23 20 5655 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c107d87f16723f2051e7142c51c1b42a.pdf 70636d17a0cf68483fb137911cb87cb0 PDF Text Text On Thomae More. 8 u,tO,RiS.* Ev& Brann Among ·the new and most pecuHarly modem disciplines tl)ere is one, to be pb.ced, I auppoae. among the aocial studies, sometimes called 11 fu turology," whioh deals with the art of conjecturing concerning the future. Those who pu.r- sue this art often say that there is a great "need for modem utopian pictures." . · Let me Q .uote a. passage from a founder of this art, Bertrand de Jou.venelr · It im tim@ that exports represented the many different out ocmee which can be obtained by many different uses of cu:r many and increasing poeeibilitiee. Thia repreaentaticn ehould he in pictures aacording to the utopian tradition. Sinae thf.I 11u topian tra.. i ti on" begins with the book Thomas More called d 11 Utopie. 11 e.nd einee it is in human matters commonly the case that the first of a kind iR alao the truest to that ldnd, it seems right to go to More's book ·to connlder what a utopia properly so called might be, end whether such a work can do wha t the atudent of the future needs it for--to supply the ends to be nchicved by our profusion of means. * Lecture ~i.ven at St John's College, .Annapolis, on May 5, 1972 �-2-:- 1. Utopias as Political Poetry Two poems purporting to be by the poet laureate.of Utopia wer,e prefixed to the book by More's Dutch friend Peter Giles, whose house is the setting for the narrative. One of them says: The ancients called me Utopia (or nowhere) because of my isolation; now however I a.m a rival of Plato's Republic, perhaps even a vie tor over it, for what it delineates in words, I alone have exhibited in men and works and the best laws. I dese.ry-e be called by the name of Eutopia, (or th·3 good place). to I cannot resist first quoting from the . original of the other, which is given in the Utopian language and alphabet: n :Bar~l ·h~ magl~mi baocan soma gymnos~phaon • .t\grama· gymnosbphon labare.'ll bMha bodam11omTn. n I alone of all lands without the aid of philosophy Have expressed for mortals the philosophical city. Both poems express the srune point. a.ted in words" by its actuality. in Pl1J.tar.ch's Utopia surpasses other cities "delineNow the original of this claim is to be found Lives where it is made of Lycurgus, the founder of the Spartan polity: All who have written well on politics, such as Plato ••• have taken Lycurgus for their model, leaving behind them, however, mere projects and words: whereas Lycurgus was the author, not in writing but in reality, of a government •• o He by the example of a complete philosophic city raised himself high above the other lawgivers of Greece. It is almost belaboring the obvious to point out that Utopia is riot. actual in quite the same way Sparta was, and yet this observation can serve to introduce the question concerning the way in which a utopia has being. Now the answer to the question is not hard to formulate. Utopias are communities constructed in the imagination and expressed in words, word ·pietures, a< :kind of poetry. Accordingly Sir Phil .r\.. p Sidney includes the Utopia �-3- as a poetic work in his De.fense of Poe ·s.y and s e.ys of the utopian poet: ••• he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description·, which do th neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other · doth. Utopias, then, mEJ¥ be called politi cal poetry and belong to the faculty of the i magination. 2. Utopia as Day-dream The first kind of imagining which utopias suggest is day-dreaming, in the case of the first Utopia, a sort of exoter ic dreaming carried on by a company united in a common desire. Certainly there was a great d.eal of channed and longing make-believe among More and his many friends, of which Peter Giles' invention of a mellifluous Utopian language is an example--they were evidently so persu~sive that one benighted cleric conceived a by the Pope to Utopia as bishop. bu~ing .d esire to be sent In this spirit also More wrote Erasmus a letter telling of a day-dream in which he had seen himself as the chosen king of Utopia "marching a long crowned with a diadem of wheat, very striking in my Franciscan garb.•• But this view of Utopia as a day dream is ,inadequate. In fact, More's Utopia and most, subsequent utopian constructions are sober and disciplined places which induce strong misgivings in most readers, especially. more recent readers. These misgivings have to do not with that irresponsibly diversionary nature of utopian writing, which was castigated by Marx and .Ehgels in the Communist Manifesto as an "unscientific~· and ultimately reactionary, buildL'rlg of "castles in the air." On the contrary, the dissatisfaction comes precisely from the apprehension of utopias as practical proposals. cause they are felt ~o Utopias offend be- be "static," : monotonous, regimented, drably uniform, �.-4!"" restrictive. Mumford, for instance, thinks of Utopia as a human machine which he regards as the original social evil, as "dystopia" ·or the 11 evil place", while another writer entitles an article on More's Utopia "A Detestable State." 3. More against his own Utopia The most curious fact, however, is More's own relation to his book. . sh~ll I give an abbreviated list of items in respect to which More expressed . disapprobation of Utopian institutions. It includes almost every feature that is fundamental. He cont~ents in his own behalf at the ve-ry end of the book, where he says: •• aMany things came to my mind which in the manners and laws of that people seemed tt:i\1.'insti tuted and formed of no good reason, not only in the fashion o.f their chivalry and their sacrifices and religions and in others of their laws, but also, yea, and chiefly, in that· which is the principal foundation of all their ordinances, that is to sayt in the community of their life and living without occupying BilY money ••• More in fact regarded communimn as heretical. Yet even more fundamental than the communism of the Utopians is their -love of pleasure: •• ••• they think that all our actions, and in them the yir- tues themselves, be referred at last to pleasure as their end and felicity." But More, who secretly wore a hair shirt next to his body, considered that "a perfect man should abstain not only from unlawful pleasure but from lawful. 0 Again, the Utopians pennit free choice of religion, and thus have no idea of doctrinal heresy. in the Dialo~e .Q!!_ More on the other hand, in several places, for instance Heresies,argues that heretical books should not be suffered to go abroad, and .that the burning of heretics is sometimes lawful, necessary, and well done. �_,_ TheUtopians _permit a rationally planried suicide, _More regards :lt as a devilish temptation under all circumstances; the Utopians permit a divorce under the condition of insuperable incompatibility, More opposes it; the Utepians use no images in their worship, Mare defends their necessity. How did ' More manage to invent an ideal commonwealth whose institutions were contrary to his own views? ~at might seem to be the answer to the ques- tion, that the Utopians are not Christians, while More himself was a moat de' .vout Christian, is not sufficient for it does not' explain .·why More should have imagined "the best state of the .commonwealth" as pagan. 'Ihus it appears that the first Utopia is not a mere dre·am, but a wily and comple~ product of the ~magination, and that, in order to understand it, it may be necessary to reflect on it specifically as an imaginative product as such. 4. Utopia as a Product of the Imagination First of all, utopian communities, because ' they are visually . conceived, are vivid pictures, and hence exhibit brightly delineated styles of life, usually leaning to one or the other extreme of possible publicfonn. Some utopi- as, especially : those celebrating technique, like the old Atlantis of Plato's Cri ti.as, display a somewhat sinister splendour, or like :Ba.con's ~ Atlantis, a mysterious but punctilious ritual inagnificPnce; otheri;;, l _lce Houyhnhnm Land i in Gulliver's Travels are depicted as rejoicing in subdued and sober rustic decorousness. Utopia itsel..f, with its monastic habits and absence of oma- ment, flirnished the first example of the latter style, -and. indeed Swift, who numbered More in the tmmatchable sextw.· \.Virate of statesmen which includes 1 Socrates' name9 made his horses, which have not even a name for the vice of pride• first cousins of the Utopians whose essence ist as we shall see, precisely the absence of pride. �-6- . Circwnstantially pai~ted though they may be, utopias, as beings of the fleshless~ imagination, are "arrested appearances," and as such motionless and Hence a static and two-dimensional character does invariably pervade utopias; it is this in them which offends those modern critics, who regE.lXd social mo- bility and opportunity for experience as necessary conditions for a good soci- ety. Utopias are "quasi-c:rt ~stalline structures" because it is in the nature of' the imagination to arrest motion. Secondly, utopias show modes or place and time which are appropriate to their origin in the imagination. Augustine writes of his imaginative memory as containing images which can be recalled and reconstructed at pleasure: All this do I within, in that huge court of my memory. For there have I in readiness the heaven, ·~arth, sea ••• Yet I did not swallow them into me by seeing when as with my eyes I beheld .them. Nor are the things themselves now with me, but the images of them only. The tmagination then is a power of unreal places which can be visi.ted at will. Most utopias appear to have their origin in such ' voyages within the imagination; they are places of the imagination expressed as imaginary places. 