18 20 5655 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/0b7329a6db34188cd8ae7a80d3d8f6ed.jpg 70f7c5be807b0f6cbdd962ae42bb9726 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials. The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection Use Policy</a>. Click on <a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Image Collection—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield 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 Annapolis, MD Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context imagecollectionannapolis Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image 25.5 x 20.5 cm. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SJC-P-1495 Title A name given to the resource Architectural Model of Mellon Hall Description An account of the resource 1 photographic print : b&w Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1958 [circa] Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Shulman, Julius Subject The topic of the resource Mellon Hall (St. John's College, Annapolis, MD) Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Type The nature or genre of the resource Still Image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph. Mellon Hall https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/0572c386ed35df960998ceb88e52d913.jpg 6cef4807655c44468b80a80858c079cd 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials. The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection Use Policy</a>. Click on <a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Image Collection—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield 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 Annapolis, MD Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context imagecollectionannapolis Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image 25.5 x 20.5 cm. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SJC-P-1496 Title A name given to the resource Architectural Model of Mellon Hall Description An account of the resource 1 photographic print : b&w Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1958 [circa] Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Shulman, Julius Subject The topic of the resource Mellon Hall (St. John's College, Annapolis, MD) Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Type The nature or genre of the resource Still Image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph. Mellon Hall https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fd1b5c9305d12ce0c4b62c160e45b0ae.jpg 728e2b21e090239ab8178a80bcf8eab9 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials. The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection Use Policy</a>. Click on <a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Image Collection—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield 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 Annapolis, MD Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context imagecollectionannapolis Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image 25.5 x 20.5 cm. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SJC-P-1497 Title A name given to the resource Architectural Model of Mellon Hall Description An account of the resource 1 photographic print : b&w Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1958 [circa] Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Shulman, Julius Subject The topic of the resource Mellon Hall (St. John's College, Annapolis, MD) Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Type The nature or genre of the resource Still Image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph. Mellon Hall https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/0a2e6892fb3337c8fbc215de6bd931c4.jpg 5d409ddec35fca060e73e870c7976055 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials. The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection Use Policy</a>. Click on <a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Image Collection—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield 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 Annapolis, MD Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context imagecollectionannapolis Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image 25.5 x 20.5 cm. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SJC-P-1498 Title A name given to the resource Architectural Model of Mellon Hall Description An account of the resource 1 photographic print : b&w Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1958 [circa] Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Shulman, Julius Subject The topic of the resource Mellon Hall (St. John's College, Annapolis, MD) Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Type The nature or genre of the resource Still Image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph. Mellon Hall https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f649401401d5b5f4b925c68060f0a93f.jpg 3962f82a8ee35d79fabc8ebb5acc09c3 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials. The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection Use Policy</a>. Click on <a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Image Collection—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield 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 Annapolis, MD Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context imagecollectionannapolis Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image 20.5 x 25.5 cm. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SJC-P-2193 Title A name given to the resource Architectural Model of Renovated Greenfield Library, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland Description An account of the resource 1 photographic print : color Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 [circa] Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Unknown Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Type The nature or genre of the resource Still Image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph. Greenfield Library https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/04f62d5762bfd6f7afb6f0a5c001b215.jpg 489ee35ba4fc5389833f2f21bac9abaa 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials. The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection Use Policy</a>. Click on <a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Image Collection—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield 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 Annapolis, MD Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context imagecollectionannapolis Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image 17.5 x 13 cm. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SJC-P-1599 Title A name given to the resource Archway under the Front Stairs of McDowell Hall, with Figure Silhouetted Description An account of the resource 1 photographic print : b&w Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Unknown Subject The topic of the resource McDowell Hall (St. John's College, Annapolis, MD) Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Type The nature or genre of the resource Still Image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph. McDowell Hall https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/010ab2b1b9e13443efcedcfb26526995.mp3 5ed3e665d11b5c629674c95f7a154aab Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:00:59 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Are Individuals Beings? Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 20, 2018, by Hannah Hintze as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hintze, Hannah Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-20 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Hintze_Hannah_2018-04-20_ac Subject The topic of the resource Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716. Discours de métaphysique Aristotle. Metaphysics Individuation (Philosophy) Metaphysics Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2aa4d23e1ea5948c0312b654c90e45ff.mp3 7009cce6576545d4aa34c1b8485ff4a3 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 Recordings—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 Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:03:17 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Are wasps figs? Are figs wasps? An Aristotelian conundrum Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on March 31, 2017 by Stephen Houser as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Houser, Stephen F. 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 2017-03-31 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 sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle. Metaphysics Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 20014367 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d29e9c045e69232e417d175ef3c2ae97.mp3 16b4f5a1c38055e7818b841ad72ee3cc Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:10:07 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 Argument Not Less But More Heroic: Milton's Advent'rous Song in Paradise Lost Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on February 11, 2005, by Thomas May as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource May, Thomas Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005-02-11 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 sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Milton, John, 1608-1674. Paradise lost Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_May_Thomas_2005-02-11_ac Relation A related resource <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7992" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b27f228af8885305d2eefc307393d4a2.pdf 2d2f9bc5c0f94061c40217f5f410e879 PDF Text Text NEH Milton Lecture 1 Argument Not Less But More Heroic: Milton's Advent'rous Song in Paradise Lost Thomas May, tutor February,11,2005 As the opening lines of this solemn invocation to Paradise Lost lay out the poem's tragic theme of"Man's First Disobedience and the Fruit ... whose mortal taste/ Brought Death into the world, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden ... " we can hear in them echoes of the beginnings of the great epic poems of the classical age that precede it: "the rage of Peleus' son Achilles ... hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,"2in the Iliad; "the man of many devices who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the citadel ofTroy,"3 in the Odyssey; and finally, "Arms I sing and the man who first from the coasts of Troy, exiled by fate, came to Italy and Lavinian shores ... till he should build a city ... and the walls oflofty Rome,"4 in the Aeneid. This last differs from its Greek antecedents both in setting a limit to and in defining a purpose for the struggles of its hero, and Virgil's conditional tone-' till he should build a city' -has further resonances with Milton's lines, "till one greater Man/ Restore us and regain the blissful seat." Our poet then calls upon the same "Heavn'ly Muse" who inspired Moses 1 I wish to thank both.the National Endowment for the Humanities and the College for making it possible for me to explore the writings of Milton through these past two years, and for providing funding for four of my colleagues to join me in a seminar that read Lycidas and Paradise Lost last semester. 2 Iliad l. 1-3, Homer ;The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (Viking Penguin,1990). All further citations are from this edition. 3 Odyssey 1.1-3, Homer: The Odyssey, trans. A.T. Murray, 2 vols. (Loeb, Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heineman, 1960). 4 Aeneid 1.1-2, Virgil, trans. H.R. Fairclough, 2 vols. Loeb, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heineman, 1960). All further citations are from this edition. May, Thomas L0613 Argument Not Less But More Heroic 0060 PSHOP $2.99 11111111111111111111111111111111111 1 �on Mt. Sinai and then later dwelt in Solomon's Temple on Mt. Sion, where the sacred brook of Siloa flows nearby, holy places that supercede Mt. Helicon-"th' Aonian Mount"mentioned later-and the fountain of Aganippe, haunt of the muses of classical poetry. At "Siloa's Brook" the long opening sentence comes to a partial stop with a semicolon, before the poet proceeds: I thence Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous Song That with no middle flight intends to soar Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme. (1. 12-16)5 This startling word 'advent'rous' alerts us to the nature of the song we are about to hear and by implication the character of its bard, suggesting an endeavor full of risk and peril, one that is daring, possibly even rash. 6 This poet, by contrast with his predecessors, intimates that it is not enough for him to present as hero an ideal man, some solitary and absolute sort of individual, capable of prodigious deeds and superhuman endurance in the midst of conflict; an 'advent'rous song' requires something else, something more. This difference even is even more explicit in the proem or prologue to Book Nine, when, as the poet leaves the long conversation between Raphael and Adam related in the previous four books, he announces that he " ... now must change / Those notes to Tragic,"(9.5-6) continuing: ... Sad task, yet argument Not less but more Heroic than the wrath Of stem Achilles on his Foe pursu'd Thrice Fugitive about Troy Wall; or rage 5 Complete Poems and Major Prose ofJohn Milton, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press/ Bobbs-Merrill, 1973). All citations and quotations of Milton's poetry are taken from this edition. Hereafter cited as Hughes. 6 OED 2,3,4. 2 �Of Tumus for Lavinia disepous 'd, Or Neptune's ire or Juno's, that so long Perplex'd the Greek and Cytherea's Son ... (9.14-20) He remembers Achilles for the implacable avenging wrath that consumes him in his pursuit of Hector around the walls of Troy; Tumus is recalled as the jilted fiance of Lavinia and for his jealous rage at Aeneas, who is mentioned only obliquely as 'Cytherea's Son;' similarly, Odysseus is styled as the 'Greek perplex'd,' i.e., tormented and plagued, by Neptune's ire. How are we to take this? Is this curious summary meant to dismiss the three greatest classical epics just as we are about to be presented with the climactic temptation and fall of man? I don't think so. The more attentively I read Paradise Lost, the more echoes and reverberations I hear with the three great classical epics we read together in our first two years here; I wonder if Milton's purpose isn't rather to rehabilitate heroic antecedents such as these. Sometimes his allusions are tinged with irony, as I think is the case in the passage I just cited, but irony of this sort can prompt us to reconsider and reassess what we think and feel about characters like Achilles, Odysseus, or Aeneas, without permitting us simply to discount them. Early on in the course of our NEH study group on Milton, at a moment when we had just noticed one of these epic echoes-one like" ... say first what cause / Mov'd our Grand Parents in that Happy state ... to fall .. " (1.28-30), at the beginning of Paradise Lost Book One, with the Iliad's "What god drove them (i.e., Agamemnon and Achilles) to fight with such a fury?"- one ofmy colleagues asked with a hint of exasperation, "What is he doing?-he can't just play around with things like this!" This remark struck me as being both fair and true, a rightful 3 �insistence that poets should not be simply permitted to do whatever strikes their fancy; they ought to be held to some standard of poetic justice. If we consider for a moment the answer to each of these epic questions' Apollo,' in the case of the Iliad, and 'Th'infernal Serpent' in Paradise Lost-we might gain some sense of what Milton is doing. Later on in Book One of Paradise Lost, soon after Satan summons his defeated legions with the majestic command, "Awake, arise, or be forever fallen," (1.330), as they gather on the plain of Hell, we learn that the names of all the fallen angels were blotted from the heavenly record after their rebellion from God, and that later, after the Fall, men came to adore "Devils ... for Deities" (1.373) and gave them the names of all the "various Idols through the Heathen World."(1.375) So, this means that Apollo, the son of Zeus and Leto, whose anger at Agamemnon for failing to honor the request by the priest Chryses for the return of his daughter prompts him to smite the Achaean armies with a fatal plague at the opening of the Iliad, turns out to be merely one of that nameless horde of apostate angels who appear in Paradise Lost in the catalogue of devils, Milton's counterpart in Paradise Lost to Homer's catalogue of ships in the Iliad. And, by the way, the Greek gods come last in this catalogue, far behind Moloch and Chemos and Baal and Ashtaroth, the horrible and magnificently obscene gods of the Ammonites, Moabites, and peoples of Canaan, all enemies of the Israelites and the living, invisible God of Milton's poem. Moreover, his prolepsis in calling the fallen angels by their names as pagan deities as named and worshipped by postlapsarian humankind also contrasts dramatically with Adam's account to Raphael in Book Eight of how, at God's invitation to him to give all living things their names, he" ... nam'd them, as they pass'd, and understood/ Thir Nature ... (8.352-53); the postlapsarian naming of 4 �bad angels by the sons and daughters of Adam does not participate in the same knowledge and insight with which God endued Adam's original, innocent apprehension of the unfallen created order. I should mention here that this is only one of many such instances in Paradise Lost, where so often we are first given the fallen version or perspective on things, the one closest to us as readers, as children of our fallen "Grand Parents" Adam and Eve, before we are given the truer but to us remoter original. This amounts to nothing less than an epic deflation, a gigantic put-down of the gods of antiquity who figure so largely in the epics of Homer and Virgil. But if Apollo is nothing more than some dissembling fallen angel turned false god, what of the heroes of Homer and Virgil; what of Achilles and Odysseus and Aeneas? Are they similarly debunked in the course of Milton's poem? By associating and contrasting these classical heroes with the chief figures of Paradise Lost, with Satan, with the Son of God, with Adam and Eve, Milton raises the same questions that are with us from our first seminar on the Iliad, the Odyssey, or the Aeneid: What is a hero and what is worthy of being considered heroic? It is important to note at the outset, however, that despite the historical precedence of the ancient epics to Paradise Lost, it claims to tell the story that is really prior, of the first man and woman and their fall, the causes for this, and the remedy that will ultimately transform their (and our) tragedy into a divine comedy in which restoration is effected and redemption is possible. Thus, the ultimate terms of heroism here range from the transcendently and divinely heroic to the demonically evil and debased, with the possibility of a genuine human heroism newly realized that reflects knowledge of these ultimate terms as the fruit of the poet's great argument. 