the immediate sequel the monster asserts to Frankenstein that “the human senses are insurmountable barriers”
to any sort of union between the monster and a human being [F 98].
16
In the end Frankenstein does not comply, and the monster only kills members of his family. So it seems that his
threat to kill “thousands of others” was a bluff or an exaggeration.
17
“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous” [F 66].
18
Frankenstein asks, “did I not, as his maker, owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to
bestow?” [F 99]. We might wonder, since some of us are makers of children, to what extent this rhetorical question
should be answered in the affirmative.
26
�19
“Our lives will not be happy,” the monster continues, “but they will be harmless, and free from the misery I now
feel” [F 99]. If the monster is not content with harmlessness, and seeks happiness as well, then he will be drawn
back to human society.
20
Shelley would have been familiar with the argument that links solitude with wickedness through the dispute
between Rousseau and Diderot communicated by a footnote in Emile. Against this link, Rousseau writes,
The precept of never hurting another carries with it that of being attached to human society as little
as possible, for in the social state the good of one necessarily constitutes the harm of another. This
relation is in the essence of the thing, and nothing can change it. On the basis of this principle, let
one investigate who is the better: the social man or the solitary man. An illustrious author
[Diderot] says it is only the wicked man who is alone. I say that it is only the good man who is
alone. If this proposition is less sententious, it is truer and better reasoned than the former one. If
the wicked man were alone, what harm would he do? It is in society that he sets up his devices for
hurting others [CW 13:240 note *].
21
Seeing Frankenstein destroy the inanimate body of his companion, the monster says, “You can blast my other
passions; but revenge remains – revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food!” [F 116].
22
“My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in
communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of
existence and events, from which I am now excluded” [F 100].
23
The two monsters “might even hate each other,” Frankenstein muses; “the creature who already lived loathed his
own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female
form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again
alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species” [F 114].
24
Indeed, the monster demands that his mate be “as hideous as myself” because “once as deformed and horrible as
myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects” [F
99, 97]. He gives no other indication of why he thinks the effects of his own ugliness can be overcome. His thought
seems to be either that two solitary and isolated members of the same species will feel compelled to unite [F see 99],
despite their ugliness, or that because his mate will have been created particularly for him, they will be connected in
a way that overcomes the effects of their ugliness. The former thought seems naïve, while the latter thought depends
on the monster’s identification with Adam.
25
After the monster recounts his failed attempt to reveal himself to his cottagers, he says, “I, like the arch fiend, bore
a hell within me” [F 92]. See PL 4:73-75.
26
To be ugly is to have bad looks, to be dis-specied, without species. See Plato, Sophist, 228a.
27
One wonders whether it is the difference in age between Alphonse and Caroline Frankenstein, and the youthful
acquaintance of Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza, that explains how unerotic these relationships are – or
whether this simply should be attributed to authorial discretion. The lack of eros between these partners might also
contribute to Victor Frankenstein’s easy elision between his family and his friends. The reason for this elision is
that friends who are not family cannot be true friends. “Even where the affections are not moved by any superior
excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds, which hardly any later
friend can obtain,” Victor explains. “They know our infantine dispositions, which, however they may be afterwards
modified, are never eradicated; and they can judge of our actions with more certain conclusions as to the integrity of
our motives. A sister or a brother can never, unless indeed such symptoms have been shown early, suspect the other
of fraud or false dealing, when another friend, however strongly he may be attached, may, in spite of himselF be
invaded with suspicion” [F 147]. Alphonse Frankenstein delicately mentions his romantic coolness to Victor when
the latter postpones his marriage to Elizabeth Lavenza: “You, perhaps, regard her as your sister, without any wish
that she might become your wife” [F 104]. Elizabeth sees no difficulty in this arrangement: “our union has been the
favorite plan of your parents ever since our infancy. We were told this while young, and taught to look forward to it
as an event that would certainly take place” [F 130]. The coolness of the connection between Victor and Elizabeth
might explain why Victor does not realize that the monster’s threat, “I shall be with you on your wedding-night,” is
27
�directed against Elizabeth, rather than against himself – as his reply, “before you sign my death-warrant, be sure you
are yourself safe” [F 116] indicates. Victor seems to lack self-knowledge when he later says, “if for one instant I
had thought what might be the hellish intention of my fiendish adversary, I would rather have banished myself for
ever from my native country, and wandered a friendless outcast over the earth, than have consented to this miserable
marriage. But, as if possessed of magic powers, the monster had blinded me to his real intentions” [F 133].
28
The editors of the Norton Critical Edition of Frankenstein supply here “Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535),
German physician, author of De Occulta Philosophia (1531), and reputed magician” [F 21 note 6]. The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds that Three Books on Occult Philosophy (1510 and, reworked and enlarged, 1533)
is “a comprehensive treatise on magic and occult arts,” and that Agrippa was also known for On the Uncertainty and
Vanity of the Arts and Sciences: An Invective Declamation, “a rigorous refutation of all products of human reason.”
See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agrippa-nettesheim. Retrieved on February 2, 2018. Is it a coincidence that
Agrippa’s other major work resembles, in its title at least, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts? Is Agrippa a
stand-in for Rousseau?
29
Paracelsus (1493-1541) was, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a German-Swiss physician and alchemist
who established the role of chemistry in medicine. See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paracelsus.
Retrieved on February 4, 2018. Consider also CW 13: 436-437. According to the same source, Albertus Magnus
was a teacher of Thomas Aquinas and a proponent of Aristotle who established the legitimacy of the study of nature
for Christians. See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Albertus-Magnus. Retrieved on February 4, 2018.
30
Though his disgust is not so great as to prevent him from studying Pliny and Buffon at this point [F 23]. Victor
also learned Latin and English when he was much younger [F 20].
31
Louis Pasteur did not succeed in spreading the germ theory of disease until the 1870’s. Frankenstein is set
sometime in the eighteenth century. See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Pasteur/Vaccinedevelopment. Retrieved on February 16, 2018.
32
Shelley may have chosen Ingolstadt for Victor Frankenstein’s education because the secret society of the
Illuminati was founded at this university in 1776 [F 24 n 1].
33
This childhood circle includes Victor’s friend, Henry Clerval [F 21], who later studies with him at Ingolstadt [F
36], and ends by being murdered by the monster [F 122]. There is not enough time in this lecture to treat Clerval in
detail, let alone Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor’s other companion from childhood [F 26]. But it is worth nothing that,
even though Shelley presents Clerval’s favored subjects as a kind of antithesis and antidote to Victor’s reading [F
44] – Clerval recalls Victor to his friends, his family, and his love of nature [F 43-44] – Victor is quite familiar with
the kind of works Clerval reads [F 15-16, 31, 35-36, 101, 107-108, 143, 146-147], and this familiarity on its own is
not enough to deflect him from his path.
34
Krempe seems to be tracing the projects of the alchemists back to the eighth century, whereas the writings he is
criticizing date from the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It’s not clear to me why he does this.
35
Mary Shelley was born on 30 August 1797, and began writing Frankenstein sometime in June 1816 [FN lxxvi and
lxxviii].
36
Compare Rousseau’s account of his sudden illumination on the road to Vincennes in the second of his Letters to
Malesherbes [CW 5: 575-576].
37
Almost immediately, Frankenstein tells Walton, he forgot the steps that showed him the cause, but retained the
power [F 31]. It is puzzling that Frankenstein does not use this detail as an excuse when Walton asks him later for
the secret of the monster’s animation [F 146].
38
Shelley’s claim that Frankenstein uses his “instruments of life” to “infuse a spark of being” into the monster [F
34] may be metaphorical, since there is no other reference to electricity in the account of the monster’s animation.
39
The mention of the gratitude due to a father in this passage could give the impression that Victor intends to
supplant the role of the mother in generation, and to claim the gratitude that is her due. While there is something to
28
�this reading, I am more struck by the contrast between the mention of the father in this sentence and the mention of
the creator in the previous sentence. To say nothing about the pagan gods, the Hebrew one has already twice
supplanted the role of the mother in generation. Most striking, however, are the reflections Victor’s exultation
encourages about gratitude. Compare Rousseau’s reflections on gratitude in Book IV of Emile [CW 13: 387-388].
40
Victor later admits to himself that he “thoughtlessly” bestowed life on the monster [F 60].
41
The lack of skin also argues for the theory that the monster is not an assemblage of proper parts, taken from
corpses. Each of these parts would have had skin of its own, and more than enough, had they been harvested as
wholes.
42
As he sleeps after animating the monster, but before his flight, Victor has a horrible dream:
I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted
and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with
the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead
mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds
of the flannel [F 34].
Not only does this dream depict the thought that we are all made of dead materials, and so in a sense dead things, but
it connects this interpretation of metabolism and growth with sex and generation.
43
Frankenstein infers the monster’s guilt directly from his ugliness. Seeing a figure in the trees, he says, “its
gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that
it was the wretch, the filthy dæmon to whom I had given life. Could he be,” Frankenstein asks, “the murderer of my
brother? No sooner did that idea cross my imagination, than I became convinced of its truth… […] Nothing in
human shape could have destroyed that fair child. […] The mere presence of the idea,” he concludes, “was an
irresistible proof of the fact” [F 48].
44
Frankenstein realizes that he cannot create a female monster without “again devoting several months to profound
study and laborious disquisition” [F 103]. In particular, “I had heard of some discoveries having been made by an
English philosopher, the knowledge of which was material to my success” [F 103]. Since it is hard to imagine that
Frankenstein needs additional anatomical information, which he acquires in any case through direct
experimentation, this comment might indicate that he has, reasonably, started to think about the moral formation of a
female monster. Perhaps the English philosopher Frankenstein has in mind is Mary Wollstonecraft, author of
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Mary Shelley’s mother.
This would also explain why he puts such weight on the uncertain character of a female monster in his ultimate
decision to destroy his second creation. However this may be, Frankenstein’s need for additional study is another
indication that he might not have planned from the beginning to make a female monster, perhaps because he
intended his monster to interbreed with human women.
45
Even cleaning up the aftermath of his interrupted work is sickening to Frankenstein. “The remains of the halffinished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living
flesh of a human being” [F 118].
46
Frankenstein thus anticipates a problem that arises in Paradise Lost: Adam is prohibited from eating from the tree
of knowledge before Eve is created. She does not hear the prohibition directly, but from Adam; this inclines her less
to obey it. See PL 8:323-333 and 9:758-760. We will soon see that Frankenstein too seems to have read Milton’s
epic poem [F 131 and 147]. He does not voice, but presumably could have anticipated, a similar but greater
problem regarding the monsters’ offspring, whom the monster has said nothing to bind.
47
Perhaps this also indicates that, if Frankenstein makes his monsters capable of reproduction with one another, he
also makes them capable of reproduction with human beings.
48
Frankenstein’s fears are another indication that he does not manufacture his monsters from the proper parts of
corpses. If they were assemblages of corpse parts, would not their offspring be human?
29
�49
The monster encourages Frankenstein to pursue him in order to draw out his revenge. As Frankenstein tells it,
“sometimes he himselF who feared that if I lost all trace I should despair and die, often left some mark to guide me”
[F 141]. Oddly, Victor adds, “yet still a spirit of good followed and directed my steps, and, when I most murmured,
would suddenly extricate me from seemingly insurmountable difficulties. Sometimes, when nature overcome by
hunger, sunk under exhaustion, a repast was prepared for me in the desert, that restored and inspirited me… I may
not doubt that it was set there by the spirits that I had invoked to aid me” [F 141]. Since the monster occasionally
leaves food for Frankenstein [F 142], it seems likely that he is also responsible for the activities of Frankenstein’s
‘spirits of good.’ Frankenstein’s meeting with the monster on the alpine glacier is preceded by his invocation of
“Wandering spirits” [F 65].
50
As Walton tells his sister, “I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic,
and affection enough for me to endeavor to regulate my mind” [F 10]. Later, he adds that his desire for friendship is
“one want I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe
evil” [F 10; see also 16],
51
Walton asks his sister: “do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose. My life might have been passed in
ease and luxury; but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path” [F 9].
52
Frankenstein also claims to have superior physical endurance: “I had ever inured myself to rain, moisture, and
cold” [F 63]. But there is some reason to doubt this: he is forever swooning, for example, or struggling with
madness [F 37 and 122]. In his superior endurance Walton more resembles the monster; the same resemblance can
be found in their respective longings for a companion. Walton may be a chimera of Frankenstein and his monster.
53
“Are you then so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition?” Frankenstein asks
them. “You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your name adored, as belonging to brave
men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind. […] Oh, be men, or be more than men” [F
149]. Frankenstein himself has encountered death for glory and the benefit of mankind; he has been a man and
made more than a man; and he has suffered greatly for it. It is striking that he is willing to repeat an appeal that has
cost him so much to heed.
54
If the monster is the gratification of Frankenstein’s wishes, then by calling him a “serpent” here Frankenstein
anticipates the later moment when, certain he will not receive a mate from Frankenstein, the monster compares
himself to a “snake” [F 116]. The image is Biblical, if it is not once again from Paradise Lost.
55
This is odd, since in his story Frankenstein claims to forget “all the steps” that “progressively led” to his
discovery, and to be left with “only the result” [F 31]. He clearly thinks he can continue to animate dead matter,
since otherwise he would have begged his incapacity in reply to the monster’s demand for a mate. But can he teach
this power to others?
56
Walton says, “the letters of Felix and Safie, which he shewed me, and the apparition of the monster, seen from our
ship, brought to me a greater conviction of the truth of his narrative than his asseverations, however earnest and
connected” [F 146].
57
Nor can we say he is secretly relieved by their compulsion. He writes to his sister, “The die is cast; I have
consented to return, if we are not destroyed. Thus are my hopes blasted by cowardice and indecision; I come back
ignorant and disappointed. It requires more philosophy than I possess, to bear this injustice with patience” [F 150].
58
In an early letter to his sister Walton considers the possibility that he might find a friend among his crew. “My
lieutenant,” he writes, “is a man of wonderful courage and enterprise; he is madly desirous of glory. He is an
Englishman, and in the midst of national and professional prejudices, unsoftened by cultivation, retains some of the
noblest endowments of humanity” [F 10]. Walton also tells his sister a lengthy story about the heroic generosity of
his master, but adds, “he has passed all his life on board a vessel, and has scarcely an idea beyond the rope and the
shroud” [F 11]. Walton concludes, “I shall certainly find no friend on the wide ocean, nor even here in Archangel,
among merchants and seamen” [F 10]. His crew is thus composed not of family nor of friends, but of associates
made necessary by Walton’s inability to reach the pole alone.
30
�59
Since Shelley read a few of these books twice during this period, and since she sometimes gives several works a
single entry in her journal – for example, “Shakespeare’s Plays” – this is only a rough count [J 32-33, 47-49, 71-73,
88-90].
60
The defect mentioned by at least one modern critic, that the novel’s three major characters all sound the same, is
thus not a bug but a feature, an indication that they are repetitions of the same person. See Germaine Greer, “Yes,
Frankenstein really was written by Mary Shelley. It’s obvious – because the book is so bad,” The Guardian. April
9, 2007. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/apr/09/gender.books. Retrieved on February 4, 2018. Greer
complains, “There are three narrators: Thomas Walton, Victor Frankenstein and the monster himself. The three of
them, including the inarticulate monster, speak in paragraphs, with the same tendency to proliferating parallel
clauses and phrases and the occasional theatrical ejaculation.” It’s not clear why Greer thinks that the monster is, or
should be, inarticulate.
61
“It seems that all great things,” Nietzsche tells us in Beyond Good and Evil, “in order to inscribe themselves with
eternal demands upon the heart of humanity, must first stalk the earth as colossal and fear-inducing masks” [Preface,
see also Sections 25 and 40]. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil / On The Genealogy of Morality.
Translated, with an Afterword, by Adrian Del Caro. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). Even if the
fear and disgust the monster inspires are natural rather than learned, it does not follow that his ugliness expresses the
truth about his interior, nor that his ugliness is a disability. Since the monster’s vengeful path is ultimately due to his
accidental reading, since he was born good but was made wicked by society, Shelley can refer to Frankenstein in
one of her letters as “a book in favor defence of Polypheme” [L I: 91].
62
“If this rule were always observed,” Frankenstein continues, “if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to
interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his
country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been
destroyed” [F, 33].
