1
20
105
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c31006301547cf74718332e6c2c7b0bf.pdf
5476000426cfcb7dd3df21a39e549846
PDF Text
Text
In the year 610 of the Christian Era, a merchant of the prominent Quraysh tribe sat
meditating in a cave on Mt. Hira near Mecca. He heard a voice saying,
Recite: In the Name of thy Lord who created.
created man of a blood clot.
Recite: And thy Lord is the Most Generous,
who taught by the Pen,
taught Man that he knew not. [96.1-5]
Thus began the youngest of the major world religions and one of the most successful
lives in world history. As a religious, political, and military leader, Muhammad
(570-632) is without equal. Only Moses comes close, but Moses was not allowed to
enter the Promised Land, while Muhammad returned to Mecca as a victorious conqueror.
We are. moreover, fortunate to have better documentation for his life than for that of
Moses, Jesus, or the Buddha. On any reckoning, Muhammad’s biography is one well
worth studying. If you read the Qur'an, you may want to read along with it the most
important early biography, the Life of Muḥammad by Ibn Isḥāq.
Today, however, our primary goal is to become acquainted with the Qur’an. While
some light may be shed on this great book by a fuller knowledge of its historical context,
nothing replaces study of the text itself. Thus, most of my talk will focus on the primary
text, though I will first discuss some of the major events and issues that form the
background of the Qur’an.
Muhammad was an orphan. His father died before he was born and his mother when
he was six years old. His grandfather took care of him for two more years before he died
#1
�as well. Thereafter his uncle Abu Talib, head of the Banu Hashim clan, assumed
guardianship of the boy. Thus Muhammad grew up as something of an outsider within
Meccan society. Although he did belong to its most prominent tribe, the Quraysh, he was
a weak and vulnerable member of it. He rose to prominence, however, due to his skills as
a caravan trader, as well as for his reputation of honesty. When he was 25, the wealthy
widow Khadija, rather impressed, asked for his hand in marriage, was accepted, and
became his first wife.
Mecca was a major hub of the Arabian caravan trade routes that connected the
Byzantine Empire in the north with the spice-exporting Yemen in the south. The Quraysh
not only dominated Meccan trade but also were custodians of the Kaaba, the central
shrine for the still largely pagan Arab tribes. The word Kaaba, related to our word
"cube", refers to the cubical structure enclosing the Black Stone, a sacred object
traditionally venerated by the pagan Arabs and possibly of meteoric origin. Mecca and
the Kaaba were already sites of pilgrimage before Muhammad's time, the time that
Muslims refer to as Jahiliyya, or the time of ignorance.
During their sojourn there, the Arabs would hold fairs, including competitions in
poetry, still a largely oral art. Several of these pre-Islamic poems survive. Some of them
are known as the "Hanging" or "Suspended" Odes and were supposedly hung up in the
Kaaba as a token of honor.
Although Arab polytheism still flourished at its major center of Mecca, monotheistic
religions were common not only in the surrounding areas but even with Arabia itself.
Orthodox Christianity was the official religion of the Byzantine Empire, while the
#2
�Sassanid Persian Empire supported Zoroastrianism, arguably a monotheistic faith,
although a highly dualistic one. Many Christians, of various sects, were spread througout
Arabia, and there was a sizeable Jewish community in the city of Yathrib.
Thus when Muhammad brought forward his monotheistic message, he had many
enemies. Although he had hoped to find a receptive audience among the “People of the
Book”, i.e, Jews and Christians, in this hope he was largely disappointed. The fiercer and
earlier struggle, however, was against the leaders of his own city and tribe, the polytheist
Quraysh, for Muslims, like Jews and Christians before them, not only believed in the
existence of one God, but held that God to be a jealous god, a god who would “have no
other gods before him.” Polytheism was not simply mistaken, but even a direct affront to
God and could not be tolerated.
Polytheism is more tolerant than monotheism. The chief god of the Arabic pagan
pantheon was Allah, or "the God." "Allah" simply comes from a common Semitic root
for "god" and is cognate with Hebrew Elohim and Ugaritic El. The pagan Arabs had
traditionally associated other gods with Allah and worshipped these other divinities, in
particular Allah’s daughters (al-Lat, Manat, and al-Uzza). The polytheists could well
accept that Allah was the one supreme god; they could not, however, accept that he was
the only god or the only god to be worshipped. Particularly offensive to this traditional
tribal society, however, must have been the claim that their ancestors, by worshipping
associates alongside of Allah, were now burning in hell. Moreover, Muhammad’s attack
upon polytheism was a direct threat to their domination of the Meccan trade and shrine.
#3
�The polytheists challenged Muhammad to prove his apostleship by performing a
miracle. He replied that it was not in his power to perform miracles, but only in God’s
power to do so, and that the Qur’an itself was the miracle. A noble, elevated discourse
spoken through an illiterate merchant, the Qur’an impressed both believers and nonbelievers alike. Muhammad challenged his opponents to sit down and produce
something like it. If they could not do so, the argument goes, then the Qur’an must be a
work of greater than human creation.
Besides the Qur’an itself, there is one other miracle involving Muhammad that
cannot be passed over in silence, since it is the basis of the Muslim claim on Jerusalem as
a holy city. It is reported that one night as he was sleeping in Mecca, Muhammad was
transported by the fabulous winged beast Buraq to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,
whence he was allowed to ascend the seven heavens and discourse with Abraham, Moses,
and Jesus. Thence he was brought back to Mecca the same night. More than half a
century after the Muslims conquered Jerusalem from the Byzantine Christians, the
Umayyad Caliph Abd-al-Malik, had the Dome of the Rock constructed on the Temple
Mount, known to Muslims as Haram es-Sharif.
The hostility of the Quraysh leadership could well have led to the murder of
Muhammad, if it had not been for the protection of his still pagan uncle Abu Talib. The
killing of somebody under tribal protection would have led to a blood feud. So instead of
attacking Muhammad directly, the polytheists persecuted his followers. Despite
persecution, Islam grew, attracting in particular many of the alienated members of
Meccan society, such as freedmen and slaves. When Abu Talib died, however, (619) and
#4
�the new leader of the Banu Hashim, Abu Lahab (another uncle of the prophet) withdrew
protection from him, Muhammad looked for another home for the Muslim community.
When an opportunity for refuge and alliance presented itself in nearby Yathrib, he and his
Muslim followers migrated there. This migration, or hijra, is the beginning of the
Muslim epoch.
Up to this point, Muhammad had been a religious leader. Now he became a political
leader by founding the nascent Islamic state in Yathrib, now known as Madinat an-Nabiy,
that is, the City of the Prophet, or Medina. The revelations of the Medina period show a
much greater concern for political matters and laws relevant to the foundation of a state.
The hostility between the Muslims and the polytheists of Mecca did not end then,
however. Muhammad insisted that the Muslims be allowed to worship at the Kaaba,
which he claimed had been originally a monotheist shrine founded by Abraham and his
son Ishmael. The Meccans had also confiscated Muslim properties in Mecca and the
immigrants to Medina turned to the Arab tradition of caravan raiding to make a living.
This hostility broke out into open war when Muhammad led the Muslims in a raid on a
Meccan caravan at Badr (624). Engaging with reinforcements from Mecca and
outnumbered by more than three to one, the Muslims won a decisive victory. After
further battles with mixed results, Muhammad entered Mecca as a conqueror in 630,
pardoned nearly the whole population, and purified the Kaaba of its idols.
Muhammad only lived for two more years. In that time he completed the conquest
and conversion of Arabia and unified the Arab tribes for the first time in history, a
unification made possible perhaps by religion alone. He thus provided the basis for the
#5
�astonishing Arab military expansion that was to explode onto the world scene shorty after
his death. He had no surviving sons, however, and his only significant failure as a leader
was that he did not appoint a clear successor or establish a clear policy of succession.
This failure resulted in a series of civil wars after his death and in the schism of the
Islamic community into Sunni and Shi’ite sects that has remained of fateful importance
even to the present day. The majority sect, the Sunnis, accepted Abu Bakr as the caliph
or successor to Muhammad, whereas the Shi'ites believed that Muhammad's nephew and
son-in-law 'Ali should have been recognized as the first caliph.
Even if Muhammad had only united the Arab tribes, he would be remembered as an
eminent political and military leader. But his importance as not merely an Arab leader,
but also as a world leader rests on his prophetic mission. For although the Qur’an is in
Arabic and addresses Arabs most directly, its message is of universal import. From the
beginning, Islam, like Christianity, has seen itself as having a universal mission. So
without further ado, let us turn to the Qur’an.
When we first encounter with the Qur’an as Westerners, we are likely to be puzzled.
This is not a book like the books we are familiar with. It does not tell a story like the
Iliad or War and Peace. Although it has many themes in common with the Bible, it lacks
the narrative frame that organizes many, if not all, of the books of the Bible. Although it
has chapters, or suras, there is little or no apparent connection between a given chapter
and the one that comes before or after it. Even within a given sura, one can encounter a
bewildering mixture of prophetic warnings, stories, and legal stipulations. So our first
question is, “What kind of book is the Qur’an?”.
#6
�Just as the Bible is not one book, but a collection of many books, so too the Qur’an is
not a single revelation but a collection of several revelations. If one were to sit down and
read the entire Bible, one would be rightly puzzled if one were to find the book of Joshua
next to the Gospel of Matthew, the Song of Songs next to Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It
is not surprising to find diversity within the Bible, a collection of texts spanning some
thousand years, written by different authors, addressing different audiences in widely
divergent circumstances. Since the Qur’an, however, was all revealed within a span of
some 23 years, and to one man, Muhammad, we might have expected a high degree of
uniformity, and while there is more uniformity in the Qur’an than in the Bible, there is
still a surpising amount of diversity, as we shall see.
When I say that the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad, I do not wish to take a
stance on the question of divine authorship, but I do want to emphasize that Muhammad
did not compose or write this book. According to all accounts, both those supportive of
and hostile to him, Muhammad spoke forth individual suras while in a kind of trance or
ecstatic state. Some believed that he was receiving communication from the angel
Gabriel, others that he was possessed by a genie or demon. The former, of course, took
him to be the latest prophet and became his first followers; while the latter accused him
of being a “poet possessed,” alluding to the traditional Arabic view of poets as being
possessed by some divine or demonic spirit. The Arabic word for "crazy," majnun
derives from the same root as jinn or genie.