5 �In the passage we just looked at, we saw that in raising and answering the question that introduces the narrative of the poem-'what cause? ... Th' infernal serpent'-Milton introduces the character of Satan, who dominates the first books of the poem and whose implacable envy and revenge against what he calls "the Tyranny of Heav'n"(l .124) prompt him to undertake his odyssey from Hell to our newer world, either to waste it utterly with Hell fire or to possess it as an empire (2.364-66), a demonic project that mimics elements of both the Aeneid and the Odyssey. It is difficult in these early books not to find Satan at least somewhat attractive and sometimes immensely entertaining, in spite of the numerous cues that Milton gives to warn us about his true nature. Consider, for example, the names of Satan, beginning with the aforementioned "Infernal Serpent", to "th' Arch-Enemy, and thence in Heav'n call'd Satan" (1.80-81), "th' Apostate Angel" (1.125), "th' Arch-fiend" (1.156), "the lost Arch-Angel" (1.243), "their great Sultan" (1.348), and "Arch-Angel ruin'd" (1.593)-these all occur in Book One--and this is not an exhaustive list! Each tells us something of what Satan is and that he certainly is not good, but like Eve, it is hard for us not to be fascinated and taken in by him, perhaps because of Milton's calculated grandiloquence. If such is meant to deter us, we might be tempted like the poet William Blake to say: The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was A true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. 7 More influential in our initial assessment of Satan perhaps are his own stirring words that he uses to rally the fallen angels: 7 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. xvii. 6 �What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield And what is else not to be overcome? That Glory never shall his wrath or might Extort from me. (1.105-111) His refusal to compromise or concede, his indomitable courage and enormous sense of honor and personal worth may remind us of Achilles at first, until we remember that Achilles' wrath against Agamemnon is neither immortal nor unlimited. At the height of his rage in Iliad 9, he tells the embassy of Odysseus, Phoenix, and Ajax that he will not think of arming for bloody war again, not till the son of wise King Priam, dazzling Hector batters all the way to the Myrmidon ships and shelters, slaughtering Argives, gutting the hulls with fire. (9. 795-798-emphasis mine) Later, the climactic scene in Iliad 24 shows an Achilles capable of marveling at the majestic nobility of Priam, who comes to ransom the body of his fallen son Hector (567), and who spares the life of the old king despite himself when Priam inadvertently enrages him with his suggestion that the Achaean prince can enjoy the ransom just paid, when he returns to his native land (652-669). By contrast to these heroes, Satan claims to possess "a mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time"(l.253), to which he adds, in two of the most famous lines of the poem, The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell ofHeav'n. (254-255) This inalterable hatred against heaven originates in the umbrage he takes at the Father's proclamation to the full company of angels that his only begotten Son, "the powerful Word" (7.208-9) through whom all things were made (6.836-38), is "Messiah King anointed" (5.664), an announcement that Satan finds unbearable, for he "thought himself 7 �impair'd" (5,665) i.e., lowered in rank and esteem among the company of heaven. The epic voice tells us in the following line (666!) that Satan, "Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain," is at that moment inspired to launch his rebellion and perpetual war against heaven. After his defeat in a three day long epic battle, related in Book Six of Paradise Lost, and his expulsion into Hell with the rebel angels, he builds his great capital Pandemonium and resolves almost immediately to 'enlarge his honor and empire' by conquering the new world that he has just heard about. Many readers have also noticed parallels between Satan's heroic journey to discover this new world, related through parts of the narrative of Books Two, Three, and Four, and the account that Virgil gives us of Aeneas' flight with his countrymen from Troy and his struggle to establish the new kingdom that will serve as the basis for Rome. By contrast it is significant that Satan undertakes this quest alone and as the ultimate in impious projects, one that is meant to thwart the divine will and to destroy the inhabitants of earth by fraud. When at the opening of Book Six he alights on Mt. Niphates, ready to initiate his destructive program, he pauses dramatically to consider his situation, only to find that Horror and doubt distract His troubl'd thoughts, and from the bottom stir The Hell within him, for within him Hell He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell One step no more than from himself can fly By change of place ... (6.18-23) In our Milton study group, one of my colleagues pointed out that Satan's inner tumult here, initially wordless, is reminiscent of Plutarch's description of Caesar's deliberations before he crosses the Rubicon: ... he wavered much in his mind when he considered 8 �the greatness of the enterprise into which he was throwing himself. He checked his course and ordered a halt, while he revolved with himself, and often changed his opinion 8 one way and the other, without speaking a word. Despite the great journey he has undertaken, Satan paradoxically finds himself trapped and confined within the limits of his fixed mind, for once at a loss for words, and as he gazes first towards Eden and then heaven, try as he might, he is unable to make a heaven out of his inner Hell. Remembering "what he was, what is, and what must be/ Worse ... " (4.25-26), he at last gives utterance to his inmost thoughts in a speech that begins with 9 lines originally intended for a tragedy Milton proposed to call "Adam Unparadiz'd." In the eighty-one lines of this soliloquy, Satan demonstrates the truth of La Rochefoucauld's maxim that "whatever discoveries one may have made in the land of self-love, there is still a lot of uncharted territory." 10 Chronologically the first lines written for Satan in Paradise Lost, these lines give us a sense of how Milton originally conceived his matchless villain. Satan recognizes the enormity of his offense against "Heav'n's matchless King,"(4.41) whom he acknowledges as his creator-contradicting his claim to the angel Abdiel later in the poem that he is "self-begot, self-rais'd-and confesses that "lifted up so high/ I s'deined subjection" (49-50). This word "disdain" returns again later in the soliloquy as he considers the possibility of repentance and pardon, in order to escape the ever lower hellish deep that threatens to devour him: 0 then at last relent: is there no place Left for repentance, none for Pardon left? 8 Plutarch, "The Life of Caesar" from The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden, rev. Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: The Modem Library) p. 874. 9 Edward Phillips, The Life ofMilton, in Hughes, op. cit., pp.1034-35. 10 Francois, due de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes et Reflexions Diverses. (Paris: GamierFlammarion, 1977), maxim 3, p. 45. (translation mine) 9 �None left but by submission; and that word Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame Among the spirits beneath, whom I seduc'd ... (4.79-83-emphasis mine) What is so terrible for Satan, so forbidding in this word disdain? Its primary meaning is to think unworthy of oneself, to despise or treat with scorn, 11 and Satan's sense of impairment, of his diminished status beneath both the Father and the Son of God, drives him not only to cut himself off from "Heav'n's free Love dealt equally to all"(4.68), but, as he confesses here, to seduce a third of his fellow angels from the allegiance and service they rightfully owe to God. In proposing to himself what it would mean to repent and obtain pardon, he can only imagine that his own "high thoughts" would soon prompt him "to unsay what feign'd submission swore" (4.95-96). Like Claudius in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Satan brings himself to the very threshold of repentance but in his great pain and anguish can sustain no firm purpose of amendment. In the painful course of this long deliberation on Niphates, Satan shows what Hume later on will assert in his Treatise, that "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." 12 And like Caesar, who ultimately casts aside his misgivings to cross the Rubicon and move on Rome to pursue empire and personal power, Satan rejects hope and contrition to embrace the evil that he calls his good, to win by deceit and hold by fraud "Divided Empire with Heav'n's King" over "this new World" (4.111-14). He comes to Eden as an "arch-felon" (4.179), a terrorist whose mind is set on the destruction of the blissful, sweet, newly created world that he can appreciate but not abide. "That fixt mind/ And high disdain"(l.97-98) that II 12 OED 1 David Hume, A Treatise ofHuman Nature, II,3. (Oxford, Clarendon Press,1968), p. 416. 10 �distinguish him from the outset of the poem persist through all his outward transformations: from stripling cherub to cormorant to toad and finally to "monstrous Serpent on his Belly prone/ reluctant"(l0.514-15) in Book Ten, the form he first takes on to deceive Eve but then finds himself stuck in when the explosion of hisses from his fallen angel followers, similarly and horribly and aptly transmogrified, greet him at the end of his triumphant return to Hell. In his fixity and self-professed unchangeableness, Satan distinguishes himself not only from the classical heroes of antiquity, but also from Adam and Eve, and the entire company of heaven loyal to the Father, including the Son of God. We need next to consider the last of these, for in looking at the Son of God and then comparing him with Satan, we can lay out the two extremes of transcendent heroism and unsurpassed villainy, the ultimate terms of the created order. It is important first to note that God the Father is "Omnipotent, Immutable, Immortal, Infinite, Eternal King," "Author of all being"(3.372-74), and "invisible amidst. .. glorious brightness" (3.375-376); while the Son, "the radiant image of his (the Father's) glory" (3.63) is the "Only begotten Son" (3.80), suggesting a being in essence different from the Father, 13 a unique and mutable creature, albeit the first-born of creation, in the relation to the Father of an inferior to a superior. 14 I apologize if this seems to be a needlessly abstruse digression on Milton's anti-Trinitarianism, but it helps to explain two features of Milton's presentation of the Council of Heaven in Book Three that most readers find strange, if not troubling. 13 John Milton, Christian Doctrine, trans. John Carey, vol.6, p. 210 from Complete Prose Works ofJohn Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953-1982). 14 Ibid., pp. 275-276. 11 �First, the Father and the Son are depicted there as having a conversation in the presence of the loyal angels, in which the Father, prompted by the sight of Satan winging his way towards Eden, tells the Son how the desperate revenge of Satan will pervert man through guile to fall, and goes on to explain how the mitigating factor of this deception warrants the mercy and justice that He will show man after the Fall. Orthodox Christian theology about the Trinity, with its formal profession of the unity of substance attributed to Father, Son, and Spirit, as formulated in the Nicene Creed, would most likely deter the poet from presenting such an exchange, but here the Son is a creature, though the first born and highest of all creation, and he learns in the presence of the angels what is hidden in the depths of his Father's foreknowledge. If the Son were to know everything by virtue of his own consubstantiality with the Father, this celestial conversation would take on the aspect of a strange court masque with the king and the crown prince as the principal players, or of a duo recital for the benefit of the angels -and us readers, something I don't think Milton means to do here, however strange we may find this scene to be. Second, as the sacred conversation continues, the Father explains that once man has fallen, with the vigor of his original goodness being "forfeit and enthrall'd"(3.176), justice demands that "He with his whole posterity must die" (3.209), adding ... unless for him Some other able, and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death. (3.210-12) This long exposition on the need for atonement for the sin of Adam and Eve culminates with the Father's hard, direct question addressed to the entire company of heaven: Say Heav'nly Powers, where shall we find such love, Which of ye will be mortal to redeem 12 �Man's mortal crime, and just th' unjust to save, Dwells in all Heaven charity so dear? (3.213-16) The silence that follows this question -"the Heav'nly Choir stood mute"(3.216)-is the most dramatic event in this scene up to this moment, until the Son of God offers himself as the proxy for disabled humanity, with the dramatic words Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life I offer, on mee let thine anger fall; Account mee man; I for his sake will leave Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee Freely put off, and for him lastly die Well pleas'd ... (3.236-40) Notice here that Milton differentiates the "mee" of the Son's dramatic offer by adding and extra "e" to the spelling, something he does elsewhere with the pronouns he, ye, and she, as if to simulate the emphasis Greek achieves with the accented or by adding the particles 817 or over the enclitic for additional stress; or like the use of moi as a stressed pronoun in French. Yet the Son's 'mee ... mee ... mee ... mee' is not the selfaggrandizing or vain-glorious egotism that we hear later from Satan, when discovered in the garden by the angel guards Ithuriel and Zephon, who do not recognize him, he asks: Know ye not then said Satan, fill' d with scorn Know ye not mee? ... Not to know mee argues yourselves unknown ... (4. 827-30) Rather, the Son's proposal is to empty himself of all that is rightfully his for the sake of mankind, which is the sacrifice of "glory ... freely put off... "(3.239-40) in the incarnation, and which necessarily entails his own death, so that his emphatic mee is a rhetorical 13 �measure both of the desperate condition of a fallen world and the heroic love of the Son for mortal man. 15 Moreover, the Son's words here echo those found in an incident related in Book Nine of the Aeneid, during the bitter war that erupts between Aeneas and the Rutulian prince Tumus for the hand of Lavinia, after the Trojans have landed in Italy. 16 Two Trojan soldiers, Nisus and Euryalus, are a devoted pair of lovers who set out from the besieged Trojan camp through enemy lines to gain help from Aeneas, who is away. Nisus, the older, cannier veteran of the two, hears the cry of Euryalus his innocent, spirited cohort, as he is caught by a Rutulian patrol after impulsively wrecking havoc in their camp. Nisus, in trying to deflect the avenging wrath of the Rutulians from his young comrade onto himself, cries out: On me-on me-here am I who did the deed-on me tum your steel, 0 Rutulians! Mine is all the guilt; he neither dared nor could have done aught; this heaven be witness and the all-seeing stars! He but loved his hapless friend too well! (Aeneid 9. 427-430) This cry of 'on me, on me ... mine is all the guilt' sets the poetic precedent for the Son's cry during the Council of Heaven, but there is a sense in which Milton, though writing his poem seventeen hundred years later, scoops Virgil by having the Son offer himself for all of fallen humanity shortly after the creation of the world. It can be seen, too, that the Son's magnanimity combines elements of the experience, generosity, and selflessness of Nisus with the innocence and beauty ofEuryalus, providing a standard of heroism that is 15 Stanley Fish calls this "the poem's first truly heroic act." Stanley Fish, Swprised by Sin. (Cambridge; Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), p.86. 16 Alastair Fowler also points out this echo in a note to 3.236-38, The Poems ofJohn Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London and New York: Longman, 1968), p. 574. Hereafter cited as Fowler. 14 �at once poignant and extraordinary, perhaps we might say transcendent. Whatever the case, the Son at this point emerges as the outstanding hero of the poem. In reading Paradise Lost for seminar in junior year, we completely skip over Book Six and nearly all of Book Seven, the very heart and center of Milton's poem, where Raphael recounts for Adam and Eve both the Son's aristeia in the Battle of Heaven against Satan, the central epic episode of the poem, and his work as the "Omnific Word"(7.217), effecting the will of the Father in Creation. We should note here that the exact center of the poem, whether we take the ten-book division of First Edition of 1671 or the twelve-book division of the Second Edition of 1674, with its additional fourteen lines, is placed at the climax of the Battle of Heaven in Book Six, when the Son appears in the "Chariot of Paternal Deity"(6.750) and single-handedly defeats the Satan and his cohort of fallen angels, who throw themselves headlong into the bottomless pit. 17 It should be needless to say that in a work of such length and complexity, it is doubtlessly significant, the result of great art and deliberateness, that the center is placed here. What then of Adam and Eve? We meet them before the Fall, in Book FourTwo of far nobler shape erect and tall, Godlike erect, with native Honor clad In naked Majesty ... Lords of all, .. .in their looks Divine The image of their glorious Maker shone (4.288-292) Despite their common heroic bearing and natural dominion over the garden, they are not equal: For contemplation hee and valor form'd, For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace, Hee for God only, shee for God in him (4.297-299) 17 The central line in Edition I occurs at 6.761; in Edition II at 6.766. Ibid., pp. 441-442; cp. Fowler,441-442 15 �'Valor' suggests the sort of strength and bravery that makes one equal to conflict and battle, while 'softness,' at least before the Fall, is simply meant to imply mildness and gentleness, 18 rather than weakness or timidity. 19 As in Heaven with the Father, the Son and the angels, so too in Paradise there is a hierarchical order, here expressed in Adam's "gentle sway"(4.309) and Eve's "coy-i.e., quiet, modest20 -submission"(4.311). In the first words we hear between the two of them, Adam marvels that they should enjoy freely such unmerited happiness, while following the "delightful task"(4.437) of tending the garden and obeying God's" easy charge"(4.421) -to refrain from eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Eve seconds this and claims herself the happier of the two in enjoying Adam's preeminence, something we tend to forget-or don't want to believe- in the course of her long account of first awakening on the day of her creation. Is it the case that such perfect harmony between the sexes, though without equality, is something that can only be imagined by a poet who claims to be the beneficiary of extraordinary inspiration? If we grant this for the sake of the poem, we might be tempted to think that the created world of Eden is simple and perfect and static, but this turns out not to be the case. The angel Raphael, sent by the Father to warn Adam of the danger that Satan presents to his happiness, first shares a meal with Adam and Eve, and in answer to Adam's question about how an angel can partake of earthly fruit, gives an account of a dynamic created order in which corporal nutriments, endowed with various forms, are· equally capable of nourishing different forms of life, which all having first proceeded 18 OED 2 OED 3 20 OED 1,2. 