'therefore almost all in fact have the form of narrations of voyages of discovery; the Odyssey is their prototype. mode 1of their fictitiousness. But utopirm voyages differ from odysseys · in the For utopias are not pure inventions but images whose existence is--on one level-ardently desired. Hence their descriptions do not have the ingenious verisimilitude appropriate to tales of adventure. Insofar as utopian accounts are not disinterested in existence, being institutions of desire in the places of the imagination, they intrude the fact of' the unreality of their place purposefully and persistently--the very word "utopia" means "M'1_>lace. " But what most intimately characterizes utopias is that they tamper with time. �-7Thnisbecause . the sole source of the imagination is the past; it is stocked with "perpetual sense impressions" left by what is no. longer present, and so is a power of bringing the past into the present, a commemorative power. Hence the products of the imagination are often ca.st in the past tense, "once upon a ~ime," a _paradigm product of the purifying and simplifying ima- gination being the Golden Age. But since utopias invariably stand as ac. . cusa.tions against a particular present, they are often resurrections of a particular past, . representing_ the pristine community "behind" the degenerate one. So Utopia with its fifty.~four cities corresponding in number to the :Ehglish shires, its capital called the "Dark.ling City," built like a foggy but salubrious sheep-and Londo~, fost~red in and ;i. ts unenclosed count.ry- :i.de unspoiled by rampaging s harmonious . balance with the cities, presents the old and merry England behind that of the fallen present. It seems appropriate to note he.re that since utopias by their nature arise from dissatisfaction with the present, those which do not draw on the past are utopias o_ terror, in which the evils incipient in the present a.re f projected in magrrification onto the future and there depicted with . fascinated and even avid horror. Such anti-utopias are warnings based on a modern no- tion of history as progress, but in this case as pe..rjorative progress. best known examples of futurist utopias are Huxley's Brave~ The World and Orwell's Nineteen Eigl1ty-Four, and it is significant that both, but particularly the latter, understand the realization of their nightmare to depend primarily on the obliteration of the past. 5. The Special Place and Time of Utopia As the expression of a thought-infonned product of the imagination, that ist as political poetry, More's Utopia thus empl.oys special modes of time and place. �-8- Utopia is Greek and means "no-place•. Utopia is a place of the imagina- tion wordly in all respects· but that i t lacks bodily e·x istence, the quality of being there, that is, of real location. More signifies this by having Hythlo- day, the narrator, fail to specify exact geographic coordinat~s. In addition some of the names, especially the place names of this region, are privative, :..:;.. like the land "Achoria'.1 ''Un-country," and the river "Anydrus"--"Waterless". More and his friends engaged in much pleasantry concerning this lack of geographic placement, giving each other ·circumstantial explanations of how it crune · to be omitted in the account and earnest commissj.ons to inquire further of Hythloday, s.o underscoring the claim that More's Uto12ia, al though feigned in the imagination, is a place on earth in contrast to Plato's Politz, a product of the .;intellect, which is a "pa.t tern laid up in heaven." Now, curiously .vague as · is Utopia's locat.i on in place, its settingin time.is vecy precise. Three exact dates are supplied: the date of its foun- ding; according to the annals of Utopia 1760 years before Hythloday's account, that is in 244 B.C.; the arrival of some Romans and Egyptians 1200 years ago, that is, in the beginning of the fourth century A.D.; and the arrival of Hythloday' s company; who were left behind during Amerigo Vespucci 1s last voyage which took place in 1504. Each of these dates is significant. Utopia's present goverrunent was founded just when King Agis of Sparta attempted Unsuccessfully to revive the constitution of Sparta's original lawgiver, Lycurgus. '!his constitution in- stituted a common way of life like that of the Utopians, except that land, though equally shared out, was held as private property,. Agis had begun by re- cindin.g. a law opening the way for inequality of holdings, a law which, Plutarch .says, had been "the ruin of the best state of the commonweal th." Utopia is thus Sparta's successful .counterpart. The Romans and Egyptians--note, no Greeks--arrived just before Constan- �-9- Christi.~i ty tine .made the Roman state z·eligion, so that, while bringing the arts and useful inventions of antiquity and perhaps the occult wisdom of the Egyptians, they came without either the texts of the waning Greek philosophy or the news of ·t he rising Christian faith. And finally Hythloday arrives with a bo,x: of humanistic learning.• The effect of these three dates is to m~k the Utopians as being outside of the tragedies and passions, the rises and declines, of our human history. They live in natural but not in human times, they are not atemporal bµt they ~' to· use a. modern term, ahistorical, that ·i s to say, they are not bound by the conditions which arise from prior human action and passion, in particular from 1!!£ fall . of ~· Hythloday "startingly observes o.f the Utopians that if their ch:ronicles .are to be .believed .,cities were there before men were here." . . . Utopians are not descended from Adam, nor, it seems, are they creatures in the sense of Genesis, namely such as are capa:tJle of rebellion against their creator. 60 More's Utopia as the "First Ci,ty" o.f Plato~s Republic . A very good way· further to define Utopia as a city having its place and time :if1 the imagination, is to see it in the.light of its ostensible source and defeated rival, the polity which is the product of the intellect, namely that set out in Plato's Republic. by Hythloday; Plato is the name :inost frequently mentioned when in particular he speaks of "those things Plato feirgneth in his weal-public or that the Utopians 2£ in theirs;" he is referring to Utopia's communism. In Plato• B dialogue Socrates . aises the question "What is justice?" r The way of answering this question assumes that justice is to be found in the relation of the parts of the hwnan soul and that politic al cornmuni ties are . magnified expressions of these relations,. He therefore constructs a sequence �-10- of three cities each arising by the addition of a part o.f the soul and corresponding to the dominance of that part, proceeding in o~der from the most su- pine and common to the most superior and rare constituent of the soul. Now the city in which a common way of life obtains is only the third city, which is under the dominion of the reasonable part of the soul, that is to say, which is ruled by philosopher kings. And even in this, the "philosophi- cal city," only the rulers and their wanior auXi.l: iaries live communally: "No one wa· to have any of the ordinary possessions of mankind. s They we::i;-e to be warrior athletes and gua.:rzdians, receiving from the other citizens instead of annual payment only their maintenance." This is the first 'p rinciple of unity of the philosopher's city; the se·c ond, and as Socrates acknowledges, even more offensive one is "that the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children common and no person is to know his own child, nor any child, his parent." Since the social foundation of Utopia is the family, or rather the extended family or household, it cert ainly does not share the human aspect of Socrates' communism. But neither does it share the economic one. The actual title of the book referred to as Utopia is On the~ State . . of ~.Commonwealth. The Latin term translated by "commonwealth" is 0 res publ i ca. 11 Sir Thomas Elyot~ one of .More's circle, in his ~Named the Governor s ,p eaks of the irnplications of this translation, referring to those who "do sup- pose it, so to be called for that, that everything should be to all men in common without discrepance of any estate or condition." once alludes to this meaning of shared wealth. Hythloday more than And precisely here lies the distinction between Utopia and the philosopher's city--the communism of the latter .is an ascetic communism of poverty, while Utopian communism means shared wealth or well-being. If Utopia has anything to do with Plato's polity is not with its third or philosophical city--as Peter Giles' poem had hinted. �-11 ... .Now the first Socratic city corresponds to the desires in the soul and :. has t:wo stages. At first there arises a "city of craftsmen," a small, simple, moderate and merry community based on division of labor for the purpose of patisfying basic necessities. ious, the Then, as desires become mo.re complex and luxur- city of craftsmen, which Socrates c~lls the "true .snd healthy city," undergoes a transformation and becomes, as he .says, feverish.· To the simple crafts are added the arts of the embroiderer; gold and ivory are used, and peo,Ple devoted to "forms and c.olors" ·are .introducad into the city. 