While some thought that he spun old wives’ tales, there is no contemporary
accusation that he was simply “faking” an ecstatic state for some ulterior motive, e.g., a
#7
�political one. This, I have no doubt, is how Machiavelli sees Muhammad, thus joining
him with Numa and Moses as political leaders who feigned divine communication in
order to bolster a political order. But telling against this view is the fact that when the
Quraysh offerred Muhammad political leadership in exchange for ceasing to preach
monotheism, he refused.
Muhammad spoke forth individual revelations or suras when he fell into an ecstatic
trance. He and many of his followers were illiterate, so although some may have been
written down by his literate followers, by and large the revelations were passed on by
word of mouth, until they were all written down and collected by the third caliph
‘Uthman (c.656). Although traditions had passed down some information about when the
various suras were revealed, in particular whether during the Meccan or the Medinan
period, ‘Uthman did not attempt to arrange the suras chronologically. Instead, by and
large, and with the exception of the first sura, the suras are arranged from longest to
shortest.
It turns out that the Meccan suras tend to be shorter than the Medinan suras, so the
Qur’an roughly moves in a backwards chronological order. Thus the traditional Muslim
way of learning the Qur’an in Arabic—beginning with the end of the book—also makes
chronological sense. A concern with chronology, however, is a largely Western concern,
for Muslims would deny that there is any change or development in the message revealed
in their holy book, whereas Westerners are always looking for development, even where
there is none to be found. Although I would argue that there are interesting differences
between the Meccan and Medinan suras, it is still debatable how significant those
#8
�differences are. The Meccan suras tend not only to be shorter, but also often use beautiful
natural imagery to discuss the coming Day of Judgment. The Medinan suras, by contrast,
are not only longer, but often deal with many of the social and legal issues that needed to
be addressed by the nascent Islamic state in Medina.
So the Qur’an is not a composition, if by “composition” we mean an arrangement
ordered according to a certain principle, so that it would be impossible to move pieces
around and still have the same thing. Exodus cannot come before Genesis, the death of
Patroclus cannot come before the anger of Achilles, Proposition I.47 of Euclid cannot
come before proposition I.1. Nothing is lost, I would argue, by reading the Qur’an
backwards. This is another way of saying that the Qur’an is a collection rather than a
composition.
But perhaps a more important point to emphasize is that each sura is meant to stand
on its own. The longer suras, one might argue, are even meant to present the whole truth.
Thus to go from one sura to another in sequence is not like adding pieces together to form
a whole picture but is like revisiting the same truth again and again, sometimes from a
slightly different angle. Thus a key feature of the form of the Qur’an is repetition. While
this may be tedious for a Western reader who is used always to encountering something
new in the next chapter, this formal feature also reinforces one of the central points of the
content of the Qur’an: human beings’ central failing is that they are forgetful. Prophets
come to remind us of the truth that we have forgotten or that we would like to forget.
And as anybody knows who has tried to learn a foreign language, repetition is the key to
remembering.
#9
�To fend off the accusation that Muhammad was just another “posessed poet,” the
Qur’an itself is claimed not to be poetry, altough it does make use of many poetic
techniques. The suras are composed of verses and make extensive use of end rhyme. I
will now play for you a recitation of the first sura, “Al-Fatihah”, or “The Opening.”
Notice the end rhyme on “-im, -in.”
I hope this excerpt, even through the medium of a foreign language, gives you a sense
of the beauty, power, and appeal of the original. These features of language, in particular
of poetic language, suffer the most in the process of translation. Nor are they thought to
be extrinsic to the essence of the Qur’an. For the Qur’an tells us more than once that it
is written in clear, noble Arabic. The incomparable beauty of the language is the main
argument for the Qur’an being a divine revelation. The verses are called ‘ayāt,’ which
literally means “signs.” Just like the beautiful and powerful cosmic signs such as the sun,
the moon, and the stars, the verses of the Qur’an are taken to be signs that point to the
power, goodness, and wisdom of the Creator who made them.
Having touched briefly on the form of the Qur’an, I will now turn to its content. The
first and most essential part of this content is the theology. A concise statement of its
theology is provided by sura 112:
Say: ‘He is God, One
God, the Everlasting Refuge,
who has not begotten, and has not been begotten,
and equal to him is not any one.’
#10
�Thus God is one and without associates. That he neither begets nor is begotten not
only rules out the Arab polytheist beliefs that he has daughters but also the Christian
trinitarian doctrine. He is eternal and absolute. Elsewhere we are told that he is allknowing and all-powerful. He created everything, not only inanimate things like the sun
and moon, stars and earth, but also the different orders of living things—the angels, the
jinn, and human beings and plants and animals. God is not only just but also
"compassionate and merciful." He commands human beings to do good and resist evil,
but is compassionate towards those who turn to him and ask for forgiveness. On the Day
of Judgment, human beings will be resurrected and summoned before God. Their good
and evil deeds will be recorded and weighed in a balance. Those whose good deeds
prevail will be rewarded will eternal life in Paradise. Others will be cast into the pit of
Hell to suffer eternal torment.
When God created Adam he commanded the angels to bow down before him. All did
so except for Iblis (Satan), who thereby became man’s bitter enemy. Adam and Eve were
cast from the Garden for eating of the fruit of the tree of life, contrary to divine
prohibition. There is no Islamic doctrine of original sin, however. We are not being
punished now for the sin that Adam and Eve committed. We have, however, inherited
their forgetfulness. In particular, human beings get caught up in pursuing their individual
self-interest, such as accumulating wealth, and forget divine warnings. We will all die
and cannot take our wealth with us. We will all be judged and our wealth will not help
us. We are commanded to provide for the more vulnerable members of society—the
#11
�widow, the orphan, the poor. We are commanded to do so by paying the alms tax, the
zakat. Failure to do so will result in grievous punishment in the hereafter.
Prophets have been sent to all peoples and have by and large been ignored. Even
after punishment came upon certain cities that ignored a prophet’s warnings, others did
not heed those examples. God has even sent down two books, the Torah and the Gospel,
to be constant reminders. The people who preserve those books, the “People of the
Book” (i.e., Jews and Christians), continue to bear witness to the one true God, although
even they have altered the true message by corrupting the divine text with human
interpolations. During to these corruptions, Islam, unlike Christianity, does not regard
earlier biblical texts as part of its canon. All the truths of the Torah and Gospel are also to
be found in the Qur'an itself. Muhammad has now been sent as the final prophet, as the
“seal of the prophets,” so this is humanity’s last opportunity to finally get the message.
The message has been essentially the same ever since Abraham, the first monotheist,
brought it to human beings. By submitting his willing to Allah, the one God, Abraham
became the first Muslim, (“one who submits”). The word muslim comes from the same
root as the greeting salām, and is cognate with the Hebrew shalom. According to Islam,
Islam did not begin with Muhammad but rather with Abraham. Muhammad’s importance
lies not in founding Islam, but in restoring it and in being the final prophet. Together
with his son Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs, Abraham built and consecrated the
central shrine of Islam, the Kaaba in Mecca.
To receive the message brought first by Abraham, restated by Moses and Jesus, and
finally restored by Muhammad, is to be a believer. To ignore or reject the message is to
#12
�be a non-believer, or infidel. Since the essence of the message is monotheism, infidels
and polytheists are seen as one and the same. Because prophets have been sent to all
peoples, there are no “innocent” polytheists: every people has had an opportunity to
accept the monotheist message. Since there are clear signs everywhere pointing to the
existence of one God, rejecting the oneness of God is taken to indicate not mere
ignorance, but willful ignorance. Polytheists reject God because they want to, not
because they are clueless. Some passages suggest a doctrine of predestination: "God
guides whom he wills and leads astray whom he wills."
The “People of the Book” are not infidels, nor are they believers in the proper sense.
While they have accepted the core of the message—i.e., that God is one—they have
become confused as to other aspects of it. Christians, for example, have mistakenly taken
their prophet Jesus to be not a mere messenger of God, but to be God. Jews have
wrongly rejected Muhammad’s prophetic mission.
Islam asserts a strong dualism of good versus evil and sees them as in constant
struggle with one another. Struggle, or jihād, is a central concept of Islam, although it is
not quite one of the pillars of the faith, at least for Sunnis. Just as in the universe, so too
amongst human beings and in the human soul there is a constant battle between good and
evil, a battle that will last until the Day of Judgment, when all will be resolved by God.
Since God is good, and believers are the ones who have taken God’s side, believers are
inherently on the side of good. This does not mean that believers cannot fall into evil or
err, but it does at least mean that they are on the right side of the cosmic struggle.
Contrariwise, to disbelieve is to go against God, to side with evil against good. Thus
#13
�whatever meritorious action, such as feeding a beggar, disbelievers may do, that action
cannot override the fact that disbelievers have taken the wrong side in the battle of good
versus evil. While they continue in their disbelief, they cannot be saved. Believers, on
the other hand, are not guaranteed salvation, but they will at least receive God’s open ear
and mercy when they ask for forgiveness for their sins.
The struggle against disbelief and evil in oneself and in the world has important
implications for how the Islamic community defines itself in relation to others. During
the Meccan period, when Muslims were a perscuted minority in a largely pagan city, the
message preached sounds something like a message of toleration, as we can see from sura
109:
Say: ‘O unbelievers,
I serve not what you serve
and you are not serving what I serve,
nor am I serving what you have served,
neither are you serving what I serve.’
To you your religion, and to me my religion!’
Now this sura can be taken in more than one way. The weakest reading is that it is a mere
observation that Muslims and polytheists have different religions. But since this is said
directly to polytheists, it is at the very least an act of defiance, for polytheism seeks to
incorporate new gods and cults within itself. It may even, as we can see from Herodotus,
deny the existence of different religions. This sura may be a way of saying, “You may
say that both you and we worship Allah, but in fact we don’t worship the same thing, for
#14
�we worship Allah alone, while you worship him alongside of his supposed daughters and
other false gods.” The last line is thus an assertion of an impassable barrier between
Islam and polytheism.
Another intriguing possibility lies in an ambiguous word in the last line. The
word translated as “religion,” din, can also mean “judgment,” as in the expression,
yawmu d-din, the “Day of Judgment.” Thus we could translate instead, “To you your
judgment, and to me my judgment.” This could be a way of saying, “We fundamentally
disagree, and God will decide between us on Judgment Day.”