63
Rousseau discusses the arguments for and against novels in the dialogue that serves as the Second Preface of Julie
[CW 6: 7-22].
64
In the Critique of Judgment, Kant asks us to
consider bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling high up in the
sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their
destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean
heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on. Compared to the might of any of these,
our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more
attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects
sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to
discover in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, and which gives us the
courage [to believe] that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence [Ak. 261].
Note that the ability and the courage Kant mentions in this passage are not dependent on our safety from nature.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment. Translated, with an Introduction, by Werner S. Pluhar. (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 120.
65
In a letter to Fanny Imlay, Mary Shelley describes the promenade of Plainpalais, outside of Geneva:
Here a small obelisk is erected to the glory of Rousseau, and here (such is the mutability of human
life) the magistrates, the successors of those who exiled him from his native country, were shot by
the populace during that revolution, which his writings mainly contributed to mature, and which,
notwithstanding the temporary bloodshed and injustice with which it was polluted, has produced
enduring benefits to mankind, which all the chicanery of statesmen, nor even the great conspiracy
of kings, can entirely render vain [F 174 or L I: 20].
66
“Would anyone believe, if he did not have the proof,” Rousseau writes in the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard
Vicar,
31
�that human foolishness could have been brought to this point? Amatus Lusitanus affirmed that he
had seen a little man an inch long, closed up in a bottle, whom Julius Camillus, like another
Prometheus, had made by the science of alchemy. Paracelsus, De natura rerum, teaches the way
to produce these little men and maintains that the pygmies, the fauns, the satyrs, and the nymphs
were engendered by chemistry, Indeed, I do not see anything that further remains to be done to
establish the possibility of these facts, other than to advance that organic matter resists the heat of
fire and that its molecules can be preserved alive in a reverberatory furnace “ [CW 13:436-437
note *].
What would Rousseau have his Vicar say if the alleged generation did not require the use of fire?
67
For more on Shelley’s concern with this matter, see James O’Rourke, “‘Nothing More Unnatural’: Mary Shelley’s
Revision of Rousseau,” in ELH. Volume 56, Number 3. (Autumn, 1989), reprinted in in F, 543-569. O’Rourke
quotes from Shelley’s 1838 encyclopedia essay on Rousseau:
Our first duty is to render those to whom we give birth, wise, virtuous, and happy, as far as in us
lies. Rousseau failed in this, – can we wonder that his after course was replete with sorrow? The
distortion of intellect that blinded him to the first duties of life, we are inclined to believe to be
allied to that vein of insanity, that made him an example among men for self-inflicted sufferings
[F, 547].
68
It is difficult to be sure exactly what Shelley read of Rousseau in the years before the publication of Frankenstein,
mostly because she does not name Rousseau’s works consistently in her journal. In 1815 she records reading
Rousseau’s Confessions, Emile, and Nouvelle Heloise [J, 47-49]. In 1816 she adds Rousseau’s Reveries, over four
days in late July and early August [J, 55]. She was writing Frankenstein at this point, having begun in June [F,
333]. She also reads something she calls the “Letters of Emile” over two days in September 1816 [J, 64]: could this
refer to Emile and Sophie? In the summary of her reading for that year, she repeats these titles, listing the Reveries
and the “Letters of Emile” [J, 72-73]. Shelley turned to correcting and transcribing Frankenstein in April, May, and
October 1817 [J, 78-79, 85]. Over six days in late June and early July 1817, she records re-reading Rousseau’s
Julie, having completed Frankenstein in May that year [F, 334]. She re-reads the Confessions over three days in
October 1817, followed by three days on something she calls “Rousseau’s Letters” – perhaps those referred to in the
Confessions, which would have included the April 20, 1751 letter to Mme. de Francueil where Rousseau discusses
his treatment of his children [CW 5: 551-552; J, 85-86]. She lists the Nouvelle Heloise and “Confessions et Lettres
de Rousseau” in her reading for 1817 [J, 89-90].
32
�
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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"We shall be monsters" : Frankenstein and the ugliness of enlightenment
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Transcript of a lecture given on March 2, 2018 by Jeff J.S. Black as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein
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The Winnowing Oar: Odysseus’ Final Journey
Claudia Hauer
St. John’s College, Santa Fe, September 21, 2016
Abstract
In book 11 of the Odyssey, in the underworld, Teiresias describes to Odysseus a final
journey that he must take to propitiate Poseidon when his labors on Ithaka are
concluded. Teiresias tells Odysseus he must walk inland with an oar until a
wayfarer mistakes the oar for a winnowing fan. There, Teiresias says, Odysseus
must build a shrine to Poseidon and plant the oar as a dedication. In this talk, I will
explore various interpretations of this puzzling description of Odysseus’ final
journey.
Paper
In book 11 of the Odyssey, called the Nekuia, the book of the dead, Odysseus goes to
the underworld in order to question the ghost of Teiresias. Teiresias describes a
final journey that Odysseus must make after he kills the suitors:
But after you have killed these suitors in your own palace,
either by treachery, or openly with the sharp bronze,
then you must take up your well-shaped oar and go on a journey
until you come where there are men living who know nothing
of the sea, and who eat food that is not mixed with salt, who never
have known ships whose cheeks are painted purple, who never
have known well-shaped oars, which act for ships as wings do.
And I will tell you a very clear proof, and you cannot miss it.
When, as you walk, some other wayfarer happens to meet you,
and says you carry a winnow-fan on your bright shoulder,
then you must plant your well-shaped oar in the ground, and render
ceremonious sacrifice to the lord Poseidon. (Lattimore, 11. 119 – 130)
The most obvious intent of this journey will be the propitiation of Poseidon. i While
Athena and Zeus love Odysseus ‘terribly’ (1. 265), Poseidon’s anger over the
blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus remains a menace to the ‘long, peaceful life’ that
Teiresias next prophesies Odysseus could enjoy.
Poseidon, we learn later, did not intend to prevent Odysseus’ homecoming, but the
god wanted Odysseus to suffer more than he did, and arrive at Ithaka without
treasure. In book 13, after Odysseus has been ferried safely to Ithaka by the
Phaeacians, Poseidon complains to Zeus about the potential loss of status he will
incur with respect to his thwarted intentions for a more difficult homecoming for
Odysseus. Poseidon says:
Father Zeus, no longer among the gods immortal
Shall I be honored, when there are mortals who do me no honor,
the Phaiakians, and yet these are of my own blood. See now,
I had said to myself Odysseus would come home only after
much suffering. I had not indeed taken his homecoming
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altogether away, since first you nodded your head and assented
to it. But they carried him, asleep in the fast ship, over
the sea, and set him down in Ithaka, and gave him numberless
gifts, as bronze, and gold abundant, and woven clothing,
more than Odysseus could ever have taken from Troy, even
if he had come home ungrieved and with his fair share of the plunder.
(Lattimore 13. 128 -139)
Having been thwarted with respect to his intention for Odysseus, Poseidon’s wrath
now turns to the Phaeacians. Poseidon takes Zeus’ suggestion that he teach the
Phaeacians a memorable lesson by turning the returning ship to stone in sight of the
Phaeacian harbor. Odysseus is safe… for now. The fate of the Phaeacian ship has
the intended effect. Alcinous recalls that his father prophesied that Poseidon would
cover the Phaeacian city with a mountain of rocks after turning a ship to stone, and
the Phaeacians immediately begin fervent propitiations to the god.
The forgotten prophecy suggests that the Phaeacians have let their diligence lapse
with respect to Poseidon – Alcinous only belatedly recalls the prophecy that
Poseidon would one day be angry with them because of their indiscriminate offers
of convoy. Yet Odysseus told the Phaeacians the story of the blinding of the Cyclops,
a story which included Polyphemus’ declaration that he is the son of the “glorious
earthshaker” (9.518). Nonetheless, the Phaeacians did not recognize that they were
risking Poseidon’s wrath in showering Polyphemus’ mutilator with gifts and giving
him convoy.
Odysseus’ propitiation of Poseidon on his final journey will, similarly, attempt to
compensate for any lost honor (τιμή) that the god may suffer over the ease of
Odysseus’ homecoming. But Odysseus’ propitiation will lack the anxiety that
characterizes the renewal of the Phaeacians’ worship of the god. Teiresias mentions
no future threat or calamity, and predicts a sleek old age for Odysseus once this final
labor is complete.
The propitiation will permit Odysseus to render proper observances to all of the
divinities. After describing the final journey, Teiresias orders Odysseus to return
home and “render holy hecatombs to the immortal gods who hold the wide heaven,
all of them in order” (Lattimore, 11.132-3). Odysseus’ propitiation will restore
Odysseus’ own relationship with the pantheistic order and permit him in the future
to perform the ceremonies of piety with Poseidon in his proper position of honor.
The task of the final journey is to establish a shrine to Poseidon in an inland region
far from the sea. The propitiation will extend Poseidon’s domain and his worship
cult into a community whose inhabitants do not recognize the dedicatory oar as
such, and who have never even seen the sea. What does this mean? Why is
Odysseus’ founding of an inland shrine with an unrecognized talisman an
appropriate propitiation of the god of the sea?
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Whatever oar Odysseus will take on this final journey, it will not be from the ship on
which he left Troy. Lattimore (1965), Fagles (1996), and Mitchell (2013) all
translate Teiresias’ command as a reference to “your well-shaped oar.” Yet the
Greek could also mean “a well-shaped oar,” and this must be its correct meaning, for
all of the oars from Odysseus’ ship were lost when Zeus destroyed it in the blast that
kills the companions. At the end of book 12, we learn that Odysseus, the only
survivor, washes up on Kalypso’s isle with the aid of “two long timbers” (perimήκεα
dοῦra), the only surviving pieces of the lost ship.
The last we hear of those ship’s oars, they are associated with impiety, since the air
around them is permeated with the odor of the cooking meat from the forbidden
cattle of the Sun God on Thrinakia. Odysseus, who had been praying to the gods by
himself, apart from his men, describes his return to the scene of the crime as
follows: “as I was close to the oar-swept vessel, the pleasant savor of cooking meat
came drifting around me, and I cried out my grief aloud to the gods immortal”
(Lattimore, 9.368-9). The contrast between the pleasant odor of the meat, and
Odysseus’ grief highlights the distinction between the worldliness of the
companions’ human appetite and Odysseus’ otherworldly concern with honoring
the gods. Odysseus’ words condemn the vessel and its oars, now tainted by the odor
of impiety.
From the first 4 books of the Odyssey, the Telemachia, we have learned that the
other surviving heroes from Troy, Nestor and Menelaus, are both very careful to
render proper sacrifice to the gods. Yet neither of these two surviving heroes is
“home” in the way Odysseus intends to be home. The anger-prone Nestor tells
endless war stories about the glory days, to the chagrin of the youth of Pylos. In
book 15 (191ff), Telemachus asks Nestor’s son Pisistratus to conspire to let
Telemachus skip a goodbye visit to Nestor, since the old man’s clinging company is
so tedious. Pisistratus immediately sees the sense of the request. “How overbearing
his anger will be,” Pisistratus rues, yet urges his new friend to sail immediately.
Menelaus, on the other hand, whose memories might be somewhat more bitter, is
drugged into mindless joviality by Helen.
Odysseus, as we have learned, is active, engaged, and responsive to mortals and
immortals alike, and we must assume that this is indicative of the way he wishes to
be “home.” Odysseus must restore his good standing with Poseidon, but the way he
is ordered to do it will require that an oar be mistaken for a winnow-fan. Does this
have something to do with Odysseus’ particular homecoming, his νόστος?
Teiresias describes the dedicatory oar as “well-made,” from eὐ + ἀραρίσκω. The
verb ἀραρίσκω means “to join” – so the adjective describes something crafted to be
“well-joined.” The fin and handle of the oar will have been “put together” by a
craftsman who knows how to fit the joints to be strong and seamless. There are only
two other uses of this adjective in the Odyssey. Elpenor’s oar is also named as “wellmade,” as is the ax with the olive wood handle that Kalypso gives Odysseus to use as
he builds his getaway raft. Certainly, the gods’ tools would be well-joined. Perhaps
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there are other well-joined oars in Odysseus’ palace at Ithaka, or perhaps Odysseus
himself will make the oar. Odysseus is well-skilled at joining – he is τέκτων, a homo
faber, a ‘maker-man,’ able to control his environment through the use of tools. ii
Odysseus’ talent as a craftsman is made clear in the two descriptions of his
handiwork in the Odyssey: the construction of the raft in book 5, and Odysseus’ own
description of his construction of his marriage chamber and marriage bed in book
23. Homer uses ἀραρίσκω to describe how Odysseus “joins” the deck boards as he
constructs the raft on which he will flee Kalypso’s island (5.252). In this passage,
Odysseus emerges from a night of extra-marital love-making with Kalypso in the
innermost chamber of her cave (μυχός), then joins the planks of the raft well to
make a sea-worthy vessel with which to return to his wife. In book 23, the joining,
by contrast, consecrates the innermost bedroom of man and wife. Odysseus himself
uses the verb ἀραρίσκω as he describes to Penelope how he “joined” the doors to
their bedroom around the stump of the olive, before he constructed their marriage
bed. In this passage, the well-joined doors seal off the marriage chamber (θάλαμος)
from the rest of the house. These doors have also so far protected Penelope from
the suitors, as she retires each night to the marriage chamber of Odysseus. The
dedicatory oar, insofar as it too is well-joined, references Odysseus’ prowess in both
adventure and return, such that he can craft the tool of passage across Poseidon’s
domain to and from war.
The oar that Teiresias has in mind will have been made to row “ships whose cheeks
are painted purple” (foinikoporeίoi). The Cyclops, Odysseus has already explained to
the Phaeacians in book 9, have no such ships (“red-cheeked ships” - miltopareίoi)
nor carpenters to build them (9.125). Although Poseidon is god of the sea, his son
Polyphemus and the race of Cyclops have no knowledge of ship-building and the art
of joining, and do not venture onto the sea. The people whom Odysseus will
introduce to Poseidon-worship on the final journey will also have no direct
knowledge of the craft that could take them into Poseidon’s domain. Moreover,
Teiresias does not instruct Odysseus to correct the wayfarer who thinks the oar is a
winnow-fan, so the expansion of the Poseidon-cult apparently does not require that
the new worshippers understand the oar as talismanic of Poseidon’s actual domain.
Teiresias tells Odysseus that the wayfarer’s mistake about the oar will be the “sign”
(sῆma) that he is in the correct place to perform the propitiation. Teiresias uses the
word “sign” to denote a “signal” or “mark” by which Odysseus can recognize the
sacred place. Yet the word can also be used to denote a grave-marker, as the shade
of Elpenor has used it just 50 lines earlier.
Recall that Elpenor fell off the roof just as Odysseus and his companions left Circe’s
island for the underworld. Since the body of Elpenor was left unburied, he does not
seem to have to drink the blood to speak to Odysseus in the underworld. He
approaches even before Odysseus has spoken with Teiresias, and begs Odysseus to
return to Aiaia, and
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burn me there with all my armor that belongs to me, and heap up a grave
mound (sῆma) beside the beach of the gray sea, for an unhappy man, so that
those to come will know of me. Do this for me, and on top of the grave
mound plant the oar with which I rowed when I was alive and among my
companions. (Lattimore, 11.74-8)
Here the oar on the tomb signifies the grave of a man who rowed. Such a sign would
be an appropriate grave-marker for any of the companions, but the others will have
no graves, for they have offended Helios in eating the cattle of the Sun God, and are
lost at sea when Zeus (interestingly not Poseidon) blasts their ship after their
departure from Thrinakia. The oar that Odysseus is to plant at the new shrine to
Poseidon will also be a sign, but one that only Odysseus as its human founder will
fully understand, as the local community will mistake it for a threshing tool.
How might Odysseus understand the significance of the winnowing oar? Given the
proximity of Elpenor’s request and Teiresias’ instructions, perhaps Odysseus will
understand the oar as a death-token of his lost companions. Perhaps the oar will
signify his lament for the companions’ human frailty, their inability to refrain from
the flesh of the forbidden cattle, an inability which Homer and Poseidon describe at
the very beginning of the Odyssey as the companions’ characteristic “wild
recklessness” (1.7, 34). This is a single word in Greek, a word that shares the root
with the word ἄth, a delusion about the cosmos that leads to ruin caused by the
gods.