'file in- fle.mmation of desire makes the city predatory and brings about the formation of a warrior class whose presence will institute the second city. Now Utopia clearly corresponds to this first city, the "true and heal, thy city" of craftsmen. There is a sign of this in the · following. When Socrates' interlocutor Glaucus first hears a description of their simple and healthy commQn banquets•he exclaims that this is a "city of pigs,'' by which he does not mean that they wall.ow but that they like simple and natural foods. According- ly the lowest official of Utopia who sits over thirty families and whose chief function is the control of idlf!ness, .is one "which in their old language is called the Syphogrant ••• " 'Ihe tennis Gree~ (for the Utopians are said to have affinity to the Greeks) and means "pig-sty elder." The next higher of- ficials who rule over ten stys. are called "tranibors" or "plain (or clear) eaters," meaning, I suppose,. that they eat perspicuously prepared dishes. Furthermore the craftsmen of Socrates' city are limited to fanners, weavers, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, and merchants. The Utopians also limit their crafts to farming, which all do, and these special crafts: wool B.:nd linen working, masonry and metal working, carpentry, and merchandising. The Utopians too have common banquets with music. But the Utopians never become luxurious. With them that sophistice.tion of the desires which is the occasion for · the genesis of the second, the war- �-12- ri.or, city never e;ripeQ. 1he ·part of the soul which dominates in this second ci. ty is called by Socrates !'apiri tednose, 11 which ia a certe.i.n readiness to :righteous wrath and a di•position to honor. .A.a we h$ve eeen, the warring ele- mont i i directly caru,eoted to euch complexity of desire (whence, as Socrates rmyc, a:r.iae all. evils in oi ties) and J>&rticularly to a taet·e for m48rtificence and apltmclour. Magnificence, however, ie totally absent in Utopia. 'Ibis ia a conse- quenoe of "the co1M1unHy o.(' th.eir l:i.fe anrl living without any occupying of money, · by whi.ch thing only"--to continue More's criticililm of Utopia quoted . a.bove-.. 11 all n~bili ty, magnifi.cence, honour, and majesty, the true . ornaments, au thfJ common opinion 10., of the ·commonweal th,. utterly at.royed." 'lbe Utopio.na :prefer comfort to honour. be ~robe ()verthrown and deBU1', they too make war., though only in defense of their borders or thei:r frlende • rights, for ' they rl!lgra.rd it i"ith loathing as beastly, and they have no spacial claee of 1-larriot'a; their soldiers are tht't ci t:i.7.ene of the land , supplemented by mercen- . ' ThE1ae ci ti~1en soldiers fight bravely, no ta1:1t1~ .for gallantry, nir1g, H' poaaible, alw~e but they hnve preferi.ng to win through calculation and. cun- J.nwng the Utopians only one cle.as of people is rewarded. by ·i11l.dlplay of honour--the virtuoue doad. '(. The Utopians as People wl thout Pride 'lllo next quoatton is what More meano to aigni.f.Y by a.aeoc:i.a.ting his UtoSli.o. w l th Pluto' a city o.f c:r.nftAmen. Plato's firat city ia a natural city which a.rises naturally and who~e ci t.izent·1 11re closft to r1a ture, taken 0J1 the given. and atr ble appearance within .P...nd w:i thout mon. In this aoni::1e Utop.ia too is a. natural. d ty. n.re aa:ld to be partly of Per.•oian ancestry. The · Utopians 'Now the descriptions· of the Per- ai nnttt in Jforodotus' Hifltorz (which, inc:ldent1.1.lly, Hythloduy ·bringa to Utopia) �•ho.,11 ihea a11 wor1hipper• ef nature who · .. Gr~•k• use no 111agtto, and whe, unlike the L"ld Ch:ri•Ua.nt 1 '1.o not believ• that the godm have the euie nature a.e mon 9 iha• ie, i~•i thoy Olli be im&19d or made inoa.rnate in hunum form. All thi• ·held11 o.f the Utopi~•• .cf whom many worship the 11oon or one of 'the :plan- eta, while all 8«1"118 on .th• wor.tlip of a sun god who is the artificer of the u.nivar•• and bear.• th~ Persian name Mithra•. So also .all the ora!tB of Utopla are clooe to nature and• of oourne, par.tiouJ.arly •o the t,U'liv41r•al oraft, farming. Sp1utilac:i1 the Utopiana themeelvM 1.41·t as forces of nature, aa when 1Cing lJtONl!ll; the fa~dex· of .1~tQpi•• out the ohannel which made Utopia into a.n is- l.'mc1, p1· 111han the ohiak• they rdu. ad•:>pt them as m.othera, or when they trana- plant wh.,le t'o. oau to hav• a closer erJurc4' of wood. r ttJeti r w~•llM g1au,Hn ti, And they appear natural;.- for inetance 1 have their ne. tural color, So oven their art:U. ioe ie an lntel1ig1mt &nd familiar lldaptation of nature to their own uso. ' Thua the Utophne ar• not oo ~h pagans ae children of nature. '!hi~ aan be . put another wa,.v, To sey thd , Utopia co:r:rsaponds to Plato'• first city only is to say .t hat 'the lJto11iune are laek:tng in oertaJ.n pri.noiplea of the soul, p·a rtioularly ln thd which g:i.v•o rie• to Md dominates .the aecond or warrior city and ooca ·. 1i .(me in i.t 1a.,p:U':f.oenQ'• honor, and luxury--spiri tedneao, that is, self- auariiol.. !h! ~ Now the Chria t ian traru1lat.lon of the facuHy of spiritedness ia 9..! l?Q'\t.• Pl'id.e, "th• craving fox• undue e:xhaltation," says Augustine in hie City !?.[. Cl-oq, was tho or.i.gin of our evil will, that corruptinn o.f. our nature which u& u1JU18 n 11elt'-aAHrtive craving "forbidden" fruit because i. t is forbiddeno .P1·id•1 h thuo th• ar ig·in of perversion in the nature of man, and as More ln hhl ~ 1!.!1 lbinB! 1 "the very he111l and r.oot of ail sins." s~a Now ae Hythlo- day J1()ints out, th4' Uto.p ians have rio euch perverse pleasure\!; tho.v never pre- .;~ �-14- fer the bitter to the sweet; they have no "taste infected by the sickness of sin; 11 their desires a.re all satisfied by natura.l objects; they do not lmow the inverte d pl ea.al.ire of self-love; they a.re never unnatural.· '.l'hie is the case - pr.ecisely because the Utopians were not created and tharefore do not know that rebellion of the creature against ·i ts creator, called the fall of .mM, which is the original case of perv-eree pleasure. incapable of aalvatio~ Hence they, unlike ou.~ pagans, are by conversion to Christianity, altnough they absorb easily--for . they are facile in absorbing everything pr ofitable--those features of Christianity congenial t ·o then:i. ture · that Hythlodey leavee them 11 So it is by reason of their Ut<>pian na- unchrist ~ned 11 a..."ld only ostensibly because there is no priest among his company. In · his youth More read a aeries of well-attended lectures on Augustine's 91ti of Q2!, so we may well suppose that he considered the relation of hie Utopia tq the two cities of Augustine's work, ~hich •have been formed by two ~oven, .. ' ' the 4'arthly city by the love of self, even to the contempt of God, ·t he heav1iily by the . love of God. to the contempt of self." city; their nature . is nothing~ 'lhe Utopians are of neither absence of perversion; ·they have neither contempt of f,iod, nor as we shall see, contempt of self; they inhabit an earthly paradise--Wld that is. the essential character of · the painted -city of the ~magination; its missing dimension is original human evil, which, as a kind of non-bei,ng» lies beyond the likeness-making :i.magi.na ti on. 8. Utopia as a Communi. ty of Pleasure But i f Utopia is pri va.tiv~ with respect to p~ide, it is positive with respect to pleaaure • . Freedom from the vices of the will leaves the Utopians · to the enjoyment of their goods, and that enjoyment is the end and center of their community. What is · its nature? their education and their "philosophy," To answer that question one must examine �-15All major utopias follow Plato's Republic in tional provinces," bein~ essentially "educa- transforming So,cratea• deliberately :.mage-lPas program of lea.ming· into vivid piot:urea of ideai inati tutions of in1:truction and inquiry. In the Republic itself, education forms both the peliticul beginning end the philosophical end of the city. fut in the island of Utopia education haa a cha.rac ·;eristically diffe+ent . . standing. The liberal arts, are, to be sure, studied in Utop:.a as in the Republic, · for the Utopians have made the same ~iecoveries in leam: .ng as the h"'u.ropee.ne • .'The trivium, which dee.ls with the arts of language under grammar, rhetoric .and logic; ia reduced to one useful art--dialectice, "tlte ways of reasoning which reasoning has observed useful for investiBating th: .ngs." phnsizea their lack of concern with pure· logic. JzythlodB¥ em- They ha·re no universals and have never heard of a "second intentiqn, 11 the ref"lective product of the intellect "which," as More ea.ya elsewhere, "is nowhere." ~hich is nowhere, no intellectual Hoplace .ha.s nothing being~. They possess the full quadriviB!fll, which ooncema t!1e world of nature, and in it especially ·p ureue astronomy, for they regard· tl 1e world as a spectac le made for man--in fact the whole section · on ed1:1cati•>n appropriately comes within the a·e otion on sightseeing. as among the most useful branches They characteriatica:.ly regard medicine of philosophy. Now what characterizes this education is the absen•:e of almost all phiiosophy, and first of all " absence of physics underitood as the inquiry an into causes; they confine themselves to engaging in desu .tory and inconclusive debates, inventing new theories to add to those af the a icienta·. there is an apparent absence of politics; inquiries conc&~rning of the commonweal th'' are absent in the best commonweal th . Secondly "the best state �-16- And fin•lly as fQt metaphy~ics, inquirie~ intri being or god, th~y ha~e nono,. but r,or· · their highest inquiry they conduct debates "in that part of . . pti!losophy" which entreateth af manners and w.i rt us," and their chief quest.i on · is , .. • . in .what thing,· be it ,one or moi~, the felicity ot ~an.