19 16 �from the Almighty are meant by degrees and over time to return to him. The importance of this for Adam and Eve is made explicit when Raphael continues: And from these corporal nutriments perhaps Your bodies may at last tum all to spirit, Improv' d by tract of time, and wing' d ascend Ethereal, as wee ... (5.496-499-emphasis mine)) Happiness takes time, may increase over time-indeed is meant to-yet the metaphysical and moral dynamics of the created order are such that each stage is capable of only so much and no more-Leibniz would say only so much at any given moment is compossible. This is what it means to eat right. Note, too, that the ascent is to the angelic order. Raphael then tells Adam and Eve that in time they ... may at choice Here or in Heav'nly Paradises dwell; If ye be found obedient, and retain Unalterably firm his love entire Whose progeny you are. (5.499-503) In this first of six warnings that Raphael gives Adam in the course of their long conversation, 21 he sets out clearly what is at stake in obedience and disobedience, suggesting the dynamic of growth that presupposes both a hierarchy of perfection and the continuity of unchangeable love. Later, in Book Seven, Raphael relates to Adam and Eve the conversation that the Father has with the Son just prior to creation. After characterizing Satan and the fallen angels as "Self-lost"(7.154)-a divine correction of Satan's earlier claim to be "self-begot, self-rais'd "(5.860), he proposes to create Another World, out of one man a Race Of men innumerable, there to dwell, Not here, till by degrees of merit rais'd They open to themselves at length the way Up hither, under long obedience tri'd, 21 The others are found at 6.897-912;7.542-547; 8.166-178;8.561-594;8.633-643. 17 �And Earth be chang'd to Heav'n and Heav'n to Earth, One Kingdom, Joy and Union without end. (7.155-161) In his final angelic admonition, the most succinct and the one given to Adam alone, Raphael says: Be strong, live happy, and love, but first of all Him whom to love is to obey, and keep His great command; take heed lest Passion sway Thy judgment to do aught, which else free Will Would not admit; thine and of all thy Sons The weal or woe in thee is plac't; beware. I in thy persevering shall rejoice, And all the Blest: stand fast; to stand or fall Free in thine own Arbitrement it lies. Perfet within, no outward aid require; And all temptation to transgress repel. (8. 633-643) 22 'Arbitrement' is the capacity to decide for oneself; in a word, free choice. The warning 23 ends with two imperatives: require, i.e., ask or demand as a right, no outward help; and resist any enticement to break the law set down. We can only infer from this that Adam and Eve are fully capable, self-sufficient, and perfect, so far as repelling any temptation to break the "sole command"(7.47) is concerned. We know even before we reach it that Eve and Adam will both fail the "trial. .. unsought"(9.366) that Adam realizes will come, indeed must come, and of which he warns Eve as she leaves him alone, in Book Nine. Just as Homer displays Achilles in single combat against Hector and Virgil presents Aeneas alone against Turnus, Milton, in the second great epic episode of the poem, presents Eve as protagonist alone against Satan, now incarnate in a "spirited sly snake"(9.613), endowed with speech, intent on her ruin. After Eve recovers from her amazement at hearing "Language pronounc't / By Tongue ofBrute"(9.553-4), she asks 22 23 OED 1 OED II.5 18 �the serpent how he became capable of speech, and he replies vaguely but enticingly, attributing his "strange alteration"(9.599) to eating the "fair Apples"(9.585) he found after coming by chance upon a "goodly Tree"(9.576) in the garden. She then follows him to the Tree of Knowledge, which she immediately recognizes as the one forbidden, telling the serpent that it is neither to be eaten nor touched, under pain of death. In reply Satan takes on the role of advocate for cosmic justice and human entitlement, like "some orator renowned/ In Athens or free Rome" (9 .670-71 ), and in what is to be his last speech in Paradise, he rises to an eloquence that appears to provide incontrovertible proof of the native virtue of the interdicted fruit, raising formidable arguments against its ban and for its wholesomeness. 24 The most compelling of these is based upon the simple specious proportion stating that-in eating the fruit-as change from serpent: change into serpent with logos:: change from man: change into god. 25 We know that this is specious from Raphael's discourse earlier and from our reading of Genesis-and also from our status as the hapless descendants of Eve, as 'the fruit of that forbidden tree.' The true proportion expressing the change that has taken place in Satan and is about to take place in Adam and Eve is: archangel : archangel ruin' d : : man : fallen man. Eve knows the first ratio of this second proportion from Raphael, but she believes she sees the evidence for the first ratio of the first transformation before her eyes and hears it in her ears. But she ignores the contradiction between the ultimate term of the first, satanic proportion-'god '-and Raphael's earlier discourse about the possibility of 24 Barbara Lewalski , in Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric ofLiterary Forms (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1985) note 43, p.357, states that the false analogies that Satan leads Eve to make are "evidently original with Milton." 25 cp. Fowler, note ix.710-12, p. 898. 19 �gradual, ordered ascent to the angelic order. Besides, it is noon, she is hungry, and the savory smell of the fruit beckons, so she pauses to deliberate, her private musings ultimately giving approval to what, for her, the serpent has proved. She first plucks the fruit "through expectation high/ of knowledge"(9. 789-90), and then, serpent-like, she greedily engorges it a far remove from her earlier rural repast (9.4) with Adam and Raphael, and she forgets Raphael's discourse on the natural and gradual improvement to be gained by eating in accord with the divine command. The effects of the fruit on Eve are immediately apparent: she worships the tree, praises experience as "Best guide"(9.807), speculates about whether God has seen what she has done, and then deliberates over whether or not to "keep the odds of Knowledge"(9.820) to herself by not sharing the fruit with Adam, to draw his love the more to her, now his equal, or better yet, his superior. Experience is not such an effective teacher, or so it seems. Eve's first impulse here is not to imitate her own experience of the serpent's apparent generosity. But second thoughts cause her to worry that if God has seen her, she will die alone, and Adam might re-wed, happily, a second Eve; fearful, jealous thoughts that prompt her to decide firmly that "Adam shall share .. .in bliss or woe."(9.831) The epic battle here lost by Eve is not one of "fabl'd Knights/ In Battles feign'd"(9.30-31) but one of words and will, and natural grace disregarded and abandoned. When Adam finds her at the Tree of Knowledge, Eve recounts what has happened but adds the lie that she did it all "chiefly" for him, and now she bids him to eat "Lest ... different degree/ disjoin us"(9.883-84). Adam's inward musings, like Eve's on the cusp of her Fall, show the paradoxical character of his decision: 20 �... how hast thou yielded to transgress The strict forbiddance, how to violate The sacred Fruit forbidd'n! some cursed fraud Of Enemy hath beguil'd thee, yet unknown, (9.902-905) Unlike Eve, however, Adam is not deluded by the seemingly miraculous transformation of the serpent, but just as he earlier gave irrefragable arguments for why they should not separate before, only to let Eve go off, he now abruptly adds: And mee with thee hath ruin'd, for with thee Certain my resolution is to Die; How can I live without thee ... ? (9.907-909) Another Eve could never repair the loss of the one who stands before him-or so he imagines- and "The Link ofNature"(9.914) that draws him to her also commands his inward assent, even as he hails her as "advent'rous Eve' (9.921). Well, what else might he do? He might recollect something he heard from Raphael. Earlier, when Raphael gave Adam and Eve the account of the Fall of the rebellious angels, he told them of the "dreadless Angel" (6.1) Abdiel, who in his efforts to dissuade Satan from his disastrous course urged him to "hast'n to appease/ Th'incensed Father, and th'incensed Son,/ while pardon may be found in time besought."(5.846-48) Adam no more recalls this exemplary advice than Aeneas remembers his duty to the gods and his Trojan countrymen while trysting with Dido during the royal hunt and storm outside of Carthage, 26 or Paris his combat oath when he beds down with Helen while Menelaus ranges the battlefield before Troy. 27 As Adam eats the fruit in "This happy trial of... Love" (9.975), Eve joins him, repeating her "former trespass" (9 .1006), and the two complete together "the mortal Sin / Original" (9.1003-4) in a kind of idolatrous, sacramental meal. The force of the fruit 26 27 Aeneid 4.129-172. Iliad 3.437-454 21 �quickly inflames carnal desire in them both, and they consummate the Fall with a gross coupling that has aspects of both rape and meretricious seduction; this "glorious trial of exceeding Love"(9.961), so hailed by Eve, culminates with the transient 'link oflust,' sealing their disobedience with sex as a second pagan sacrament. They lapse into a restless sleep and awaken to guilt shame, and estrangement that leads them to mutual recrimination, "neither self-condemning"(9. l 188). Each is now isolated and alone, though together, in Paradise. Later, after the Son is dispatched from heaven by the Father to apprise Adam 28 and Eve of the judgment against them and of the mysterious promise of the seed, thus 29 tempering Justice with mercy, Adam, now alone, laments what he can only see as "the end of this new glorious World"(9.721). With its one hundred twenty-four lines it is the longest and darkest soliloquy of the entire poem, wherein Adam, at the prospect of all future generations cursing him, wishes for death and submits to the justice of his punishment. In the end he acknowledges that all his reasonings .. .lead me still first and last conviction: own But to my On mee, mee only, as the source and spring Of all corruption, all the blame lights due; So might the wrath. Fond wish! Couldst thou support That burden heavier than the Earth to bear, Than all the world much heavier, though divided With that bad Woman (9.830-837) Recall the words ofNisus and the Son that we considered earlier, words of deep love and selfless heroism; it is difficult not to hear the stressed accusatives of Adam's words, in their despair at his impotence and in his contempt for Eve, as the 28 29 Paradise Lost l 0.179-181) Ibid., 77-79. 22 �dark inverse of those antecedents. When Eve approaches him, he upbraids her for being as false and hateful as the serpent. For her part, in profoundly moving, lyrical lines, she professes her love for Adam and begs for forgiveness with words that resonate with the promise of hope and restoration offered earlier by the Son: On me exercise not Thy hatred for this misery befall 'n On me already lost, mee than thyself More miserable; both have sinn'd, but thou Against God only, I against God and thee, And to the place of judgment will return, There with my cries importune Heaven, that all The sentence from thy head remov' d may light On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe, Mee mee only just object of his ire. (10. 927-936) Eve, in acknowledging her sin and pleading for Adam's forgiveness, first reaffirms the order established from the beginning of' Adam for God and she for God in him,' the created order that has been fractured by their sin. Then, perhaps remembering Abdiel's injunction to 'hast'n to appease/ Th'incensed Father, and th'incensed Son,' she resolves to go alone to the place where they both have received the divine judgment, to implore the divine mercy that Adam cannot even imagine, overwhelmed as he is by his hellishly dark vision of divine justice. In words that most nearly echo words of the Son to his the Father, 30 she offers to take upon herself the entire burden of guilt that Adam despairs even the two of them together can sustain. Her final words 'Mee mee only just object of his ire' correspond most nearly to the Son's as he says to the Father," .. .life for life/ I offer, on mee let thine anger fall." (3.236-237) Yet, while this offer is utterly, heroically 30 cf. Joseph Summers, The Muse's Method: an Introduction to Paradise Lost (Binghamton, New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1981), pp. 179-80. Summers rightly contrasts the Son's and Eve's use of the stressed accusative "mee" with Satan's use of"I," though we have seen that Satan uses the "mee" -to very different purpose-as well. 23 �generous, it stems from but one impulse among a host of conflicting emotions that Eve feels. Eve's heroism here is a nascent, fallen heroism. It nevertheless has its effect: Adam is moved slowly to relent in his anger and first advises Eve to bear her own punishment first, but he then imitates her generosity in wishing that all might fall upon himself, finally suggesting that their proper task is to "strive/ In offices of Love "(9.959-60) to lighten each other's burden of woe. Eve next proposes desperate measures-an end to sexual love between them, to render them childless, and joint suicide as a form of euthanasia-but Adam, perhaps reminded by Eve's earlier selfless impulse of the Son's promise that her seed will bruise the serpent's head, now urges what she had just before, that they both return to the place of judgment humbly to confess their faults in deepest sorrow, "with tears/ Watering the ground." (10.1101-1102) Significantly, the poet does not give us their words, but as Book Eleven opens, the prayers of Adam and Eve are received in heaven, where the Son renews his pledge to serve as advocate, and the Father dispatches the angel Michael with a cohort of cherubim to "send them forth, though sorrowing, yet in peace. "(11.117) To this end, the remaining two books of the poem are devoted to Michael's education of Adam, through a series of visions and lecture/ narratives in which he is shown the nature of death and the ultimate victory of the promised seed. There is not time enough now to consider the lengthy course that Michael gives Adam before the expulsion from the Garden of Eden; let it suffice here to notice Adam's response to what he learns: ,Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best, And love with fear the only God, to walk As in his presence, ever to observe His providence, and on him sole depend, 24 �Merciful over all his works, with good Still overcoming evil, and by small Accomplishing great things, by things deem' d weak Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise By simply meek; that suffering for Truth's sake Is fortitude to highest victory ... (12.561-570) With these final words, Adam seconds those of the poet earlier in his proem to Book Nine, where Milton holds up what he claims is "the better fortitude/ Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom"(9.31-32) as the proper subject for heroic song. Courage, bravery, and fortitude are what epic bards traditionally sing about; in Greek poetry, tharsos ((courage, confidence, boldness) and thrasos (courage, confidence, rashness), with andreia (manliness, strength, bravery) designating the word for this virtue that Plato and Aristotle use; in Latin poetry, virtus (manliness, virtue, bravery, courage) andfortitudo (physical strength, moral bravery, courage), in all three languages one of the four cardinal virtues. We saw the paradigm instance of this in Paradise Lost before, at the Council of Heaven, in the Son's volunteering to empty himself in order to redeem man, by taking on human flesh with all of its vulnerability and mortality after the fall, becoming small in order to accomplish great things. Adam has come to understand that obedience may ultimately demand the greater fortitude, from the heroic examples of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and preeminently, Messiah, all presented by Michael in his account of the career of the seed, steadfast despite the reversals brought about by Cain, Tubal-Cain, Nimrod, Pharaoh, and Rome-and ultimately by Satan, Sin and Death. 25 �Michael, in his final reply and last words in the poem, calls this "the sum/ Of wisdom"(12.575-76), higher than all earthly knowledge of the stars and "all Nature's 31 works" (12.578), as if to say with Pascal: Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance . Of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality Will always console me for ignorance of physical science. (23/67) It is not enough, however, merely to have such wisdom and knowledge; Michael continues: ... only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith Add Virtue, Patience, Temperance, add Love, By name to come call'd Charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A paradise within thee, happier far. (12. 581-87) 'Answerable,' i.e., responsible, knowledge shows itself in action, in deeds, as the fruit of this highest wisdom that Michael recognizes in Adam. Michael's words here follow almost exactly those found in 2 Peter 1. 5-8, except for the final verse, where Peter writes: For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. (KJV) Michael instead gently reminds Adam that he must leave Paradise the place, taking it with him as an inner state, as if to suggest that the fruitfulness of the Garden of Eden can be extended to wherever wisdom and the greater fortitude of acts of charity consonant with it are done. We can thus see how Michael's final words are equivalent to this verse from 2 Peter, as adapted to the circumstances of Adam, who has just been brought from 31 Pascal's Pensees, trans. Alban J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth, New York: Penguin Books, 1984) p. 36. 26 �despair at the loss of Paradise, a despair that prompted Eve to propose a deliberately 'unfruitful' barrenness, to the prospect of an even greater happiness that comes with possession of "a paradise within."(12.586) And what of Eve? She has slept through all of this, Michael having "drencht" her eyes with a soporific before his conversation with Adam began. At Michael's urging, Adam hastens to the bower where Eve has been sleeping, only to find her already awake, and advised by her dreams of all that he has learned, "For God is also in sleep."(12.611) Eve is given the last words quoted, as beautiful and lyrical as any in the poem: ... but now lead on; chiasmus In mee is no delay; with thee to go, go stay Is to stay here; without thee here to stay Is to go hence unwilling; thou to mee stay go Art all things under Heav'n, all places thou, Who for my willful crime art banisht hence. This further consolation yet secure I carry hence; though all by mee is lost, Such favor I unworthy am voutsaf t, By mee the Promis'd Seed shall all restore. (12. 614-623) Eve at once accepts and approves their banishment from Eden, and urges Adam to lead the way, thereby reversing their roles during the catastrophe of the Fall. The flowing iambic motion of"In mee is no delay; with thee to go," interrupted by the affectingly simple chiasmus that follows, with its stop-start alternation of"go ... stay ... stay ... go," convey both a sense of the restored order she professes in her relation to Adam and the incipient joy that she feels in the newly discovered " paradise within." Her words also both echo and anticipate the words of Ruth the Moabite woman to her Hebrew mother-inlaw Naomi as they set out from the security of Moab to return to Judah: 27 �... whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge ... Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried ... (Ruth 1.16-1 7) Eve's final lines indicate that she is at once "though sorrowing, yet in peace"(l 1.117), and her final two stressed accusative 'mees' reverberate with her earlier offer to take full responsibility for the Fall and with the Son's offer to save mankind, to the extent that the two almost seem here to merge in her final line 'By mee the Promis'd Seed shall all restore.' This is the last spoken line of the poem, but it is not the last that we hear. The final five lines, with their deeply touching image of Adam and Eve as they depart Paradise, show that they are now, again, together alone: Some natural tears they dropp'd, but wip'd them soon; The World was all before them, where to choose Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide; They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow Through Eden took thir solitary way. This penultimate word 'solitary' seems to be in tension with the 'hand in hand' of the line before, just as 'wand'ring' in that line is with 'place of rest' in the line before it. These tensions may strike us as both troubling and true, the very crux of the matter in an 'argument ... more heroic.' Thank you for your fortitude and attention. 28 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. 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Title A name given to the resource Argument Not Less But More Heroic: Milton's Advent'rous Song in Paradise Lost Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on February 11, 2005, by Thomas May as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource May, Thomas Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005-02-11 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Milton, John, 1608-1674. Paradise lost Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_May_Thomas_2005-02-11 Relation A related resource <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7879" title="Recording">Recording</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1d1ce748c39faa37a8b4de870d3fa0a7.mp3 1aef65c7ba3dcdc179fe5b04cec2aaed 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/. 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Title A name given to the resource Aristophanes' Birds : a city without Gods Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on February 3, 2017 by Michael Grenke as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grenke, Michael W. 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 2017-02-03 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 sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Aristophanes. Birds. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 20014363 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/50f23710ab61759c567a7fb8477afe9a.pdf f61d04b7862210970082476f1c0e3910 PDF Text Text ARISTOI'LE (An Int~oduction)* by Jacob Klein I Many, many years ago, I attended a series of lectures on Aristotle 1 s philosophy. The lecturer began his exposition as follows: "As regards Aristotle himself, as regards the circumstances and the course of his life, suffice it to say: life in philosophizing, and died"• most appropriate: Aristotle was born, spent his This beginning seemed to me !~ for Aristotle means to us, indeed, nothing but what we know of him, or fancy we know of him, as of a man engaged in that extrav@gant enterprise which, since Pythagoras (aecording to the tradition), has borne the name of "Philosophy". There is a difficulty, though. Whenever we try to understand what Aristotle is saying, we st11GD.ble upon something that we simply cannot ignore, and that is that his words bring up the words of another man who was his teacher and bore the name of Plato. There is no alternative: we have to face that peculiar circumstance in Aristotle's life. It is pretty certain that, at the age of 17 or 18, Aristotle joined the community founded by Plato outs~de the walls of Athens and called (from i t s geographical location) the Academy. He stayed there until Flato died, that is, for about 20 years (367 • 347). following 13 years he taught ~or In the a while in Asia Minor and was invited to tutor a young Macedonian prince who later became lmown as Alexander the Great. In 334 he returned to Athens and established, again outside the walls of the city, a spot of leisure, that is of study, called the LycetlDl. Not being a citizen of Athens, he could not own this place. He mer ely t aught there. About a year before he died, it pleased the *Enlarged version of a Formal Lecture delivered April 20, 1962 �- 2 - city of Athens to accuse him of impiety, that is, of undermining the city's life. Aristotle decided to leave Attica rather than stand trial. He is supposed to have said on that occasion that he did not want the Athenians to commit a crime against Philosophy for the second time. !!El£ Born in Stagira (Thrace) 384 (with approximate dates) Academy 367 - 347 '--· -----;----' 20 Lyceum Death 334 - 323 322 Abroad 347 - 334 '----,,.---·' 13 ·- -- y - - - ' 11 Now, if we look at what is known as The Works of Aristotle, we cannot help being amazed by both their bulk and their diversity. These works have come down to us in nearly the same condition in which they were edited by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century B. c. There are all kinds of stories concerning the way they came to be edited. shall omit them. I We do know, at any rate, that this edition did not contain a series of other works attributed to Aristotle and not available to-day, except for the book entitled "The Athenian Constitution" the text of which was found in 1880. Above all, that edition did not contain - and was not supposed to contain - a series of genuine works Of l:ristotle, Dialogues, Epistles, and also compositions in verse, already published and well known in antiquity. fragments of them. We possess only a few As to the body of Aristotelian works available to us, it consists, beyond any doubt, of some of the material directly related to the lecturing and studying which went on at the Lyceum and presumably also at other places where Aristotle taught. Parts of that material are lectures or treatises composed with great care; but other parts are more or less loosely conjoined treatments of topical themes, �notes, perhaps mer~ compositions. There are, on the one hand, different and sometimes abstracts from, or comments on, more original irreconcilable versions of one and the same theme, and, on the other hand, identical passages re-occurring in different contexts. You have a sheet detailing the body of Aristotelian Teaching as it has come down to us since its publication by Andronicus of Rhodes. (Some of the listed works are of doubtful authenticity ••• ; some are incomplete ••• ) It seems not unimportant to note that all these writings, the listed ones as well as the lost ones, can hardly have been produced in the 11 years of the Lyceum period, during which short period, incidentally, Alexander succeeded in conquering a world. The writings con- cerning the classification, the physiology and anatomy of animals alone must have required many, many years of study and observation on the part of quite a few people. It is even doubtful whether the tremendous effort to which the extant Aristotelian writings as well as the titles of the lost ones testify can be thought of as confined within the limits of the 24 year period between 347 and 323. It seems more reasonable to conceive of that effort as having begun in the Academy period, long before Plato's death. We have indeed, some evidence to that effect. It is undeniable, furthermore, that Aristotle and those who assisted him in his work utilized studies made before Plnto's days. But it is still true that everything we read in that collcctio n of Aristotelian writings bears an unmistakable stamp: terms in which it is written. the language and the peculiar lfuB.tever the degree of incoherence or coherence in the body of Aristotelian writings, their language has always the same characteristic mould. And, what is more, the shadow of Plato is always perceivable in them. �As you undoubtedly know, classical scholarship, in the last 150 years, has concentrated on the task of finding the correct chronological sequence of the Platonic dialogues. brought to a more or less successful end. This task has indeed been Let us not forget, however: it is one thing to establish the chronological order of the dialogues and quite another to understand what they are about, what they repre• sent, what they say and do not say, and why they do so. To interpret the chronology of the dialogues as mirroring the development of Plato's own thinking - even under the assumption that such a development did actually occur - is a sign of considerable naivete or of no less considerable rashness. More recently, the attempt has been made to construetthc development of Aristotle's thinking and to distinguish a so-called "Platonic period" in Aristotle's life from a post-Platonic and finally an anti-Platonic phase. Granted that !1ristotle's thinking must have had a history, granted that what we call his philosophy did not spring out of him as Pallas il.thena did out of Zeus' forehead, the evidence presented by his work, fragments and all, is far from sufficient for establishing and delineating with any degree of accuracy such stages of his thought. Two things, however, are overwhelmingly clear: 1) the basic postulates of I ristotle's thinking are to be found in what we conceive to be Platonic - and Socratic - philosophizing; 2) there is an unshakable unwillingness on Aristotle's part to follow Plato's lead in certain crucial respects. It is safe to say, I think, that fristotle's relation to Plato is a supreme example of the true pupil-teacher relationship: the pupil's unswerving loyalty to his teacher manifests itself in the pupil's commitment to Truth, even if that commitment makes the pupil reject the teacher's teaching. Let us hear Aristotle �- 5 - himself on that subject. About to begin an investigation into what is meant when people talk about "The Good", Aristotle remarks that such an investigation is ''distasteful" to him because it involves "men dear to him" ( qdA.o t. avbp E g who introduced the doctrine of "ideas" (i;?x €Lbfl ), that is - to use the Latin term - the doctrine of "species", or - to use the equivalent English term - the doctrine of "looks". on to say: These men are Plato and his followers. Aristotle goes "But - for those pursuing philosophy, at least - it would seem that it is probably better and, to safeguard the truth, even necessary to go against the grain; for, beth one's friends~ the truth,, being dear to one, it is right and proper to give greater honour to truth". "friends" (cp O.o 1. The companions in the .Academy called themselves )• In an Elegy, a fragment of which has been pre- served, Aristotle speaks of an altar dedicated to "holy Friendship" and unmistakably refers to Plato (without naming him) as to a "man whom even to praise bad men have no right". Let us, then, keep in mind this exam.plary relation of Aristotle, the pupil, to Plato, the teacher, in trying to understand Aristotle's own way. II It would be ridiculous, you will agree, to try to encompass, in a lecture like this one, the sum total of Aristotle's philosophy. All I can do is to point to • I should rather say, to hint at • some of the fundamental features of this vast edifice. Let me first put up a somewhat simplified table of .Aristotle's main themes indicated by the following terms: �- 6 cpt10'LG 'td( L {; (nature) -t:w~ (life) cxv9pwn:o~ - 'tl!XVf} •. A.dyoG. (soul) -vou<; ( •••• ) (order) -xcfoµo<; {world) i (man) (art) ( •••• ) None of these terms is specifically "Aristotelian". They are Greek words commonly used in a somewhat confused and ambiguous way. In Aristotle they acquire - to a large degree - an uncommon and unambiguous significance. Let us look at them. Unavoidably, we have to begin with A.dyo£ • The principal and rt/ inext±guishable meaning of this word is speech. We mean by speech ( - you, and I, and everybody - ) a sequence of sounds uttered by somebody in such a way as to be understandable to others. The verb "to understand" refers primarily - if not uniquely - to speech. Hearing somebody speak, we may say: I understand what you are saying, We may, in fact, misunderstand, but even misunderstanding involves understanding. But ~ do we understand in hearing somebody speak? Not the sounds by themselves, the audible and articulated, low and high pitched noises issuing from somebody's mouth (or some machine, for that matter). We hear these noises. But hearing is not understan• dl.ng. That's why we do not understand speech in a foreign tongue. In a manner which, itself, is hardly or not at all understandable, the sounds carry with them - or embody - or represent - something else, precisely that which makes us understand, whenever we understand. This source and target of our understanding consists of units, to which single "words" correspond, as well as of combinations of those units, to which whole sequences of "words" correspond. The speaker and the hearer share - or, at least, intend to share - the understanding of those units and of those combinations of units. transposes what he ~ The speaker into sounding words and the hearer who under- �stands reverses that process in reaching back to the intended meaning. The intenc1.ed meaning is what the Greeks call "Ch VOf}"tdV, its single units are theVOf}"tcf (VOTJ"Cc.5Vbeing a verbal adjective Of VOELV ). Speech and Understanding are inseparable. Aoyor;, .neans inseparably both: speech and that which can be and is being understood,!!! speech. It is in man "nd through~ (~v8pwn:OG ) thnt>-.~o; manifests itself conspicuously, so much so that Aristotle is able to say: .man is a living being possessing speech, and that means possessing the ability to ~ders~ the spoken word ( ~cpov >-.oyov exov). But what does speech "bespeak"? The answer is: everything man is familiar with - the sky and the earth, the rivers and the sea, the living beings around him, on land, in water, in the air - the things he himself builds and produces as well ~s the tools and appurtenances that his arts and skills require to produce those things • and furthermore the lmowledge that guides his arts and skills, not only to satisfy his most elementary needs but also to establish customs and institutions in which his life flows from generation to generation, in m:i.sery or happiness, in friendship or enmity, in praise or bla111e, and to which customs and institutions he is attached beyond his most pressing wants. That's what his speech and his understanding are mostly about. I just said: n ••• are ~"· tfuat a loose way of speakingJ Speech and the understanding that goes into it and can be gotten out of it are not just "about" something. To be sure, we can choose a theme and talk about it, circumscribe it, beat about the bush. But what we say, however circuitously or confusedly or loosely, is said in words and sentences each of which conveys immediate meaning. The ~ cannot help moving in the medium of the immediately understandable. To be sure, words and sentences can be involuntarily or deliberately �-sambiguous. But they can be that only because they carry with them several distinct meanings which, separately, are clearly understood. To be sure, speech can be obscure. But it can be obscure only because the clarity of some of its parts impinges or seems to impinge upon the clarity of others. Speech, then, presents to the understanding of the listener what the speaker himself understands. but combinations of ~1l!tcf • It presents to the listener nothing In doing that, however, speech "bespeaks" all the things and all the properties of things that abound around us, all the special circumstances and situations in which we find ourselves. The question arises: do the \IOf}'t"d presented to us in speech stem from the speaker, whoever he might be, or do they stem from the things and circumstances spoken of? Does not any human speech translate the language of the things themselves? Let me turn for a moment to the way the things around us are referred to in more recent times, in the 17th century. words: "The Descartes: Harvey: ~ of Nature is written in mathematical characters". "The science contained in the great boo15 of the world". "The consulted". In Galileo's ~ of Nature lies open before us ~nd can be easily The phrase "book of Nature" is a metaphor, to be sure, but why was this metaphor chosen by so many authors? Is it not because Nature is here understood as something that can be read, read like a book, provided we know how to read it? What have we been doing ever since but reading and decoding the book of Nature? indeed imply a language which is nature's own? But does not that Francis Bacon was of the opinion that Nature is subtly secretive, full of riddles, Sphinxlike. But secrets can be revealed, riddles can be solved - in words. We persist, as you can read every day, in solving the "riddles of �- 9 - nature". In ancient times, the language of all that exists around us is taken mudh more directly (I was about to say: in a much more literal sense) as a spoken language, a language not written, yet visible, and if not visible, one to be guessed at. Human speech seems indeed to translate that visible or invisible language of things into the audible language of words. find just as the sound of human .s peech can be traced down to its ultimate components to which the letters of the alphabet correspond, things around us can be de-composed into their first rudinents, the "elements", the original letters of the language of things, as it were. Our speech, even our unguarded colloquial way of speakinc, may reveal to the attentive listener the hidden articulations of the language of things, Aristotle • no less than Plato - is always bent on fallowing- up casually spoken words. No doubt, speech can deliberately deceive us, distort and falsify the truth of thingso The fireworks of the Sophists, for example, - and there are always sophists around - make things anq relations of things assume a most unexpected, dazzling and puzzling aspect: suddenly apoear not to be what they are. things But who is doing the lying - if it be lying -, the sophists or the things themselves? A critique of speecht a critical inquisition into speaking and arguing has to be undertaken - as it was undertaken by Parmenides - by Prodicus - by Plato - by Aristotle. follows: The result of this critique can be stated as to speak does not always mean to make thinfS appear in their true light. For Aristotle, only one kind of speech, ~;,>,,&yob ~nocpa'\! 't (.X"b' the declaratory and revealing speecht translates or interprets the language of things. To be able to use this kind of speech requires a discipl!!.1..!:., the discipline of the >..dyoG • Everywhere in Aristotle's work one senses, to the annoyance of some and to the delight of others, �- 10 - the effectiveness of that discipline, the effectiveness of what we call the "Logic" of Aristotle. It is this emphasis on the >..dyo£, the A.dyo£ &'ltocpa v-r t xd~, which made Aristotle the great teacher through the centuries. this respect he is as much a ·pupil·· as a teacher. But in We have a significant passage in Plato's work which indicates that rather clear- ly. I mean the passare in the f~ where Plato makes Socrates meet Cebes' crucial objection concerning the deathlessness of the soul, Here, Socrates, after - silently - looking back into himself for quite a while, reaches - in speaking - far back into his own youth. He wanted very much, he reports, to find out, with regard to any single thing or occurrence, what was responsible for its coming into being, its passing away, its being the way it was. satisfactory answers. But he could not find any Nor could he learn thera from anybody else, not even from the great Anaxagoras. He had to abanc1on the way in which questions like the ones he was asking were dealt with in the various versions of the "inquiry into nature" or the "story of nature" ('JtEp\ cpl!crnwi; ten op 'a ) • He decided to embark upon a different journey, his second journey, his "next best try" ( bet5-rEpoi; TIA.oui; i'Jt\ 't~V 't~G a l-i; fob ~ rf'tflO't.V). This is the presentation he makes of his new endeavor. By looking directly at whatever presents itself in our familiar world, at things and their properties, at human affa irs ancl. actions, we run the risk of being blinded as people do who observe the sun during an eclipse if they do not l ook at its image on s ome w0tery surface. That nmy well have happened to thos e investigators of nature. To avoicl. being "blinded", Socrates thought he had to "take r efuge in spoken words" ( € (£ 'tO~ £ A.dyou i; xa-racpuydVL~~ in exchanging questions and answers with himself and wi th others, and in ~ search for the �- 11 - truth of thinr s • What Socrates implies is that the reasons for things being as they are and the truth about those thinfs are to be found in the spoken - or, for that matter; ~ilcnt - words and the \IOfJ'td they embody. That is not to say, Socrates warns, that the example of the sun, which can only be looked at through its image, is applicable here: if one compares a man who investigates things in words with one who investigates them directly, the former can hardly be said to be more concernecl with images than the latter. On the contrary, we surmise, it is the former who sees things as mere images or copies of genuine originals, ~a~ely of the VOfJ'td revealed to us in speech, in spite of the widespread opinion that "mere" words and their meanings at best mirror and usually do nothing but distort what we call "reality". "Reality" is an anglicized queer Latin term, the more adequate, if barbaric, English translation of which is "thinghood"• - It is safe to say, I think, that in one respect at least, . Aristotelian philosophy consists in the execution of that Socratic program. It is in speech, in searching for and finding adequate words, that the A.