Odysseus himself is apparently free from this kind of cosmic folly. Yet it can be hard
for a contemporary reader to appreciate this, for Odysseus’ relationship with his
men often strikes contemporary readers as merely instrumental. As Robert
Hollander writes in his commentary on Dante’s Inferno Canto 26, which I will return
to below, “the companions are Ulysses’ oars” (Hollander, 493). By this reading, the
oar is, in a sense, any man who rowed for Odysseus, and it will be unnamed and
unrecognized, just as the companions are.
Another possibility is that Odysseus will understand the transformation of the oar
into winnow-fan as a transition from sea to land, or from war to peace. Teiresias has
prophesied for him a long life into “sleek old age.” Odysseus’ life will be peaceful and
prosperous, focused on animal husbandry, fruit trees, and the growing and harvest
of grain. We don’t know what form this death will take, but it will come not “on the
sea” but “from the sea,” as something foreign to Odysseus’ pastoral life on Ithaka.
The Odyssey tells the tale of a man who figured out how to get home from war – not
just back to his native place, as Nestor and Menelaus have also done, but home, at
home, alive to the present, not haunted as so many veterans are. The poem shows us
that homecoming in this fullest sense (νόστος) is not simply a transition from
‘violent’ war to ‘non-violent’ domestic life. Odysseus makes himself at home in a
world that he understands to be full of forces beyond the power of humans to
control. The transformation of “a well-made oar” into a winnow-fan is not simply
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the transformation of a tool of the stormy sea into a tool of a peaceful agrarian life.
Olson (1997) points out that the word Teiresias uses for winnow-fan is a hapax
legomenon, a word that only appears once in surviving Greek literature, a composite
of ἀleίqei (ears of corn) and loigόj (destroyer). Homer’s poem avoids the two names
of this tool in daily use – ptύon and qrίnax - in order to call attention to the way this
agrarian tool destroys the objects on which it is used.
Odysseus is, similarly, a wrecker of men. By this reckoning, the Odysseus we get to
know in the Odyssey may strike a reader as a strange figure to be charged with an
evangelical function with respect to Poseidon. The final journey will have little in
common with Odysseus’ adventures on the way home from Troy. Odysseus has only
to walk inland until the oar across his shoulders is mistaken for a winnow-fan. Yet
Odysseus’ survival to perform this final propitiation has come at considerable cost, if
not to Odysseus, then certainly to others. Odysseus has broken the goddess
Kalypso’s heart, lost his own comrades, brought about the death of the sailors on the
Phaeacian ship that bore Odysseus safely to Ithaka, and potentially led to the
obliteration of the rest of the Phaeacians as well. Odysseus has mercilessly
slaughtered the suitors and the maidservants who slept with them, including
Eurynomos, characterized by Homer as a decent, god-fearing man. He has all but
killed Irus, the local beggar.
For a reader who has never gone to war, it may be hard to accept that none of these
actions have earned Odysseus the enmity of the gods. Rather, Odysseus is hated by
Poseidon because he mutilated Poseidon’s monstrous son Polyphemus in order to
escape from the Cyclops’ cave. Obviously, the contemporary code of universal
morality condemns this. The only reason Odysseus was in the Cyclops’ cave in the
first place was because he was eager to acquire gifts and glory. Yet any concerns a
contemporary reader has about the moral quality of Odysseus’ motives will have to
be set aside. In the Homeric context, gifts and glory constitute a warrior’s honor,
much as medals, decorations, and ceremony do today. Yet the markings of honor do
not always go to the most worthy men. Indeed, there is much dispute in the classical
literature about whether Odysseus deserves the honor he received at Troy, since he
utilizes cunning in combat, and does not rely on naïve strength and physical power.
Yet Odysseus’ methods work. His strategems at Troy won the war for his side. Lives
were saved, as we would say in the American military context today. Homer’s gods
are not much concerned with the methods that mortals employ in the deadly
business of war.
With respect to the gods, Homer lacks what we would call moral theism. Moral
theism is the notion that the proper worship of the gods entails the wish for moral
purity, serves as the basis for moral redemption, or requires repentance of sin.
Worship of the Homeric pantheon is transactional, and, as we shall see, relational,
but it is not based on any stable moral theism.
The idea that a character like Odysseus could successfully propitiate the angry
Poseidon requires many contemporary readers to suspend something of their
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theistic expectations. Against the backdrop of my own peaceful life context and
relatively unchallenged theological commitments, much of what Odysseus does
appears morally deficient. Odysseus himself, for example, in telling the tale to the
Phaeacians, calls his boast to the mutilated child of Poseidon a “taunt” (κερτόμιος).
However savage the Cyclops were, they kept to themselves, and Odysseus only
visited their island because he wanted to “find out about these people, and learn
what they are” (Lattimore 9.174), in the hopes, as always, of gaining status in the
form of gifts (dῶra), honor (timή), and fame (klέoj). Such passages challenge a
reader to ask herself: what do we really mean when we insist that the tenets of
moral theism apply to soldiers at war?
Occasionally in translation, Homer is made to suggest that divinities engage in
something like moral retributive justice. When Poseidon complains to Zeus that
Odysseus has had an effortless landing on Ithaka, Zeus tell him “if any humans
should insolently deny you your proper honors, of course you must feel free to
punish them in whatever way that you want to” (Mitchell, 13.141-2). The Greek here
for ‘punish,’ tίsij, means something like “extract payment”. Yet it is not the primary
offender Odysseus who is characterized as owing a debt to Poseidon, it is the
secondary offenders the Phaeacians who owe this “payment” for their lapse in the
diligence of their worship. Poseidon’s turning the ship to stone alerts the Phaeacians
to their debt, which they attempt to pay by their fervent sacrifices. Poseidon does
not pursue any principled retribution against Odysseus, in fact Poseidon is
(presumably) placated at the very moment that Odysseus is free to undertake his
machinations against the suitors. Poseidon does not “punish” in the morally theistic
sense of giving mortals what they justly deserve. Rather, the word tίsij implies a
transactional lapse; the Phaeacians “owe” Poseidon something if the god is not to
lose honor and status among his fellow immortals.
Homer’s narrative captures this through the technique of caesura in line 13.187.
Caesura, or “cut,” is a sense break inserted in or after the 3rd of the 6 feet of a line of
dactylic hexameter. In book 13, line 187, the 1st three feet are translated: “standing
around the altar”, a phrase that finishes the description of the ceremonies of
sacrifice that the Phaeacians diligently undertake after witnessing the ship turning
to stone, and after Alcinous’ belated recollection of the prophecy about Poseidon’s
wrath. That is the last we will hear of the Phaeacians. We do not find out if their
propitiation succeeds. Homer’s narrative now turns to Odysseus and his attempt to
slay the suitors. The final three feet of this line of dactylic hexameter shift the scene
with: “But now great Odysseus wakened.” Homer intends us to view these separate
scenes as simultaneous, so that Odysseus’ forthcoming strategems on Ithaka are
framed by the urgency with which the Phaeacians have learned that because of their
good treatment of him, they are in danger of suffering Poseidon’s full punishment,
which would obliterate their city and presumably themselves under a mountain of
stone.
This narrative device of caesura draws attention to the fact that Odysseus will not
have to “pay” Poseidon the price of the many sufferings the god intended for him.
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Poseidon, it turns out, does not reckon his accounts that way. Poseidon’s wrath is
kindled for partisan reasons: when his own kindred are wronged or have done him
wrong. He is angry that the Phaeacians did not keep him properly in mind, and he
wants to take revenge on the man who mutilated his son. Poseidon’s vengeance has
tribal meaning, but not moral meaning. Those who expect gods to be moral will have
trouble appreciating this curious feature of Homeric divine retribution. Homer’s
world is a theistic world, in that there are gods, and they take a personal interest in
the affairs of mortals, but it is not a moral theism. Yet there is much to learn from
this theistic tribalism, in particular the way it appears to reflect something timeless
about the way warriors respond to violence.
To illustrate this contrast between the heroic model of the warrior and the Christian
model of moral theism, let us return to Dante, the 14th century author of the
Commedia. Dante knew of Homer’s Odysseus not directly, but from references in
Latin poetry. In his Inferno, Dante offers a retelling of the Odysseus story that is not
willing to absolve Odysseus merely on the grounds that Homer lacked a context of
moral theism. Dante’s language illustrates that Dante understood that this context
was absent in Homer’s pagan world, and yet condemned Odysseus anyway.
Dante’s Ulysses is guilty of irredeemable impiety. Dante’s story overlaps with
Homer’s up until the departure from Circe’s island, when Homer has Odysseus enter
the underworld, but Dante has Ulysses abandon the homecoming in order to
attempt a hubristic assault on the Mountain of Purgatory. Condemned to hell for his
unrepentant false counsel, Ulysses speaks of the Christian God dismissively, as
merely “another,” a god with his own petty tribal reasons for wanting Ulysses
destroyed.
Dante’s account is true to Homer’s in one respect: Homer’s Odysseus does not show
any hint of repentance or concern for redemption. Much has been made of the
transition in Greek narrative from the ‘shame culture’ of Homeric times to the ‘guilt
culture’ in place by the 5th century before the Christian era. E. R. Dodds (1951)
points out that Homeric characters do not exhibit much anxiety about triggering
fqόνος, the “jealousy” of the gods, or, more theistically, their “righteous indignation.”
Dodds writes, “It is plain…from the uninhibited boasting in which Homeric man
indulges that he does not take the dangers of fqόνος very seriously: such scruples
are foreign to a shame culture.” iii Yet Dante’s Christian theism requires him to
condemn this attitude categorically, and Dante places Ulysses in the 8th circle of hell,
among the false counsellors.
Dante’s Ulysses is driven by a love of experience that is also familiar to readers of
Homer. Ulysses tells the pilgrim Dante: “not tenderness for a son, nor filial duty/
toward my aged father, nor the love I owed/ Penelope that would have made her
glad/ could overcome the fervor that was mine to gain experience of the world and
learn about man’s vices, and his worth” (Hollander & Hollander, Canto 26. 94-99).
This passage seems to reference the opening lines of the Odyssey: “Many were they
whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of” (Lattimore, 1.3), as well as
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Odysseus’ misguided insistence upon landing on the Cyclops’ island, to “go and find
out about these people, and learn what they are….” Dante’s language also references
The Aeneid of Virgil, Dante the Pilgrim’s beloved guide, who wrote his own epic hero,
Aeneas, to exhibit filial piety as his most characteristic and reliable virtue.
Dante’s treatment of Ulysses in Inferno has other interesting references to Homer’s
Odysseus that can help us see how foreign Homer’s notion of propitiation is to a
theistic understanding of redemption. In Canto 26, the shade of Ulysses uses the
following language as he boasts to the pilgrim Dante how Ulysses exhorted his men
to cross the straits of Hercules in search of the realm of Purgatory:
“O brothers,” I said, “who, in the course of a hundred thousand perils, at last
have reached the west, to such brief wakefulness of our senses as remains to
us, do not deny yourselves the chance to know – following the sun – the
world where no one lives. Consider how your souls were sown: you were not
made to live like brutes or beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge”
(Hollander & Hollander, 26. 112 – 120)
Dante’s passage has much in common with the opening of Homer’s Odyssey book 10,
where Odysseus’ companions lie disheartened, having just landed on the shore of
Circe’s island after being unable to control their impulses with Aiolus’ precious bag
of winds. Odysseus exhorts his disconsolate men as follows: “Dear friends, for we do
not know where the darkness is nor the sunrise, nor where the Sun who shines
upon people rises, nor where he sets, then let us hasten our minds and think,
whether there is any course left open to us…” (Lattimore, 10. 190-193). The
overlap between this passage and Dante’s continues, as Circe will turn the first
group of Odysseus’ men into pigs, a reference that Dante also intends us to get, with
his “you were not made to live like brutes or beasts.”
Dante focuses on the way Odysseus’ insatiable curiosity and love of experience
constitutes an irredeemable failure to grasp the nature of original sin. Although
Homer condemns the companions and saves Odysseus, Dante insists that it is
Odysseus himself who is damned. His comrades, and the hapless Phaeacians as well,
could be reframed by Dante’s theist paradigm as simple sinners who
wholeheartedly repent of their impious follies once they learn of their
consequences.
Homer’s passage, by contrast, draws attention to the vice that Odysseus’
companions exhibit with the bag of winds, the lack of control that Homer and
Poseidon have noted. The companions’ recklessness with the bag of winds is the
reason Odysseus has to go to the underworld to talk to Teiresias, who will give
Odysseus the instructions for the propitiation of Poseidon. Odysseus himself draws
attention to the connection between the companions’ fatigue at their oars and the
current crisis that requires the intervention of Teiresias, calling his companions
after their expulsion by Aiolus as “teίreto… eἰresιηj,” (worn down by rowing –
�Hauer 10
10.78). iv Thus Teiresias’ name itself phonetically evokes the companions’ inability to
sustain themselves at the oars of Odysseus’ ship.
Odysseus’ exhortation here, “let us think, whether there is any course left open to
us,” has its own etymological reference to an important difference between
Odysseus and his companions. The ‘course’ that Odysseus asks his companions to
seek is the Greek word μήτις – ‘cunning’ or ‘strategem’, a word that has a homonym
in the word μητις – the indefinite ‘not anyone’ that Odysseus counts on when he
tells Polyphemus his name is οὐτις – ‘nobody.’ This is the trick that prevents
Polyphemus from getting help from the other Cyclops after Odysseus has escaped
and barricaded Polyphemus in his own cave. The sound of the word μήτις is thus
associated with the action that triggered Poseidon’s wrath. In book 12, Odysseus’
companions will not find a stratagem, they will fall under Circe’s spell. Odysseus,
however, with the intervention of Hermes, will find an effective stratagem. Odysseus
will be able to master Circe, while his comrades will have to suffer living “like brutes
and beasts” until their leader can save them.
From Dante’s perspective, it is precisely the lack of repentance that condemns
Ulysses to hell. While this aspect of Dante’s portrayal is true to form, in that
Homer’s Odysseus does not repent, Homer’s world does not have a theistic context
in which Odysseus could be condemned morally for this absence.
Since the tenets of moral theism don’t apply, Odysseus’ identity as propitiate on the
final journey has to be understood in some other way. Many scholars speak of the
anthropomorphic patron-client relationship between mortals and immortals in
Homer’s world. Odysseus is able to get home and slay the suitors because he is
favored by Athena, and Odysseus is favored by Athena because he has the kinds of
qualities that will enable him to get home and slay the suitors. Odysseus can utilize
deception and cunning to attain his ends, and does not see these means as entailing
scruple. In fact, this very freedom from scruple may be the key to Odysseus’ piety,
for deception and cunning require a certain type of self-discipline, and this selfdiscipline constitutes what Homer intends as Odysseus’ salvific virtue, the capacity
that distinguishes him from his reckless companions.
Nowhere is this more evident in Homer’s epic than in the tale Odysseus tells of what
happened on the island of Thrinakia, where only Odysseus has the self-control to
refrain from touching the Cattle of the Sun. Olson (1997) explores the relationship
Teiresias draws between the oar and a winnowing fan by connecting Teiresias’
prophecy to the upcoming ‘winnowing’ that will happen to Odysseus’ men in
retribution for their offense of eating the cattle on Thrinakia. v On Thrinakia, the
‘pure’ Odysseus is separated from the ‘impure’ chaff that his men represent in their
reckless unwillingness to endure hunger rather than touch the sacred cattle. Olson
notes that the name Thrinakia comes from qrinax, a common word for a winnowing
shovel (literally “three-toothed” or “trident,” which references the symbol of
Poseidon). Olson reads the entire legend of the Cattle of the Sun as a winnowing test
for the kind of self-control that Odysseus alone is capable of. Odysseus passes the
�Hauer 11
test himself, but cannot control his companions’ desire for the forbidden food,
because he has left them to go off to “pray to the gods” that they might show him a
road (ὅδος) homeward, “but what they did,” Odysseus says, “was to shed a sweet
sleep on my eyelids” (Lattimore, 12.338). vi
Throughout Homer, sacrifice is associated with the odor of the meat of oxen, cattle,
sheep and rams, an odor that spreads out into the air, conveying honor to the god to
whom it is dedicated. The meat of the different animals yields distinct odors, and
these odors seem together to make up the completeness of propitiation. Teiresias,
for example, tells Odysseus that the sacrifice to Poseidon on the final journey must
consist of a ram, a bull, and a boar. The herds of Helios though, are sacrificially
taboo, for Helios does not want to smell the odor of their flesh, since this god
“delights” in watching these animals with his eyes (χαίρεσκον, 12.380).