~onsi~teth. But in this· point thay seam almost too much given and inclined to the opinion of them which defend pleasure, wherein they det~rmine either all or the chief~st part Qf menf•· feljcity to rest. And (which is more to be marveled at) their defense of ·this so dainty and deli~ate . en opinion they fetch •van from their grave, sharp, bitter and rigorous raligiono Indeed they never have any philosophical di1cussions without resorting to relitj1ous principles; thu~ employing the exact convars• · of ~pr~'• paated cQnton~ion that reason should and can serve religion. often re- The religious principles which they employ are two: . they .Pelif'le in s wise -providence ~hich governs the world end ordaiMs· felicity for man, and in th~ immortality of tha soul and its reward and punishment after death. are .free to choo~e what religious practices In all plea~e ~ther respects Utopians them, but these two prin- ciples .they are strictly required .to affirm, for as we shall see, they aro the requirements of a communal pursuit of pleasure. Now the content of their doctrines of pleasure are 1 as one might guess, · what we · would call Epicurean. Epi~urus It is the notoriously apolitical teaching of modified to become the political philosophy of the most unlikely republic ever davised--a stable community of pleasure. These are tha modifications the Utopians makei the Epicureans believe that the gods, if there are any, . do not guide the worlds fore, the Utopians as~ert as mentioned be- divine providence, presumably because without it the natural circumstance of man would not necessarily be conduOive to pleasure. The Epicureans beli~ve th~t the soul dissolves with the body; the Utopians require·tha immortality of the _soul to assure that the calcul~s of �-17- pl~asures is not so short term es to admit imparmia•ibla or false pleasures. The Epicureans belisve in private property' the Utopians in common wealth, for they. regard all wealth as "mat·erie. voluptatis," the material of pleasure, thaugh they abate their communism 'to tha degree that privacy is necessary to pleasure--this is why they . . ~ase their society on the famJly. As far as the chief doctrine of Epicurus, that pleasure is the highest ~oad, i~ concerned, they agree~ but they think ·not ·felicity to r. st in all pleasure, b~t e only in that pleasure that.is good and honest, and that hereto as to perfect blessedness our nature is allured and drawn even by virtue. It follows that the Uto~ians find it possible to absorb the Stoic position~ that .ts, to obuiate the question Qf the priority of virtue and pleasure as · ends among which a choice must be made, . the ref\tc.tion on ·which choice ennobles the pagan philosophers. The uiitue mQst peculi~rly In this they follows. ~elonging to human beings i~ "humanity," that is to say man's virtue is simply the t~re. ~rgue . as realiz~tion of hi~ essential na- ".Now' the most earn~st and painful followers of virtue and haters of pleasure exhort you to relieve the misery of others,~ praising such deeds es "huinanity." Thus virtue itself is nothing but an argument for a~d an instrument of pleasure, understood however in such a way as to become the basis for a theory of private and social contracts: But in that nature doth allow and provoke men one to help another live merrily ••• verily she commandeth thee to use diligent circumspection, that thou do not so seek f6r thine own commodities, that thou ~rocura othara' incommodities. Wherefore their opinion is, that not only covenants and bargains made among private men ought to be well and faithfully fulfilled, observed, and kept, but also common laws ••• Tn this way the Utopians constitute a political community based on pleasure, t.hat is, on· nature, and therefore stable. Their only requirement is that �-18- · pl~esuras ba true and not false. To te~ch their citizens to make this ~lscrimination is the object of their . educat.ion. Bv false or "counterfeit" pleasures arel of course, meant . tho•e counter to natural desire. for "pleasure they call _every motion and state of. the body or lfrind lilhsrein. man hes actually dalectstion. 11 r alsa · _plaas_ ures are therefore perverse pleasures, namely those which yield no · in,trinsic.ally pleasing state, but are present mostly for the sake of asserting first among th.esa are the pleas.u res which result from a "futile oneself. conopi~acy" d~es~, of men, b@~inning with th~ mistaken pleasure of magnificence in and .going on to the . pleasure tskeM in honor and nobility derived from property. Thus the prideful pleasure of conspicuous consumption is the _car- dinal sin of ~topia. 9. The Uee of Utopia Utopia than is a land of pl•asure without pridQ. -- - Whan --- E~asmus says of this book called On the Beet Ststa of the Commonw,alth, that in it More - - ~----....... "proposed to illustrate the source ahd spring rif political evil," he must . . mean just thie-that Mora in his Utopia has disclosed and eradicated the root of all evil in leisur~ pri~e. Erasmus goas on to say that Mora first,at his wrote the second book (which contains Hythlodey's narrative of Utopia) and "recognizing the need for it" hastily added a first. Where was the . need to prefix this latter book, which at first sight, seams to ' contain mostly an account of the particular political evils of More's En~- l; and 'for which Utopian inst.i tutions are proposed by Hythloday as the cure? Ths answer is in the fact that it is "utopian" in the derogatory sense of the term to paint a pattern of a political community fr.om which human evil is radically removed1 or worse, as e straight political proposal, i t is a culpably futile undertaking. But. when Hythloday solemnly closes, saying �-19- that all the world would loMg ago have been brought under the laws of Utopia "~ere it not that on~ only beast, the prince~s and mother of all mischief~ Pride doth withstan·d and let itH he is . taking a fierce pleasure in vitiating the book by underscoring precisely the futility of' hie narrstiue. Hence the first botJk was wH tten to reh'abili.ta'te the ser;:ond and contains directions for the proper ~ ~ utopias. The first book is so.metimas; appropriately, called a dialogue on counsel. f9r the occasion of Hythloday•s reletirin of ths evils of England !s his da·cided ·refusal. of Peter Gile·s• suggestion that hra should get into a king's court to· iris~ruct · him with examples ~nd help him with counsal. Hythloday allows. that h~ h~s learned in his travels of institutions which would cure the condition~ which he·had so acutely observed in England, put he shows by serious and comical examples how his solutions would never ·be taken seriously· at court. Raphael Hythloday's first name is Hebrew for "tha physician of health," and·his laet name is Gresk for "knowing in babble." vation which is, first, in its~lf impossibl~ evmn to advocate in the places that matter. Hythloday brings a sal• and which he, secondly, refuses He is a babbler on two counts. and . ha knows it. ~ore himself now attacks Hythloday: for whereas your Plato judgeth that weal-publics shall by : thi~ means attain ~erfect felicity either if . philoso- phers be kings or else if kings ·giv•·themselvss to the study of philosophy, how far, I pray you, shall commonwealths ~hen be from felicity, if philosophers will nnt vouchsafe to instruct kinqs with theit gorid counsel? Hythlo.day objects that philos.ophy can have no power among kings. More coun- tersr Indeed, .this school philosophy (philosophia scholaetica) h•th not, which thinketh all things meet for . every place. But there is another philosophy more civil (philosophia civilior) ••• which knoweth, as you would say, her own stage ••• And this ia the philosophy you must use. �-20- . The Citizen and Undar-Sf\eriff of London, King' a Councillor to be and futura Lord Ch~ncellor ~f England then ·9ivas the content of this "more citizen-like philos.o phy," tac!tl v h::tnamuting Plato's most radical proposal into practical wladarn: · If ~~il ~pinions ~nd n~ughty persuasions cannot be utt~rly and quite ; plucked · out of their hearts, if you .cannot even as you would remedy vices which use and custom has confirmed, .yet for this · cause you muet not l~~u~ and forsake the commonwealth. You must not forsake tha ·ship . in a tempe~t because you cannot rul$ and keep down the winds. No, nor you ; must not labor to drive into their heads new and strange information which you know well shall be nothing regarded with them that be of clear contrary rnlndso But you must ~!th crafty wile and a subtle train study and endeavor yourself, as much as in you liath, ta handle the matter wittily and handsomely for the purpose. And that which you cannot turn to good, so o~dsr it that it be not vary ,bad. For it ia not possible for all things to be ~ell unles~ all· men were good, which I . think will not be yet this good meny years. . Many books on counsel~ng · princes, such as Erasmus' Education of ,,! Christian Princs and· Machiavelli's Prince were written in More's age; from these tha --·· Utopia differs in being a book of counsel for subjects and citizens, and its first advice to them is ~ ~ inject utopia ~ their counsels• attack qn radical polities among the advisors of rulers. Jt is an But what then is the profit, not in the book Utopia, but in the land Utopia of the second. book, the ideal commonwealth itself? first of all it seems to me that Utopia negatively proposes a great po1itical principle, true in f~ct · and potent as a conviction: that originally and fundamentally communities are expressions of human nature and that the converse is not so much the case. This understanding of the book is, of course, at variance with. what Utopia appears to exemplify, )')11.mely the reconstruction of numen nature through a perfectly planned society. And secondly, in pointing to human perverseness as the a~oiler of pol!