Whichever of these possible readings we adopt, something like tolerance is still
being proposed, for in this sura the believer is told to speak the truth to the non-believer,
rather than to attack, oppress, or kill the unbeliever. It does not, however, go against the
idea of a fundamental struggle between good and evil, or between believers and nonbelievers. The Muslim community in Mecca was not in a position to take the offensive
against the Meccan polytheists, so the most that can be expected of them is to maintain
the integrity of their belief by bearing witness to it, i.e., being martyrs for it, in the face of
persecution and oppression.
Once the Muslims migrated to Medina, however, and became powerful enough to
assert themselves against the Meccans, they did so. And the suras from that period reveal
a more aggressive and militant policy against polytheism. Muslims are commanded to
fight the polytheists of Mecca until they cease oppressing Muslims and allow them to
worship in the sacred mosque of Mecca: “Fight them, till there is no persecution and the
#15
�religion is God’s; then if they give over, there shall be no enmity save for
evildoers.” (2.193).
Thus Islam is not a religion that says “Turn the other cheek.” On the other hand,
Muslims are explicity warned not to be the aggressors, “And fight in the way of God with
those who fight with you, but aggress not: God loves not the aggressors.” (2.190) Thus
only defensive warfare is justified, and it is not only justified but even commanded.
Moreover, while Muslims are commanded to spread the word, forced conversion is
explicitly forbidden, “No compulsion is there in religion.” (2.256).
The People of the Book have a special status within Islam. While conflict
between Muslims and polytheists is seen as nearly unavoidable, the People of the Book
should be granted tolerance as fellow, although erring, monotheists. Tolerance in this
context means that Jews and Christians living in a Muslim society are allowed to practice
their own religion under their own laws so long as they recognize Muslim superiority and
pay a tax in exchange for Muslim military protection. While this policy is not explicitly
stated in the Qur’an itself, it did become enshrined in the shari’a or Muslim law. The
Qur’an itself is equivocal on the relations between Muslims and Jews or Christians. To
cite a favorable passage:
Dispute not with the People of the Book
save in the fairer manner, except for
those of them that do wrong; and say,
‘We believe in what has been sent down
to us, and what has been sent down to you;
our God and your God is One, and to Him
we have surrendered.’ (29.46)
#16
�We also read:
Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry
and the Christians, and those Sabaeans,
whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works
righteousness—their wage awaits them with their Lord,
and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow. (2.62).
If we turn to the structure of the Islamic society, we find it bound together by religious
and social duties. Although the Qur’an itself does not assign a particular number to these
duties or refer to them as “pillars,” different Islamic sects have enumerated different
“pillars of the faith.” The majority sect, the Sunnis, enumerate five such pillars. Besides
payment of the alms tax, or zakat, that we have already mentioned, we also find the
prescription of five daily prayers, or salat, the pilgrimage to Mecca, or the hajj, as well as
the fast of Ramadan. The remaining duty, the shahada, or testimony of faith, is not
explicitly prescribed as a duty in the Qur’an but may be seen as a precondition for
accepting the Qur’an as a revealed word at all. It goes, “I testify that there is no god but
God, and I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.”
What kind of society do these duties promote? First of all, it is one that struggles
against the selfishness of individualism. There is nothing wrong with becoming wealthy
in itself, but there is if one does so at the expense of others, or if one refuses to contribute
to the welfare of those less fortunate. The Qur’an does not seek to abolish or level
existing social hierarchies, whether of rich vs. poor, free vs. slave, or man vs. woman, but
#17
�it does accept the spiritual equality of all before God and insists that all have a duty to
attend not only to the spiritual, but also to the physical, welfare of all others in the
community.
The opposition between the spiritual and the physical, between the spirit and the
“flesh,” so marked in Christianity, is not so strong in Islam. Islamic paradise includes
flowing water, flourishing plants, abundant honey, and beautiful virgins and youths.
Christians have long been scandalised, but that only shows that Muslims do not war
against the flesh as Christians have for so long. Given that God has made both our bodies
and our souls, our flesh and our spirit, to reject the physical is to reject part of God’s
creation. While Islam does believe in a strong opposition between good and evil and
does contrast this current inferior world with the superior world to come, it does not show
a marked contrast between flesh and spirit, nor does it brand the “desires of the flesh” as
inherently evil. There is nothing wrong with desiring and enjoying beautiful things. This
world is inferior to the world to come not because this world is physical and the next
world is spiritual. Even Christians, after all, insist on the resurrection of the body, and
what would a body be good for in a purely spiritual realm? This world is inferior to the
next rather because it is fleeting and filled with injustice and selfishness.
To take one particular example. Islam prohibits the consumption of alcohol not
because it excessively titillates our appetite for gustatory relish, but rather because it
inhibits our ability to act as responsible members of society. Likewise, its sexual
regulations, against adultery and fornication for example, are justified in terms of
mainting a well-regulated society. There is nothing wrong with sexual pleasure per se,
#18
�much less with sexual desire. Modesty in dress is prescribed for both men and women,
although it is more strictly expected of the latter.
Let us take another example. Islam, along with Judaism and Christianity,
prohibits usury on loans to one’s fellow citizens. While economists will rightly point out
that prohibiting usury is both ineffective and inefficient, that criticism misses the point,
for the economists are presupposing a core human selfishness that Islam is striving to
overcome. It is possible to feed the poor to bolster one’s sense of grandeur, or one’s
ranking on some list; it may even work well when all in society simply pursue their
enlightened self-interest. But to do the right thing for the wrong reason is still not to act
morally: one should support charity just because it is the right thing to do.
This is much more that one could say about the Qur’an. I hope the little that I
have said gives you some sense of the context in which it was revealed, of its form and
content, and also of how it conceives of the nature of Islamic society and the relation of
Islam to other religions.
#19
�
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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
pdf
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
19 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Qur'an : an introduction for Johnnies
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on June 16, 2021 by Ken Wolfe as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. Mr. Wolfe provided this description of the event: "In this introduction to the Qur'an, I will explore the context of its composition within the life of Muhammad and 6th century Arabia, its form and content, its relation to other texts and traditions (the Bible, Judaism, Christianity), and its influence upon certain aspects of the Islamic tradition."
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Wolfe, Kenneth
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
2021-06-16
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
Qur'an
Islam
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SF_WolfeK_The_Qur'an--An_Introduction_for_Johnnies_2021-06-16
Graduate Institute
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d42f276fbca3d172192295ca1d572a14.pdf
3d5cac9e721a5a70d19189c3cafefcdb
PDF Text
Text
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
�
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
5 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
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.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Wiener, Linda, 1957-
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2004-07-07
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
Leone, Sergio, 1929-1989.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24002968
Graduate Institute
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/68f3a583cf9504ada28f749bfce5ffd2.pdf
a42e69f5025bff2259b3a06065dd6733
PDF Text
Text
���������������������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
33 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
A background for perplexity : some fundamentals of quantum theory
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on September 26, 1986 by Hans von Briesen as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Von Briesen, Hans
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
1986-09-26
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
Quantum theory
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000221
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/26c516ed0ee95edc10d7104ceb236b9a.pdf
0701e02df09c9af86f1b18e9075cd6b2
PDF Text
Text
������������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
22 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
Liberal education : an insider's account
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on August 26, 1994 by Stephen Van Luchene as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Van Luchene, Stephen R.
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
1994-08-26
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
Education, Humanistic
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000438
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a7536e940d4589ea40709e1a1f95cc01.pdf
e73ecc8b4c78be056e5a86a3b5c81e40
PDF Text
Text
������������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
22 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
Books, a balance and the tongues of men and angels
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on August 25, 1995 by Stephen Van Luchene as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Van Luchene, Stephen R.
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
1995-08-25
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
Education, Humanistic
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
25051889
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/69a1862f567659144f63c8c04af8f7f9.pdf
66d9a9bf56b0df71c7b15881f4a4e4b8
PDF Text
Text
������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
16 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Morality, Aristotle, and liberal education
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on August 27, 1993 by Stephen Van Luchene as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Van Luchene, Stephen R.
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
1993-08-27
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
Aristotle. Nicomachean ethics.
Education, Humanistic
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000306
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/88b364f0f37e6b7bf534883b5edcb43a.pdf
f0cf1b77988d8c4befbb7282cd34e655
PDF Text
Text
�������������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
25 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
William Blake : a beginning
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on July 7, 1993 by Stephen Van Luchene.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Van Luchene, Stephen R.
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
1993-07-07
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
Blake, William, 1757-1827 -- Criticism and interpretation
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000215
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4d01552e8e79291f7ec8736b5055aa64.pdf
c23bbed69a3c62ca73058cc517172127
PDF Text
Text
�����������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
17 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Plato's Republic and the great hope for education
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on September 13, 1991 by Stephen Van Luchene as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Van Luchene, Stephen R.
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
1991-09-13
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. Republic
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000214
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/129bb85b1b6b6b933e8f2028957bba97.pdf
1cef4abc2bfd403216195dedd49667a8
PDF Text
Text
������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
19 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Liberal studies and educational reform
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on August 28, 1992 by Stephen Van Luchene as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Van Luchene, Stephen R.
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
2016-08-28
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
text
Subject
The topic of the resource
Educational change -- United States
Education -- Philosophy
Education, Humanistic
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000213
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ac24fd8868984eaad5b6abf44060b9b6.pdf
9c37a0183f9094799914a5c8d29bcfb0
PDF Text
Text
This material may oe protected by
Copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)
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.
*****************************
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
29 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
A ramble of fern hill
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on April 8, 1994 by Jonathan Tuck.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Tuck, Jonathan
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1994-04-08
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
lec Tuck 1994-04-08
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c71f19b6a666d027cec9ed79d9f07cc9.pdf
227d8a113c280f3566a8ce7ae6e4d15c
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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
pdf
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
33 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
Truths about quantum mechanics
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on November 30, 2018 by Bernhardt Trout as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concern Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Trout, Bernhardt L.