Although Odysseus reports to the Phaeacians that Lampetia told Helios that “we”
killed his cattle, Helios only asks Zeus to punish “the companions of Odysseus.”
Odysseus ordered his companions to swear to him before they left the ship that they
would not touch the herds on Thrinakia, but once the food from the ship has run out,
the men forsake their oath during Odysseus’ pious absence and slaughter the
animals. Although Helios has to be told that the animals have been killed, he
somehow knows to absolve Odysseus, whose salvific self-control includes the ability
to fast and pray when necessary, apparently without consequence to his strength
and endurance.
Since the events on Thrinakia are narrated by Odysseus to the Phaeacians, a reader
might be suspicious of Odysseus’ self-portrayal of his singular purity, especially as it
includes the actual conversation between Zeus and Helios. Odysseus, however,
makes a point of telling the Phaeacians that he heard this dialogue narrated by
Kalypso, who in turn heard it from Hermes. We are to understand the conversation
between Kalypso and Hermes as having taken place during Hermes’ visit, described
in book 5, to convey the message to Kalypso that Zeus has decided Odysseus must
finally get home. It was during this visit that Hermes presumably narrated to
Kalypso the conversation between Helios and Zeus which led Zeus to administer a
“just” punishment to Odysseus’ comrades for killing the forbidden cattle of Helios on
Thrinakia. vii
Once Odysseus has lost his comrades, his choice for killing the suitors is no longer
between “treachery, or openly with sharp bronze” as Teiresias told him. Now the
suitors must be overcome only by treachery, or trickery, as Homer’s word δόλος can
also mean. And so Odysseus does overcome them this way, which brings us to the
final scene of the Odyssey, in which the families of the suitors, seeking tribal
vengeance for their sons’ deaths, put on armor and march openly on Odysseus,
Laertes, Telemachus and their small armed band of loyal supporters.
Here we have an event which Teiresias did not mention in his prophecy, perhaps
because it is not left to Odysseus to find a way to accomplish it. At first it appears
�Hauer 12
that open warfare will break out. Laertes throws himself into the conflict, and exults
at the way “My son and my son’s son are contending over their courage” (Lattimore,
24.515). With Athena’s help, Laertes throws the spear that kills the father of
Antinous, who was, appropriately, the most vicious of the suitors. But as Odysseus
and Telemachus throw themselves into the front line, Athena stops them. “Hold
back,” she says, “from grievous war, so you can most swiftly come to a decision
without blood.” When Odysseus is slow to withdraw, Zeus sends a warning
thunderbolt. The epic closes with the phrase “And pledges for the days to come,
sworn to by both sides, were settled by Pallas Athene, daughter of Zeus of the aegis”
(Lattimore).
Because of the deus ex machina character of this passage, Athena’s role in this scene
could be compared to the end of Aeschylus’ 5th century tragic series, the Oresteia,
where Athena brings in judges to make a decision about Orestes, and then
persuades the furies to transform into the kindly ones and bless the Areopagus. In
Aeschylus’ play, the presence of the goddess accounts for Athens’ shift from the
customs of tribal vengeance to the rule of law. Zeus’ and Athena’s motive for not
permitting the battle between Odysseus and the families of the suitors can perhaps
be similarly characterized at the end of the Odyssey in terms of the gods’ righteous
concern with overcoming the tribal cycle of violence, a morally theist concern that
appears anachronistic in light of my argument here.
Yet this is not the only way to interpret the Odyssey’s final passage. The other
Homeric epic, The Iliad, ends with a similar stasis, as the hostilities of the Trojan
War are interrupted for the “burial of Hector, breaker of horses,” which restores
order to both the Achaian and the Trojan communities, similarly disrupted by
Achilles’ berserk mutilation of Hector’s corpse. The end of Iliad book one offers
another example, this time of hostility between the divinities, restored to stasis from
the brink of violence by the quick words and obsequious capering of the impulsive
god Hephaistos. Many Shakespearean tragedies, including King Lear, Hamlet, and
Julius Caesar, end with comments that draw attention to a cycle in human affairs in
which a broken community acknowledges the restoration of intelligibility and stasis.
This cycle need not be interpreted through a moral lens. Michel Foucault (1970)
suggests that such a cycle is intrinsic to a human sociology, as a pre-moral model in
which human beings emerge from conflict by “finding a solution that will – on one
level at least, and for a time – appease their contradictions.” viii If this is true of the
Odyssey, perhaps there is a connection after all between Athena’s and Zeus’ abrupt
ending of the hostilities and the contractual, not moral, piety I have attributed to
Odysseus.
In book 23, after the slaying of the suitors, Odysseus repeats Teiresias’ instructions
for the propitiation word-for-word, in the first conversation he has with Penelope
after their reconciliation. The word-for-word repetition is a mnemonic technique of
oral composition, but it also serves here to establish Odysseus’ piety with respect to
the importance of this task of propitiating Poseidon. The epic could have ended
without further reference to Teiresias’ mention of the final journey. The iteration
�Hauer 13
suggests that Odysseus’ intention is to follow the instructions precisely, and further,
to enlist his wife’s support and understanding of the significance of this crucial task.
This, I suggest, might be the most profound meaning of Odysseus’ νόστος.
Odysseus’ earnest piety takes additional meaning from the final passage, in which
the conflict between Odysseus and the families of the slain suitors is resolved by
divine intervention. The Odyssey ends with a divine mandate that the people of
Ithaka live in peace. Odysseus’ need to propitiate the one remaining hostile deity
now emerges as an urgent prerequisite to his fulfilling his political potential as a
wise and engaged combat veteran, capable of rendering due observances to a
complex hierarchy of divinities. Odysseus, Homer suggests, will not permit the kind
of lapse that exposes the religious and political immaturity of Poseidon’s existing
mortal kin, the Phaeacians. Perhaps it is Poseidon’s frustration with the
forgetfulness of those who should by their kinship be his most zealous celebrants
that leads the god to wish that Odysseus extend the Poseidon-cult into the
landlocked agrarian communities of what scholars assume was Arcadia, a name that
calls to mind Virgil’s eclogues, which are pastoral idylls of shepherds and wood
nymphs. The pastoral pleasures certainly await Odysseus, once he has seen to it
that his own religious observances will be acceptable to all the gods, even Poseidon,
in their due pantheistic order.
Hansen, William F. “Odysseus’ Last Journey.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica. No 24. 1977. 27 –
48.
ii Pucci, Pietro. The Song of the Sirens: Essays on Homer. Roman & Littlefield, 1998.
iii Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. University of California Press. 1951. 30.
iv Dimock, G. E. Jr. “The Name of Odysseus.” The Hudson Review. Vol. 9, No. 1. 1956. 11.
v Olson, S. Douglas. “Odysseus’ “Winnowing Shovel” (Homer. Od. 11. 119-37) and the Island of the
Cattle of the Sun.” Illinois Classical Studies. Vol. 22. 1997. 7-9
vi It is worth noting here as a digression that Odysseus’ landing on Ithaka is characterized by his
being in a deep sleep.
vii Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Harvard, 1985. 129-30.
viii Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things. Pantheon Books, 1970. 357.
i
Additional Bibliography
Adkins, Arthur. Merit and Responsibility. Midway Reprint, 1975
Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Harvard, 1985.
Kirk, G. S. The Nature of Greek Myths. Overlook Books, 1975.
Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. Harvard, 2000.
Parry, Milman. Ed. Parry, Adam. The Making of Homeric Verse. Oxford, 1971.
�
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The winnowing oar : Odysseus' final journey
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This senseless course of human things : 'one of Professor Kant's most cherished ideas'
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Friday night lecture
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The forgotten faculty : the place of phronesis or practical sense in liberal education
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ihno(^
David Lawrence Le\ ine
**/!/ the Very Center ofthe Plenitude"
Frida\ Niaht Dean's Lecture, Ausust 29. 2003
Page 1
14.\
*'At the Very Center of the Plenitude^
Goethe^s GrandAttempt to Overcome the 18'^ Century'
Or
How Freshman Laboratory Saved Goethe
From the General Sickness ofhis Age
""Nature has become the fundamental word
that designates essential relations...to beings."
Heidegger^
"We have failed to restore to the human spirit
its ancient right to comeface toface with nature."
Goethe"*
"Goethe teaches coin-age...ihzi the disadvantages
of an\' epoch exist only to the fainthearted."
Emerson^
1. Incidental Thoughts, Fniitfiil Life:
To everyone: Welcome! To our freshman in particular a special Welcome!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, we know him first as a poet and playwright—seniors will
read his Faust ne.xt week. Yet there is another Goethe that is less well loiown but who, from his
own point ofview, isofequal, if not greater consequence,^ the Goethe who spent his life studying
nature—botan\'. zoolog}', geologv', meteorolog>', theory of color—^and is known, in this regard,
for his work in morpholog\'. I would like to speak about this lesser known Goethe tonight.
There are two subtitles to this evening*s lecture "At the Very Center of the Plenitude."
The first is given to it by Friedrich Nietzsche, the second. m\- own curious invention. The first is
"Goethe's Grand Attempt to Overcome the 18"' Centur}-." As we will see. from Nietzsche's
perspective Goethe was a philosophical thinker of the highest order who inherited, as we all do,
ideas from previous generations and thinkers, ideas that he thought were ill conceived and needed
to be rethought. Thanks to these ideas, we had become, according to Goethe, "blind with seeing
eyes."
Similarly the second subtitle. "How Freshman Laboratory Saved Goethe from the
General Sickness ofhis Age." This clearly reflects our unique studies here at St. John's. Here too
we see something of greater moment than we might first have seen. Here we wall have a chance
to see that his life work studying nature—^as seen in the paper that we read in freshman
laboratory—has a far greater significance than just'science.' great though this is in its own right.^
For Goethe the smdy of namre was the necessary antidote to a growing tendency—"sickness'" he
called it—^that needed to be countered for the sake of our lives and health.
n
U
We have our work cut out for us this evening.
"
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Lcc
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St. John's Colfe^"^ - Meem Library
�Da^ id Lawrence Levine
"At the Very Center of the Plenitude^"
Friday Night Dean's Lecture. August 29. 2003
Page 2
14x
Goethe's thinking, though philosophical, is not s\"stematic. and that means there's no one
place where his deepest thinking is to be found. Just the opposite, his profoundest thought is to be
disco\ ered throughout his works, and not just in his major works, but minor ones too, often just
jottings here and there, on slips of paper, in the margins of books, the comers of newspapers, in
brief letters, in short wherever occasion found a suitable surface for pen and ink to secure for a
time his emergent thoughts. These were often then collected into "maxims and reflections."
sometimes inserted as the thinking of one of the characters of his novels, sometimes collected
under his own name.
These occasional thoughts will provide much of the material for tonight's talk. But
incidental thoughts are not necessariK" insignificant thoughts.' Not unlike flotsam and jetsam,
thoughts appear throughout our da\". Are these daih' musings 'distractions of the moment' or
'disclosures of moment'? Such irrepressible thoughtftilness and imagination gives added
dimension to the thin linearity of time. A da\' punctuated b>' the wondrous, sparked by light, is not
just another day. DaiK^ discoveiy* is meat not spice. nourishmenL not just flavoring. And its joy is
invigorating. The mundane is thereb>" transformed. Thinking happens.
One such collection of thoughts is a book of selected conversations by his secretary
Johann Peter Eckermann, a man of no small talent, who took it upon himself to record for
posterit} personal con\ersations he had \%ith his world famous employer during the last nine
>ears of his life. These are intermittenth* and imperfecth' recorded, often self-conscious,
sometimes seem contrived, and are frequenth' without a definite outcome. There we find
observations about passing acquaintances, deliberations about the wine list for the evening dinner,
plans for journeys to be taken, personal estimates about famous and not so famous authors and
statesmen. latter->'ear reflections and regrets about his youthful writings, plans for the
reconstruction of the local theater that had burned down, conversation with his patron the Grand
Duke of Weimar, observations about his wife and children, expressions of hope and
disappointment about friends, frustrations about works of his that had been overlooked or were
under appreciated. But throughout the rich array, there emerge as well recurrent themes and
persistent questions of consequence.
The same author mentioned above. Nietzsche, sa\s the following: "Apart from Goethe's
[own] writings, and in particular Goethe's conversations M'ith Eckermann, the best German
book there is. what is there realK" of German prose literature that it would be worthwhile to read
o\'er and o\er again?'"'^' 'The best German book there is." worth "reading over and over again"?
Hardly on the face of it.
Though perhaps prone to hyperbole and "philosophizing with a hammer,'* Nietzsche was
not prone to misrepresentation. What could he mean b\ such e.xaggerated praise? Perhaps what is
remarkable is not the book per se. but what is portrayed therein? Perhaps what is notable is not its
ultimate literaiy value—^the book is not on our program—^but the attempt to record a life that is in
no wa>' ordinaiy? Indeed, even through Eckermann's eyes we glimpse new possibilities for a
human life that aspires to what is extraordinary, a fullness of possibilit\" rarely seen. We glimpse a
paradigm of a full\- engaged, e\ er creati\e. wholesome fecundit>. In shorL we see philosophy as a
way of being in the world. not as a book bound between leather covers.
2. '•^Everything Nowadays is Ultrai
In 1825. late in life. Goethe wrote a letter to his friend, the composer Zelter in which he
reflected on the character of life as it had come to be lived in their lifetime:
�Da\ id Lawrence Levine
*'At the Very Center ofthe Plenitude'"
Friday Night Dean's Lecture. August 29. 2003
Page 3
14x
Everything nowadays is ultra, [he \\rites] eren thing is being transcended
continually in thought as well as in action. .Vo one hw^vs himselfany longer, no
one can grasp the element in which he Ih es and works or the materials that he
handles. Pure simplicity is out of the question; of simplifiers we have enough.
Young people are stirred up much too early in life and then carried away in the
whirl of the times. Wealth and rapidit>" are what the world admires.... Railways,
quick mails, steamships, and every possible kind of rapid communication are
what the educated world seeks but it only oxer-educates itself and thereby
persists in its mediocrity. It is. moreover, the result of universalization that a
mediocre culture [then] becomes [the] common [culture]....
He then adds ruefully: "We and perhaps a few others \\ ill be the last of an epoch that will not
soon return.""
According to Goethe, a radical transformation of our wa\' of being has taken place: 1) a
change in the character of human thought and action. 2) a change in our knowledge of ourselves,
3) a change in our sense of place, and finally, 4) a change in the character and efficacy of
education.
"Exeiything noM cidays is ultra " As earh' as the beginning of the nineteenth century,
what was coming to characterize human life—^and thereb\" change the face and depth of human
experience—^Nvas the speed [die Voloziferishe] at which life was lived, a hitherto unheard of,
dizzying and disorienting pace suchthat \oung people—^but not only—could only be caught up in
"the whir! of the times." "Being caught up" means living some other life than one's own, being
inauthentic.
"Railways, quick mails, steamships:" Ever faster communication changes the lived
dimensions of life: time quickens, distance collapses. There is no delaj- between an event and its
hearing. "It's as if we were right there.'* A leisureK^ walk is replaced by a carriage ride, thereafter
b> a train ride, then a jet plane, and now b\"... a transporter (or at least in our imaginations). The
\\ ait for "news" from the pon}' e.xpress. a telegram, a phone call, a pager continues to shrink. Our
e-mail pings or our blackberry vibrates: we hear about an event "as it happens" no matter the
distance. Life, in short, is lived in fast forward. Goethe asks "Who can possibly keep up with the
demands of an exorbitant presentand that at ma.\imum speed?"'"
This matter of life's ever accelerating pace in not a philosophically indifferent one for
Goethe. "The greatest misfortune [L'nheil] of our time.'* he says elsewhere, "which let's no thing
come to fruition, is that one moment consumes the next,"^'" While the speeding up of things may
assist us in "keeping informed" and "staying in touch," it also subtracts from other essential
dimensions once thought definitive of human life. It makes certain things more difficult, if not
impossible, specificalh" those things that take time, for e.\ample, those that require slow
assimilation and acclimation. abo\e all human learning and experience. It takes time cnxay from
thoughtful reflection and other possibilities of human carefulness. For time and leisure (skole) are
tlie proper gestational home of reflection, philosophy and human care.