- tics and na.md.ng it pride, . an.d by painting a pattern of a prideleas community, �-21- positively, by preeanting it in delightfµl M~te s~ows it would mean to very. sen~itive tri that • • • detail, what li~e .. in Utopia, w~at the lif~ of pleasure in abstr~ction fro~ tti~ · briginal human c(ln~ition looks like. • imag~nativ• 1 ' in The student of Utopia should become ~rd~osals for new · ~n~ improved ways of life which r~a-lly impila. an · 2lteration of hum~n nature • s Ptnally, Utopia ag~in .. by the negative influence of its imaginative . ·. r11alization, effepts a kind of celebrat.i,on of and satisfaction in the given . . . human condition. In his last long work written in the Tower of London, end :called E_ Dialogue Ef. Comfort against Tribulation) More argues that tribulation is the pre-cond'ition of salvation, a truth which, even when i t is not taken in : lt~ pre~ise Christian meaning, exercises a powerful influence on the politics of · ~hose ~ho believe it. And finally, Utopia iS the beneficial o.c casion of a kind of ·civic festivity. ·An early biographer calls Mor~ "our noble new Christian Sricrates," and More~ ·who ~eeembles Socr~tas bot~ · ~n many particulars of the m~de of his lif~ and the crucial parts of the manner of his death, · resembles him in nothing so much as in his serene playfulness. when he m~ans mer~ily" ~f · ~~re's favorit& It was said of More that he "looks sadly and the "island of Utopia" is written in that way. write~s, One one which Hythloday brought to the· Utopians, . who .t ake special delight in him for "his many conceits and jests;' is the ancient writer of comic and fentastical dialogues, Lucian. Lucian wrote two accounts oL voyages to the moon whenct '1.he foibles of earth come into sharpa•t focus. The Utopians, that"facile and facetious" people, equipped with golden chamber pots and followed about by loving chicks, are just such moon people--in fact the first thing Hythladay mentioris about th~ island is that it is moon-shaped. More can afford such pranks, fbr although like Soctates a participant in dialogues, he is unli~e the latter, a writing Socr~tes. This effects a difference �-22- in · the .form ~t S~cratic ~~d Mor~an itony1 the latter is a~thor end interlo6utor in .one, ~hence he ~an by sob~r spee~h · control from the in~ide of th~ dialogue . Utdpia wh~t me~rim~nt he has set afobt from the outside b~ writing ,it • . Thus fltore h_ . started a. subtle and inviting game·, which has always as dra·wn togeth_.r B in a me~ry end melancholy -inquiry th.ass who - ~ b~ : Citi~en• of the best commonwealth~ WOUld like ta Just t~is is conv~y~d iri the ful~ title . of the book as printed in the first editiont A :Truly Golden Booklet, as Sa~ing as it is restive, on the Best State of the Commonwea~th and the New Island of Utopia~ Now to return to the beginning, I hav~ tried to ~ho~, by looking to the book call.a d . Utopia, that the term "utopia" bears .a ·c ertai"n particular original meaning . to wh.i ch the utopian tradition always beers some relation. But i t is clear that utopias understood in that particular sense are unflitted to fill ~he needs for~ulated by those interested in conjec~uring about and planning for the tuture. You will remember that the demand was for an frnaginativs presentation of a variety of possible "life styles" based on pro- . jections into the future - of present possibilit{aa. t~ be used as an instru~ent The utopian tradition was of the social sciences by means of which a ~ore conscious choice of ends could be achieved. This seems to me inappropriate for . two reasons. no e~ty of First I think there can be deliberate pre-pl~nnad vari~ utopias, for a utopia is not a description of mere style but a vividly . delineated constructiOn·'· in the imagination of political wisdom, and its com.. position is presumably not undertaken until the author has settled his opinions and persuaded himself of their truth. realization of the impossible~ And ~econdly a utopia is an imaginative which far from being a projec~ion possibilities, if it lies anywhere in time, lies behind. of present �-23..;. . . , , · ~ritics of t'1e utopian enterprise quite r _ghtly characterize it ae i essEmtially .nes~a!gi~, b,acioe;111ard~l.~oklng • . Jn . fact i t _ might be said .that the notiqn of .utopia and . . . th~ .' . concept of a . : "r~tura" are incompatible. The urgent . quas.tion is: " the stu·Ciy of. which of these makes for the better state of the ·.· . ' . � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. 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Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 23 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 On Thomas More's Utopia Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1972-05-05 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on May 5, 1972, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1972-05-05 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/260">Audio recording</a> Subject The topic of the resource More, Thomas, Saint, 1478-1535. Utopia Future, The Utopias Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/81b24b3fe4a605a69d36bdc96fc71d7f.pdf 77efc19749a51816a00e1c213b4ee6d3 PDF Text Text , QUX ® ~n RH A FORMAL LECTURE DELIVERED AT ST JOHN'S COLLEGE by Eva 13rann JS' tr ~OD~ x·s s · r ? �What la a Body in Kant's Syat. .1 1. * The reason for this inquiry. I think it. is ray first duty to explain why I have chosen to inquire into the place and meaning of body in Kanta' syst••• I would like to begin by calll~ on an eaaay by Kant entitled •concerning the Noble Tone of Late Raised in Phlloaopaay.• In this essay Kant points to Plato and Pytha8oras aa the partly unwltti~ progenitors of those who philosophize in a certain elevated and enthusiastic mode. •the philosophy of Ariatotle, on the contrary, is work• he goes oa to observe in sober pra1... And he calls Aristotle an extremely prosaic philosopher,• adding that •at bottom, after all, all philosophy la prosaic.• What characterizes Arlatotle'a philoaophical work la that it la an acute and serious analytic and synthetic labor performed by the pure intellect, resulting in a uaable product, such •• a preli•inary table of categories, (B 107), which provides the materials for a later worker to employ ayste. .tically (B 107). * furt Rta1on, First Edition (1781), Aa Critiqyt Ba Critique of P\Jre Re11on, Second Edition (1786). FHMa a( Foundatione of th! Metaphysica of Morale (1785). HFSN1 MetaphY!lCfl Foun4tt1ons of Netural Scienc1 (1786), tr9ns. James Ellington (Library ot Ltberal Arta, 1~7u)~ MFDR1 Hetaphxeical Foundations ot the Doctrine ot Right (1797)" OP1 KOP1 K.ant'a Ooya PoatU!UJI by Erich Adickea (Berlin 1920~ �2 I have begun by citing this essay becaue~ my inquiry will unavoidably issue in the questU>n whether phtlosopy should be prose and work or perhaps something else. And furthermore I feel obliged to set off the spirit of llY present uadertaking from that of philosophical work. For I came on my question concerning body not at all in the orderly progress of finding and accomplishing a task, but in a most unsystematic or anti- aysteaatic waya by attending to certain particular sections and sequence• in Kant's work which struck me with a sense of aaazement and revelation as well as a conviction that through these passages there of Kant's edifice. m~ht be access to the unfounded foundations As a result it now seem• to me that the 11arvel of Kant's thought lies in this very circumstance -· that in the naae of systematic co11pletene1s it throws open depth upon dizzying .depth of inquiry. Let 11e begin by setting out the items of my conviction and by showing how they all implicate body in the crux of Kant's effort. 2. The ends of the Critique of Pure Reason. The f irat of such clues comes out of the very plan and the iap1ied end& of that enco•passing systematic edifice, the Critique of Pure Reaaon. This firat of Kant's three critiques has two great enda. The central end is "critical~ l n the proper, ordinary senaea human reason ie exposed as a faculty system of illusions. f~r a definite and inevitable In etriki.ng these down, Kant aakes a �3 clearing for the poaaibillty of d11illu1loned human actlon, performecl in tile face of tbe defecta of humaa r•aoa.. Thi• po a a ibll ity ls worked out 1n the second crlt ique, the Crltiqyt of fr19tlcal Reaaon. The encoapaaaing taak, however, la bnt'a review of tbe grounds of human knowledge. Suoh a revlev la called a •critique• ln a 1enee aore peculiar to Kallt• and lta deter11laed end la the certlflcatlon of what we call, eiaply a.S grandly, •aelenee•, and ln particular, of pbx1ic1, aa tbe al.ngle trutll•prMuelng effort. To say the ,.., thing ln other vorda; tbe poaltlve critical enterprise la the e1tabllalment of •experience.• Experience la the jolalq of the graap of understanding witb so• •empirical• -tter, -•ing to•thlmg whleb co•• to ua, in part, adventltlouely, · ao•thlng nloh 11 glvea to ua. Thia product, a graapecl give• thlag, - t • preclaely bat:'• quite traditional . .tlon of truth aa •adaequatlo iatellectua rei,• the fitting of thought to thing (I 82). I aall bave to retura to thie definition of truth. The Cr1tigut gf Psgt &••op, then, not only clear• tbe deck• for the practleal uae of our reaaon, .,_. alao provl•e& th• foundations for lta theoretical u . . , and thla latter part aeataina the great positive dlscoverl•• ~ tile book. · It waa in eonaldert.ns thia two•fold poaltlve aat negative end of the work that I hM a flrat f"llng of havlllS oo• oa an •l&M· Let • nplain. The flrat critical 1yat. . , tbat nl.C!b uaderllea theory. 1• aald to be perfectly oomplete. lta ..