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
2018-11-30
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
Quantum theory
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Trout, B. Truths about Quantum Mechanics
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/296a6c06b979502b796a1a1c4b451c64.pdf
6ce3897cd3202a3c2f9ec0b1da5c2a51
PDF Text
Text
���������������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
27 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Nietzsche : the power of perceiving
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on January 26, 2007 by Kent Taylor as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Taylor, Kent
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
2007-01-26
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
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24003295
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9481b37ba27dc9b27fa283963ec29973.pdf
6bc5acce54ca17194a5e58bb491da1fc
PDF Text
Text
���������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
21 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
Opening with a question : the Zen koan
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on February 15, 2002 by Kent Taylor as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Taylor, Kent
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
2002-02-15
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
Zen Buddhism
Zen literature
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000627
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1e946080e120e5f6e1f2a83e683fb1fc.pdf
be8bcf8e852cf39f6033af527ba68e8a
PDF Text
Text
��������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
20 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The impossibility of crows : notes on depth
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on February 2, 2000 by Kent Taylor as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Taylor, Kent
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
2000-02-02
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
Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000589
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c4519c1d1e2473f5c5d1e8c084fca69c.pdf
7dcbb75d872f9571b1b7d7deb003e365
PDF Text
Text
�����������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
23 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
What is discussion?
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given in September 1991 by Kent Taylor.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Taylor, Kent
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
1991-09
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
Discussion -- study and teaching
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000268
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/173f2f9ff4813fddf1124031feef4dfd.pdf
3ae3588c9f33ef696f01b3c8a05f4160
PDF Text
Text
������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
12 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
Nietzsche's thought of eternal return and the power to think it
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on February 8, 1980 by Kent Taylor as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Taylor, Kent
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
1980-02-08
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
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000211
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/76e6ec982b6f2573cda117ce752cb612.pdf
b1654ed6c7bfa5e7f453d3c0ba5779fa
PDF Text
Text
������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
19 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The lilies of the field : a teaching at work
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on October 21, 1983 by Kent Taylor as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Taylor, Kent
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
1983-10-21
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
Jesus Christ
Meaning (Philosophy)
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000210
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ffa24539e57c9bd8ab060d94f198c02d.pdf
bbf54888d1e97ad7d5c96a2cbfae3c34
PDF Text
Text
���������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
15 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The eyes of Oedipus
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given in February 1986 by Kent Taylor.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Taylor, Kent
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
1986-02
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
Oedipus
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000209
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/679f2fc19ff471e71070118826634435.pdf
94b6f125e62c0acb4bc443108886ac78
PDF Text
Text
On Incommensurability
This is an attempt to think about a question that is considered
settled and so I must warn you that I may seem to be wasting our
time. Like other such ventures you may encounter at St. John’s it
is less concerned with what we might be said to know either these
days or at any time and more interested in how we think we know
it. It is also, as a Wednesday Afternoon Lecture, a bit more of a
work in progress than a Friday Night Lecture might be. You and I
are in the enviable position of not having to worry what each other
will think if you just virtually slip out of this virtual Hall. You are
putting up with a good bit already in these odd times; if what is on
your screen late on a Wednesday afternoon is not at least
moderately absorbing then do something else.
Incommensurability in its most general sense describes the
relation of two or more measurable things that have no common
measure. We might say that the length of a road and the loudness
of a shout have no common measure: the road is not twice as long
as the shout is loud, or any other multiple or fraction of the shout’s
loudness either, though both length and loudness can be measured.
Must the two things, road length and shout volume, have some
common measure in order that we be aware of both of them at all?
Do we have to be able to measure a thing to know it is there? We
commonly suppose that the existence of things is found in the
evidence of our senses. If I can see the road or hear the shout, then
it is there. Seeing and hearing do not have to be the same thing in
order to testify equally well to the presence of the things we see
and hear.
Nobody is meanwhile scandalized that many things have some
kind of relation of incommensurability to one another. The
situation grows more interesting if two things that could easily be
�imagined to have a common measure can be shown to have none.
Suppose I could show you two straight lines that cannot possibly
have a common measure. They would not be lines in pencil lead
or chalk; but if those are the only kind of lines you will accept you
had better virtually slip out now. No matter how small the equal
pieces may be that I can divide one line into, I would show that no
such piece would ever fit a whole number of times into the other
line. It seems unimaginable that this should be so. It may be even
harder to imagine than the possibility – shall I call it the “opposite
possibility”? -- raised in the Meno that all human excellence could
be grasped as a simple unity.
Let us begin with what measuring is. It seems to be a laying out of
something next to something else in order to tell which one is more
in some way and which less. Euclid says that a small line measures
a larger line if it fits into it some whole number of times. We can,
using a looser notion of measurement, easily see who is taller when
two stand side by side. But how do we know who will make a
better ruler? If there is a unit by which leadership may be
measured, it has not yet been discovered. Creon in Sophocles’s
Antigone knows that he is being measured by the hard times he
must rule in, but he does not imagine that it might be in yielding to
Antigone that he would show his worthiness to rule. “To what
must I show myself adequate?” cries Creon. Or more literally
“What is it? To what kind of happenstance do I arrive
commensurable?” The Greek word translated by
“commensurable” here, “summetros”, means “sharing a measure
with.” Symmetric things in English might seem at least to have
their parts in proportion to each other: things can be in balance and
hold together by having a common measure. Creon seems worried
that there may be situations he cannot rule. He is not wrong to
worry: rulers need not only strength but understanding. The human
soul itself could turn out to contain parts that share no common
measure. Do our powerful fears and desires have any common
language with our cautious reasonings at all? To find oneself
�incapable of judging a situation for want of a proper measure is
perhaps not an uncommon fear. It might be like an anxiety dream
in which you have to take an exam in a language you don’t
recognize.
Anxious democracies often invoke the importance of the things we
all have in common, our commensurability; we say that is our
strength, what unites us. But those things must be so often invoked
because of the strength of what divides us: each of us is a unique
self. Some of the things we want most cannot be shared. We find
ourselves sometimes desperately wishing a very particular
someone could see something in us that is to be found in nobody
else. Sometimes we boast of how well we know that no-one else
can die for us; it seems to make not only our deaths but our whole
lives look at least for a moment like inalienable property and to
give us permission to do whatever we want with every precarious
moment we are alive. Have I persuaded you that
incommensurability has much more to do with us all than we
might usually think? Here is one last example, from the Hebrew
tradition. Adam, speaking to God after God has tried every other
animate possibility before finally solving the question of where to
find Adam a companion and has divided the first human in two:
“This, at last, is bone of my bone of my bone and flesh of my
flesh!” Hear the deep relief. Are the Tyrant and the ordinary
Citizen of one bone and flesh as well?
Socrates reminds us early in his conversation with Meno that
Meno’s father was a friend of Xerxes, the Great King of all Persia,
and he means us to glimpse Meno’s inner Xerxes, and our own.
Meno has grown up knowing that he is two degrees separate from
the absolute ruler of all the lands from Egypt to Turkey to the edge
of India. Those who unashamedly take Xerxes as a measure in
their drive for greatness are likely to refuse to be run-of-the-mill
examples of the generically Human. Sophocles minces no words in
titling his paradigmatic tragedy about a man who introduces
�himself as “Oedipus the Great”: the play is called Oedipus the
Tyrant. We each have something in us that wants to be a God,
utterly unconstrained. Whether that leads to philosophy or tyranny
or eternal salvation is not clear. Each looks, and may seek to look,
incommensurable with our daily life.
Incommensurability and the Golden Section
My wonder at the Incommensurable was re-kindled a few years
ago in a Freshman Mathematics Tutorial when we came to
Euclid’s proposition eleven of Book Two, which shows how to
divide a line so that the rectangle formed by the whole line and the
smaller piece of the division will equal the square on the larger
piece. The more famous example is already hiding in I, 47, the
Pythagorean theorem. In neither proposition does Euclid say
anything explicit about the topic. But it somehow came to mind for
me in Book Two. When we have learned how to make the division
of the line in Proposition 11, we may wonder, even if we do not
recognize what we can now do as dividing a line in the so-called
“golden section”: is there a numerical relation between the two
pieces into which we divide the given line? Whether or not it exists
among numbers the Golden Ratio has been found in countless
examples of the great works of art and architecture that have
survived their Ancient Greek makers. The Parthenon is only the
most famous example. But is that ratio to be found among
numbers? That is, could the two pieces into which Euclid’s line is
divided be measured by some common unit and would there thus
be a fixed numerical ratio between the two pieces? Are there then
two numbers whose relation to each other names a specific kind of
beauty? Maybe so. We might on the other hand be disappointed to
find beauty of any kind to be, as we say, formulaic. And yet,
perhaps the example of maximum commensurability, instantly
recognizable in its unsurpassed simplicity, is the ratio of the
double. Aristotle is not afraid to say that the sound of the Octave is
�the embodiment of a 2 to 1 ratio and that it is not only agreeable
but beautiful.
Why should we like the relation produced by doubling? This is
the sort of question that may conceal more depth than we think:
what does it mean that beauty could be a kind of order? The two
sets of vibrations that coincide every second beat: ONE two, ONE
two, ONE two, hundreds of times per second are a kind of hyperallegro march or two-step of 440 against 880 beats per second that
we hear as two pitches, a perfect mingling and repetition of Same
and Slightly Other. We may not even perceive more than one
pitch, the two blend so well. Two faces, neither especially
noteworthy, placed side by side and seen to resemble each other
will often make us laugh with pleasure; who knows why?
What can it be that makes twoness beautiful? “I am dying, Egypt,
dying,” repeats Marc Antony to Cleopatra, in Shakespeare’s play,
calling her “Egypt” in a rhetorical figure, as though the nation she
rules has produced in her an image of itself, a kind of double.
“Dying…” he repeats, “Dying.” To say something twice is already
to begin a poem, because in a well-crafted poem nothing is only
itself, and everything implies everything else. If it were sufficient
to call a thing by its name just once in order to say all that it is or
all one may have in one’s heart, then perhaps there could be no
poetry. The verse structure of the ancient Hebrew Psalms,
attributed to King David, is a kind of doubling or rhyming in
which the sense of a line is repeated in different form to make a
pair, or to reveal that One is Two and vice versa. One could call it
“Octavic structure”. The two beginning lines of Psalm 23 :“The
Lord is my shepherd/ I shall not want”, might be rendered in prose:
“ Since the Lord is my shepherd, I will have all I need.” The first
thought is completed and becomes one of a unified pair as we hear
that to have the Lord as one’s shepherd must involve freedom from
want. The logical undeniability of the second line, given the
�premise of the first, retroactively transforms the first line into a
proclamation of complete trust and proud allegiance.