We hear too that our thought processes are affected: "e\'eiything is transcended in
thought [as well as in action]." We have somehow been made to think different!)'. We live at a
new level of abstraction, beyond the immediate, simple. ob\ ious. primary world, such that w-e no
longer e\ en understand "the element in which we live." What could this mean?
�Da\ id Lawrence Levine
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And most curious of all. Goethe sa\s ""No one knows himself an}- longer.** How is this
even possible? Elsewhere he says: "Learning fails to bring advancement now that the world is
caught up in such a rapid turnover: by the time }ou ha\e managed to take due note of eveiything.
vou have lost your
Are we not alwa\ s the same no matter our circumstances?
Education too is thereb}- affected. It is suggested that we might even become "overeducated,"' mis-educated, that education itself has become, somehow, distorted. He reflects: "For
almost a centuiy now the humanities have no longer influenced the minds of men engaged in
them."'" Rather than distinction, we ha\e mediocrity: rather than a high culture, we have an
ordinary one. What then of the rewards of "perspective." "balance" and "e.\cellence" once
thought the outcome of an ennoblingeducation?
The "whirl of the times" has only accelerated many, many fold since 1825. The author
could not possibl}- have en\ isioned the pace at which we live our lives today. To be sure, on first
hearing, one might be inclined to take the above obsenations as the grumbling of a man seeing
the world pass him by (empt}- biographism). We might however, also take this as notice to think
better about the character our li\ es in our ultra-ultra world.
3. "The General Sickness of the Agef
"Life is our lot rather than reflection."'^
Goethe's exclamation that "nowadays... no one knows himself any longer" clearly needs
further consideration. How could this be? Don't we kno\^• ourseh es?
Throughout the modem disciplines—the ph}sical sciences, histon', even poetn- and
literature—^was a growing trend, evident to Goethe, to what he called "subjecti>ity." Juniors and
'
seniors will remember, in the Discourse on Method^ Descartes' identification of the "ego" as the
primordial truth about which we alone can be immediatel}' "certain." The immediate evidence of
this self-intuition then pro\ides the standard of truth for all else, now thought true only if "clearh
and distincth" concei\ able to us. Odd though this ma}- sound, this new self-certaint}- leads to our
world being reconceived as "the external world.'* about which we can now have only a small
measure of certainly- and that of its radically stripped dow n mathematical qualities. To be sure,
this made a "modem science" of such a world possible, yet it gave us a new- definition and sense
of self that was problematic.' This excessivel}- polarized and reduced view- of the ego as
"subject"—understood as standing "o\-er against"'^ some bare objective world—is what Goethe
meant b\" "subjectivit}:'* polarized, withdrawn, exiled to its own interior world, and thereby
alienated from an}- sense ofworld in which it could feel itself integrated or at home.'^
For Goethe the consequences of this influential (na}-, fateful) redefinition of self are
now here better seen than in his own vocation, poetry-. We have all heard the caricamre of the
modem "romantic" poet: a suffering recluse, retreating to his Paris garret, whose on!}- truth is his
inner pain. But for Goethe there is. unfortunate!}-, an element of truth to be found therein: He
observ es: "All the poets [toda}-] write as if the}- were ill and the whole wwld were a lazaretto
[leper colon}-]. The}- all speak of the woe and misery- of this earth and the joy of a hereafter: all
are discontented.... This." he adds, "is a real abuse of poetiy....""® "I attach no value to [such]
poems ....'*"'
From Goethe* s perspecti\'e, "whoe%-er descends deep down into himself will always
realize he is onK half a being...,"" and being half will discover there limited resources for
creati\-it}-. "...A subjecti\e nature has soon talked out his little internal material and is at last
_
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ruined by mannerism [that is. excessive affectation],"" he notes regretfulh'. ""Such people look at
once within: they are so occupied b>' what is revoi\ ing in themselves, [that] they are like a man in
passion, who passes his dearest friends on the street without seeing them."""* With reduced
openness to the world around them. the\" have become "blind with seeing eyes." This excessive
one-sidedness. and consequent risk of self-absorption. Goethe named "the general sickness of
the present age [heinigen Zeif]f" and led Doctor von Goethe to his famous diagnosis: ""What is
Classical is healthy; what is Romantic is sick.'"^^ Sick? Unhealthy, unproductive,
foundation less, and ultimately untruthful. We lose our fullest selves.
Goethe thus found himself standing at the point of the di^•ide where, for all our efforts to
think about each separateh". subject and object were being ever more pulled apart. This
experiential breach was of fundamental concern because, when either is over-polarized—^when
the soul is diminished as an isolated, worldless ego (psyche), res cogitans or when the Morld is
diminished as external. e\ en foreign, barren res extensa—^both subject and object are diminished
for want of their natural correlate. If I ma\' indulge in a somewhat dramatic image: like a man
standing between two horses pulling him apart, Goethe found that—^for the sake of health"'—^he
had everything he could handle to keep himself and the world whole."^
Goethe himself thus resisted being "caught up in his time:" he was not a "romantic." As
he said. "m>- tendencies were opposed to those of my time, which were wholly subjective: while
in m> objective efforts. I stood alone to m>' disad\ antage.""' His "objective efforts'? How could
he resist the subjective tendencN?
4. "The Element in which we Live:'^
In all natural things there is something wonderfuL...
So we should approach the inquiry...without aversion,
knowing that in all of them there is something
natural and beautiful..
Aristotle'®
Surprising though it ma>' seem to some, the answer is nature. Thus it is apt that the
Goethe we first meet is not the poet but the Goethe who spent his whole life researching 'the
element in which we live." that is researching into nature. It is this "objective" involvement that
saved him from the excesses of his—and our—^time. nor to mention giving him "the most
wonderful moments of his life."*'
So. what is nature?.... OK. a simpler question.... what is a plant? Which grammatical form
best names its being, a noun or a \ erb (or a gerund, a verbal noun)? By plant do we intend a static
state or an acti\ it}' alive with change, something that has grown or some process of growth?"'"
Clearh' we need to name hotb. form that is also in the process ofself-formation. **G^o^^th is the
point of life."'"
For us here in the Southwest, sumac, oak. aspen, pinon. mallow and mullen are different
kinds of plants. The principle at work is the same throughout the stages of the life cycle of a
mallow, for instance, from seedling to flowering. fructil\ ing plant. Hence we name it one thing—
a mallow—despite all these various stages and differing formal manifestations.'"*
But it is not onlv this individual plant that is before us. so is the species "mallow." and
e\ en further so is the kingdom "plant." and these, as Goethe will insist not as abstract concepts
in the mind but somehow in the living instance itself. Thus Goethe sought to account for plant
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14x
life as such, despite the dizz\ ing fact that they take infiniteh man>" and wondroush" different
shapes. Sumac, aspen, mallow are in "inner essence" still "plants.""" What is needed in this view
is to identify- the imify ing principle at work (not "underK ing') in each and every form at whatever
stage of gro\\"th and complexit\- the>' might be. But how to do so? And how to find a language
that captures this universalK" active principle of forms forming themselves?
To do so Goethe had to depart radicalK -ffom his contemporaries and from their analvtical
approach. But in so doing this departure brings him closer to us. We can see this at the outset of
the Metamorphosis of Plants that we read in freshman laboratory, where he appeals, not to
results of the latest scientific journals, but to our own untutored experience. He begins: "Anyone
M-ho has paid a little attention to plant growth..."'^ [2.\]. This means that we. ordinary human
beings, still have access to a realm of primaiy significance, one not to be diminished as "prescientific." if what is meant thereb> is "pre-insightful." Rather we, >ou and me, have deep access
into what is before us."
Indeed he is critical that, with all our education and learning, we ma}* on the contrary be
closing ourselves offfrom this primary le\el of our experience. He often referred to a passage in
one of his earh" plays to illustrate this eclipse ofexperience by theory:
...as it is said in my Goetz von Berlichingen. that the son, from pure learning,
does not know the father, so in science do we find people w-ho can neither see
nor hear, through sheer learning and Inpothesis. Such people look at once
within: the>" are so [pre-] occupied b\' what is revoh ing in themselves, that the%are like a man in passion, who passes his dearest friends in the street without
seeing them. [Rather] the observation of nature requires a certain purity of mind
that cannot be disturbed or preoccupied b> an>thing....It is just because we carry-
about with usa great apparatus of philosophy and hvpothesis, that we spoil all.*®
"Like a man in passion:" Ideas, no less than passions, can take hold of our minds, preventing us
from seeing what might othenvise be evident and therebv" preventing us from attending to our
primary experience.'^ So overwhelming are our present-day theoretical preoccupations that—in
one of his most shocking statements of all—Goethe claims that we no longer even concern
ourselves with nature! "That nature, which is our [modem] concern. isn*t nature any longer....'"
he says."*^ [2x] Extraordinary!
What has been lost, in Goethe's view, is a sense of the wholeness of wholes and the
interrelatedness and integration of all things, in short, Nature (capital N). This loss is the
necessary consequence of an>- approach wherein wholes are but "b>-products"^' of
uncoordinated, underh ing, isolated forces and elements ("mater in the void"). Looking at things
in terms of their parts—elements, simples, particles, atoms—anaKtical ways of thinking stumble
in the face of the Humptv Dumptv- problem: how to put the whole back together again."*" If we
begin with parts, we end up with reconstituted conglomerates, aggregates, bunches, but the
wholeness of things, the integral realitv-. remains a secondary phenomenon, a mystery, if not an
accident."*' Here too we've become "blind with seeing eyes.'*
Juniors are soon to read and seniors will remember Descartes' famous experiment with
the wax at the end of Meditations n. There Descartes places a piece of fresh bees wa.\ near a
burning candle, whereupon it melts and loses its original color and smell, te.xture and shape (i.e.
primary as well as secondary qualities), that is loses all its original properties but res extensa,
mere e.xtension (though this changes too). This experimental method is designed to bring us to see
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what is "elementar* (if not fundamental). Descartes then proceeds to claim that b\- "an act of
intuition of reason" he—and we—^wouid know thistransmogrified, charred lump in front of us to
be the same thing as before his infernal e.xperiment. He asks, yvho M
ould not so conclude thus?
(Aristotle, for one) Well... if that were a plant, and not an amorphous hunk of bees wax. M'ho
M
ould concur M
idiDescartes that what remains is the same as what was putto the flameT*^
The anahtical flame dissociates or separates what originally was together. It "kills." So
this method."*' The disfigured, deracinated, blackened carcass of the plant is anything but. the
li\ ing whole, nowhere to be found. The mass of matter lying before Descartes is '^he same" only
if life and death are not different, and if form is not an acti\e principle but a derivative by
product. With this "lethal generality'"*^ we lose—and lose sight of—^"the spirit ofthe whole." as
Goethe would say. For this reason, he claimed as well that the modem approach—subjecthelv
predisposed to take the objects of our e.\perience in such a reduced way—loses its claim to
"objectivity.""*
The question for Goethe—and for us—is whether and how we can recover the whole. Is
it still possible to begin elsewhere, think differently such that the whole is retained along with its
manifold parts? Can we yet begin where we naturally begin, with what is "first for us" (Aristotle),
with integral wholes?
5. Our Ancient Right:
The spirit of the actual is the true ideal."
""No one who is observant will ever
find nature dead or silent.""*^
Goethe thus sought "another way." in order, as he said, "to restore to the human spirit,
its ancientright to comeface toface with nature." "*' [2x]
He asks: "What does all our communion M-ith nature amount to... if we busy ourselves
with analyzing only single portions, and do not feel the breath of the spirit that dictates the role
of every part and restrains or sanctions all excess through an immanent law ?""® Thus "phenomena
once and for all must be remo\ed from the gloomy empirical-mechanical-dogmatic [torture]
chamber [Materkammer]." he said, "and [be] submitted [rather] to the jury of [common human
understanding]."'^ But how^ are we to do this, to return to "common human understanding"?
Since apparently we can live in more than one world. Goethe makes his bid—^"naively"
yet knowingly"'—^to reclaim nature as our home-world. "If we are to rescue ourselves from the
boundless muhiplicir\\ atomization and complexit}- ofthe modem natural sciences" he says, "and
get back to the realm of simplicity [Einfache]. we must always consider [this] question: how
would Plato [or any non-modern] have reacted to
fundamentally one unity as it still
is, how would he have \ iewed what may now appear to us as its greater complexity?"'* We need
to remove what "now" stands in the way.'"* We need somehow to shuck off our modem
predisposition to see all things as artificially reconstituted'" and see our world, rather, as one
might whose \ ision was not so refracted. But how?
Mindful that "the first stages of a discovery lea\-e their mark on the course of
knowledge.*'"^ Goethe first seeks to reorient us. To begin with, "anyone who has paid a little
attention" has to acknowledge that our primary and original experience of things is otherM ise than
we've been brought to conceive. 'To nature," he said, ""we never see anything isolated:
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""At the Very Center ofthe Plenitude*'
Friday Night Dean's Lecture. August 29. 2003
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everything is in connection with something."* An\- account, then, of our experience must begin
here M'ith the wiiTy and interrelatedness ofall things. Herein lays Goethe's unified field theoiy:
"I abide bv what is simple and comprehensive, he says."^ (This he also calls his "stubborn
realism."*'')
As we heard, a certain kind of undisturbed purity of mind—clarit>-. breadth of sur\ e> .
anention to manifest differences—is the pre-requisite to an>- genuine openness. In the garden,
along a path, in the laboratoiy. we need first to see the things themselves, to recognize the ways
and means that the plant [or whatever our object] uses.'*^ "...to follow it carefully throu^ all its
transitions.'"^' in short. "...xo folloM- as carefully as possible in thefootsteps of nature.' ' "In the
process.'' he sa\s. "we become familiar with certain requisite conditions for what is manifesting
itself. From this point of \ iew everything gradually falls into place under higher principles
and laws revealed not to reason through \%ords and h\potheses. but to our intuitive perception
\Anschauiing^ through phenomena.^" In this way. our relationship to things is not at first
"speculative." but what Goethe calls "practical." that is grounded in the concrete experience of
individuals and the real.^ (Here have we a model of openness and e.xtreme care that will serve us
well, not onl\- in the laboratoiy . but throughout our work at the college.)
Given this, gi^•en observation that is undertaken with a"truly sj*mpathetlc interest."^* a
remarkable transformation can then begin. We can be moved to insight. In an often quoted
passage from the Introduction to his Outline ofa Theory of Color. Goethe addresses this process
of natural ideation. He writes:
An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never met...that [bare] empirical
data should be presented without any theoretical context.... This demand is odd
because it is useless to simpK" look at something. Everyact oflooking [naturally]
turns into obsen-ation. every act of observation into reflection, eveiy act of
reflection into the making of associations: tints it is that we theorize every time
we look carefully at the world. The abilit\ to do this with clarity of mind^ with
self-knowledge, in a free wa>, and (if I may venture to put it so [he adds]) with
irony, is a skill we need in order to avoid the pitfalls of [modem scientific]
abstraction.''^
Nature con\erses with us. Like an\" organic transition, thought is the natural and continuous
outgrowth of its prior condition, the fmit ofconcrete experience. As such we are naturally led to a
higher integration through *\..tbe practical and self-distilling processes of common human
understanding"!'^ [2.\] "We theorize every time we look careful1\- atthe world."
When we are able to sune\' an object in eveiy detail, grasp it carefully and
reproduce it in our mind's e\e [he reflects, then] we can sa>- we have an intuitive
perception [.•inschauimg] of it in the truest and highest sense. We can [rightfully]
sa)' it belongs to us.... And thus the particular leads to the general [as well as] the
general to the particular. The two combine their effect in eveiyobsen'atioD, in
every discourse.^
As much as we take the lead in inquiry, then so too are we led by what we are inquiring
into. Experience is bi-directional. Subject-object: object-subject. Tme sympathetic observation
results in the recapitulation in our summary imagination of the originating principle. The object
becomes for us as it is in itself. In this way the object "belongs" to us as much as we. in
communion, belong with it. Our natural correlation is thereby reestablished, the Cartesian
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subjective reduction of experience is offset, if not re\ ersed. and a kind of renewed originaiin* is
returned to human experience, widening and opening our puniew®'. whereby we might be
thought once again to come "face to face" with nature. Our ancient right is restored.