~yo{; of things, the A.dyoG of nature ( cpuO't{; audible and capable of being understood. ) becomes That's what constitutes the characteristic mould of Aristotelian language I referred to earlier. It is an unfortumite, if perhaps not surprising, historical accident that Aristotle's vocabulary acquired immeasurable weight and a fetishlike character in its Latin rendering perpetuated in almost all modern tongues. It is perhaps no exaggeration to state that something like three quarters of all existing scientific and philosophic terminology is either determined by Aristotle's latinized vocabulary or .can be traced back to it. Quite a few ti.mes in the past a revulsion against �... 12 .. that gibberish set in, We witness some of it to-day, of .Aristotelian terms endures: But the impact our corimon daily language bears witness to that.• On the other hand, Aristotle's execution of the Socratic program entails at least five interrelated modifications of some of the crucial Socratic-Platonic postulates, In trying to speak about this other aspect of Aristotelian philosophy, I shall have to consider some of the other terms in the table I put up .• Ill Socrates, in the Phaedo decided, as he said, to take refuge in spoken worc1s in order to fi~1d that m ich is responsible for any single thing or occurrence coming into being, passing away, being the way it is, The phrase character of the 0 to be responsible for•••" describes the at'tta presented to our understanding in speech, '\>Of"J'tcf Aristotle firmly holds to this view, The V'OT)'tcf are the £ rt:if) , the species, the invisible looks, on which the existence of things depends, They provide us with true answers to the question: why do things come into being, why do they pass away, why are they as they are, But the way of their having that responsibility is, according to Aristotle, not made sufficiently clear by Plato and those who follow Plato. sense has a VOfl'tdv, an that a VOfl'tdV 1 an sists. € € tbOG being? rboG 11 is 11 ? In what What docs it mean to assert The Socratic w2y of questioning per- But Aristotle's answer brings the first decisive modification of the Socratic-Platonic view. Wh'1 t Aristotle has to say about his controversy concer ning the objects of mathematical scienc es is also applicable to his controversy concerning the will not deny thnt they ~ being" ( oµ, n:cp ' L i;ou- 7 E: Lb~ : "The dispute but will be about the manner of their € L va 1., , ' ' \. a}.,,)\a nep ' 1. 't'OU- 'tp01t?O.A The l)hrase �- 13 "manner of being" will be gradually clarified, I hope, as I proceed with this lecture. The manner of being of an e {cob is that it is al together "at work" (the Greek neuter adjective is ~vepydv), that is: ~.2!· ~work £.!ght Its being can, therefore, be characterized as Jvf!pyE La. not certain whether Aristotle coined this term. It is But whether he did or not, it belongs to him as intimately as our skin belongs to our body. The being-at-work of an £ ro0£makes it responsible for the work done. -How it is done, what that responsibility entails, . is a complex matter. For the work of the £ tbob is not done by the Et~6~1:he way our hnnds, for example, do their work (although Aristotle, on one occasion, compares the functioning of the soul to that of a hand). to come back to that point after a while. I shall have What is most noteworthy about "being-at-work'' is that there has to be something else, that namely which is being worked on. This other something has to be capable of being worked on, that is to say, its character must be that of a suitable material, as wood or timber is suitable material for the work a carpenter has to perform. The chara~eristic name of that suitable mat erial is uA.ti (actually derived from the Greek word for "wood"). Its manner of beinr: consists in nothing but in its ability to play that role. Its manner of beinr is ot!vaµ Lb • Nothing, I re- peat, nothing is ~"-fl except in relation to work it is subjected to, that is, in relation to an bricks. Iron is iron. ~vtpyE La. Wood is wood. Bricks are Wood can be called a material only with regard to some operntion to be performed on it, an operation that woulcl tranl!form it, say, into a table-. 'Where do we get an inkling of the work involving£ rcob and and their respective manners of being? ~"-ti The Aristotelian answer is: in the conspicuous phenomenon of generation~ of y~VE<1L~of "coming to �-14 - be"• I mean the phenomenon, ever present before our eyes, of produc- tion and re-production, of generation and re-generation. Men generate men, cats generate cats, birds generate birds, fishes generate fishes; there are always young ones playing about; and this quite independently of any possible evolution stretched out over an exceedingly lonr period of time. Flowers and grass appear in the Sprinr, disappear in the Winter, only to reappear the next Spring; trees bud, then blossom and grow fruit, and fruit produces seeds, and seeds grow again into plants; every morning the stm. rises, every year Spring is born anew; and even moisture con0enses into clouds which in turn produce water apain. That's what the word ylve0'1.~ becoming; the thinr,s which are implies: it means both coming.!.£ fener~ted are all things The old myths tell this story over and over genesis is the very soul of any myth. story of its genesis has to be told. of their genesis has to be told. subjects of any myth. ~gain. E!!. an<l !£ rn· In fact, To understand the world the To understand the gods the story Cosmogony and Theogony are the primary To understand properly any event in human life, or the character of a people, or a city, this event and this character has always to be related, it seems, to its mythical oririns. To tell the myth of something means to tell how this something came to be. An enterprise of this kind does not make much sense unless one relates everything ultimately to beginnings which make any genesis possible. These are precisely the mythical origins. these two elements: They contain, of necessity, the Male and the Female. And however distant the sobriety of Aristotle is from the exuberance of those ancient tales, still the same aspect of the world as a chain or as cycles of reneration dominates his thought. One great and prime exar.iple of generation is the generation of livint- beings, of animals. 1i.ristotle does not assume that all �- 15 .. generation requires the separate existence of the male and the female; he !mows that i11 some cases it is very difficult to attribute the role of the male or of the female to any part 0f the generating process. But on the whole, the male and the female are distinct. This, then, is how Aristotle describes the process of' reneration in those cases in which he thinks that the male animal emits semen. ''!tlther the male .!!£!: the female emits seI:Ien £!!to~~~' they both dep0sit together what they have to contribute .!!! ~ but female, because in the female there is the material (~X.fl ) out of llhich that which is beinr- fashioned is maO.e" • 01')µ1.oupyotfµevov san, a craftsmen, a (Aristotle uses the word , which means that which is worked on by an arti~f)µt.oupydb ) "• •• Hence, of necessity, in the female that parturition takes place. it is For the carpenter is close by his wood and the potter close by his clay, and, in general, the working on the material and the last motion which acts upon it is close by the material; for instnnce, housebuilding takes place at the houses which are beiilf built. These instances may help us to under- stanc how the male makes its contribution to generation; f or not every male einits semen, ano in the case of those which do, this semen is not a part of the embryo as it develops. In the same way, nothinr passes from the carpenter into the pieces of wood which are his material, and there is no part of the art of carpentry present in the object which is being fashioned; it is the visible shape and the f 0rm (~ µ.opq>lf xa\ 't~ er bO£ )which pass from the carpenter and which come to be in the material by means of the movement that fh i::; carpenter execates. It is his soul, wherein is the form (i;b etbo£), and his knowledge which move his hands or some -0ther part of his body in a particular way (different ways for different products and always the same way for �- 16 - any one product); his hands move his tools, and his tools move the material (~X.fl ). ~ ~ }!!milar way, Nature, acting in the male of semen-emitting animals, uses this semen as a tool, as something that, by virtt1e of being !!!, .!!£!:! ( 'VEpye t~ ), has movement; just as when art, the tools are in movement because the movement which belongs to objects are being produced by any art is, in a way, in them"• The embryology implied in this passage as well as throughout J~ristotle's work is faulty. We know much more about the mechanism of fertilization than he could have possibly (We should not forget, knO't.ll• though, how incomplete this our knowledge is.) But there are elements in this description which are quite inaependent of any embryology. Let me first restate what I have just quoted in a more technical way. The material factor o;f generation is represented by what the female contributes to the embryo. It is the ~hfl • The motion which works on that material is the motion of the semen that is emitted by the male animal, and its semen corresponds to the caroenter's tools. But what, in generation, corresponds to the table that the carpenter, as we say, hns in mind, and furthermore, to the purpose that determines the looks of the table? It is Nature, qn.fo· LS, on which the motions of the male animal and of its semen ultimately depend. It is cpt!crt.c; which provokes in the living being the urge to generate:epws, desire, overpowers the living being. And that is how life ( l'.;w1'f) is perpetuated for ever. This process shows the double aspect of what we call Nature, cp\!a LS (which term is derived from the verb q>'1w meaning beget, en• gender, generate): .I cpu~qnust 'I be under.stood as £t.l:>oc; It shares in both, in ~vf!pye La~ l>'5vaµt.G • u'\ ~as U/\fl • But it is of utmost importance to Aristotle - and to us who are trying to understand Aristotle's thought - that ! v~pyE La (and, therefore, any s t~o~) �- 17 - outweighs its correla'ie bt1vaµq;(and, therefore, any nificance, in rank, in manner of being. u"-11> in sig- Aristotl.e devotes an entire book (Book 0 of the Metaphysics) ahowin·g the "priority" of !vtpye La The famous clich~ question: over l)\1vaµ t.b. what comes first, the chicken or the egg? is no puzzle to Aristotle. The chicken - I should say more precisely, the rooster - very definitely comes first. But this "coming first" has nothing to do with any sequence of time. "Coming first" means to be 11 first" in weight, in dignity, in efficacy, - in the ladder and order of being. We shall see in a moment what ultiniate consequences Aristotle derives from this priority. Aristotle's emphasis on generation carries with it the second decisive modification of the Socratic-Platonic view. The 'I £ t.bo~ is perpetually "at work", is perpetually lv£pyS'Cf , without ever undergoing any change. It is efficacious _!!! the ever changing bodies of living beings, as it is effective in the motions of celestial bodies and also - but only analogously so - in the customs and institutions of men. No need, therefore, to assign to the e; rof) a "separate" existence, no need to characterize their manner of being as one of "separation''()(wp t.CJµds ). Their purity and eternity is not affected by all the changes they are responsible fer. duplicate the world. The things around us . th i ngs has "being", has , l a, OUO' . an is There is no need to ~' • ' a. C>O<J each one of those But each thing derives its being, its ofla(a , from the ~vtpye Let of its £ {bo~ • Each thing as has being only inasmuch/it is the manifestation of the its ., E \.OOG • I am because I am "man". Brown is because it is "£!!.!"• ~vlpye; t.a of The cat that belongs to Mrs • The tiger who, this year, April first, ate a man in India, is because he is "tiJ?er".. Much more important than the ~"-11' out of which I and the cat and the tiger are built, is, �• 18 - in each case, the e{bo~ that determines the growth of our bodies, that holds the body together as a unit, that makes us act the way we do. The priority of Jvipye La over b\fvaµ LG manifests itself con- spicuously in the preponderance of what is 0 at work" over what is being worked on, in the preponderance which, in the ways of Nature, the ., e LOO{; has over the u t>~T}. And let us not forget: e tt>oc;; presented to our understanding in speech, - -r:b it is the very e {cob i:b • IV If the world need not t 1-,us be duplicated, there is indeed another duplication, an unavoidable one, which - ultimately perhaps - threatens the integrity of /lristotle' s philosophizing, - the bifurcation of the direction in which the £ {boC- "works". For it is remarkablet most ., remarkable, I should say, that the role of the £ t.ooc;; in the process of generation is repeated in the process of understanding. '1 e L bOG The same which presides over the generation, the growth and the suste: ... nanee of living beings makes us sustenance. ill~ this !!eneration, growth and We, men, - and apparently in varying degrees all living beings - are able to perceive what is around us. We have the capacity, the ability, the faculty, the power, the bdvaµ t.G, of receiving information (as we say in typical Aristotelian fashion) about so much that surrounds us. Leaving aside our cousins, the animals, we men see and hear and sraell and taste and perceive by touch and furthermore understand and lmow quite a few things. and understand are ultinately the That which makes us perceive sll>TJ • Each of us as a µerce:lr ving and understanding beinp- is said to have a soul ( 1'>\)X11 ), the function - the proper work - the af!(f:IJ of which is not only to sustain our life but also to enable us to sense and to understand beyond what �.. 19 - is necessary for our living. The ability to sense, that is the ability to be affected bodily by bodies around us, is called the power of ') (or 'tb a\.0'8fJ'tLxc1v), the ability to be affected by the ala9dvecr0aL is called the power of voetv VOT}'tcf (or A \IOUG). With respect to what we perceive and ttnderstand, with respect to the a L0'9fl"td and , these powers have a manner of being similar to the manner ., of being the material, the u"-ri , of a thing has with respect to the ., E l.bO~ , the species, the invisible looks of that thing. Let me try to describe these philosophical jargon. ~owers by avoiding all latter-day Consider • and reflect upon - the phenomena of sensing and understanding with which we are all familiar. Put aside the picture of something, as we say, uin" us that we call "mind", a sort of closed container or box. What characterizes us inasmuch as we are able to perceive and to understand is our being awake. The state of wakefulness ( lypt1yopa q; ) has its degrees, as we all lmow. We can be drowsy and half-asleep. on around us. ·we can be inattentive to what goes But as long as we are not fully asleep we are awake, and we know that we are. (The fact that we might dream that we are awake does not refute that knowledge but confirms it. How else could sleep~) 'Ibis state and we distinguish wakefulness from dream even in manner of being is a state in which we are not closed up but .2E.!:!!• Wakefulness is openness, • the very openness of a huge open door. It is !!£!. a state of activity but rather a state of preparedness, of alertness. - \IOU£ .TI!!! .. or voe l. \I state or manner of being is co.mm.only called in Greek • It is a manner of being which corresponds to the ., manner of being of any material, any U~f}, and, like the latter, it is only conceivable in relation to what transforms it into a finished product. This transformation and information is brought about by we sense and by ~we understand. .!h!!! The transformation and information �- 20 - being completed, we are~ with what we perceive, understand, know. It is not we, in our state of wakefulness, who grasp, actively, something that is prepared to be grasped. On the contrary, we, in our state of preparedness, ar e being grasped, moulded, f or ned by what is at work, by the iv~ ~a Of the " £I.Of} , sometimes, nay, mostly, through the intermediary of our s ensinr power. In our sensing we are not one with the natural thing perceived but with what works on our sensing ., £LOO~ power, with what Aristotle calls, quite consistently, the Cit 0'0f}'tdV • The relation of the E to fl a'lcr0f]'trlto the £ t~ comparable to the relation of the sounds ~ V01'1 'tcf is in speech to what we The e'Co11 afo011'td constitute, one might say, the understand in speech. very l anguage of thi np,s tha t affects our wak inp souls. The process of understanding , the process of ga ining a n insirht is, in Aristotle's eyes, ~a proce ss of begetting and generating. The o\fvaµL£Of any "natural" material, a ny ~X.1"} qn.