“I am dying, Egypt, dying, only/ I here importune death a while,
until/Of many thousand kisses the poor last/ I lay upon thy lips …”
says Antony; the first five words could be his very last if taken to
mean: “I have killed myself because they told me you were dead,”
but he speaks again,
“… Dying…” that is, ‘it is nothing I can draw back from now, it
is fully real that I will soon cease to be real.’ And perhaps he is
asking himself and his love how a story that seemed so full of
strength and new possibility has now brought inescapable death.
The poetry of the drama perhaps plays with incommensurability
here: the lines are spoken as Cleopatra and her two women
servants are about to hoist Marc Antony up to the window of their
tower. He is almost immovable and will very soon be unreachably
far away, among the dead, and yet he and they are asserting the
greatest nearness between him and Cleopatra that these great
lovers have ever felt. Two are becoming one as they near the
vanishing point.
If the question of whether it can be numbered does occur to us
about the golden rectangle I think Euclid supposes that we
ourselves may be able to supply the surprising answer in the
negative with only a little reasoning. It is unfortunately not the
kind of reasoning I am confident will succeed in this lecture. I have
tried several times to write out a brief and perfectly clear account
that shows the two pieces of the Golden Section have no common
measure; but without the assurance that audience members could
be free to pause the lecture and ask a question wherever something
is not making sense to them I have felt that my attempts have
failed. There may be an unexpected commonality between Plato
and Euclid in that the real life of both authors’ work only manifests
itself fully in conversation, and in deeds. I will include my proof
�that the Golden Section makes two lines that have no common
measure in the written text of this talk, which will be available
through the Dean’s Office, and maybe another short proof that the
diagonal of a square has no common measure with its side. Neither
is terribly difficult to follow. Even one of them might still take up
too much of our time together today. For now I ask you to grant
me that both these things are provable.
[Shall I belabor your sense of wonder with one more corollary? If
line A and line B should be shown to have no common measure,
then the line that is their sum could be measured neither by any
equal division of A or of B. Add them together to make a new line
and call their sum C. So we will have three lines, none of which
shares a measure with either of the others. If we add A to C then
we have a new line, D, the largest of the four, which likewise has
no common measure with C and thus with any of the others, and so
we may proceed ad infinitum, making new lines, each of which has
no common measure with any of its components: an endless array
of mutually incommensurable lines growing larger and larger
forever. We could have proceeded by subtraction and produced
the same result in the direction of the infinitesimal.]
Perhaps the beauty people say is to be found in the Golden Section
and made visible in the dimensions of the Parthenon and of
numerous Ancient Greek sculptures and vases, and paintings
would be a kind of opposite to the beauty of the Octave. The Two
to One ratio is commensurability at its clearest and simplest,
expressed in the very smallest numbers, while the Golden Section
is a ratio we cannot express but only continually approach in even
the very largest numbers. Yet it too has a kind of sublime
geometric simplicity: a line has been divided in two pieces so that
the area made by a square on one piece and that made by a
rectangle of the whole line with the other piece are equal.
�In the language of ratios, which the Freshmen will learn very
soon, the smaller piece has to the larger piece the same ratio as the
larger piece does to the whole. In that same language the side of a
square equal to a unit will have the same ratio to the diagonal of
that square as the diagonal has to two of those units. The diagonal
is the mean of One and Two, somewhat as the larger piece of the
Golden Section is the mean between the smaller piece and the
whole.
Measure and Counting
It was one of the complaints of the traditional moralists of Athens
that Socrates was a Sophist, a teacher of slippery arguments by
which to win debates in courtrooms or public assemblies and that
he could make the weaker argument look like the stronger; that he
could make you think that day was night or even was odd. These
were some of the accusations brought against him in the trial that
led to his death.
When Meno’s slave has seen that doubling the side of a square has
not given us the length to produce a double square, but rather has
produced a quadruple, Socrates innocently asks him to say exactly
how long the line would need to be to give us a double of the
original square, or just to point to it if he prefers. Plato is well
aware that there will be no possible naming of the size in any units
that also measure the side of the square, and yet that it is very easy
to draw a line, the diagonal of the original square and then to point
to it as the right size for the side of a double square. But the side
and the diagonal are incommensurable. This would be a good
moment to consult a written-out proof, one or two of which I will
append to this talk.
[ Appendix: Euclid I, 47, which shows that the square on the
hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal in area to the sum of the
squares of the other two sides can be applied to an isosceles right
triangle that is half of a square. Then the squares on its two equal
�sides will add together to make an area equal to the square on its
larger side which we may call the hypotenuse or the diagonal of
our half square. So the square on the hypotenuse has an even
number of square units. This is only possible if the hypotenuse
itself is an even number of units long. But if the ratio of side to
diagonal is expressible in numbers then it has an expression in the
lowest possible terms, as e.g. 3:2 are the lowest terms for 6:4. One
or both numbers will be odd in such lowest-term expressions. Let
our half-square triangle’s sides in their relation to its hypotenuse be
expressed in lowest terms. Since this case has a diagonal with an
even numbered length, the length of the smaller side must be odd.
But since the diagonal’s square is even then we know its length
must be also; now to be even is to be two times some number, for
that is the definition of “even”. So when we multiply it by itself to
get the area of the square on the hypotenuse we will be making a
square whose area is ( 2 x N) x (2 x N) where N is just whatever
number it needs to be to give us, when doubled, the even numbered
length of the hypotenuse of our original triangle. That means our
square on the hypotenuse, or on the diagonal is (4 x N x N) square
units. So each of the squares on the sides of the isosceles right
triangle will be half of that, or (2 x N x N) square units. Aha! Each
smaller side of our original triangle, since it has a length whose
square is 2 x N x N, must after all itself be even for no even square
can come from any but an even side. But we said it had to be odd
because the hypotenuse was even and the sides of our triangle were
to be expressed in lowest terms. If the side and the diagonal of a
square have a common measure, i.e. can both be expressed as
whole numbers of the same ‘unit’, then we have shown that the
same line must have a length measured by a number that is both
even and odd. Since there is no such number, we conclude that our
premise must have been mistaken and there is no common
measure.]
Something happens to a mind that has begun to follow
geometrical demonstrations; something that looks like a choice as
�it regards the truths of different realms; maybe it shows itself most
clearly in the response to the absurdity that results when the square
and the diagonal are assumed to have a common measure. It does
not look like peace of mind. The Imagination presses to remind us
that we may divide the side or the diagonal as finely as we like,
and insinuates that anyone with sense would see that somewhere
in the realm of the very small there is bound to be a piece so small
as to measure whatever other piece from wherever else we might
assign it to. The Reason insists that no possible common measure
can be found which does not involve the result that an even
number must also be odd.
Aristotle points out that as to the role of wonder in Philosophy,
although Socrates may say Philosophy begins in Wonder, we can
see how in some cases wonder must give way to a kind of
familiarity and that what would now really produce wonder would
be a demonstration that diagonal and side were after all
commensurable. More wonder would be there than in the known
outcome, namely that they are not and never can be.
But I am afraid that the original wonder has not ceased to work on
me, and even some familiarity with the proofs has not driven away
a sense of aporia about their result. Is the incommensurability that
lurks so near the beginning of Geometry really just something to
get over? Would that make it like the contemporaneous horrifying
discovery that lies could prevail over the truth among the audience
of a fair and open discussion? Day can be made to seem night.
One must still make up one’s mind if that discovery means no
persuasion by words is ever to be trusted, or if something like truth
can somehow still be approached. That is the choice I am thinking
of. If, as I am suggesting, Euclid well knows the problem of
incommensurability, and even expects his more discerning readers
to perceive it very early in his book, then we see it has not
discouraged him. Is there a common unit that measures both our
�thoughts and the world? Let us return to this matter of measuring
in its primal form of counting.
When we count we could be said to measure the
“how much” of something in units. We want to know how big our
herd is today, perhaps to see if any lambs were carried off in the
night, and we lay down a kind of measuring stick called “one
sheep” next to the herd and see how many we can find in it. The
unit, one sheep, is not exactly like a fixed length: it may match a
small lamb in one instance, a large ram in the next. They are
equally sheep and there are two of them. Cattle ranchers talk about
how many “head” of cattle are on their ranch, so that the head has
become the unit, since cows, bulls, and calves each agree in having
one head and so can be counted quickly by counting heads. Each
particular sheep’s head is not exactly like any other, any more than
each sheep was. “A unit,” as Euclid will say in Book Seven, “is
that by which each thing is called ‘one’.” Actual unity is like
perfect doubleness, not a thing one finds in one’s hands, (although
hands may seem quite a good example of the double,) but it is a
way of seeing with the mind’s eye and of talking. Things appear to
come in kinds. A kind is a natural unity. It may not be saying too
much to say that different kinds must always be somewhat
incommensurable. Money is a fiction that lets us pretend that three
days of the labor and materials and skills of shoe-making could be
equal to one day of the labor and material and skills of housebuilding. Money and the market price allow us to set things as
equal that in fact have no common measure. Euclid says that ratios
can exist (only) among things of the same kind and that things are
of the same kind which can by multiplication exceed one another.
No number of houses can exceed a shoe, or even equal one,
whatever Mother Goose may say.. Comparing houses to shoes is,
as we say, like comparing apples to oranges. What lets us count
heads or noses or whole sheep of different ages and sizes without
difficulty is the notion of the pure unit: the oneness that any
thinkable, nameable thing must have to be a thing at all. Things
�that are generically of the same kind can be counted by reference
to ones that are all exactly the same as each other. Do we invent
these units? Different assemblages of these ones are the different
whole numbers. Each such assemblage has in addition to its
component units a single unity peculiar to itself: three is one
number and is different from all others. It is not possible even to
be as a multiplicity without at the same time being a kind of one.
Can numbers image The World of Being? It sounds absurd. Yet
there are enough numbers for every individual being there is or
ever has been. And perhaps there would turn out to be enough
groupings of numbers to mirror the groupings of things by kinds,
by larger and smaller categories. If everything that is real can be
named and reckoned with by computers then we are already deep
into the project of mirroring the entire world in numbers. Does it
matter if we suppose that numbers are simply a convenient
labelling device we have in some unspecified way dreamed up or if
we think that the three of three horses and the three of three frogs
are both able to be three by some active power, a unifying force at
work on them as we might imagine the activity at work on making
a horse be and stay a horse at all? It might matter quite a bit.