6. The Original World:
"...the sublime tranquilit\' which surrounds us
when we stand in the solitude and silence of nature.
vast and eloquent."
"A living thing cannot be measured
b>" something external to itself."" ^
This reunion of obser\ er and world—^we should sa\' union—is possible because of a
unique human facult}'—one out-rightK" denied " or at least overlooked by other modem
thinkers—but to which Goethe again and again retums our attention. As we read: "When we are
. able to sur\€y an object in every detail, grasp it carefulh^ and reproduce it in the mind's eye. we
can say we have an intuitive perception of it in the truest and highest sense." This capacit>- for
"concrete imagination" or summary "intuition" (intuitive perception, Anschauung) is our
faculty for e.xperiential wholes wherein the acti\ ely unii} ing principles at work in the world
manifest themselves. (Deny it and we haNe no wholes). They are not deduced, inferred, or
synthesized. We do not ha\ e to go be\ ond or behind *the phenomena to see these at work. These
are made known to us at the level of our primary e.xperience. We "see" them.
There's a famous story: At. a meeting of the Society' for Scientific Research in Jena there
was a 'Tortunate encounter" between Goethe and the poet Friedrich Schiller—^whose poetry at the
time Goethe thought too romantic, too subjective. Goethe sought to explain to him his own
attempt to articulate such a principle whereb\" the natural plenitude of plant life might be
accounted for. His "idea" was. he admits, ''the strangest creature in the world**'^ wherein the
whole range of plant formation might be seen as "stemming" or "derived'* from an aboriginal
form that was in this regard the formal progenitor of the whole kingdom. Goethe named this the
Urpflanze^y the original ororiginary plant. ^
Schiller's first response to this suggestion reflected his philosophical background, in
particular his indebtedness to Kant. "This is not an obser\ ation from experience." he said. "This
is an idea.
"
Schiller could not see what Goethe claimed he scnw He was disinclined—^as we
ma\' be—^to grant that this was an\*thing but a "regulative idea" constructed b\" reason to help it
organize its experience, not a principle at work in the world organizing the phenomenal arra\" of
plant forms. It was mereh* an idea, merely "subjective." For him and for Kant, it couldn't be
anything more, as in their \ iew phenomena are themseh es constituted b>' consciousness and are
thus not things in themselves.
Convinced, rather, that he had identified the objective generative source of all plant
forms. Goethe replied: "Then 1 may rejoice that I ha\ e ideas without knowing iL and can even
see them with my own eyes,"* For Goethe, perception and reason, as moments of a natural
process, are not disparate faculties, but continuous. Thus this, and all other ITr-phenomena.
immanent and at work throughout our experience, are real and hence must be available to us on
the primary level of common human understanding ^. He wonders: "Why should it not also hold
true in the intellectual area that through an intuitive perception of etemalK" creative nature we
may become worthy of participating spiritually in its creative process?" He thus insisted that he
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could see with his eyes something to which others seern to have become blind. ^ (Despite this
ftindamental difference, the two became close friends.)
But more needs to be said about this "strangest" of all creatures that holds, in Goethe's
words, "the secret of the creation and organization of plants" (or any family of phenomena). As
we mentioned earlier. Goethe's interests were vast and not restricted to botany; he also did
research in osteology" or bone formation. Indeed it was Goethe who discovered the role of the
intermaxillaiy- bone, the missing link that alIo\\ed zoologists to connect man and ape
anatomicalK'. In a passage from his work On Morphology, we see most clearly the point of
origination of his thinking concerning £^r-phenomena:
The distinction between man and animal long eluded discovery. Ultimately it was
belie\ ed that the definiti% e difference between ape and man la\' in the placement
of the ape's four incisors in a bone clearly and physically separate from other
bones. [Goethe provides the link.]... Meanwhile I had devoted my fiill energies to
the stud}' of osteolog}'. for in the skeleton the unmistakable character of ever}'
form is preserved conclusively and for all time.
The developmental history of an organism is not past; rather the history of successive
generational transformations is preser\ed and encapsulated in the fullness of any present form.
Just as osteogeny can now be seen to recapitulate ph} logen}'. so more generally can any such
morphological account. This "pregnanc}"^' of the present form allows of a new kind of
thinking to uncover the C/r-principle at work, a re\"erse thinking that ''traces the phenomena
[back] to their [empirical] origins.''®" (This is the first methodological principle of the new
science of morpholog}'").
In another context he reflects on this Ur-principle. now also called an "archetype:" •\..
an anatomical archet}pe will be suggested here, a general picture containing the forms of all
animals as potential [2x], one which will guide us to an orderly description of each animal.'"®^
The £/r-principle is thus a kind of omni-potential in conversation with its environment and out
of which the whole pohmorphic metamorphosis issues. "All is leaf" As such these are not
ideas in the usual sense of Plato or KanL neither separate nor abstract. Rather the}' are like ideas
in enabling us to give an account of the unify ing principles at the origin of the plenitude. They
are like ideas, as well, in that they might ser\'e as a kind of "formula" providing a way to
generate new forms—if only in imagination.®' (The "deri\'ation®^' is not ofhypothetical but real
possibilities.) Though they are more like the eidos in Aristotle, an active principle embodying
the manifold fruitfulness of nature, here ho\N'ever "the secret of the creation and organization"
ofthe family of forms. (He sometimes called itentelechy} )
Thus whatever the family of phenomena—^botany, osteolog'. geology, meteorology,
color—C/r-phenomena emerge. We come to see the unify ing principle, the spirit 'That dictates
the role of e\'er}' part and restrains or sanctions all excess through immanent law." From this
"empirical summit.®®" all things can be seen as unified. Thus we have order out of chaos®',
integration where we might otherwise have discontinuity. The plenitude is comprehended.
Therefore when you pick up Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants to read, or any of his
other writings on nature, do not close yourseh es off when hearing its foreign language, rather
attempt to hear its new \'oice and direction for the understanding of nature, "the element in
which we live." Whether, indeed. Goethe has bequeathed us afi uirfidpath by means of which
I
^
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our ancient right might be restored or whether it is but a false porta. is for each of us to
determine for ourselves.
7. Against Self-knowledge:
"Eveiything that liberates our mind
without at the same time impartina
self-control is pernicious
Where are we. then, in the midst of all this? Is there a lesson to be learned about
ourselves from this "other \\ ay of studying nature"? As we'\'e seen there are two unities that are
reestablished by Goethe's wa}- of thinking: there's the unit}' of wholes that had been fragmented,
and the unit}' of obsen er and world that had been alienated. Let us think more about the latter.
This unit}" of obsen er and world means that, like any organism, man cannot be known,
nor know himself, apart from his world—his environment— which sustains him and of which he
is an integral part. Given the polarized, inauthentic. and diminished sense of self that is the
consequence of the di\ orce of the "ego'* from its world in modem thought, it is understandable,
then, that to Goethe "no one knows himself an}' longer." This led him to his famous—if at first
shocking—remark concerning the Delphic oracle: "I mustadmit.'" he said, 'ihat I have long been
suspicious of the great and important sounding task: 'know-thyself.' This has always seemed to
me a deception practiced b}' a secret order of priests who wished to confuse humanity with
impossible demands, to divert attention from acti>it}' in the outer world to some false inner
speculation.*'" Self-knowledge—or what we take to be such—can be misleading, indeed
disabling.
But how can we make it truthful...and enabling? As we would expect, for Goethe the
success of our efforts to know ourselves depends on the degree to which we are willing to extend
ourselves be}ond ourselves. "Man is b}' all his senses and efforts directed to externals—to the
world around him....'"'* he stresses, and thus "the human being knows himself only insofar as
he knows the world: he percei\ es the world onl} in himself and himself only in the world."'"
This brings to mind his earlier obser\'ation: "WTioe\'er descends deep down into himself will
always realize he is only half a being:" this thought was then completed with 'iet him find ...a
world....and he will become whole."" In short, that we might be drawn out of our overly selfpolarized existence, we need to reestablish ourselves once again as "worldly beings, full}" engaged
with and in our natural correlate "the outer w orld."
Thus he answers the question "How can we learn self-knowledge?" in this wa}": ""'"Never
by taking thought but rather by action."'" [2x] This reph' should not surprise us. for itwas our
history that our very attempts to thwk about ourseKes and the world brought us to this unnatural
polarization. Thus it is •'acti^'it}' in the outer world" alone that is necessary" to restore a balanced
polarit}'and healthy equilibrium. We see this in Goethe's own ''objective activit} :"
Without my attempts in natural science, [he said] I should never have learned
to know mankind [including himself] as it is. In nothing else can we so closely
approach pure contemplation and thought, so closeh' observ e errors of the sense
and of the understanding, the weak and strong points of character. All is more or
less pliant and wavering...but nature understands no jesting; she is always true.
alwa}'s serious: alwa}'s severe... the errors and faults are alwa}'s those of man.
The man incapable of appreciating her. she despises: and only to the apt. the pure
and the true, does she resisn herself and res eal her secrets.'^
�David Lawrence Levine
Page 12
"At the Very Center ofthe Plenitude"
FridayNight Dean's Lecture. August 29. 2003
Here we see Goethe learning lessons from nature that once were thought the fruit of introspection
and the stud\' of the human sciences. The book of nature, as other texts, can serve as an occasion
for self-reflection. 'The apt. the pure, and the true'* learn about themselves and other human
beinas as the\ self-criticalK" open themseh es up to new fields and methods. The earlier passage.
"For"almost a centuiy now the humanities have no longer influenced the minds ofmen engaged
in them:" comes to mind. It is followed b>-: "it is a real piece of good fortune that nature
inter>'ened. drew the essence of the humanities to itself and opened to us the way to a true
humanitarianism from its side."^" The stud>- of nature can thus be a liberatingstudy, freeing us
from the burden of blinding conceptions and enabling us to return to our original worldliness
wherein we. once asain. can open oursel\"es to our fullest possibilities. In this wa\. the study of
nature is properly a liberal art.
8. The Grand Attempt:
"Where do we meet an original naturel
Where is the man with strength to be true,
and to show himselfas he is?"'®
FinalK". certain questions emerged earlier about our modem way of life. How are we,
given the ^'demands of an exorbitant present,*" not to get ""caught up" in the whirl of our
times and to reclaim a sense of productive leisured For Goethe the answer is ...nature, whose
rhythms, it was once thought, could not be accelerated, and through our study of which
intimations of timeless self-sameness might prove a refuge and shape our own being in the world.
How are we to regain afooting ""where everything is in flux of continual change"? Here too.
the answer for Goethe is nature, our home world, whose inherent lawfulness, as evidenced in the
unities of life forms, can thus provide a secure base upon which to take our next steps. How are
we to know ourselves more completely? Nature is especially needed here to offset our tendency^
to over self-involvement and to return us to our original fullness of being. And how are we to
educate ourselves more truthfully? Since modem education only brought us, in Goethe's view,
to become "blind with seeing eyes." he sought in nature a complement—not to mention an
antidote—^whose truthfulness would bring us "to see with seeing eyes" that fullness of view,
perspective and measure that is the proper fmit of serious study. Our question: can our own
sustained reflection on these questions, beginning with freshman laboratory, lead to lessons such
as these as well?"
B\ way of conclusion I would like to quote Nietzsche one last time. Toward the end of
his life (1889). he himselftried to capture in one of his aphorisms "the European event" that was
Goethe. This distillation lis es up to his well-known boast that he "wrote whole books in one
sentence.""''® though in this case he is somewhat more loquacious, for it took him a whole
paragraph to epitomize this extraordinary life:
Goethe - not a German event but a European one: a grand attempt to overcome
the eighteenth century through a retum to nature, through a going-z/p to the
naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-ov ercoming on the part of that
century. - He bore within him its strongest instincts: sentimentality, natureidolatiy. the anti-historical, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionaiy.... He
called to his aid history, the natural sciences, antiquity , likewise Spinoza, above
all practical activity; he surrounded himself with nothing but closed horizons;
he did not sever himself from life, [rather] he placed himself within it [that
is, ""at the very center of the plenitude"]; nothing could discourage him and he
took as much as possible upon himself, above himself, within himself. What he
^
�David Lawrence Le\ ine
''At the Very Center ofthe Plenitude*'
Page 13
Friday Night Dean's Lecture. August 29,2003
14x
aspired to was rotaliry: he stro\ e against separation of reason, sensualit}'. feeling,
will (—preached in the most horrible scholasticism b> Kant, the antipode of
Goethe): he disciplined himself to the whole, he created himself...Goethe was,
in an epoch disposed to the unreal, a convinced realist: ...Goethe conceived of a
strong, highly cultured human being, skilled in all physical accomplishments,
who, keeping himself in check and having re\ erence for himself, dares to allow
himself the whole compass and wealth of naturalness, [one] who is strong
enough for this freedom .... A spirit thus emancipated stands in the midst of the
universe with a jojful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is
separate and indi\idual ma>' be rejected, that in the totalit>- everything is
redeemed and affirmed - he no longer denies ... But such a faith is the highest
of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name [...] Dionysus.—
Those who've read more wideK" in Nietzsche will recognize this last act of baptism as
extraordinary: there is no higher, nor deeper, nor more original mode of being for Nietzsche
than this aboriginal and creative life force that he identifies in the person of Goethe: 1) this rare
independence from it's times. 2) this extraordinary, if circumspect, positivity, 3) this unlimited
and deep interest in all things. 4) this secure groundedness in practical, concrete reality-, 5) this
insistence on our original, primary experience. 6) this noble distance from suffering, 7) this
incomparable sense of measure, and of course 8) this Olympian courage. If not Dionysus, then
what name or word would be appropriate?
Goethe and Nietzsche saw that we modems ha\e a hard choice before us: between
disaffection and engagement, between c\nicism'*'" and wonder. Goethe somehow was able to
affirm life, to sav YESl'*^*
So we ask you tonight to consider this figure, how he might move you to "discipline
yourselves to the whole" and summon the natural fecundity of your inherence.
.\nd we ask you tonight "to place yourselves within life." to seek out what is primary
and original and. daring to speak the language ofdisco\'ery. to speak "poetically.'^"
And we ask you tonight to "make time" for thoughtfulness. that you transform the
mundane with thejo> s of daily discos eiy. that\ our life be rich and yourdays notordinary ones.
One last comment: Eckermann observed that even until Goethe's last da>'S (that is. into
his 83"^ year), he was continually learning. May this be so for you as well.
Thank vou.
�David Lawrence Levine
".4r the Very Center ofthe Plenitude"
Page 14
Fridav Nidit Dean's Lecture. August 29. 2003
14.\
Endnotes
'
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. .Maxim and Reflections. = 337: also 664 [hereafter MR]. Given as the annual
Fridav niaht Dean's Lecture' to open the 37'" academic year at St. John's College. Santa Fe. See MR = 864. This talk
is a further development of work begun in 1966 (see Levine. "The Political Philosophy of Sature. .4 Preface to
Goethe s Human Sciences." Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal. XL 1986. pp. 163-178). It was Thomas McDonald
who introduced me to the work of Eric Heller and Karl Lowith. and all three who introduced me to the depth of
Goethe's thinking: m\ debt to them continues. For the ambiguiiv' and greatness of Goethe's "grand anempt." see
Johann Petet Eckermann. Conversations with Goethe, translated by John Oxenford. London. 1951 [1850]. [hereafter
ECK]. October.20.1828. .As alwa>s my deep gratitude to Jacqueline Levine and John Comell for their thoughtful
suggestions.
I
"
Nietzsche. Twilight ofthe Idols, Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, translated by R.J. Holilingdale.
1968 [1889]. = 49. p. 102[hereafterTl\.
•'
.Martin Heidegger. "On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in .Aristotle's Physics B. 1." Pathmarks,
Cambridge. 1998. p. 183 [hereafter Phusis].
"
.Analysis and Synthesis [hereafter .AS], in Goethe. Scientific Studies, vol. 12. edited and translated b\-
Doualas Miller. The Colleaed ff'orks. Princeton. 1995. p. 48 [hereafter SS]. The publication of this collection of
Goethe's disparate scientific workshas provided a new occasion for further reflection about his"grand anempL"
•
Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Goethe, or the Writer." Representative Men. New York. 1995 [1850]. p. 195.