>0'1.xtf , is here repla ced hy the s oul's capability ~f being awa~e and of reeeiV:int;. This capability include s both the capability of sensh"lg (a l0'9dvecr9a L ) and the c apability of being informed by the VOf'}'tcf • 'We are commonly not aware of this capability as such, since it cannot subsist all by itself, cannot subsist without being worked on. The closest we can come to observing it is t o l ook into the eye s of very sm"lll children. This Aristot el ian understandinr of th e proc e ss of understa nding in our souls brinps Platonic view. a third decisive dcpnrture fr om the Socratic- Since sensing- , not unlike spee ch, ma ke s us the material worked on by the £ u1.01"} 1tAOU~ , it is i mportant to r ev ert to th e , the first j our ney tha t Socrat es, in the wa ~rs Pha~do, 1tpwrro~ clai ms to in which one is ma ster ed by the h av e given up. Ther e are t wo E tbfl VOfl'td : on e is the way of the °Adyo~ , the way of speak ing and understanding, the wa y of bringing together, in our understanding , the �- 21 - vo~~d presented to us in speech, the way of the syl-logismos; there is another, in which our teachers bring us face to face with the things to be understood. This latter way is called l'Itaywy~ • The term "induction" is an exact translation Of the Greek word but has come to mean something quite different. on our being affected, thro~gh thing, by .its e {~ob • 1 The efficacy of an ~'Itaywy~ rests the observable sensible features of a 1 ttaywy" does not necessarily require many ' and varied experiences or observations. Cne case might be sufficient. But a mere glance at the titles of all the Aristotelian (and pseudo• Aristotelian) writings shows how intent Aristotle must have been on engaging in protracted observations, on listing all kinds of observable phenomena and on collecting information from all possible sources. v This activity, however, is altogether auxiliary. It serves the great and awe-inspiring goal of giving a nearly complete account of the world as a whole. This may be reckoned as the fourth radical de• parture from the Socratic-Platonic view. For Plato, it seems, did not believe it possible to reach that goal, although the philosophical enterprise he was engaged in, in its extravagance and divine immoderation, indeed demands that our efforts to reach it never cease. Aristotle undertook to satisfy that demand once arrl for nll. Only a few after him made such an attempt. The term "world" or x~aµob - in Greek as well as in English - does not mean - and never meant - simply the swn tot al of all existing things. It means r ather the peculiar way in which diverse parts are suitably arranged to form~~£ or, as we say, a "universe". An account of the wholeness of all that is implies of necessity an account of the intrinsic order ( ~cf~ Lb ) which makes the whole a whole. An �- 22 - account of this kind is what is called, though not by Aristotle, a cosmo-logy. It seems that Aristotle's philosophizing culminates in, and rests on, a cosmology. You are all acquainted with some of its features. Within the huge sphere of the world (ridiculously small in modern terms) there is a tiny sphere - the sublunar sphere - encompassing the Earth. Not that the Earth is located at the midpoint of the world sphere, as if a mathematical point could determine any location within the world lll'ithout regard to the body involved. and the bulk of the Earth that cosmos is. det~rmine It is rather the globe where the middle region of the Beyond the sublunar dor.iain a number of concentric, contigu- ous, rigid, . and translucent spheres r each up to the limit of the world, to the sphere of the so-called fixed stars. Beyond that limit there is nothing, nay, not even nothing, not even "void". The world is, strictly speaking, nowhere. The cosmic spheres are in perpetual regular motion, around diverse axes and at different rates of speed. including the Sun and the Moon. Some of them carry the planets, The combined motions of these spheres are responsible for the appearance of all the irregular motions of the celestial bodies which we observe from the Earth. This "saving of the phenomena", as the traditional phrase has it, is the task of a math& matical discipline "most akin to philosophy", namely the science of the visible , yet eternal, bodi es, the science of &a-rpo}...oy(a , the science of the fix ed and wandering stars, Aristotle follows here in the footsteps of Eudoxus and Calippus, trying to improve upon their hypotheses without preswning to have the last word as far as the number, the sequence , and the motions of all th ese spb.eres are concerned. The-ir combination and co-ordination, which r emains to be decided upon by mathemat i cal astronomers, can be r epres ented - visi bly and t angibly - �- 23 - by a man•made model. The Lyceum seems to have possessed one. Yet what, in Aristotle's cosmology, is more important than the proper encasement and number of the spheres is its intimate link with the highest discipline Aristotle propounds and to which he occasionally assigns the name of "First Philosophy" ( ip~'tfl cp t.>..oO'ocp {e,0 • This is the discipline which considers not particular and definite bodies of any kind that "are" or might be, but which considers Being 2E. ( " O'V (i;b "- 'I... Cl1t~W~ ov or ~ OV fJT ., ) 0\1 • "Indeed", says Aristotle, 11 ~ ~ is being )? - that is, ~ is being·ness ( o~O' Ca )? - that is the question of ancient times and the question now and the question always and always the puzzle one faces"• "And so", he continues, "it is in- cuI!lbent upon us, too, to consider - above all and first of all and uniquely, as it were, - ~Being, taken in that sense, is"• It might not be inapproPriate to assign to this most fundamental discipline a name coined in the 18th century, the name of onto-logy. It deals with what is ultimately responsible for t11e coming into being, the persisting, as well as the passing away of any single t1·,ing. It is within its province, therefore, to deal with what is ultimately responsible for the being and the intrinsic order of the world as a whole. That is to say, this highest discipline has to account for the "Highest", the divine, and can, accordingly, be characterized by Aristotle as the l1t1.0''t't1µ11 or qn.>-..oaoqi(a eeo>-..oyut~, the knowledge or wisdom which consists in the comprehension of divinity. Thus Aristotle's cosmological and ontological (or theological) considerations converge at the level which marks the beginning of the bifurcation I mentioned earlier. It is the level of the ,, £ t. bfl • Their manner of being, as we have seen, is characterized by ~vipyet.a , by "being-at-work". It is indeed l "~PY£ftl that, for Aristotle, answers the eternal question concerning Being !! fil!Ch. Whenever we say �- 24 - that something is or exists we imply - without being always aware of this implication .. that it owes its being or existence to • It is temptinr to substitute for that Greek word the modern tern "energy". This substitution would not necessarily falsify the state- r.tent I just made but would make it somewhat misleading, For "energy" has either a strict meaning adequately rendered only by a variety of mathematical expressions • the physical dimensions of which will always be: (unit of mass) X (unit .o f distance)2 X (unit of timer 2 .. or a vague meaning associated with somethin.P like vigor, agcrcssiveness, vitality, We observe, though, that even for us to-day, both creanings of "energy", the strict one and the vague one, are tied to the notion or picture of work done or to be done, Tradition~lly the translations of ~v~pyel.a are mostly derivatives of the Latin verb~' to wit, "act", "action", "activity", "actuality", we say: Note how curious it is that "actually, Mr. Jones does not live in Washington" or "actually, the Earth is a plunet". We may substitute for the word "actually" phrases 1 ike "in fact", "in effect", "in truth", are eqdvalent to stating: that is so or is not so, 11 indeed". Such phrases considering that which truly is, this or It is still an Aristotelian way of speaking, although the ontological assertion that being-ness means 11 being•at- work" or being "active" remains hidden behind the screen of our colloquial use of weighty words. Aristotle merges cosmo-logy into onto-logy by distinguishing two aspects of the phenomenon of VOE tv , more precisely, by reaching beyond the meaning commonly attributed to "what is called \IOU c; (~ xa>-..otfµ€VO£ voub ). " Noe:l'v ' as I tried to say earlier, is the state of wakefulness, a state of preparedness and alertness, which, in relation to what we perceive, understand, know, plays the role of the �,.. 25 - material to be worked on. In that sense - voe: 1.\1 is "passive", is the state of being mastered by something ( ••• i;b voe: Lv 'JtcfO'XE 1. v 't ( ~ C1't t. \I ) , namely b~ the impact of various e: Lb fl • this sense is somehow the mere capability of becoming what is understood (ouvcfµ.e t. m~G lO''H 't~ VOT')'t?i ~ vo'.k;) and nothing on its NouG · becomes ~ own. g_ tr"!!!!! when it is ~with what is understood, £!!..£with the VOfl'tc! have done their work. , that is to say, when the E:LOT') Only then can the vou G be said to be wakefulness "at work", to be !ve:pye: {ct 'VOUG , only then is the vou G "at its own end", is it lvtEAEXE~ VOUG• But Aristotle's thought - anticipated to a degree by Anaxagoras and by Plato - goes one crucial step further: the very being of this accomplished \IOUG is nothing but ~ vf!pye: t.a , and conversely, Being-at-work ~ \IOUG, impartible ( &µ.e:pfiG ), indivisible ( &o t.a lp E'tOG), impassive \ ( &n:a9f1c; ), unchangeable ( &va~Cwi;o' eternal ( &•f b LOG). ), undying ( &0dva-co<;), It is eternally "at work", and it itself as Being-at-work is its own eternal life (~w'1 ) and its own eternal delight ( ~~ov11). It is deity ( (~ o~pavc1,)and Nature (fj: b 9e:dG )• The entire heaven q>tfCTL<;;) hang upon ( ~p'te:'ta1. ) this kind of "Capital beginning" ( &pxrf ) • Let us try to understand the full meaning of this solemn statement which echoes Anaxagoras' famous proposition about the vou~ "ordering everything and being responsible for everything" ( b LaxoO'µ.wv 'te: xa\ mfv"twv af 't'-OG). We have seen that the et brrvo11"td are responsible for the being of everything and for all the changes that occur in the world. Now, the priority of Being-at-work over the manner of being manifested in the capability of being worked on, the priority of lvtpye: La over btfvaµ q;, on which Aristotle insists so much, demands that a �- 26 - VOfj'tdv be not only something understandable ( buvcfµEL VOf)'tdv) but also something under st~ "in fact" ( VOf}'tOV l v£pye ~Cl- ) that it may be efficacious, may indeed be an a t't fo • so The VOfJ'td can play their generatiiig role only when they are one with the vaj°G "at work", one with the productive state of wakefulness, one with the 'YOO(; not.f}'tl.Kd~as Aristotle's ancient commentators name it (relying on Aristotle's own conjoining Of't~ at'tLOV and~ 'JCOLf)'t' 1.x~v). This identity of the »OUG and the VOT)'tdv , of the 1'ooGv and the voo'1µ£ vov - as well as of the accomplished state of lmowing (~ xa't' lv!!pye 1.av ~n:1.0't'l1µ.ri)and the known object ~o ln LO''tfJ'tdv or 'tO np<lyµa) -, characterizes a state of wakefulness which is not "empty" openness but complete "fullness". only where all that ~ be has ~~ This st ate prevails realized, where there is no place for mere "possibility", "capability", "ability", bt.fvaµLG , in other words, where no material to be still worked on is in any way involved. The divine VOUG - that is to say, the sum total of all £ Lbf] as comprehended by that vou G - is totally immaterial (aveu ~Aof)G ), or - since as ~vipye La it requires some material to be worked on - it can be said to be itself material for itself (vo1f0'£WG vd11a l.G). It is thus totally "separated" from every• thing else in the world and consequently outside of time, uncontaminated ( Aµ1.yf1G ), pure . ( xaSapdG)• understanding of the "separated" Strangely enough, in this VOUG - with all the it "contains" - Aristot/lep' seems to revert to the position of his teacher. VI First Philosophy or ontology is not confined to the consideration of 'VOUG as lvipyt La• It has to take into account not �- 27 - only the manner of being labelled bt1vaµ q; but also other manners of being and furthermore the different ways in which something can be said to be responsible for somethinE! else, .As far as this latter theme is concerned, Aristotle does not deviate from the Socratic-Platonic path, There are different meanings attached to the question "why?" and, correspondingly, there are different ways of answering that question. as it is? We might answer: ~ecause material, out of which it is made. ~.ll is this lectern ~ of the wood, the particular We might also say: because the particu_lar carpenter, the oaker, made it ttiis way. We might also say: because of the shape .2!: form the maker had in mind. We might finally say: because of the ~~ this thing is supposed to serve. However important and even indispensable the first three answers might be, it is not difficult to agree that the choice of the material (~ ~A.f) ) the shape or looks ( 'tO E!bo<;) of the thing, and the performance of the maker who initiated the transformation of the material into this lectern, - that all these depend on the purpose, the end for the sake of which the lectern has been made. It is that purpose which is decisively responsible for the lectern be~ as it is. its end ( 'tO 't'ftA.o<;), is its true "beginning" { Its purpose, &pxt1 ). - All those questions and answers are perhaps not possible with respect to every single thing or occurrence, but it is one of the most important tenets of Aristotelian - and Socratic-Platonic - philosophizing that, universally, the purpose - the goal - the end - the 't{A.o<; - provides the only satisfactory answer to the question "why". J~nd this holds especially for the world as a whole. There is a characteristic aspect of anything we call a purpose or a goal or an end, namely that it is an object of £.esire. The ~~A.o~ - in the making of a thing - in the contrivance of some device - in the �- 28 - establishment of an institution - in the action of a man - is responsible for all the changes it brings about, and yet it itself remains w1changeably, "immovably", what it is. efficacy the way an instrument does. It does not manifest its It attracts - but does not get involved in the concatenation of changes which it originates. Such is the efficacy of an e: IcoG , wherever Nature rules, - the generating ,. efficacy that the e: I. COG owes to its manner of being, which is Being.. at-work. An E {COG is "at work" ~! something striven ~' as an object . ,, l" of des1re, of ope:., LG • And that is also true for the di vine as the "container" of all the e: "l.bfl of the world. The whirling spheres of the world, including the last one, the one of the fixed stars, strive to become what the best of all, the vou G , beyond all time is: this desire of theirs holds them for ever in their never ending circular motions. Thus, for Aristotle, the eternity of the world in time is an inescapable consequence of the timeless ontological character of ~v~pye: 1.a , which the e:Lofl and the VOUG possess. As to the problem of manners of being other than that of &v~pye:t.a a .!if.!h departure from the Platonic view marks Aristotle's thinking. ! For Plato, it seems, being-ness is an e: 00£ of the highest rank, an e:fboG embracing the entir e family of e:Lof) "within" it: it is a "genus". Everything that is, inasmuch as it is, falls "under" it, as it were. 1fuenever we face "being" we face Being. ~ and th~~~ kind of For Aristotle, however, it is necessary to distinguish between "Being" in the strict and primary s ense of or degre es of t v!tpy•HCI and other manners Being related to the fornier "proportionally", xa"t' • It is precisely the difference in the kind~ !?.f.. ~latio!!_ to the primary aspect of beine;, that of t •dpylt ·,a , which justifies our &.va}..oylav speaking of ''manners of being"• As Aristotle says~ .,. . " Being is �- 29 - - spoken;'lb various senses, but in every case with so.me reference to -- . one capital beginning" ( ... "~ dv }..~yei;at. 7tOAX.axwb µit'v, &X.X.' ~Pxt1v . ~7tClV ~ µ1.av /\..). This holds not only for the manner of being which characterizes bt1vaµ Lb , but also for the various attributes of things, such as their motion, their color and warmth, their number and size, their health, benificence, and well-being. The 't'd~ t.~ , the hierarchy of the spheres with their specific ~v~pyet.al. is conceived as fallowing an "analogical" pattern, too. VII Where, then, is the place of ~ in this order of things? It is not too difficult to assess Aristotle's answer to this question. Man is said, on the one hand, to rank highest among the perfect, that is, viviparous, animals. produced everything for his sake. Nature is said to have J11ilong all the animals man is the only one with an erect nosture, "for his nature and his being are di vine". And yet, on the other hand, he is not the mo st important, not the best being in trye world, as becomes perfectly clear when we consider the celestial bodies which compose the cosmos. This somewhat ambiguous position of man is rooted in the insufficiency of man's wakefulness, in the "incompleteness" and "passivity" of his You~• Man is open to everything about him. Whenever this openness is filled with the ,, EI.bf) of the world he shares in the god-like mannerof being, in the lvtp~'l!I.of the divine voub • But this sharing is an intermittent one: ever so often man is overcome by fatigue, his wakefulness yields to sleep. to lie down. He has His divinity is but a passing shadow - as his very life is. Still, he has to make the best of it. Since he is not a solitary �- 30 - being but has to live with others of his kind, he establishes familiee rears children, acquires arts, learns and teaches, forms tribes, founds states, sets up institutions, rituals, customs and laws. he has to have ~pdv~aL<;, In doing that, has to exercise sovnd judgment in the con- duct of his affairs. Aristotle provides the justification and the guiding rules for all these specific human activities in his teaching and writing on matters of the Household, on Ethics and Politics, on Rhetoric and Poetry. diction of the Adyo~ All these subject-matters fall within the juris- , which is no attribute of divinity. Only to a few is given the happiness of a philosophical life, the immoderate, though intermittent, sharing in the tuneless ~vlpyeLa of the VOU~ • Let me, by way of conclusion, report toe preposterous, yet deeply significant, story told in ancient times about Aristotle's sleeping habits. When he went to bed, so the story goes, he used to hold in his hand a sphere of bronze - I presume the sphere representing the whole world -, while on the floor, close to the bed, beneath his extended hand, lay a pan. As soon as Aristotle would fall asleep, the sphere would slip off his hand, fall on that pan, and the ensuing noise would wake him up. and over again. This procedure was apparently repeated over Aristotle could have hardly survived such an ordeal for any length of time. claim to immortality. But no story could more aptly relate his �The Body of Aristotelian Teaching as it ' has come down to us since its publication by Andronicus of Rhodes in the 1st century B.c. Categories On Interpretation Prior Analytics, 2 books Posterior Analytics, 2 books Topics, 8 books Sophistic Refutations l The "Organon" .. ....... Physics, 8 books On the Heavens, 4 books On Coming to be and Passing away, 2 books On Phenomena high above, 4 books On the World On the Soul, 3 books On Sensation and Sensibles On Memory and Recollection On Sleep and Waking On Dreams On Prophecy in Sleep On Length and Shortness of Life On Youth and Age On Life and Death On Respiration On Breath Inquiries concerning Animals, 9 books Parts of Animals, 4 books Movement of Animals Gait of Animals Generation of Animals, 5 books ••••••••• On Colors On the Audible Physiognomies On Plants, 2 books ..... -· ... On Marvelous Things Heard Mechanics Problems, 38 books On Indivisible Lines Location and Names of Winds •••••••••• On Xenophanes, Zeno, Gorgias Metaphysics, 14 books .......... Nicomachean Ethics, 10 books Great Ethics, 2 books Eudemian Ethics, 7 books On Virtues and Vices Politics, 8 books The Crdering of Households, 2 books The Art of Rhetoric, 3 books Rhetoric to Alexander Peotics � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper 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 Aristotle (An Introduction) Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered April 20, 1962, by Jacob Klein as part of the Formal Lecture Series. The typescript is an enlarged version of the lecture that was delivered. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Klein, Jacob, 1899-1978 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1962-04-20 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The Greenfield Library holds the literary rights to Jacob Klein's work. 