[The Freshmen will soon read a book in which Socrates offers a
line divided in four as an image of all visible and knowable things;
the primary twofold division is between knowable and visible, and
each of those two parts is again divided in two “in that same ratio”,
however we may like to think of it, between knowable and visible.
Within the example we have to represent the relation between
visible and knowable simply as a matter of the sizes of our two
pieces of an original line, which itself we may suppose to represent
all that is. Should the visible be larger than the knowable or vice
versa? If we draw a line, divide it first in two in any way we
choose, and divide each piece in the same ratio as the first division,
we will produce four lines, the greatest, the least, and the two in
the middle. It can be easily proven that the two in the middle will
be of equal size. In Socrates’s example the upper division of the
�lower part of the whole line represents among the visible those
things we would call “visible originals”: trees, people, animals,
stars etc.; while the lower division represents “visible images” of
those things: shadows, reflections, paintings, and so forth. The
lower piece of the upper part of the original line thus must
represent in the realm of the knowable the knowable images,
which Socrates suggests are mathematical beings: triangles, lines,
points, drawable figures and representable numbers, etc. while the
uppermost piece of all will represent whatever could be the
“knowable originals” or the actual things that are known, whether
always through images or perhaps sometimes directly through
themselves. The mathematical or “learnable” things would thus be
the shadows of the knowables, and the quantity of images of the
knowables would match that of the originals of the visibles. Or
would they overlap? The things both knowable as images and
immediately visible as things would then be the same.]
The appearance of things coming in kinds and our capacity to see
and grasp it grounds most of how and what we think. When we
recognize something at all we are finding it to be a part of some
whole, an example or a fragment of a certain kind of unity. Here
too we seem to have a choice: shall we notice this power we seem
to have, give it a nod, and just get on with our work of
understanding and re-shaping the world, or shall we try to dwell
upon it and wonder at it? Maybe returning to it would modify our
urge to reshape the world a little. On the other hand it may be so
near to our root that to dig it up would leave us nothing to get near
it with. Just the same, let us try a little right now.
When we encounter something that appears especially unified,
that brings together many parts in many ways to make a One, we
feel delight. We call it beautiful, whether it be a painting or a
melody or a story, or a face, or a sunset. We locate unities within
larger unities: person, family, city, nation, Cosmos. When we
meet something that strongly resembles something of a different
�kind in some respect, we delight to bring the two together in our
speech. We call it making a metaphor. “All Flesh is Grass”. Is it
a stretch to describe this behavior as a kind of counting or
measuring? It seems to have little to do with the measuring about
which Nietzsche complains. That, he says, is a devaluing of the
only world we have, by the false invention of another better world
somewhere else, whose beings we claim to glimpse and by which
we judge our world and find it wanting. This measuring that lets us
see how flesh is grass might be no slander on real flesh or grass,
but a primary encounter with both.
People sometimes express disappointment that the earliest ancient
examples of writing – the wedge-shaped marks in tablets of clay
that were baked or dried in Mesopotamia many thousands of years
ago -- seem to be restricted to inventories: mere lists of things or
quantities of grain. But counting or measuring in a primal sense is
the essence of our grasp on the world, at least as that grasp is found
in language itself. We need not shy from calling those lists the
first written poetry. The transition from listing names (i.e. units)
and numbers of things to writing poetry seems very slight indeed
compared with the transition from an unbroken sequence of
immediate stimulus-reactions, to names and numbers of things at
all. Indeed ancient poets as well as modern ones are notoriously
fond of lists as such. Homer gives us the Catalog of Ships. The
Hebrew Scriptures list who begat whom. And both are masters of
metaphor and measure. Homer speaks unforgettably of the sword
or spear blade cutting flesh as “Pitiless Bronze.” If we are not
explicitly measuring by unities, or counting -- “giving an account”
as we say -- we are measuring still. Saul was by head and
shoulders the tallest among the men of Israel. Thomas Hobbes says
in Leviathan that all thinking is counting and computation: adding
and subtracting. It is a surprising agreement with the Platonic
insight that our capacity to see unity is what makes us human. And
somehow we can see unity in what refuses to break into natural
units. The Continuous must have a unity of its own: it is imaged
�in the line in which every point has another as near to it as you
please. Could the Unlimited be another ingredient of the World,
like wholeness being present in everything that is? It could never
be visible without having already undergone some unification but
it might always maintain its indeterminacy in a kind of refusal of
any permanent allegiance to particular unity or identity. Nothing is
immune to change and everything must decay. Today’s Ponderosa
Pine tree seems fully formed and vitally involved in being what it
is; it seems almost to breathe if you look at it in the sun and the
wind. Botanists will tell you that it does breathe. But some few
years from now it will be lying on the ground, rotting into dirt,
relinquishing the noble form that seemed completely to possess it.
In Incommensurability we seem to have found a thing we cannot
imagine, if to imagine means to give a unified identity to
something, but must nevertheless think as true. This is already
remarkable and may encourage us to be more careful in
distinguishing the imaginable from the true in other cases. The
imagination is not a perfectly reliable guide even to the possible,
let alone to the true. Is it the infinite divisibility of the line that
leads our imagination and our reason in opposite directions?
Perhaps we can know some things to be true regarding what is
infinite without being able to imagine them. Moses Maimonides
points out that Apollonius proves a curved asymptote approaches a
limiting straight line so that the distance between them is forever
diminishing without limit and yet without ever entirely
disappearing. They can get infinitely nearer forever without
meeting. Maimonides says that we cannot imagine this but that we
can know it. Even to look down railroad tracks includes imagining
we see that they meet at the distance of the vanishing point. We
may get so used to knowing something, that we think we are
successfully imagining it, or we may decide to discard our
imaginations as any help at all to knowing, but both alternatives
are likely to be mistaken.
�What about the wider implications of incommensurability?
There are many. One seems to be a fundamental distinction
between the continuous and the discrete: two different kinds of
magnitude, represented in our thinking here by lines, which are
continuous and by numbers, which are assemblages of discrete
units. Of course a line may be divided into as many equal parts, or
artificial units, as we please, or as few as two, so it is not in every
way unavailable to the language of number, but it has no natural
unit and can be thought of apart from the notion of an assemblage
of units. It may be this absence of natural units that is at the heart
of incommensurability. When we want to measure distances in the
physical world we begin by inventing a unit length like the inch:
roughly the top joint of a king’s thumb. Everything that has a
length must thereafter submit to being so many thumbjoints long,
measured to the nearest half-thumb-joint. But that original thumb
joint reveals its peculiarity when we ask how we would measure its
length. Strictly speaking it has none since there is no agreed-upon
unit by which we would measure it. It is one unit long. How big
that unit is cannot be determined. Would we say, “One is one”?
Calling One a number might be like claiming to know how long an
inch is: it only works for us as a measure in multitudes of itself. If
we really want to say anything satisfying about how long an inch is
we must invent a centimeter and say it is 2.5 of them, but then we
cannot say what the ‘absolute’ length of the centimeter is.
So we do seem to make, or find, a multiple thing, number, amid
things, namely units, each of which contains no multiplicity. Can
the One be incommensurable with the numbers of things it counts?
Socrates on the day of his death says that he gave up the study of
natural science when he realized he still did not understand how
one and one made two. Do we understand it? We may simply not
know how to come any closer to understanding unity and so we
proceed to get farther away, to make progress in some direction
�rather than seek we know not what from the origins. We might
remind ourselves that although lines are limited or determined by
points, they are not made of them. Wherever there can be two
points we can think of a line that joins them but since the line can
always be divided then there is always another point between any
two so that if a line were made of points it would have as many as
we like and we could add as many more without expecting it to
change in length. That is not the way a wall is made of bricks at
the very least. Is it the way a brick is made of clay? We can think
so many remarkable things if we do not linger too long at the
beginning that perhaps it would be wrong not to get on with our
deductions and further explorations merely because we do not
really understand unity. Perhaps there is room for both directions
of thought?
Let me offer another image of a kind of incommensurability. Do
we know what allows us to use words? Can there be untranslatable
words? What do we mean when we say that a particular word, say,
of Greek or French, really has no equivalent in English? We might
like to say that such a word in its own language brings together as
parts of the same whole several different thoughts or meanings
which nowhere exist together in any single word of English. We
can still list those meanings and instruct the learner to think them
together; and we may have the learner’s experience of beginning to
feel as if after all the different meanings do deserve to have their
own single word to unite in. We may start to think that “Deinos”,
the Ancient Greek root of our word “Dinosaur”, doesn’t have to be
heard as: “Terrible but possibly also in other cases “Wondrous”
and in yet others “Clever and Effective”. We begin to hear
“Terrible AND Wondrous, Clever AND Effective” all at once, in a
way not really captured by our own recent and over-used
“Awesome”. But perhaps our minds have jumped a gap or
discontinuity between Greek and English rather than finding a
common unit of measure, and we are briefly thinking in Greek?
�Perhaps all foreign words are strictly speaking not
incomprehensible but yet never perfectly translatable?
I should address a doubt. What shall we say to someone who tells
us we are making mountains of molehills and that there is no real
problem with translation or even with expressing the diagonal in
terms of the side? The Doubter will say that if the side is called
“one” then the diagonal may be called “the square root of two”, or
“that number which when multiplied by itself will give us an
answer of two”. We may ask if the doubter can tell us how many
times we will be multiplying it by itself and receive the somewhat
mysterious reply “1.4142 …” with the further explanation that the
dots represent a continuing fraction that never actually ceases. We
may feel as if something is peculiar about a number that can never
finish being named. But any number ending with a finite fraction
will when multiplied by itself give us an answer that is either
bigger or smaller than two. Inventing a symbol that means “find
the number which when multiplied by itself gives the number
under this sign” and calling it a “square root sign” does not
guarantee that there is such a number corresponding to any number
I put under the sign. For 49 we find 7 but for 2 we find “1.4142…”
and the dots go on forever. If this infinitely continuing fraction is
our way of reconciling the continuous with the discrete, or letting
the same number be even and odd, we may wonder what might be
getting lost. Perhaps there are no two things so close that the mind
cannot find a gap nor so far apart that the mind cannot find a
bridge? What about Being and Nonbeing, or life and death? Or
Right and Wrong? Are they incommensurable once and for all?