^
ECK Januaiy 4. 1824. May2. 1824. Februaiy 18and 19. 1829.
ECK Februaix 26. 1824: also .MR = 662.
'
ECK March 1. 1830.
'
Outline of a Theory of Color [hereafter OTC]. SS. = 743 see also note 21.
10
Nietzsche. "The Wanderer and His Shadow. " Human at! too Hunum, A Bookfor Free Spirits, translated by
R. J. Hollingdate. Cambridge. 1986. Vol. II. Pt II = 109. p. 336
Lener to Zelier. June 7. 1825: in Ldwith. Karl. "The Historical Background of European Xihilisin." "The
Fate of Progress." .Mature, History, and Existentialisnu and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History'. E\anston.
1966. pp. 4. 156-7: Front Hegel to Sietzsche. the Revolution in Sineteenth Century Thought. New YorL 1964. pp.
27-8. 177-181 [hereafterHN): also MR = 480.
i
MR =474.
•
MR = 479.
'•*
.MR = 770.
HN p. 226.
The EnterpriseJustified. On Morphology. SS. p. 61.
The ego or modem selfis doubtful of all but bare existence, where even the e.xiemaliiv . the worldness of the
world, is in question.
Foran interesting reflection on the problem of the subject-object polaritv . see Heidegger. Phusis. p.188.
.A modem ironv: man is least at home in a world of his own conception.
�David Lawrence Levine
Page 15
the Very Center of the Plenitude"
Fridav Niaht Dean's Lecture. August 29. 2003
14x
ECK September 24. 1827.
ECK September 18. 1823. Bj-contrast, all of Goethe's poetn* was insistently "occasional." that is objecti\ ely
motivated: "The world is so great and rich, and life so full of \ ariet>*. that \ou can ne\er want for occasions for poems.
But the\ must be occasioned [poems] [Geiegenheitsgediche]: that is to sa\. realin- {lVirklichkeif\ must give both
impulse and material. .A panicular even becomes universal and poetic by the veiy circumstance that it is treated bv- a
poet. .All mv poems are occasioned poems, suggested bv- real life, and having therein a firm foundation." ,A radicalh
different orientation and tone is apparent here. See also January 29. 1826. MR ^ 337.393. 119.
"
MR = 935.
ECK Januarv- 29. 1826: also .MR =1119.
ECK .May18.24.
-
ECKJanuaiv 29. 1826.
MR = 1031: ECK .Mav 2.1829.
.A comparison wiih Nietzsche is appropriate here.
ECK March. 14. 1830; also December 21. 1831: ITP p. 39.
29
ECK .April 14. 1824: also 77je Cement Prefaced. On Morphology. SS. p. 67. and HN pp. 6-7.
On the Parts of.Animals, l.v. 645al6. 19-27.
Fortunate Encounter [hereafter FE], SS. p. 18.
"The Germans." Goethe notes, "have a word for the complex of existence present in the physical organism.
Gestalt [or structured form]...[whereby] an interrelated whole is identified, defined, and fixed in character. But if we
look at all these Gestalten [all these forms], especiallv- organic ones, we will discover that nothing in them is
permanent nothing is at rest or defined—everything is in flux of continual motion. This is why the Germans
fi-equentlv- and fininglv- make use of [another] wordBildung[formation] to describe [both] the end product and what is
in process of production as well." The PurposeSet Forth. On .Morphology. SS. p. 63.
Significant Help Given by an Ittgenious Turn ofPhrase [hereafter ITP]. SS. p. 40.
See CP p. 69: also Eric Heller. "Goethe and the Idea of Scientific Truth." The Disinherited Mind. New York.
1959.p. 10 [hereafter Heller].
*'
Metamorphosis ofPlant [hereafter MoP]. SS. ^ 60.67.
MoP. p. 76.
OTC - 743.
ECK. .Mav- 18. 1824: also January 17. 1830.
This is the "modem cave." We may not be disposed at first to include the philosophers among the "opinion
makers" parading above and behind the chained onlookers in Plato's cave {Republic VII). But they are word smiths
and as such we are indebted to them for our language and lenses as well: see also Hegel. "Preface." Phenomenology of
Spirit, translated bv .A. \'. Miller. Oxford. 1977. =33. pp. 19-20: "In modem time the individual finds the abstract ready
made.... Hence the task nowadays consists...in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to
the universal and impart to it spiritual life. "
�Da\ id Lawrence LeN ine
Page 16
'\4t the Ven' Center ofthe Plenitude*"
Frida\- Niaht Dean's Lecture. Auaust 29. 2003
14x
r^
MR = 1364.
Lucreiius. On the yantre of Things. II.
•*"
"These anempts at division also produce many adverse effects when carried to an e.\ireme. To besure, what
is ali\e can be dissected into its component parts, but from these pans it will be impossible to restore it and bring it
back to life" (PSF p. 63). The natural plenitude is now compounded exponentially by the anahiical dissolution or
decomposition of wholes; cp. Heidegger's characterization: the original "atomic bomb" is to be found here in our
modem analuical disassociation or explosion of all things into bits, pans and panicles {"The Thing." Poetry,
Language, Thought, ed. byHofstadter. New Tork. 1971, p. 170).
.And thus the diminished realii>- of those who think that a home is bricks and monar. and humans their
chemical makeup.
~
Rene Descanes. Meditations on First Philosophy. 11. .AT pp. 19-34. How someone could e\en think this is
wonh fiinher thought.
.A. science that had given up trying to e.\plain our e.\perience was simply incomprehensive—not to mention
infuriating—^to one so firmly rooted in theactual ("at the very center of the plenitude"). The Extent to ff'Ttich the Idea
'Beauty Is Petfection in Combination with Freedom' May be .Applied to Living Organisms, SS 22: also ECK
September 2. 1830: see also Goethe's longstanding debate with the Newtonian school and their tendenc\ to substitute
secondaiyfor primary phenomena: OTC = 176. 718.
TheEnterprise Justified. On .Morphology, SS p. 61.
In this regard one might want to compare Goethe and Nietzsche's respective anempts to "sta\e off the
nihilistic consequences of modem science" (Levine. .4 World ofWoridless Truths, .An Invitation to Philosophy).
4S
OTC= 158.
.AOS p. 48.
ECK September2. 1830:also Heller, p. 16.
MR = 430: gemeine Menschen verstand (not "common sense"): cf. Empirical Observation and Science,
[hereafter EOSJ. SS p. 25.
""
Naively
Levine. "The .Antinomy and Irs Political Resolution." The Political Philosophy of.\ature. pp.
170-172.
.MR = 664: also ECK January 29. 1826: "People alwa\s talk of the study of the ancients: but what does that
mean, except that it sa\s. turn your attention to the real world....": see also OTC = 358. Yet as we shall see Goethe is
not an ancient but seeks to car\e out a middle position between ancient and modem science. While there is deep
asreement with .Aristotle about ourexperience of nature in terms of wholes, there isdisagreement aboutwhat is eternal.
In making form eternal. .Aristotle, hesaid, was prone to "precipitousness" (....) By contrast forhim it is theprocess, not
the form, which abides. "E\erything is in flux of continual motion." Goethe has sought to establish hisown "theory of
relativity. a relational and immanent measure, amidst the ever-changing" (Levine. The Political Philosophy ofSature.
p. 174)."
*•'
"There is no worse mistake in ph\ sics or an\ science than to treat secondary things as basic and...to seek an
explanation for the basic things in secondary ones" (OTC = 718). It'sas ifwe were "toenter a palace b>" the side door
and thereafter base our description of the whole on our firsL one-sided impression {General Observation [hereafter
GO], SS. p. 42 and OTC p. 160): also. = 177. 716 and its application tothe "grievous" Newtonian error at= 176.
"
See Heidegger. Phusis: "The act ofself-unfolding emergence isinherenth" a going-back-into-itself. This kind
ofbecoming present isphusis. But it must not be thought ofas a kind of built-in 'motor* that drives something nor as
an oraanizer" on hand somewhere, directing the thing. Nonetheless, we might be tempted to fall back on the notion
that p/»;iv(-detemiined being could be a kind that makes themselves. So easiK' and spontaneoush' does this idea suggest
�David Lawrence Le\'ine
"/4/ the Very Center ofthe Plenitude'^
Frida}' Night Dean's Lecture. August 29. 2003
Page 17
14x
itself that it has become normative for the interpretation of li\ ing nature in particular, a living being has been
understood as an "organism." No doubt a good deal of time has yet to pass before we learn to see that the idea of
organism' and of the 'organic' is a purel> modem, mechanistic teleological concept according to which "growing
things' are interpreted as ariijbcis that make themselves. E\en the word and concept "plant' takes what grows as
something "planted." something sown and cultivated (p. 195)" and "But is notphusis then misunderstood as some son
of self-makingartifacti Or is this not a misunderstanding at all but the onl\ possible interpretation of phusis. nameh. as
a kind of technel This almost seems to be the case, because modem metaphysics, in the impressive terms of ...Kanu
conceives of "nature" as a "technique" such that this "technique" that constitutes the essence of nature pro\ ides the
metaphysical ground for the possibilii>. or eN en the necessit>-. of subjecting and mastering nature through machine
technology (p. 220)."
56
GO p. 42.
ECK. May 12. 1825; also .AS p. 48.
58
ECK .April II. 1827.
59
FE p. 20.
60
The Influence of.Modern Philosophy, (hereafter IMP], SS p. 28.
MoP = 77.
62
.MoP = 84.
o r e = 175.
64
EOS p.25.
OTC = 665. There are times when Goethe seems to anticipate Husserl's phenomenological approach, in
panicular in The Experiment as Mediator Between Object and Subject [hereafter EMOS]. p. 16. and LALO p. 22.
where the rigor and thoroughness of something like "eidetic variation" seems to be proposed. The question is li\ ing
form: ""...We cannot find enough points of view nor develop ourselves enough organs of perception to avoid killing it
when we anahze it" that is. multiple adumbrations may give us a kind of whole but at the risk of rendering the
outcome a "mental composition' (as in Kant). It would be interesting to see how Husserl and Heidegger treat life in its
original vitality. See also OTC = 166.
^
Preface. OTC p. 159. We'\ e taken the liberty to add the specification "modem scientific" to abstraction.
Throughout his OTC Goethe addresses the problems of scientific cognition and its tendency to excessive abstraction
(== 310. 716. 754.and p. 162). ForGoethe, as for Hegel, this tendency is consequential and reckless. See note52.
EOS. SS p. 25.
68
Polarity. SS p. 155: OTC = 175: Lenerto Herder. .May 17. 1778 (in Heller, p. 10).
OTC = 732 (""expanded empiricism").
On Granite. SS. p. 132.
.4 Study Based on Spinoza, SS. p. 8.
Despite Kant's denial of such a human faculty in his Critique of Teleological Judgment. Goethe found a
window ofopponunity. He wrote that Kant had "... a roguishly ironic way of working: at times heseemed determined
to put the narrowest limit on our ability to know things, and at times, with a casual gesture, he pointed beyond the
limits he himself had set." The passage in Kant that Goethe alludes to reads thus: "He can...think [of a kind of]
understanding which [unlike our discursive one is}... intuitive, [and] proceeds from the synthetical-universal tthe
intuition of the whole as suclu to theparticular, i.e. from the whole to theparts.... It is here notat all requisite toprove
that such an iniellecius archerypous is possible, but only that ue are led to the idea of it—which too contains no
�Da\ id Lawrence Le\ ine
"'At the Very Center ofthe Plenitude"
Friday Niaht Dean's Lecture. August 29. 2003
Page 18
14x
contradiction—in contrast to our discursive understanding, which has need of'images finiellectus ect}pust and to the
contingenc}- of'its constitution." However. Goethe then drew the opposite conclusion: "Whyshould it not also hold
true in the intellectual area that through an intuitive perception of eternally creative nature we may become
worthy of participating spirituallyin its creative process?." he wonders. "Impelled from thestart byan inner need. I
had stri\ en unconsciously and incessantl>' toward primal image and prototype, and had even succeeded in building up a
method of representing it which conformed to nature. Thus there was nothing ftinher to prevent me from boldly
embarking on this "adventure of reason" (as the sage of Ronigsberg himself called it)." Judgment through Intuitive
Perception [hereafter JIP]. SS pp. 31-2: also E.MOS. pp. 11-17. Contrast Kant's "aesthetic normal idea" Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment, § 17.
OTC = 177.
Lener to Herder. .Ma\ 17. 1787:"...1 am ver> close to discovering the secret of the creation and organization
of plants....The crucial point from which evetyihing else must needs spring.... The i'rpflanze is to be the strangest
creature in the world.... .After this model [visual formula] it will be possible to in\ ent plants ad infininim. which will all
be consistent...would possess an inner truth and necessity . .And the same law will be applicable to every thing alive
(Heller, p. 10). .Also OTC ? 175. Polarity p. 155.
"•
Vrpflanze is often translated as"symbolic plant." While this rendering might behelpful if we keep a strictK"
Goethean notion of symbol in mind (as in MR = 314). this translation more often misdirects us if it suggests to the
reader either a mental abstraction or a literaiy device. Rather it seeks to embody the manifold fruitfiilness of nature "in
potential" (Outline for a General Introduaion to Comparative Anatomy, Commencing with Osteology [hereafter
GIC.A]. SS. p. 118).
".All is leaf." .MoP =119: OTC = 120.
Fortunate Encounter [hereafterFE], SS. p.20: ECK No\"ember 14. 1823.
^
Leners to Schiller. Februaiy 10. 14. 1787 (in Heller p. 20).
Hegel too—who other\vise was well disposed to Goethe's project, indeed helped Goethe see how it fit into
the larger scheme of the development of ideas—Hegel too nevenheless failed to see the i'rpflanze as anjthing but an
abstracted archet> pe(See Hegel, The Letters, translated b> Butler and Seller. Indiana. 1984. pp. 681-711: HN. p. 11).
^
CP, SS. pp. 68-9. .And we read in the .Metamorphosis of Plants of the cal\-x that it "...betrays its
composite origins in itsmore or less deep incisions or divisions.
ITPp.41.
OTC p. 166. This ma\ sound like "deconstruction." yet we would have to consider whether it represents a
true break with anaKiical thinking, as Goethe seeks to do here.
CP. SS p. 69. Just as it led to his "discovering" the Ur-principle of the plant kingdom, so Goethe is led in
his other studies to "postulate" one for the mammal famih': "In the process 1 was soon obliged to postulate a
prototype against which all mammals could be compared asto points of agreement and divergence. .As I had earlier
sought out the archet>pal plant 1now aspired to find the archet> pal animal: in essence the concept or idea of the
animal."
S4
GIC.A p. 118.
Letter to Herder. .Vlay 17. 1787; OTC = 175:Polarity p. 155.
86
ITP p. 41 ("...m> wholemethod relies on derivation....").
.Aristotle's eidos is not subject to metamorphosis. On the other side, in Darwin the metamorphosis of form is
not an unfolding of immanent form but the haphazard "evolution of species" and creati\e adaptation on the pan of
activ e wholes becomes ""random selection." See note 51. My thanks again to John Cornell for his helping me think this
through.
i,—^
f
>
�David Lawrence Levine
"At the Very Center ofthe Plenitude''
Page 19
Fridav Niaht Dean's Lecture. August 29. 2003
ss
I4x
OTC = 720.
OTC = 109.
90
MR = 504.
ITP p. 39. .Also "if we take the significant dictum 'know rhyself and consider it. u-e niitsm'r interpret itfrom
an ascetical standpoint. It does not b>' an> means signifi" the kind of self-knowledge advocated by our modem
hjpochondriacs. humorists, and 'Heatttotimontmens' [self-torturers], but quite simply means: pay some attention to
yourself, watch what you are doing so that \ ou come to realize who \ ou stand vis-a-ris your fellows and the world in
general. This needs no psychological self-torture'. an\-capable person knows and appreciates this. It is good advice and
of the greatest practical advantage to everyone I.MR = 657)." He objects only to those isolating tendencies of the
subjective sciences and psychologies thatare heirto the fateful alienation, if notdivorce, of the egofrom theworld.
ECK.April 10. 1829: OTC#
.
ITP p. 39. See also Goethe's ad\ ice to the \ oung Schopenhauer (
).