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 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Klein 1962-04-20 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3b17ec861fe2011b7cd4c8b9eddd702e.mp3 84e818fc14a536120af88dffe491cf8b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data cassette tape Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:13:16 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berns, Laurence, 1928- Title A name given to the resource Aristotle and Adam Smith on justice: cooperation between ancients and moderns Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994-03-18 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 18, 1994 by Laurence Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 10323 Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle Smith, Adam, 1723-1790 Justice Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/0f1843c8bce9ee12fb5f8a8649897e45.mp3 11224df1c44595977bb1f83dcf6b786c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:05:59 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lennox, James G. Title A name given to the resource Aristotle on Respiration: The Origins of Functional Anatomy Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-03-22 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 22, 2013, by James Lennox as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle. Posterior analytics Respiration Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 80898 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a5db9ffa2b25d85aff19030ef7768984.mp4 5d7f5359c9f3dbb23fd47db4a41fee99 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp4 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:52:50 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 Aristotle on the Impossibility of Defining Life Description An account of the resource Video recording of a lecture delivered on October 1, 2021, by Christopher Frey as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Frey is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Frey describes his lecture: "What unites the millions of biological species that populate our universe and sets them apart from its inanimate remainder? Why should we consider activities as diverse as an amoeba dividing, a saffron crocus blooming, a Bengal tiger stalking its prey, and a human contemplating the heavens to be manifestations of a single thing, namely, life? This is one of the central questions Aristotle confronts in De Anima. He attempts to answer it in a familiar way: he provides a definition of life’s principle—the soul. But he is pessimistic about his purported definition’s adequacy. Life, Aristotle insists, cannot be defined properly. By his own lights, this renders any attempt to define soul, including his own, “foolish.” But what is it about life that makes definition impossible? And if we cannot define life, is there any unity at all to be found in the remarkable variety of ways that organisms pursue their lives?” Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Frey, Christopher C. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021-10-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp4 Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle. De anima. Life Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Macfarland, Joseph C. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Frey_Christopher_2021-10-01access Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a354a0adfdb1da43adcc827bfefa35c1.pdf 4487c49e4f4e32224cb6383a1b64338d 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 Aristotle on the principles of natural beings : Physics, book 1 Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given in 1995 by David Bolotin. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolotin, David, 1944- 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 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. Physics. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24000280 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/41958b22aa5896310ba862f998e823c4.mp3 c4818f37d03c782cb7ddcf7ecb9a2fac 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 Recordings—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 Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:49:50 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 Aristotle, thinking with images Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on August 1, 2018 by Ed Sarkis as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sarkis, Ed 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 2018-08-01 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 sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle. De anima Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Sarkis, 2018-08 Graduate Institute Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fb3408aca935ffcd2a2ea3d941ee102b.pdf 77c1cc29af0d15782ccd897fcaf4506e PDF Text Text The College Aristotle's Definition of Motion by Joe Sachs Aristotle defines motion, by which he means change of any kind, as the actuality of a potentiality as such (or as movable, or as a potentiality-Physics 20la 10-11, 27-29, b4-5.) The definition is a conjunction of two terms which normally contradict each other, along with, in Greek, a qualifying clause which seems to make the contradiction inescapable. Yet St. Thomas Aquinas called it the only possible way to define motion by what is prior to and better known than motion. At the opposite extreme is the young Descartes, who in the first book he wmte announced that while everyone knows what motion is, no one understands Aristotle's definition of it. According to Descartes, "motion . . . is nothing more than the action by which any body passes from one place to another" (Principles II, 24). The use of the word "passes" makes this definition an obvious circle; Descartes might just as well have called motion the action by which a thing moves. But the important part of Descartes' definition is the words "nothing more than," by which he asserts that motion is susceptible of no definition which is not circular, as one might say "the color red is just the color red," to mean that the term is not reducible to some modification of . a wave, or analyzable in any other way. There must be ultimate terms of discourse, or there would be no definitions, and indeed no thought. The point is not that one cannot construct a non-circular definition of such a term, one claimed to be properly irreducible, but that one ought not to do so. The true atoms of discourse are those things which can be explained only by means of things less known than themselves. If motion is such an ultimate term, then to define it by means of anything but synonyms is willfully to choose to dwell in a realm of darkness, at the sacrifice of the understanding which is naturally ours in the form of "good sense" or ordinary common sense. Descartes' treatment of motion is explicitly anti- 12 Aristotelian and his definition of motion is deliberately circular. The Cartesian physics is rooted in a disagreement with Aristotle about what the best-known things are, and about where thought should take its beginnings. There is, however, a long tradition of interpretation and translation of Aristotle's definition of motion, beginning at least five hundred years before Descartes and dominating discussions of Aristotle today, which seeks to have things both ways. An unusually clear instance of this attitude is found in the following sentence from a medieval Arabic commentary: "Motion is a first entelechy of that which is in potentiality, insofar as it is in potentiality, and if you prefer you may say that it is a transition from potentiality to aotuali.ty ." You will recognize the first of these two statemen ts presented as equivalent as a translation of Aristotle's definition, and the second as a circular definition of the same type as that of Descartes. Motion is an entelechy; motion is a transition. The strangeness of the word "entelechy" masks the contradiction between these two claims. We must achieve an understanding of Aristotle's word entelecheia, the heart of his definition of motion, in order to see that what it says cannot be said just as well by such a word as "transition." The word entelecheia was invented by Aristotle, but never defined by him. It is at the heart not only of his definition of motion, but of all his thought. Its meaning is the most knowable in itself of all possible objects of the intellect. There is no starting point from which we can descend to put together the elements of its meaning. We can come to an understanding of entelecheia only by an ascent from what is intrinsically less knowable than it, indeed knowable only through it, but more known because more familiar to us. We have a number of resources by which to begin such an ascent, drawing upon the linguistic elements out of which Aristotle constructed the word, and upon the fact that he uses the word energeia as �January, 1976 a synonym, or all but a synonym, for entelecheia. The root of energeia is ergon-deed, work, or act-from which comes the adjective energon used in ordinary speech to mean active, busy, or at work. Energeia is formed by the addition of a noun ending to the adjective energon; we might construct the word at-work-ness from AngloSaxon roots to translate energeia into English, or use the more euphonius periphrastic expression, being-at-work. If we are careful to remember how we got there, we could alternatively use Latin roots to make the word "actuality" to translate energeia. The problem with this alternative is that the word "actuality" already belongs to the English language, and has a life of its own which seems to be at variance with the simple sense of being active. By the actuality of a thing, we mean not its being-in-action but its being what it is. For example, I recently saw a picture of a fish \vith an effective means of camouflage: it looks like a rock, but it is actually a fish. I don't seem to be talking about any activity when I attribute an actuality to that thing, completely at rest at the bottom of the ocean. But according to Aristotle, to be something always means to be at work in a certain wav. In the case of the fish at rest, its actualitv is the activity of metabolism, the work by which it is constantly transforming material from its environment into parts of itself and losing material from itself into its environment, the activity by which the fish maintains itself as a fish and as just the fish it is, and which ceases only when the fish ceases to be. Any static state which has any determinate character can only exist as the outcome of a continuous expenditure of effort, maintaining the state as it is. Thus even the rock, at rest next to the fish, is in activity: to be a rock is to strain to be at the center of the universe, and thus to be in motion unless constrained otherwise, as the rock in our example is constrained by the large quantity of earth already gathered around the center of the universe. A rock at rest at the center is at work maintaining its place, against the counter-tendency of all the earth to displace it. The center of the universe is determined only by the common innate activity of rocks and other kinds of earth. Nothing is which is not somehow in action, maintaining itself either as the whole it is or as a part of some whole. A rock is inorganic only when regarded in isolation from the uni- verse as a whole, which is an organized whole, just as blood considered by itself could not be called alive, yet is onlv blood insofar as it contributes to the maintenance of some organized bodv. No existing rock can fail to contribute to the hierarchical organization of the universe; I can therefore call any existing rock an actual rock. Energeia, then, always means the being-at-work of some definite, specific something; the rock cannot undergo metabolism, and once the fish does no more than fall to earth and remain there it is no longer a fish. The material and organization of a thing determine a specific capacity or potentiality for activity, with respect to which the corresponding activity has the character of an end. Aristotle says "the act is an end and the being-at-work is the act, and since energeia is named from the ergon it also extends to the being-at-an-end ( entelecheia)" (Metaphysics, 1050a, 21-23). The word entelecheia has a structure parallel to that of energeia. From the root word telos, meaning end, comes the adjective enteles, used in ordinary speech to mean complete, perfect, or full-grown. But while energeia, being-at-work, is made from the adjective meaning at work and a noun ending, entelecheia is made from the adjective meaning complete and the verb exein. Thus if we translate entclecheia as "completeness" or "perfection," the contribution the meaning of exein makes to the term is not evident. I would suggest that Aristotle uses exein for two reasons, which lead to the same conclusion: First, one of the common meanings of exein is "to be" in the sense of to remain, to stay, or to keep in some condition specified by a preceding adverb, as in the idioms kalos exei, "things are going well," or kakos exei, "things are going badly." It means "to be" in the sense of to continue to be. This is only one of several possible meanings of exein, but there is a second fact which makes it likelv that it is the meaning \Vhich would strike the ear of Greek-speaking person of Aristotle's time. There was then in ordinary use the word endelecheia, differing from Aristotle's word enteiecheia only by a delta in place of the tau. Endelecheia means continuity or persistence. As one would expect, there was a good deal of confusion in ancient times between the invented and undefined term entelecheia and the familiar word endelecheia. The use of the pun for the serious philosophic purpose of saying a 13 �The College at once two things for whose union the language has no word was a frequent literary device of Aristotle's teacher Plato. In this striking instance, Aristotle seems to have imitated the playful style of his teacher in constructing the most important term in his technical vocabulary. The addition of exein to enteles, through the joint action of the meaning of the suffix and the sound of the whole, superimposes upon the sense of "completeness" that of continuity. Entelecheia means continuing in a state of completeness, or being at an end which is of such a nature that it is only possible to be there by means of the continual expenditure of the effort required to stay there. Just as energeia extends to entelecheia because it is the activity which makes a thing what it is, entelecheia extends to energeia because it is the end or perfection which has being only in, through, and during activity. For the remainder of this talk, I shall use the word "actuality" to translate both energeia and entelecheia, and by actuality I shall mean just that area of overlap between being-atwork and being-at-an-end which expresses what it means to be something determinate. The words energeia and entelecheia have very different meanings, but function as synonyms because the world is such that things have identities, belong ,to species, aot for ends, and form material into enduring organized wholes. The word actuality as thus used is verv close in meaning to the word life, with the exception that it. is broader in meaning, carrying no necessary implication of mortality. We embarked on this quest for the meaning of entelecheia in order to decide whether the phrase "transition to actuality" could ever properly render it. The answer is now obviously "no." An actuality is something ongoing, but only the ongoing activity of maintaining a state of completeness or perfection already reached; the transition into such a state always lacks and progressively approaches the perfected character which an actuality always has. A dog is not a puppy: the one is, among other things, capable of generating puppies and giving protection, while the other is incapable of generation and in need of protection. We might have trouble deciding exactly when the puppy has ceased to be a puppy and become a dogcrt the age of one year, for example, it will probably be fully grown and capable of reproducing, but still awkward 1 1 14 in its movements and puppyish in its attitudes-but in any respect in which it has become a dog it has ceased to be a puppy. But om concern was to understand what motion is, and it is obviously the puppy which is in motion, since it is growing toward maturity, while the dog is not in motion in that respect, since its activity has ceased to produce change and become wholly directed toward self-maintenance. If the same thing cannot be in the same respect both an actuality and a transition to actuality, it is clearly the transition that motion is and the actuality that it isn't. Descartes is right and Aristotle is wrong. Of course it is possible that Aristotle meant what Descartes said, but simply used the wrong word, that he called motion an entelecheia three times, at the beginning, middle, and end of his explanation of what motion is, when he really meant not entelecheia but the transition or passage to entelecheia. This suggestion would be laughable if it were not what almost everyone who addresses the question today believes. Sir David Ross, certainly the most massively qualified authoritv on Aristotle of those who have lived in our century ;nd written in our language, the man who supervised the Oxford University Press's forty-five year project of translating all the works of Aristotle into English, in a commentanr on Aristotle's definition of motion, writes: "entelecheia ·must here mean 'actualization,' not 'actuality'; it is the passage to actuality that is kinesis" (Physics, text with commentary, London, 1936, p. 359). In another book, his commentary on the Metaphysics, Ross makes it clear that he regards the meaning entelecheia has in every use Aristotle makes of it everywhere but in the definition of motion as being not only other than but incompatible with the meaning "actualization." In view of that fact, Ross' decision that "entelecheia must here mean 'actualization' n is a desperate one, indicating a despair of understanding Aristotle out of his own mouth. It is not translation or interpretation but plastic surgery. Ross' full account of motion as actualization (Aristotle, New York, 1966, pp. 81-82) cites no passages from Aristotle, and no authorities, but patiently explains that motion is motion and cannot, therefore, be an actuality. There are authorities he could have cited, including Moses Maimonides, the twelfth century Jewish philosopher who sought to �January, 1976 reconcile Aristotle's philosophy with the Old Testament and Talmud, and who defined motion as "the transition from potentiality to actuality," and the most famous Aristotelian commentator of all time, Averroes, the twelfth century Spanish Moslem thinker, who called motion a passage from non-being to actuality and complete reality. In each case the circular definition is chosen in preference to the one which seems laden with contradictions. A circular statement, to the extent that it is circular, is at least not false, and can as a whole have some content: Descartes' definition amounts to saying "whatever motion is, it is possible only with respect to place," and that of Averroes, Maimonides, and Ross amounts to saying "whatever motion is, it results always in an actuality." An accurate rendering of Aristotle's definition would amount to saying (a) that motion is rest, and (b) that a potentiality, which must be, at a minimum, a privation of actuality, is at the same time that actuality of which it is the lack. There has been one major commentator ·on Aristotle who was prepared to take seriously and to make sense of both these claims. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his interpretation of Aristotle's definition of motion, (Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, London, 1963, pp. 136-137), observes two principles: ( 1) that Aristotle meant what he wrote, and (2) that what Aristotle wrote is worth the effort of understanding. Writing a century after Maimonides and Averroes, Thomas disposes of their approach to defining motion with few words: it is not Aristotle's definition and it is an error. A passage,, a transition, an actualization, an actualizing, or any of the more complex substantives to which translators have resorted which incorporate in some more or less disguised form some progressive sense united to the meaning of actuality, all have in common that they denote a kind of motion. It motion can be defined, then to rest content with explaining motion as a kind of motion is certainly to err; even if one is to reject Aristotle's definition on fundamental philosophical grounds, as Descartes was to do, the first step must be to see what it means. And Thomas explains clearly and simply a sense in which Aristotle's definition is both free of contradiction and genuinely a definition of motion. One must simply see that the growing puppy is a dog, that the half- formed lump of bronze on which the sculptor is working is a statue of Hermes, that the tepid water on the fire is hot; what it means to say that the puppy is growing, the bronze is being worked, or the water is being heated, is that each is not just the complex of characteristics it possesses right now; in each case, something that the thing is not yet, already belongs to it as that toward which it is, right now, ordered. To say that something is in motion is just to say that it is both what it is already and something else that it isn't yet. What else do we mean by saying that the puppy is growing, rather than remaining what it is, that the bronze under the sculptor's hand is in a different condition from the identically shaped lump of bronze he has discarded, or that the water is not just tepid but being heated? Motion is the mode in which the future belongs to the present, is the present absence of just those particular absent things which are about to be. Thomas discusses in detail the example of the water being heated. Assume it to have started cold, and to have been heated so far to room temperature. The heat it now has, which has replaced the potentiality it previously had to be just that hot, belongs to it in actuality. The capacity it has to be still hotter belongs to it in potentiality. To the extent that it is actually hot it has been moved; to the extent that it is not yet as hot as it is going to be, it is not yet moved. The motion is just the joint presence of potentiality and actuality with respect to same thing, in this case heat. A number of things need to be noted here. In Thomas' version of Aristotle's definition one can see the alternative to Descartes' approach to physics. Since Descartes regards motion as ultimate and given, his physics will give no account of motion itself, but describe the transient static configurations through which the moving things pass. By Thomas' account, motion is not ultimate but is a consequence of the way in which present states of things are ordered toward other actualities which do not belong to them. One could build on such an account a physics of forces, that is of those directed potentialities which cause a thing to move, to pass over from the actuality it possesses to another which it lacks but to which it is ordered. Motion will thus not have to be understood as the mysterious departure of things from 15 �The College rest, which alone can be described, but as the outcome of the action upon one another of divergent and conflicting innate tendencies of things. Rest will be the anomaly, since things will be understood as so constituted by nature as to pass over of themselves into certain states of activity, but states of rest will be explainable as dynamic states of balance among things with opposed tendencies. Leibniz, who criticized Descartes' physics and invented a science of dynamics, explicitly acknowledged his debt to Aristotle (see, e.g., Specimen Dynamicum), whose doctrine of entelecheia he regarded himself as restoring in a modified form. From Leibniz we derive our current notions of potential and kinetic energy, whose very names, pointing to the actuality which is potential and the actuality which is motion, preserve the Thomistic resolutions of the two paradoxes in Aristotle's definition of motion. But though the modern science of dynamics can be seen in germ in St. Thomas' discussion of motion, it can be seen also to reveal difficulties in Thomas' conclusions. According to Thomas, actuality and potentiality do not exclude one another but co-exist as motion. To the extent that an actuality is also a potentiality it is a motion, and to the extent that an actuality is a motion it is a potentiality. The two seeming contradictions cancel each other in the dynamic actualiity of the present state which is determined by its own future. But are not potential and kinetic energy two different things? The rock which I hold six feet above the ground has been actually moved identically to the rock which I have thrown six feet above the ground, and at .t hat distance each strains identically to fall to earth; but the one is falling and the other isn't. How can the description which is common to both, when one is moving and the other is at rest, be an account of what motion is? It seems that everything which Thomas says about the tepid water which is being heated can be said also of the tepid water which has been removed from the fire. Each is a coincidence of a certain actuality of heat with a further potentiality to the same heat. What does it mean to say that the water on the fire has, right now, an order to further heat which the water off the fire lacks? If we say that the fire is acting on the one and not on the other in such a way as to disturb its present state, 16 we have begged the question and returned to the position of presupposing motion to explain motion. Thomas' account of Aristotle's definition of motion, though immeasurably superior to that of Sir David Ross as interpretation, and far more sophisticated as an approach to and specification of the conditions an account of motion would have to meet, seems ultimately subject to the same circularity. Maimonides, Averroes, and Ross fail to say how motion differs from rest. Thomas fails to say how any given motion differs from a corresponding state of balanced tension, or of strain and conshaint. The strength of Thomas' in terpreta ti on of the definition of motion comes from his taking every word seriously. When Ross discusses Aristotle's definition, he gives no indication of whv the he toiouton, or "insofar as it is such," clause should have been included. By Thomas' account, motion is the actuality of any potentiality which is nevertheless still a potentiality. It is the actuality which has not cancelled its corresponding potentiality but exists along with it. Motion then is the actuality of any potentiality, insofar as it is still a potentiality. This is the formula which applies equally well to the dynamic state of rest and the dynamic state of motion. We shall try to advance our understanding by being still more careful about the meaning of the pronoun he. Thomas' account of the meaning of Aristotle's definition forces him to construe the grammar of the definition in such a way that the clause introduced by the dative singular feminine relative pronoun he has as its antecedent, in two cases, the neuter participle tou ontos, and in the third, the neuter substantive adjective tou dunatou. It is true that this particular feminine relative pronoun often had an adverbial sense to which its gender was irrelevant, but in the three statements of the definition of motion there is no verb but estin. If the clause is understood adverbially, then, the sentence must mean something like: if motion is a potentiality, it is the actuality of a potentiality. Whatever that might mean, it could at any rate not be a definition of motion. Thus the clause must be understood adjectivally, and Thomas must make the relative pronoun dependent upon a word with which it does not agree in gender. He makes the sentence say that motion is the actuality of the potentiality in which there �January, 1976 is yet potentiality. Reading the pronoun as dependent upon the feminine noun entelecheia with which it does agree, \Ve find the sentence saying that motion is the actuality as which it is a potentiality of the potentiality, or the actuality as a potentiality of the potentiality. This reading of ,t he definition implies that potentialities exist in two ways, that it is possible to be a potentiality, yet not be an actual potentiality. I said at the beginning of this talk that Aristotle's definition of motion was made by putting together two terms, actuality and potentiality, which normally contradict each other. Thomas resolved the contradiction by arguing that in every motion actuality and potentiality are mixed or blended, that ;the condition of becoming-hot of the water is just the simultaneous presence in the same water of some actuality of heat and some remaining potentiality of heat. I also said earlier that there was a qualifying clause in Aristotle's definition which seemed to intensify, rather than relieve, the contradiction. I was referring to the he toiouton, or he kineton, or he dunaton, which appears in each version of the definition, and which, being as I have claimed grammatically dependent on entelecheia, signifies something the very actuality of which is potentiality. The Thomistic blend of actuality and potentiality has the characteristic that, to the extent that it is actual it is not potential and to the extent that it is potential it is not actual; the hotter the water is, the less is it potentially hot, and the cooler it is, the less is it actually, the more potentially, hot. The most serious defect in Saint Thomas' interpretation of Aristotle's definition is that, like Ross' interpretation, it broadens, dilutes, cheapens, and trivializes the meaning of the word entelecheia. An immediate implication of the interpretations of both Thomas and Ross is that whatever happens to be the case right now is an entelecheia, as though being 3't 70 degrees Fahrenheit were an end determined by the nature of water, or as though something which is ·intrinsically so unS'table as the instantaneous position of an arrow in flight deserved to be described by the word which Aristotle everywhere else reserves for complex organized states which persist, which hold out in being against internal and external causes tending to destroy them. Aristotle's definition applies to any and every motion: the pencil falling to the floor, the \Vhite pages in the book turning yellow, the glue in the binding of the book being eaten by insects. Maimonides, Averroes, and Ross, who say that motion is always a transition or passage from potentiality to actuality, must call the being-on-the-floor of the pencil, the being-yellow of the pages, and the crumbled condition of the binding of the book actualities. Thomas, who says that motion is constituted at any moment by the joint presence of actuality and potentiality, is in a still worse position: he must call every position of the pencil on the way to the floor, every color of the pages on the way to being yellow, and every loss of a crumb from the binding an actuality. If these are actualities, then it is no wonder that philosophers such as Descartes rejected Aristotle's account of motion as a useless redundancy, saying no more than that whatever changes changes into that into which it changes. We know however that the things Aristotle called actualities are limited in number, and constitute the world in its ordered finitude rather than in its random particularity. The actuality of the adult horse is one, although horses are many and all different from each other. Books and pencils are not actualities at all, even though they are organized wholes, since their organizations are products of human art, and they maintain themselves not as books and pencils but only as earth. Even the organized content of a book, such as that of the first three chapters of Book Three of Aristotle's Physics, does not exist as an actuality, since it is only the new labor of each new reader that gives being to that content, in this case a very difficult labor. By this strict test, the only actualities in the world, that is the only things which, by their own innate tendencies, maintain themselves in being as organized wholes, seem to be the animals and plants, the ever-the-same orbits of the ever-moving planets, and the universe as a whole. But Aristotle has said that every motion is an entelecheia; if we choose not to trivialize the meaning of entelecheia to make it applicable to motion, we must deepen our understanding of motion to make it applicable to the meaning of entelecheia. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that if there is a distinction between potentiality and actuality at all, there must be a distinction between two kinds of potentiality. 17 �The College The man with sight, but with his eyes closed, differs from the blind man, although neither is seeing. The first man has the capacity to see, which the second man lacks. There are then potentialities as well as actualities in the world. But when the first man opens his eyes, has he lost the capacity to see? Obviously not; while he is seeing, his capacity to see is no longer merely a potentiality, but is a potentiality which has been put to work. The potentiality to see exists sometimes as active or at work, and sometimes as inactive or latent. But this example seems to get us no closer to understanding motion, since seeing is just one of those activities which is not a motion. Let us consider, then, a man's capacity to walk across the room. When he is sitting or standing or lying still, his capacity to walk is latent, like the sight of the man with his eyes closed; that capacity nevertheless has real being, distinguishing the man in question from a man who is crippled to the extent of having lost all potentiality to walk. When the man is \valking across the room, his capacity to walk has been put to work. But while he is walking, what has happened to his capacity to be at the other side of the room, which was a]so latent before he began to walk? It too is a potentiality which has been put to work by the act of walking. Once he has reached the other side of the room . his potentiality to be there has been actualized in Ross' sense of the ·term, but while he is walking, his potentiality to be on the other side of the room is not merely latent, and is not yet cancelled by an actuality in the weak sense, the so-called actuality of being on that other side of the room; while he is walking his potentiality to be on the other side of the room is actual just as a potentiality. The actuality of the potentiality to be on the other side of the room, as just that potentiality, is nothing more nor less than the walking across the room. A similar analysis will apply to any motion whatever. The growth of the puppy is not the actualization of its potentiality to be a dog, but the actuality of that potentiality as a potentiality. The falling of the pencil is the actuality of its potentiality to be on the floor, in actuality as just that: as a potentiality to be on the floor. In each case the motion is just the potentiality qua actual and the actuality qua potential. And the sense we thus give to the word entelecheia is not at odds with its other uses: a mo- 18 tion is like an animal in that it remains completely and exactly what it is through time. l\'ly walking across the room is no more a motion as the last step is being taken than at any earlier point. Every motion is a complex whole, an enduring unity which organizes distinct parts, such as the various positions through which the falling pencil passes. As parts of the motion of ,the pencil, these positions, though distinct, function identically in the ordered continuity determined by the potentiality of the pencil to be on the floor. Things have being to the extent that they are or are part of determinate wholes, so that to be means to be something, and change has being because it always is or is part of some determinate potentiality, at work and manifest in the world as change. I shall close by considering the application of Aristotle's account of motion to two paradoxes famous in antiquity. Zeno argued in various ways that there is no motion. According to one of his arguments, the arrow in flight is always in some one place, therefore always at rest, and therefore never in motion. We can deduce from Aristotle's definition that Zeno has made the same error, technicallv called the fallacy of composition, as one who would argue that no animal is alive since its head, when cut off, is not alive, its blood, when drawn out, is not alive, its bones, when removed are not alive, and so on with each part in turn. The second paradox is one attributed to Heracleitus, and taken as proving that there is nothing but motion, that is, no identity, in the world. The saying goes that one cannot step into the same river twice. If the river flows, how can it continue to be itself? But the flux of the river, like the flight of the arrow, is an actuahty of just the kind Aristotle formulates in his definition of motion. The river is always the same, as a river, precisely because it is never the same as water. To be a river is to be the always identical actuality of the potentiality of water to be in the sea. 1 Joe Sachs graduated from St. John's in 1968; he took his M.A. degree at Pennsylvania State University after graduate studies at the New School for Social Research, New York; he was a teaching assistant at Penn State and became a tutor at St. John's in 1975. This is the text of an informal lecture delivered to the summer freshmen in Annapolis on July 6, 197 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/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 7 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aristotle's definition of motion Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975-07-06 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 6, 1975 by Joe Sachs as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Sachs 1975-07-06 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sachs, Joe, 1946- Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b871b982dc33697e2d48a850a4add2df.pdf 5868bcc2aaf1f9ed163c6ac0e9e610f3 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 Aristotle's Politics : common good and forgotten excellence Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given on April 2, 2010 by Janet Dougherty as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dougherty, Janet Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-04-02 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 Aristotle. Politics. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24003867 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6f5838a4143c141032ad43f9dae5d28e.mp3 921dc75f0c76015ab13faf37cde2a9c5 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 Recordings—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 Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:01:41 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Arithmetic as a liberal art Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a tutor panel discussion with Seth Appelbaum, Janet Dougherty, Jacques Duvoisin, Topi Heikkerö, and Nicholas Starr held on March 30, 2018 as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Moderated by Raoni Padui. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Appelbaum, Seth Dougherty, Janet Duvoisin, Jacques Antoine Heikkerö, Topi, 1970- Starr, Nicholas C. Padui, Raoni 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 2018-03-30 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 sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Arithmetic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 20014432 Friday night lecture