What is at stake for us when we try to know?
Incommensurability and Meno
I want to turn now again to the Meno for some help with the
question of how we might come to know that something is true or
of how we might learn. Why does Socrates use the example of
�proving something about the diagonal of a square when he wants
to encourage Meno to suppose that it is possible to learn, and even
perhaps to learn how to be good?
My thoughts are not terribly well-organized on this topic but let us
begin with some possible connections. Virtue is proposed to us in
the Meno and elsewhere in the dialogues as having four parts:
Courage, Moderation, Justice, and Wisdom. Sometimes it is
suggested that none of these can be separated from the others, that
Courage without Wisdom is mere rashness, or Moderation without
Justice mere cold selfishness. They are compared to the parts of a
face, unable to exist as themselves except when all together.
Suppose we imagined them as a square in which their equality and
co-dependence might be imaged. Then when Socrates asks what
unites them or plays the role of that by which each deserves to be
called a virtue, we could imagine that he is asking if there is
another line that touches each and all of them. That line could be a
circle around the square, or it could be the diagonal. It is a line
which by making two triangles in its division of the square would
prevent the collapse of the square under pressure, as carpenters all
know. It is inside the square yet bigger than any of the lines
whose particular arrangement makes the square. It turns out – and
you may as I have said want to consult a written version of this
lecture to see why this is so – that its precise size is not nameable
or measurable in terms of the sides of the square; and yet it has a
perfectly well-defined size. How did Socrates’s and Meno’s
attempt to define and unify human excellence lead to a
mathematical problem about incommensurability and disharmony?
The road leads through Power. From the first they have disagreed
on a fundamental level: Socrates wants to know what human
excellence is, and Meno insists that the most needful thing is
finding out how to acquire it. Socrates seems to promise that really
knowing what it is or at least making a real attempt at learning that
might be the only way to begin acquiring it and Meno fears that
�insisting on insight will lead to paralysis; and so he seems to
recommend settling for anything that looks a lot like the path to
acquisition: say, Power. If you have power, then you can enact
whatever looks excellent to you, but without it, no quantity of
insight will help; you will be a victim or a bystander, no real doer.
Socrates helps us and Meno to see that Meno is after all more
interested in power than in excellence; since everyone wants what
is good or excellent but few seem capable of acquiring it, it must
be, thinks Meno, that those few are the powerful; and a corollary
must be that what is excellent is what can be acquired by power:
gold and silver and a place in the councils of the city. Meno and
the reader are shown the consequence of the definition of Virtue
that says it is “For the one desiring fine things to have the power to
get them”.
Socrates does not here suggest that a more important difference
among people than the division into who has or lacks the power to
get good things might lie in the question of what things are really
good and what others only look good. Perhaps he is not surprised
that the distinction between those who only think they know what
is good and those who really do know is not a familiar one for
Meno. Like most of us Meno thinks it is easy to know what good
things are. He also thought it was easy to imagine that some of the
unhappy or the unlucky might actually want for themselves things
they knew were bad for them. Socrates must carefully remind him
what would really be involved in wishing to harm oneself without
any counterbalancing benefit of any kind, namely a kind of
absurdity or impossibility; and then Meno admits we all suppose
we are choosing what is best, so that everyone can be said to share
the desire for fine things, or at least for apparently fine things.
This equality in desiring apparent goods leaves the struggle for
excellence to be, as we mentioned earlier, a matter decided
according to who has the power to get or get at those apparent
goods: Gold and Silver, and honors and powers and offices in the
�city. Meno uses the verb “porizesthai” or “ to achieve … procure…
make progress ” as the third infinitive we translated in the phrase
“ To desire fine things and be able to get them.”
“ Poros”, the noun in that verb, is cognate with the English word
“ford”, as in “ you can cross the river at the ford”. A Poros in
Greek may refer to any number of stratagems or devices for
accomplishing one’s goals. It is a word whose privative form
“aporia” has great resonances with incommensurability. Aporia is
the condition of being without resources in the face of something.
It can describe simple lack of money or that more general
difficulty that we describe as “feeling completely at a loss”. We
are at an impasse and can see no way across some barrier. Here
we are near to incommensurability. Meno first uses the word in
the dialogue to say that when one knows the different virtues
appropriate to old and young, men and women, slave and free, one
will never be in any aporia about saying what virtue is. The simple
connection of Poros, resource, to money lets Socrates remind
Meno that for all the importance of Porizesthai or the
“ being able to GET for oneself …” those fine things that virtuous
people want; and for all the ways that money lets you have access
to nearly anything you might want, there could be situations in
which not Poros, resource, is crucial to virtue, but precisely
Aporia, resourcelessness. If the only money to be had in a certain
situation was money unjustly acquired, then Meno agrees an
Aporia of money would then be virtuous. One might go another
step and say if the only action that could be taken in a particular
situation had to be action taken in complete ignorance of what a
truly just outcome would look like then inaction might be
preferable. Meno turns out to be more familiar with Aporia, at
least in thought, than one might suspect of a very ambitious and
not very scrupulous young aristocrat. The things he thinks about
are strongly marked by the possibility of aporia. What kind of
thinking does he like? He says he likes the way Gorgias explains
the functioning of the body’s senses by reference to effluences or
“outflows” from the objects sensed, which outflows can be
�compared to very small shapes constantly crossing the space
between say a sweet-smelling flower, and my nose. If the tiny
shapes fit the pores of my nose then I will sense aroma. Other
shapes, e.g. those conveying sounds, will not fit my smelling pores
but instead will find paths through my ears and I will hear things.
Socrates’s Gorgian example ends with him noting that this mode of
explanation can be adapted to all of the senses and perhaps many
other questions as well. Maybe it explains too much? The element
of the Incommensurable is very prominent. Socrates says the little
shapes are “symmetroi” with the pores of their proper sense
organs, that is they have a common measure. But smells are
incommensurable with ears. To survey the microscopic world for
a moment through this lens, we must be ready to see a constant
flow of all kinds of possible sensations, tiny shapes crossing one
another’s paths in all directions constantly and bouncing away
from doorways not designed to let them in or slipping neatly into
passages through which they fit as smoothly as an old key. A
simple test is always automatically going on amid the outflows and
the bumps of the myriad tiny shapes, “Are you the right shape to
pass?” is asked and answered thousands of times per second.
Socrates describes Meno’s pleasure in this explanation as a
response to the High Tragic Manner, in which, as he says, this
account appears. High Tragic Manner?
What is that likely to mean? Does Meno, whose father knew
Xerxes, the tragic hero of Herodotus’s History, does Meno have
reason to wish for a world built on Tragedy? If he wants to be
excellent, to win praise for his power and fine possessions, to be
honored as a Homeric Warrior is honored, is it more comfortable
than facing the impasse of your actual knowledge or ignorance of
your own powers, to think that the best warriors are just the right
shape from birth and that if you are fated to be great you will find a
fitting passage? If you are already among the leading families of
Thessaly then your fate is clearly calling you, and if your father
narrowly missed becoming a Persian Satrap over some of Greece,
�maybe that has been saved for you! Those who treasure power
above all things will recognize you because it takes one to know
one, and they will recruit you. You and they will be ready to betray
each other if that is the path to greater power, but meanwhile you
are commensurable and you both need allies.
Another piece of thinking Meno likes is the argument that you
cannot usefully seek to learn anything because either you know or
you don’t know and so you cannot learn what you already know
but you cannot even recognize what you do not know. So await
your fate in the confidence that you already have the right stuff.
It’s all or nothing at all. The tragic flavor is a flattering spice that
suggests that the great human beings must be prepared to do and to
suffer things perhaps not bearable for ordinary humans, and that
this is why we remember them and follow them and tell their
stories. Amid the chaos some shapes are arriving where they fit;
praise and blame may be beside the point. The importance of welldirected effort or the possible guidance of insight look like
idealistic distractions on a stage full of opportunities for immediate
deployment of strategies: cast what grappling hooks you have in all
directions and pull in the biggest fish you snag. Plato is showing us
a young Meno shortly before he seized what must have seemed the
perfect opportunity: an expedition led by the younger brother of
the Great King of Persia, intending to take the throne from his
incompetent elder. Xenophon, a contemporary of Plato and like
him a student of Socrates, has written in his book The March Back
of Meno’s corrupt and violent attempt to become a Satrap in the
Persian style and of the awful fate it led him to. We may suppose
that Xenophon’s report was known to Plato’s first readers.
That this young Meno even wants to talk about how virtue is to be
gotten and kept is a positive sign that he doesn’t yet simply
suppose that his job is to grab every gift of nature or fortune that
comes in his reach. He somehow is open to the thought that he
might need to do something else for himself, maybe improve
�himself somehow, and that Socrates could help him. But the
Tragic element perhaps overwhelms him. That Tragedy is finally
built on the foundation of incommensurability, the
incommensurability of Gods and humans, that may be what will
keep Meno safe from the danger of being truly changed by his talk
with Socrates. Tragedy for Meno may be about the near-miss when
a mortal comes along who could almost be mistaken for an
immortal. There is no room on earth for humans who do not die.
The great human beings who nevertheless do not yield or resign
themselves to being less than the Gods will be wonders in their
lifetimes and will be long remembered after their deaths. The
shape that is our lot may limit us to either having what it takes or
not but a certain kind of defiance of Fate is possible. The very
thing that seeks to diminish us, our mortality, can be embraced by
the tragic protagonist and can transform us. The insistence by the
tragic character that she alone will define herself even if it should
cost her life nearly makes her into a God, and it simultaneously
kills her. Medea murders her children, her husband’s new wife
and father-in-law, taunts Jason and mounts a dragon chariot on the
roof to fly to Athens, where she will bear what few can: to lead
what remains of a wrecked and miserable life all her own.
Something like this may be what Meno loves, hidden in the
answers of Gorgias. He does not seem to love learning for its own
sake.