MR = 935: the whole passage reads"...let him find a girl or a world, no matter which, and he will become
whole." This is t>pical (see Eric Heller. "Goethe in Marienbad." ThePoet's Self and ThePoem. London. 1976).
MR # 442 ("Try to do \our dut\- and \ou'll soon disco\er what \ou're like."): also #= 770. 935: ECK
Januar\"29. 1826.
96
^
ECKFebruar\ 13. 1829.
HN p. 226: Levine. The Political Philosophy of Sature. p. 173. .Also ECK October 18. 1827: In a
conversation with Hegel about the potential tor modem sophistry of the "dialectic disease." Goethe sa\s: "Let us only
hope that these intellectual arts and de.vterities are not frequentb misused, and emplo\ edto make the false true and the
true false The study of nature preserves me from such a disease. For here we have to deal with the infinitely and
etemalb" true, which throws off as incapable e\'eryone who does not proceed purely and honestly with the treatment
and observ ation of his subject. I am also certain that man\- a dialectic disease would find a wholesome remedy in the
stud\ of nature."
^
ECK Januarv 2. 1824; also .March 12. 1828.
^
.And one lunher question: now that "nature" is at risk of being obscured b\" modem thought and being made
artificial b\ modem technological advances, can it yet serve as a point of reference any longer, not to mention a
standard?
Twilight oftheIdols, or How to Philosophize l^lth a Hanmxer [1889). = 49. pp. 102-3: cf. MR=864.
ECK January2. 1824: letterto Zelter.June 18. 1831 (in HN p. 27).
See also ECK Januaiy 24. 1825. October 12. 1825: February 1. 1827; October 18. 1827; February 12. 1827;
MR =191 and 1121. See Nietzsche. Zaraihustra
This affirmation is what Nietzsche found most admirable, indeed
he was envious of this, for it was not available to him. See Levine. Afterword: Goethe and Sietzsche. ".-I ff'orld of
Worldless Truths, .An Invitation to Philosophy."
KU
A More Intense Chemical Activityin Primordial Maner, SS, p. 137.
�
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19 pages
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"At the very center of the plenitude" : Goethe's grand attempt to overcome the 18th century, or how freshman laboratory saved Goethe from the general sickness of his age
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Transcript of a lecture given on August 29, 2003 by David Levine as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Levine, David Lawrence
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2003-08-29
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text
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pdf
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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832.
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English
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24000772
Friday night lecture
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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St. John's College Meem Library
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus.
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18 pages
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A community of learning... in a land of Cartesians?
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Transcript of a lecture given on August 30, 2002 by David Levine as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Levine, David Lawrence
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2002-08-30
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text
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pdf
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Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859.
Descartes, René, 1596-1650.
Plato
United States -- Intellectual life
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English
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24000652
Friday night lecture
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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St. John's College Meem Library
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Santa Fe, NM
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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 at the Santa Fe, NM campus.
Text
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paper
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16 pages
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Four sides of a cube : or, why a certain question must be asked again and again
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Transcript of a lecture given on August 31, 2001 by David Levine as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Levine, David Lawrence
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2001-08-31
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text
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pdf
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Philosophy
Questions and answers
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English
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24000613
Friday night lecture
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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St. John's College Meem Library
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Santa Fe, NM
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus.
Text
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paper
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16 pages
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An ennobling innocence : the founding of Socrates' Republic
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Transcript of a lecture given on August 2, 1995 by David Levine as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Levine, David Lawrence
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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1995-08-02
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text
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pdf
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Plato. Republic
Language
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English
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24000405
Graduate Institute
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GOING FOR GOLD
Linda Wiener
St. John’s College
Santa Fe, NM 87505
The 1966 film, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, is the first of Sergio Leone’s great
Spaghetti Westerns, made in Spain, with Italian actors and American stars, this is the film that
made Clint Eastwood a star. According to Brent Kliewer of the College of Santa Fe, it is the
most recognizable film music score in history and the success of the film turned Italy’s film
industry into a spaghetti western industry for the next decade. Briefly, it is the story of three men
and their search for $200,000 in gold that belongs to none of them.
I’ve come to believe that a major focus of this film is the exploration of some of the
questions and motifs raised in Plato’s great dialogue, The Republic. Today, I want to explore
some of the parallels between these two works, and reflect on Sergio Leone’s and Plato’s views.
Plato’s Republic is an extended conversation about Justice. In Book I, this question is
asked by Socrates: “Can a gang of robbers or thieves…that set out for some unjust purpose in
common, achieve their object if they deal unjustly with each other?” Obviously, this is one of the
questions of the movie as well. This part of the conversation concludes: “They could not keep
their hands off each other if absolutely unjust, it is clear that some justice was in them and by this
justice they accomplished as much as they did.”
We are also told a few other things about justice in Book I. “Justice gives friendship and
a single mind” while “the work of injustice…is to implant hatred.” The analogy between justice
and gold is also raised in this first book. We are told that the search for justice is something more
valuable than even gold.
What and where is this justice? In Book 4, the narrator, Socrates, and his interlocutors are
looking for justice in the city and decide that maybe if they look for justice in one man, then by
analogy, they can find in in the city. The soul of man is determined to be in three parts: the
largest part are the desires (epithumos), for sex, food, alcohol, money, and luxuries. This part is
associated with the merchant class. Next is the spirited part, or fighting spirit (thumos),
associated with the military or guardians. This part is concerned with victory, glory, and honor.
The highest part is reason (nous), which is concerned with truth. Reason’s job is to guide and
order the other two parts and is associated with the wise rulers; the philosopher kings.
The three men of the title correspond to the three parts of Plato’s soul. Let’s meet them.
We are first introduced to The Ugly, played by Eli Wallach, when 3 bounty hunters, guns
blazing, burst into the place where he is eating, CLIP: BURSTING OUT The word in Greek is
aisxros, which means ugly or base. His name in the movie is Tuco, Greek for luck or chance, and
indeed he does seem to act by whim and according to the desire of the moment. This first view of
him with a turkey leg in one hand and a gun in the other tells us a lot.
Next we are introduced to The Bad, played by Lee Van Cleef, and nicknamed Angel
Eyes in a long sequence in which he tracks down the name of a man, Bill Carson, and learns that
he has a lot of gold. He kills a lot of innocent people, and also his not very nice or innocent boss.
CLIP: KILLING BOSS He is a killer, not by necessity or in the heat of the moment; he kills
with pleasure. Bad in Greek is kakon, which also means evil.
Our introduction to The Good, played by Clint Eastwood and nicknamed Blondie, is even
more protracted. We first see him killing three bounty hunter war out for the $2,000 reward for
1
�turning in Tuco. He then brings him in and collects the reward. Next we see him here: CLIP:
HANGING Notice the long list of crimes of desire for which Tuco is condemned. Turnso out
they have an interesting scam going and an interesting relationship with each other. It is worth
noting that the very title of the film THE Good, THE Bad, and THE Ugly has strong Platonic
resonances.
The foiled hanging is followed by an important scene. CLIP: DIVIDE MONEY Here,
one of the main dicta of the proper relationship between the parts of the soul is violated. It is
important to Plato that the desires take orders from the reason, and not the other way around and
also that each part get its proper share. Here, the desires want more than their share.
The next time they do their scam, The Good almost misses his shot and then splits their
partnership: CLIP: LEFT IN DESERT Kalos means good or beautiful in Greek. How is this
Good? I asked myself this and realized that Plato had the answer and that this film was about his
answer. The answer I got from Plato was this: The epithumos, or desires, really always has a
rope around its neck. The headlong rush of the desires toward their goal mean they often lead to
the noose and even more, need a noose around the neck in order to be controlled at all. The Good
is doing good here, though it may not seem so. But, really how could an outlaw and a killer be
Good (capital G)? That is a question I want to defer until later. The Good, as reason, does
contrast considerably with The Ugly. He is consistently soft spoken and dispassionate compared
with the rambunctious enthusiasms and anger of Tuco. He is also, like Plato’s Good, rather
abstract in that he has no real name and no family or history that we hear of.
Meanwhile, in his own brutal way, Angel Eyes tracks Carson and Tuco tracks Blondie.
When Tuco tries to switch roles by hanging The Good, it doesn’t work. Then Tuco tries to get
revenge by forcing The Good to walk in the desert without water. It is here that things really get
rolling.
At the fatal moment when Tuco is about to shoot Blondie, a runaway coach comes by. It
is here we meet the man The Bad was seeking at the beginning, the one who knows where the
gold is buried, Bill Carson. Carson tells Tuco the name of the graveyard, but when Carson sends
Tuco to get some water, it is Blondie who is told the name on the grave. Carson dies, and
suddenly: CLIP: DON’T DIE We can see they need each other because neither has enough
information to get the gold alone.
Gold, in the Republic is constantly used as the material metaphor for The Good, which is
the object of philosophical desire. Another symbol is the sun, by the bright light of which truth is
seen. It is an almost constant presence in this movie. Leone suggest that it may be these outlaws,
outside of the city, who have more understanding of things as they really are and who can find
the gold. The caves where people are deluded by shadows and showmen in this movie are The
Church, the saloon, family homes, and military barracks.
The Church is a presence. Tuco is very superstitious and crosses himself when he sees a
dead body or kills someone. However, though the monks in the movie are kind and care for the
wounded and sick, they are not necessarily closer to truth. Here we see Tuco with his brother:
CLIP: MONASTERY.
The civil war has been a constant presence in the movie, leaving bombed out towns and
wounded soldiers in its wake. Socrates, in Book IV tells about the important role the guardians
play in the city. But, he says, “if the guardians are no good they ruin the whole city…and all are
unhappy.” Now we move into the military world as our two heroes are captured: CLIP: GREY
TO BLUE. We see that there is not a good and bad side in the war, all warriors are alike.
2
�We now meet The Bad again as a sergeant in the Union army; he is shown to be a brutal
and dishonest officer. He is alerted to our two heroes because Tuco has taken the name of
Carson. He has Tuco tortured until he gives the name of the cemetery in a scene too brutal for me
to want to show. However, it is important.
Plato knows that the military man is dangerous unless he has the right education and is
under the control of reason. Otherwise, as seen here, “he teams up with the desires” and turns
brutal and savage. Tuco is sent off to die and The Bad teams up with Blondie to go for the gold.
He does not torture him, and here, the spirited part shows himself, at least outwardly,
considerably more civilized in the presence of the reasoning part.
Tuco escapes and they all end up in yet another bombed out town. When Blondie hears
Tuco’s gun he knows he is there and goes to rejoin him. The Good, who had formerly deserted
The Ugly as not worthy, now goes to seek him, showing that he knows that he cannot, in fact, do
without him. Together they shoot down The Bad’s henchmen (though he escapes) and head off
together for the cemetery. They are captured again and taken to the Captain: CLIP: FIGHTING
SPIRIT. There seems to be no intrinsic fighting spirit in these men.
Here. They really see the stupidity and futility of the war of a whole people deluded by
shadows; the best of them, like the captain, can only escape through drink. Blondie remarks “I’ve
never seen so many men wasted so badly.” The supposed evil of these outlaws pales in
comparison with the institutional violence wrought by the civil war. The gold is on the other side
of the bridge over which the armies are fighting, so they blow up the bridge to get the armies to
leave and incidentally save many men. They head again for the cemetery.
Plato tells us in Book VI that the “inborn nature of those beautiful and good is
gentleness.” CLIP: DYING SOLDIER. Even when they are so close to the gold, The Good still
spares some time to comfort a dying young soldier, sharing his cigar (a symbol of friendship in
this film) and covering him with his coat. The goodness of The Good has become more apparent
to me by this time. I think The Good has learned a few things as well, symbolized (more on this
in a bit) by the changing of his duster for the poncho.
If we saw the real value of The Good in the previous scene, we see the real value of The
Ugly here: CLIP: LOOKING FOR GRAVE. Plato speaks of the need for strong desires in the
one who will become a great philosopher; we can’t imagine The Good performing this
passionate search for the grave. In fact, reason must be dragged by the desires to begin his
philosophical search at all.
The name on the grave is Arch Stanton which is Greek. Archos, first or to begin; Stanton,
a neuter participle meaning a thing which stands. The whole name means something like the first
foundation or first thing to stand on. I’m not sure what to make of this yet.
The Bad shows up, and though we have seen the three main characters in all
combinations of two in the film, this is the first time all three are together. Here we see The
Good take control of the group and demand they earn the gold which is not, it turns out, in Arch
Stanton’s grave at all. The climactic scene take place on the fields of the dead, just as Plato’s
Republic ends in the land of the dead, where souls have to choose what their subsequent life will
be. In the Platonic myth, they can choose well or badly based on their ability to think about their
past and know what is best. This is a similar moment of truth. CLIP: SHOOT OUT.
The death of Bad shows that, for Leone, we ultimately cannot live with or train the
fighting spirit as represented by The Bad. It must be eliminated. This is a significant difference
from Plato, who places high hopes in the guardian class. Tuco digs and finds gold, in the
adjoining grave, with no name on it. Just like The Good, the Gold does not belong to anyone in
3
�particular, but is there for those who search and persevere and dig. But also, Sergio Leone
suggests that the search is long and arduous.
The whole hanging motif is repeated, Blondie divides the gold in half “just like old
times.” Before we end let us go back to the question in Book I of The Republic. Can unjust men
achieve a common goal? The answer seems to be yes, but only when the group or the parts of the
soul are well ordered and under the control of reason. However, the different parts must
appreciate what they can and cannot do; The Good needs The Ugly as much as the other way
around. It turns out that Tuco was in the end worth more than $3,000. And, at least in Leone’s
view, the fighting spirit has turned into mere savageness, a destructive force for society and one
who wants all the gold for himself alone. He must be destroyed for others to live.
CLIP: SHOOTING DOWN. They split at the end, as they have split up before.
The Ugly is still his old self. But, the last scene causes me to revisit some of the earlier
conclusions. The Good seems to have learned some valuable lessons and effected a
transformation. Notice that he rides off on Tuco’s dark horse and notice also that he is wearing
the poncho he obtained from the dying young soldier. I believe this means that he rides off as a
whole human being, with all three parts of his soul. The dark horse represents the desires (as in
the chariot metaphor in The Phaedrus) and the poncho from the young soldier represents the
fighting spirit in a more innocent, uncorrupted state. We cannot live with the fighting spirit in the
form of the institutionalized violence and savagery represented by The Bad, but we cannot
simply do without such an essential part of our soul, either. The Good rides away with $100,000.
However, the benefits to him are far more than just Gold; they are a full and well-ordered soul of
a philosopher.
Remark of one of the audience members: the film shows that the life of the mind, as represented
here by Clint Eastwood, is THE coolest thing that there is in the world.
4
�BOOKMARKS
Name
Chapter
Start
Finish
Bursting Out
3
5:39
5:48
Killing Boss
6
16:36
17:27
Hanging
9
21:53
22:58
Divide Money
9
23:39
24:12
Leave in Desert
11
28:11
29:13
Don’t Die
24
1:02:09
1:02:46
Monastery
27
1:13:56
1:14:51
Blue or Grey
29
1:17:48
1:18:37
Fighting Spirit
47
1:59:10
2:00:16
Dying Soldier
55
2:17:34
2:19:17
Look for Grave
57
2:22:48
2:23:24
Shoot Out
60
2:29:21
2:32:22
Shooting Down
63
2:39:10
2:40:45
5
�
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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St. John's College Meem Library
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus.
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paper
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5 pages
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Going for gold : Sergio Leone reads Plato in The good, the bad, and the ugly
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on July 7, 2004 by Linda Wiener as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Wiener, Linda, 1957-
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2004-07-07
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text
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pdf
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Plato
Leone, Sergio, 1929-1989.
Language
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English
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24002968
Graduate Institute
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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St. John's College Meem Library
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus.
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29 pages
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The age of Chronos and the age of Zeus
Description
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Transcript of a lecture given on November 22, 2013 by Janet Dougherty as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Dougherty, Janet
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2013-11-22
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text
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pdf
Subject
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Plato. Statesman.
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English
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24004217
Friday night lecture
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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St. John's College Meem Library
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus.
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
34 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Plato's Statesman : useful errors, a fitting image, and the statesman's art
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on September 16, 2011 by Janet Dougherty as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Dougherty, Janet
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
Santa Fe, NM
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2011-09-16
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Subject
The topic of the resource
Plato. Statesman.
Plato -- Contributions in political science
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24004034
Friday night lecture