-tapbyaloal 1uper•atuotUE"e la a .... work of neablllg out, to be lef't: largely to pup1l•· �4 Philoao~ ia essentially finished (B 884). The second critique, the er1tique ot fractical R911on, 110st explicitly contains no nev truth• nor any proaiae of new truth•• it ller9ly toraulatea the full meaning of what, according to Kant, we all know even before any philosophical intervention• that ve auat do as ve ought rather than as ve want if we are to respect ourselves (FHM, sec. I). therefore its effact on our llvea la not to give them a content but only a forma whatever ve do, ve 11Uat do it as beings whose reason ls a ruler. Hence neither of theae two critical systems presents in itself a vorklng project for hUllAll reason. w'vl : c.~ 1 !> 1 The theoretical enterprl1e founded in the first critique, ·' " doee, on the other hand, provide our lives with an infinite and legitl-te bu1lnea1, naaely physical science. Nov having expended a truly enor110u1 effort on well-founding such work and oft showing that reaeoa baa no other, does Kant glory ln its beauty, praiee lta pleasures, deund that its aodes infora public and private life? In Plato's TiMeus, for instance, which, anacbro? - niatically and la.accurately apeaking, also containa a theory of acience, the eaterpriae la acceptetl by Socrates as •a feast of accounta• (27 b) and a celebration. So ooapletely does Kant o•it all com1ent on the human significance of this single vast peraiaaible use of the human understanding that hi.a omlasion arouses auapiclon 'of an ieaue too deep in the foundations of the syatea for pa111.ng explanation. I 1hall atate right away that I "9lleve there to be evidence, not peripheral and flnlcking, but bold and central, that la I.ant'• •Y•t- phyaica •• the aclence of bo41iea do•• �5 indeed play a central human role, 12£....it the one access ~ have .tQ .S2.J.lr .Q.!m souls, and provides all the self•knowledge ~ £!!.n ~· ~ I cannot tell why Kant never explicitly drew attention to this circumstance in all lts pathos, except by noting that all great philosophical works that I know have these telling lacunae, junctures too sensitive, d"ep and dangerous to bring out in words. 3. The grand design for the deduction of physics. Let me now adduce somewhat more external evidence for the overwhelming importance which the science of bodies has in Kant's system by sketching out the intention not of one work, but of a sequence of three works which largely occupied his later years. This sequence contains a grand design for the deduction of empirical physics, an apparent contradiction in terms, which the setti~ out of the design will be only partly able to reconcile. The first of the texts in question ls again the Critique of Pure Reason and within lt the section called the "Principles of the Understanding." understanding isa One form of the principal proposition of the "The conditions of the possibility of experience ln general are at the same time conditions of the possibility !lf the oblects _of experience." (B 197). That is to say, the foundations of science are simultaneously the conditions of its objects, namely bodies, so that physics and bodies are established together. Both are the ultimate result of the same long deduction. The "Principles of the Understand i1'lg" only establish experience and its objects in general. "from the first"1 objects By "in general" Kant are~ means~ priori insofar as they have fro• the very first a form of which we ourselves are the source and which precedes any empirical addition. priori, �6 Such general objects are called things, and in their proper coaplex of lawful relations, they are called nature. -The next work in the sequence, which i.s in the grand critical 'esign parallel to the work on the metaphysics of morals t\~ed Metaohvsical Foundations of the Doctrine of Ri.&ht and Virtue (5), la called the Metaphysical Foundations of the Sclence of Natµre. In this work the outline of the metaphysics of phyeics is laid down. By a •metaphysics• Kant means the plan of a completed system of pure rational cognition proceeding by specification fro• the critical preparatloa. The metaphysics of nature (or or physics -· again, the object has the same foundation I as lta acience) is therefore the specification of the •general object• established in the first Critique by the introduction of an empirical concept, namely !ftter understood as the •11avable in space•. And so we have a •metaphysics of corporeal nature• or a •doctriae of body• (MFSN 469), a pure science resulting froa the application of the transcendental principles to an e11pirical concept. (Here a note oa the terms and •transcendental• seeas appropriate. and mean respectively only this• ~ •pure•, •a priori", All three are privative 2'· before, and beyond all sensation.) I shall give the contents of the Metaphysical Foundations ln brieflest outline and return to the work later. In it . .tter, the movable in apace, is treated under four headi:Dgaa 1. insofar as it is aerely aovable, 2. apace, 3. insofar insofar as it 110vea other utter, 4. a1 i.t fills aot aa lt is an object of exper_ence 1 but as it ls related to a knower, a i subject, and his faculties of knowledge. �7 I should add that the ti,le of thl1 work, of which a reasonable alternative translation i1 the •Hetaphy11Gal Principle• of Natural Science,• also iadlcates a corrective purpose beside thAt positive sy1temat1c one. It is intended to oppose the implications of the title N.vton gave to the work in which he presented the very physics Kant 11 groundings the Hatbelllltlcal Principle1 of Natµral Pb1101oplly. Kant will contend . e11phatically that it is not aatheaatics whloh furnl1be1 the principles of philosoJ*y, but, in a carefully liaited aenae, the conver1e •• mathematics la not usable in natural science without a l'letaphy1lcal foundation. (OP 21, !!.!A•• 72). When we coae to the third work in the critical deaign, there is no longer a parallel text dealing with the 11etaphysica of morals. Thia ls in a moat general way quite understandable, for the theory of practice by its very natures comea t:o an end in deeds, whereas the theory of experience issues in further theory. In any case, ln his old age Kant was preoccupied principally with ...king notes for what he expected to be bla aoat laportant work (KOP, 3), the completion of the deduction of experiaental physics. Thta enor11aue agglomeration of notes, including also much other ..terial, became known as the Qm!! Po•tUllUll• Kant called his projected work the •Transition from the Metaphysical Foundation of Natural Science to Physics.•. Hia great concern was that there should be no jump or discontinuity in the syste.,tlc deduction of the empirtcal investigation of corporeal nature. (I ahould note here tbat the word •deduction' la lllJMt• ..c i.t•a, and that I aa using lt, legltl.aately, I �8 think, ia tba Mn•• in which one •llbt apeak of the deduotion ef EuelidMll ..... projective geoaetry, -nln& a apec1f1oatlon of general prl.naiple1 to yleld a .,re partlaular 1y1t... ) Wllat bat intended to provide in thia •transition• vu an antlolpatton of all tbe possible finding• of pby1lca, an aatl.clpatlon which be considered •••ible bY virtue of lt1 1y1t...tlc character, and neceaaary to, lta preaervat~. Thia 11 certat.nly die place to interject th• long-deferred expoanat ion of what hat -n• by a • •Y•t-·. hnt' a aetaphor for a ayat. . la that of a work of architecture, in which th• foundations, the Aroundvork, deteralne a unified superstructure. The non-metaphorical description la ln ter11s of prlnclple1 and their rullag powers a ayat.. le a universe ptryaaively formed by it1 funda. .atal lava, which deteralne at once the nature of it• parts !ml their re lat ioaa. I vhould add that for Kant thought la such that to tbink and to -.Ile ayateaa are one and the aaae operation. Io return to the •transition to Pby•1oa•. The anticipation of phy1lcal inquiry amounts to an exhaustive claaaiflcatlon of all conceivable forces, forces being the ultlllate ooncern of phy1lca, •• we ahall see. Such a •topic• of forces ls intended to direct and regulate all future lnveatlgatlon (OP 21, A!&•, 640). I 1hall not go into thla claaalflcatlon very far, because there le a aeft89 of failure over the whole unwieldy enterprlae, due both to IC.a•'• falling powers and, again •• ,,. shall .... to tbe lnberently llalCl••• and aelf·•efeatlng ab&raoter of the atteapt to direct •perlmentatlon .! priori. �9' Aside froil corroborat 1ng that the illpulre and coacern of Kant• a ayat• really la the acience of bodiea, the Opu1 Pg 1 t,.,_ i• aoat lntrlquiag for the telling gliap••• it glvea of tbe wotlye1 of thl• concern. \\ ,, The critical aapecta of th• '2lz!.ll. are doainatecl by the theae of 11lf•d1tenirwt1pp, 11lf•tff11tion, aad 11lf•knowleclg1, by the way in which I ayaelf become the •preprl.etor and originator• of ay world. Kant hillaelf •keil an elliptical statement concerning this matter well worth quoting (OP 22, 73)1 Fl.rat the conacioueneea of oneself aa a faculty of representation, second the determination of oneaelf aa a function of oneaelf, namely a force (via) of representation. Thtd the appearapee of oneself ae a phenomenon, ae a 11&nifold of representation• a thoroughgoing deteraination of ·o -.11' 1 but only aa appearance and not aa a thlng in itaelf s · objectively ·• x, but as the aubject 11 affected by the understanding• 1tnowledge 2! ongelf tbrough 1,1lf•dtttr1ination in space IDSl ~·· (ay italic•) The importance of this passage to my •position beoo•• clear if I anticipate myself by stating that aelf•deterat.nation in apace l!lsl ti.lie is preclaely physlce •• the 11ince ~ science 2' 2' l!slll 11 llll• r ·ahall however baae ay argument for tbia atateaent not on the opus Pootuma, but on the vigorous and completed works publiahed by Kant bilulelf. 