It is striking how Gorgias’s science anticipates our own: two
millennia later our biology is still deep in the process of describing
the docking of different tiny chemical particles and molecules in an
elaborate process of sending and receiving signals and instructions
according to what effluent shapes fit what receptors. And it is still
more striking what a difference remains between the recognition
that an effluence fits an opening and the experience of
understanding a thought. To the Greek listener or reader a
similarity of sound appears between the “Aporia” or being at a loss
that Socrates will praise as an indispensable part of learning when
�he helps the slave boy recollect how to double the square, and on
the other hand the the “Aporrhoe”, or flowing outward, that
constitutes the whole Gorgian account of how we perceive and
possibly even of how we know. Maybe the nearness in sound of
Aporia and Aporrhoe is intended to point toward the thought that
the Gorgian/Scientific answer always leaves us where we started:
on the outside of what may be going on. If we can see color, we
say, it must be because little bits of something are flying into our
eyes, something we might as well call “color particles” or color
photons or color waves if you prefer; but what allows the arrival of
these little shapes to become our experience of color remains dark.
We posit that something about them carries what we end up calling
“color” and that when it arrives in our eyes, or perhaps bumps
something in our eyes that can send something that arrives in our
brains, well then, color has arrived. Leibniz says that no matter
how much we may imagine enlarging the physical pieces of the
brain and nervous system, we will not thereby have achieved more
than a larger picture of particles moving other particles. But where,
he asks, will be our own understanding from the inside of thoughts
and sensations in all this sequence of actions and reactions? We
may get to a place where we can say, in effect:
“When this exact sequence of synapses firing takes place you are
remembering your first grade teacher”; but all we will be doing is
correlating two separate events: your own experience of memory,
and a neurophysiologist’s observations of events among your
synapses. I do not mean to speak ill of the enterprise of Science,
which surely has shown us many real beauties and marvels; and
which is by no means simply identical with Technology; but I
wonder if there are important differences in kind among ways of
doing what we call knowing. We have now “known” for well over
a century that fire happens when particles of combustible
substances, like carbon and oxygen, combine in such a way as to
release light and heat, and often other gases and particles. We have
gone on learning many more details about smaller and smaller
particles involved in the process. We have also claimed to know
�for much longer than a hundred years that it is a crime to set your
neighbor’s house on fire; but we have never ceased from arson. I
make bold to say that no matter how thorough an account we can
learn to give of fire, it will make no difference to the ways we treat
our fellow human beings or indeed any of the living beings of the
world. If no other mode of knowing is available to us than the
techno-scientific, I am afraid we are doomed.
How welcome a kind of knowing of Incommensurability might
be to us if it should guarantee justice and equality! Beyond any
property I might own, I own myself as an insoluble mystery which
may decline to be judged by any other standard than its own. If our
dignity is our irreducible otherness from all others then most of our
moral experiences will be determined by ways we do not fit in.
Resistance and bravely saying “No!” will become the unmistakable
marks of human goodness. But maybe this, too, like Gorgias’s
answers, solves too much.
The simple incongruity of having no common measure with others
can stand for an inalienable freedom and an infinite value but how
do we know we are not still flattering ourselves in the High Tragic
manner? Is it not precisely commensurability we seek when we
propose with Socrates that the effort to learn makes us better? All
Nature is akin, he says. This is the opposite of severing ourselves
from a world of indifferent collisions, or of what is worse, of
seeking to become similarly indifferent ourselves. If we are bound
to act for the sake of what is or seems better, then that may be a
clue to how the cosmos acts.
These are only speculations about Meno and about ourselves.
Without them I would not know how to begin reading Plato. The
Aporia which Meno will call “ numbness” in his image of
Socrates the Torpedo Fish has its counterpart in the Gorgian
Theory of Everything: in the word “Aporrhoe”, or effluence,
outflow. Everything is only connected to everything else by this
�constant outflow or stream of shapes by which each thing shares its
visible, audible, smellable, tasteable, touchable, knowable self with
the various human organs of perception which happen to be
commensurate with it. One wonders where the inexhaustible
source for such constant outflow can be located, and why it never
runs low. One may also wonder if all that seeming
incommensurability conceals a suppression of genuine differences
of kind in things. Have we really seen very deeply, or heard any
divine harmonies when we assert more or less a priori that sight
and hearing are at bottom both the same, just matter in motion?
There may be more numbness involved in this conclusion than in
any temporary impasse that Socrates and his conversationspartners suffer in their attempts to learn.
The binary simplicity of the life of an effluence is perhaps part of
its attraction to Meno and to us; either a shape fits what it hits or it
doesn’t. It is like being told either you already have what it takes
or you never will. You are spared the wandering about in some
gray area while trying to find common measures or small steps of
approximation. You don’t have to start trying from where you are
to get someplace different. You do not have to examine opinions to
see what may be partly true in them and where that may lead. As in
the argument that you cannot learn what you already know nor
what you have never encountered, there seems to be a kind of
absolute separation between the wealthy possession of knowledge
and the impoverished condition of ignorance. Neither one is quite
understandable beyond the simple model of property ownership: if
you know something then you have it, if not then you don’t. And
having means chiefly having the power to exchange one thing for
another, to trade up, as we say. So Meno hopes by his conversation
with Socrates to end up with some answers in his back pocket that
will confound anyone he should have to debate; he is challenging
Socrates with the answers he has memorized from Gorgias: “ have
you got anything stronger than this?”
�If on the other hand it is possible to learn by experience that
knowable things are not inert possessions but after all have a kind
of life, then knowing must be different from simple possession of
property, which one can do while sleeping; knowing must be an
active practice, and one must be seeking to take on some of the life
of what one wants to know. All nature, as Socrates suggests, must
be akin for the learning that interests him to be possible. However
true it may be that each being must somehow differ from all others,
that no two snowflakes or leaves are ever identical, it is still finally
commensurability that we seek. That the example chosen to give
us hope about our capacity to learn is the diagonal of the square,
whose ratio to its side is not expressible in common units, must be
especially important. What may it mean? It seems to say that
there is more than one kind of intelligibility; the lack of a common
length measure for diagonal and side does not preclude knowing
things about the diagonal and its relation to that side. The counting
of discrete units is not the only path to knowledge. The discovery
of the line that will let us double the square depends on seeing
more than what is there; we must begin to see areas, twodimensional beings in order to address a question about finding
one dimension: the length of a line.
The diagonal is not in the end confoundingly hard to know; it is
the side of a square twice as big as the one whose diagonal it is. If
it is to be measured we must refer to a second dimension, not to a
line but to an area. The Greek language uses the word “dunamis”
or “power” in geometrical contexts somewhat as we might use
“squared” or “to the second power” in English. A line may be said
to be equal “dunamei”( the dative form of ‘dunamis’) or “in power,
by means of its power” to some area, meaning that the square on
that line is equal to the area in question. The diagonal can said in
Greek to be “in power” the double of the square it divides. The
echo of Meno’s word for his ideal of the raw power of the tyrant
who can grab whatever he wants and hold it is not accidental. But
what is echoing what?
�The suggestion that the diagonal is knowable by its power to
become a double square is a fertile one. It makes us wonder if
virtue has a kind of life in it since living things are partly known by
their power to duplicate themselves, to grow or reproduce. Does
the recognition of virtue necessarily involve a beginning of
reproducing it or a desire to see it exercise its power? When we
encounter someone good, we are in fact moved to imitation.
Virtue would then be essentially active; it would be what it can
become rather than a simple inert quantity. This could be
connected to the difficulty in saying what exactly it is or even in
describing it. A contemporary philosopher has written a book
called “The Fragility of Goodness”, but perhaps another could be
written on the Power of Goodness. What if the more knowable a
thing were the more beautiful, and alive it were? Would the most
unified and beautiful of all naturally generate an entire world as a
kind of octave of itself? We might then expect the nearness of
such a thing to possess active power, to contain a kind of life that
sustains and increases itself. Knowing would not mean to behold
something over there in calm clarity, while deciding whether to
take it or leave it. It would be to feel the effect of the nearness of
life, to be drawn to imitate and be informed by order and pattern,
so as to become more nearly unified oneself and more aware of the
unity of the world. Would such an experience make us suppose
that beautiful speeches could have the power to bring about
beautiful deeds?
One Greek word for “Rascal”, gleefully appropriated by Rabelais
many centuries after its birth, is “Panourgos”, which comes from
two words meaning “all”, and “work”. A Rascal is someone who
acknowledges no limits, who will “do everything” or do anything
to have their way. We say, typically about a villain, that he or she
would “stop at nothing” on the way to fulfilling their wicked plans.
Turn this inside out and suppose a being so fully limited, which we
will conjecture could mean so good, as to be in a sense fully at
rest: it would not need to do anything in order to be as it was, and
�it would lack nothing so that no motive would exist for its taking
some particular step, nefarious or otherwise. We might suppose it
to be already fully active all the time and indeed to be the principle
of all activity everywhere, but in a way that while pervading
everything would have nothing to prove and so no need to
undertake any new act. It would remind us of Achilles telling
Phoinix that he has no need of human honor and hence no need to
do any mighty deeds, but that he has honor enough from Zeus
simply by being who he is. So humans who resemble this
conjectural opposite of a rascal look like Gods, and the full version
of such a being might be God. Human Excellence or Virtue would
then likewise resemble God in being as self-contained as a social
being might be able to be while remaining social. It might be
better-defined than most things are, and hence more knowable, if
definition is chiefly a matter of limits. Socrates suggests a little of
this as he asks Meno about the presumed behavior of a virtuous
human.
What if becoming virtuous really is a matter of making the effort to
learn, not how we can master things but how things really are; and
what if finding that out involves discovering that things are more
orderly and beautiful than we can ever fully imagine?
�
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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
Word doc
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
30 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
Incommensurability : Meno and the diagonal
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on October 21, 2020 by Cary Stickney as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. The Dean's Office provided this description of the event: "Can beautiful speeches give rise to beautiful deeds? Please join the SJC Campus Community for our virtual Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series featuring St. John’s College Santa Fe Tutor, Cary Stickney. Cary will be giving a lecture titled 'Incommensurability: Meno and the Diagonal.'"
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stickney, Cary
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
2020-10-21
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. Meno
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SF_StickneyC_Incommensurability_Meno_and_the_diagonal_2020-10-21
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b3ed8b906e47a4df431da8e6fc052130.pdf
f0b8efc414011a82dfd71934e35b6ebf
PDF Text
Text
������������������������
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
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
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
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College 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.
24 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
Thoughts on canto 33 of the Inferno
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on February 6, 2013 by Cary Stickney as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stickney, Cary
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
2013-02-06
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
Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Inferno.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24004147
Deprecated: Directive 'allow_url_include' is deprecated in Unknown on line 0