4. The lllportance of body in the Crltiaue• Raving aketched out in a Vf.ry external way the deduction of phyeica through three worka, I llU8t now return to the t.aportance of body witbla the critique of Pure Rea19n. to -ke ay ~ I aaat give a very brief rnlev of certain f\lltd-tal critical )<, �10 Ia accordance with the not lon of truth set out before, the great faculttea. When I aay •1 thlnk•, I I - n Chat I perfora a flxed nU11ber of deflnlte functlo••• ( v Tbe ayatem ef these operationa of dla•@t't, which Kant teraa •categorlea•, la called the •understanding", vhlch gra9ps or conceives an object. \~ It la the first faculty. second faculty is receptlve1 provldes the form under which what la given to be graaped can be received. ln The ~t•a It la called the •aenslbllttf• and yields, term, "lntultlona•, sights. ICaftt's aost crucial critical discovery. Thia paaalve faculty ls It is not strictly apeaking a "faculty• at all but a formal receptacle for •aeasatlon•, which la Kant'• tera for whatever la adventitious in hllllan experience. a But, agaln paradoxically, it also contains an ptlori given, a •pure intuition• or transcendental material, a pura-acruature of relatlona, aa it were. The aensiblllty, in turn, bas two aspects or faces, an outer and an inner aense. I ahall leave the outer sense, which Kant teraa •apace•, for later and now describe briefly only the lnner, which Kant terms •ttae•. Tl. . la nothlag but our capabillty for receiving our own original tranaoendental self, that ls, our thinking aelf, as an appearanoe. It la •the intuition of ourself and our inner eeaditicm". (B 49). •Every act of atttntion can provide ua an example• (B 157) of the act of aelf•affection la which ve appear to ouraelvea. And when we exaaine the character of our intuition of ouraelvea aa originators of thought ve find it to have the fora of a flow of •nova•a coaac1.ouaneas la precisely the �11 stream we c~ll time1 to appear to myself aeans to activate or determine my sense of tlme. Here I must interject a note on the particular text which I am going to deal with. The part of the Critique which is the prime source of what follows is that section called the "Analytic of Principles" of the understanding. Here those two totally disparate faculties. the understanding and the sensibility, are brought together by a third power, hidden and mysterious (B 181), which Kant terms the "iru.ginat1on." By means of this faculty casts ~lnto, ~he u~~i:ng grasps, or the pure formal material available in the sensibility •• but only into its inner sense, only ~ ~· The products of this injection of thought into ti.lie are called "schemata". Thus schemata are thought•inforaed structures of time, or, equally, temporallzed operations of thought. The example of a few scheaata will make immediately plausible the claim tat they are nothing but the pattern under which our thinking appears to ourselves. For instance, our consciousness is understood by us to be fuller or emptier down to vacancy lere we have the appearance in time of that function of the Jnderstand1ng called the category of reality, which is the thought• function corresponding to a given object1 the resultant temporal thought structure is the scheru. of aomethlng insofar as it fills time. the waxi~ (B 1R2). So also our consciousness itself subsists• and waning materiality of our consciousness •Tiae itself does not run out, but in it the existence of what ie mutable runs on" (B 183) ·- here we have the appearance of the category of substance in t 1Jne, and the ~~·esul tant schema io �12 that ot .,JJftll,,,. t:be peraanence of 10-thing real in ti-· In a like tboee f-11 tar and t11e¥ltable pattern• of our· temporal thtdf\na by wbleh ve d1aoover la nerythlng ve conaider ae~tlou of 110Hnt1 of attention, namely ftU!lber, and tf ,.rJ'.)r.,, cante_.&MOua autual actloa, nuely aiault19tty, and rule- v-rl'IN s(;V\ sc»veJ1ned· 1ucceaa1on, naaely cauoe and effect. With the ach...ta aet out, the prlnctplea of the understanding are then si~ a aet of fund~tal rule•. Thew• rulea d-nd that, and alao tall hov, tbeae time-involved categoriea Mlat now in tura be 1ntroduoed into 1MCe, ae that aa object of •nperl-••, 111bleh - n a of truth or M science, uy ari.ae. they are ttaea, ln accord••• with the prinoiple of prlnc1plea quoted before, at the • - tlae tbe rulea for t:be conatltutlon of tbe objeota of experience am for any poaalble true acoount of tbell. Thia peculiar aequence, ill which the categories are (\rat brought together with ti.lie and only then vitb apace, iadlaatea that tlae ia the een& of aeaaea, the priury fora in vblch utryth1M chat presents ltaelf to us at all ftrat appeara1 •aut el.,e all repreaentation1, vtiletber they have outer thlags a1 object• or aot, belong ln Cbemaelvea, •• ••teralnatloaa of the · aoal, to dle l ...r atate, while ~hta inner atate belo~•·••to tt .. , it follova that t l • la an a · priori conclltio• of all appearance la general, tbat is• the l~ late cond lt ion of the 1tmer appearance (of MUl) and beoauae of thla alao tba ..cit.ate condlttoD of outer appearaaaea.• (1 ~-50). And 19t Chere l• 110 aclence of the aouL ·:appearing in aa th_..- t.a a aolence of the body appearing in apace. t 1- Noalaally, the •iAlllOe of uture, as the atudy of all appearano••• lRcludea �13 both, but hnt Mk•• it very elear tllat there 1• not now and never can be a sclenoe of 10ul, a .payehology, Tbe reaaoa la not 111trely that otb• th1ak1ng subjects will naturally not aumlt to, or lf they do, vlll aot reuin unaffected by, our 1aveat1gatlona, rather it 11 inherent both in the poverty of t 1- lteel f and of tbe lawleaa variability of its contents (A 381). IC.ant c\at•e.(ve shall aee later vby) that 1clenoe la auell only inaofar aa there ia Mtheutlce in it, preferably g•-.try. Nov the geoaetric iaage of t lme is the flowing 1 iae of a lag le di•eaeioa, whieh ehova how poor fsychology auat be . .t1'ellat1cally when compared to three d 1.Jlenat.onal apace (MFSN 471). It follow• tbat no self •knowledge of interest can come through the study of soul u ~ apD!ars. I aust add that Kant forcefully proves that lt is an illusion of reaaon to think that the soul caa know itaelf y ,1' 11. lD it1elf (B 399ff.). Self •kpovledge 1eea1 ,t2 /"< lm alygether preclu4td. And now we auat look at two sections Kant added to the "Analytic Prlnclplea" in the aecowi edition of the Cr1t19ue, the "lefutatlon of ldealiaa• and the "General Note to the Syat. . of Priaclplea•. In theae additt.ona I.Cant endeavor• to aupply a pla09 where we aay look to aH ouraelvea fully mi• aatiafyingly. 'Ehle place ia the outer sense, IHCI• The outer sense ls the aecond face of our senaibility, a receptive fora for all Jlhat is other than ourselvea, for all co-a froa the outalde to affect us, for - •••tion proper. . outer ..... is also. in inexplicit but apt refiectlon of ~t But thi• �14 purpose, the source of the most telling feature of all the objects within it, which is that they have their parts outside and beside one another and are extended in three dimensions. Thus it is the very structure of the f or11 of outer sense which not only guarantees but even requires that spatial objects shall be subject to geometry hence Kant's requirement that natural science be geametric is really the same as his claim that it can only arise in space. (It is of course also numerical, since all the contents of outer sense appear in inner sense or title as well, and number> it will be remembered, is a time schema.) To return to the additions to the text with which Kant decided to conclude the section on the application of the temporalized categories to space. Here he says that it ts noteworthy that "in order to understand the possibility of things according to categories, and so to display the objective reality of the latter, we need not only intuitions, but even always outer intuitions" (B 291). So, for instance, in order to give objective reality to the concept of substance, we need an intuition in space, namely 11atter, because that alone determines permanence, while ti11e ls in constant flux. Even to grasp our own changing consciousness we need to it as a line in space and "the real reason for i11a~ine this is that all alteration presupposes something permanent in the intuition, but that in inner sense no permanent intuition at all is to be 11etwith." (B 292). And Kant concludes/a "This whole observation is of great importance ••• ln order to indicate to us the limitations of the possibility of such knowledge whenever there is talk of self-knowledge out of mere inner consciousness and the determination of our nature without the aid of outer empirical intuitions: (B293). �15 Outer empirical intuitions are, as we shall see, bodies. Kant ls therefore saying that bodies are the necessary conditions of our steady presence before ourselves. where appear !2 ourselves !!!S! in ~ * ~ They~~ sole place lies our substance. It should be noted that this strange outcome is at least consonant with Kant's peculiar understanding of outer appearance. For when sensation comes to us from what might be called the absolute outside to fill our sensibility, the resulting appearance tn no way belongs to the alien source of that sensation and is quite incapable of indicating anything concerning the nature of that source which Kant ·calls the "thing in itself". It is rather the case that the appearance, the shaped sensation, is entirely formed by but the USJ ~ one might say that sensation itself adds nothing of our being affected, the mere activation of t:he subject (B 207). 5. * The use of the term body. At this point I would like to interject an observation on the word 'body' which I have used in posing my questions ts a body in Kant• s systera7 What Kant himself cal l _ the science s founded in the Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature a "doctrine of bodies", so the word seems perfectly appropriate. And yet it ls not a weighty word, or one of consequence, in the Kantian text. (HFSN 525)1 Let me give its definition in the Foundations "Body ls a matter between determinate boundaries (and such matter therefore has a figure)." A quantity of moving .. lllltter ts called a mass, and so a 11ass of determinate shape is �16 also called a body (537). Body is therefore a mere delimiation of matters a110rphous matter 1.s the basic, pervasive object of interest, whose concept is to be expounded. Nonetheless I want to hold on to the word body, for the sake of displaying a consequence of the insistence on founding the science of bodies metaphysically. This is the starting, non- plussing disappearance of that inert lump which move·s by effort, that shapely solid, that handy repository of trust, that constant object of our most solicitous care, that terminus of an attraction or revulsion (wholly different from the forces of si.railar name into which Kant will resolve matter), that whole which antecedes all distinction of form and matter, that possible seat of soul which most of us mean when we say 'body' and which first excites the inquiry into bodily nature called physics. * A note to point up the omission of body in its immediate organic sense from Kant's system. I here mean that body which is a living, sensate center of interpretation of other bodies as alive or dead. Kant never, to my knowledge, treats the relation of such a body as mY Q!!!1 a little work in to the transcendental outer sense, to space. ~hich In the relation of body and soul is indeed - discussed, the letter on the "Organ of the Soul", he says1 "For if I am to make the place of my soul, that ls, my absolute self, intuitable anywhere in space, I must perceive myself through that very same sense through which I also perceive the matter which surrounds me, just as happens when I want to determine my place in the world as human being, namely that I must observe my body in its relation to other bodies without me. -Now the soul can perceive itself only through inner . sense, but the body, be it internally or externally, only through outer senses and so can simply determine �17 no place for itself, because for this purpose it would have to make itself an object of tts own outer intuition and would have to place itself outside itself, which is self-contradictory." Let me first comment on this passage insofar as it seems to contradict the "Refutation of Idealism" in the Critiaue. For in that too there is no indication that I am to determine myself as a human being in a certain place within outer sense or space, but rather the outer sense !!. ~ whole contains the stuff which makes my self-appearance possible. But further, note the problem which Kant evadesa Hy body as an outer appearance has a very special character -- it is a kind of sink hole of sensationr all sensation streams toward it and all existence or non-existence is controlled from it (as when I close my eyes) e This is a difficulty for Kant's outer intuition, s·ince it, like Newton• s d ivi,ne "sensory• of infinite space (Optics, Qu• 28) ought to be homogeneous, isotropic (the same in al 1 direct ions) , and cont iJ1uous, while 11y body and its instrument1 ike sensory organs represent a point of discontinuity, of preference, and a warping of space. Hence it does appear to behav~ like a seat of soul, and this consideration cannot be acco1111<>dated in Kant's system.* 6. The constitution of body. Let me go on now to describe Kantian body as it ts developed from the "Analytic of Principles" of the Critique through. the Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature• is not, of course, temporal, but merely critical. This genesis �18 The functions of the on nothi~ understandi~, insofar as they operate given, enclose in thelr grasp, that is, conceive, an empty object, a mere x. It is only when, next, these concept functions operate on the pure content of the sensibility that a material object arises, and such an object of pure material is a pure object of experience, a thing !!l general. a. "Thing" in the Critique. Let me briefly recount the principles by which a "thing" is established. There are four of them, in accordance with the number of basic concept functions of thought termed "categories". Two of these are constitutive and are called "mathematical" because they assure that all things shall be so constituted as to be extensively and intensively measurable. are called "dynamic", because they re~ulate The other two the relations which all things by their very nature as things must have with each other, and they assure that all things whatsoever shall be enmeshed in one dynamic system, a system of mutual influence. The first principle is called an axioma it is axiomatic that all things have extension, that all are spatial intuitions and hence measurable. The second principle is called an anticipationa it is to be anticipated that everywhere in space things will have some degree of perception, that is, measurable intensity of sensation. Third comes a group of three principles called analogies• we may infer by analogy that even things not immediately available to observation are bound to each other by definite relations, �19 which are spatial applications of the time t. sch~ata, as followsa Time itself as duration is to appear in space as substance so that all things whatsoever will have a steady substrate, a permanent existence. 2. Time as connected succession is to appear in space as cause and effect, so that all things are to be similarly related as causes and effects. 3. Time as simultaneit) ls to appear in space as the mutual relation of interaction, so that all things are in a like way to affect each other conteaporaneously. The fourth principle is called a postulate and adds nothing to the nature of things objectively but only determines their subjective relation to the faculty of knowledge. Let me review ina little more detail the nature of a thing as it emerges from the so-called "Anticipations• and the first "Analogy", for these are the principles most directly relevant to the bodily nature of things. They provide, in effect, the foundation of •reality" and "substance• in Kant's system of nature. In the first analo~y, in one of those amazing junctures which make Kant's system so suggestive, substance is established as ~ spatial representation .Q! consciousnesea " ••• There must be in the objects of perception, that is, appearances, that substrate which represents time 1n general, and in which all alteration or si11ultaneity can be perceived by 11eans of the relation of appearances to the same. Now the substrate of all that is real ••• is substance.... It follows that the permanent, in relation to which all time relations of appearance can alone be determined, is substance in appearance, that ls, the real in appearance, which, as substrate of all alteration, always remains the same." (B 225). When we recall that time as the pure content of the inner sense �20 l• ayeelf l.n appearance, the state•nt that 1ub1tapce i i •Mtiallztd aelf la corroborated. And thus a truly novel ...nift8 baa been attacbed to an 014 ter11 algnlfyl.ng self• •• Subatanee la now the three dt.eu-..1 eube1at11'18 bel.ag. appttrtnpt of soul to itself. In tbe •Anticipations• the alterationa to be predicated of eubetanee are founded, or rather a guarantee la given ~ cbaqea 1n con•olouaneea vlll occur, even though lta qualltt.ee ••ftN)t M eetabllebed A priori. That we -Y anticipate that •ubatance will always be in varying degree aenee-activated, that things will alwaya be ••naatioa•fllled, that neither ti.M nor epace· w111 ner be co111>letely eapty -·this ls the critical requtr....-nt of rglitys re.a llty la the deterainatlon of a ' ' eubatance ae having giatence, that ia, •• being a thing there and then (B 225). bnt'a ayatea requires that the things of nature be . .de quick with aen•ation, that they materialize. b. - Wxl!tJA.--_ Mtt100y1ical Found&tione of the -seience of tyre In th• Metaphysical fqJlldation1 the transcendental structure la realized by the introduction of an •eapirlcal eoacept•, the concept of Mtter. By an ••pirlcal oonaept" Kant actually aeana a •concept of soaetbing eaprlcal", tbat la, a concept which is la 118 vay tbe re•ult of ob..rvatloa (though to clal.a existence for it would require experience), but rather simply a closer conceptual deteraination or specification of the transcendental "thi118" eetabllabed ln the Grltiaue• concept ia ~ ;..a.ut The aetaphysica of such a it.- ful 1 ex pl teat ion. Kant presents the concept of matter aa lf he had chosen one of a l\Ullber of �21 poas ible 1natance1 or specifications of a natural thiag ( 4 70) , But 1n fact, it 1eeas to •• ao other ~botce wae po11lble, et.nee utter turne out to be the tmt.que and nece11uy flrat empirical ooaeept of the aclence of nature. Matter la the na• •• ironically choaen if anyone expects to be presented with .0- sol id stuff -- of tbe concept of the "movable i.n apace•. It t.s poaat.ble to reooaatruct the lit.aet.ag reason why the JIOVable in apace t.a the basic concept of the acienee of nature froa tbia sentence• "Ibe funda11ental deterain• ation of a 1011ethlng that le to be an object of the external senses must be 110tlon, '51£ tblreby UlX affected" (476, ay italica). aa theat 11p111 lll The .,vable ia aiaply that which can excite aenaatien, aeaaation beirg appropriately undtratood by Kant aa tut vho1e very uture it is to be movi..tg am 11&alfold. It r-in• to 1upply another oat.1s1on by conjecturing what epeciflcatlon of the tranacendental I.ant 11 actually perfor111ng1 the 110vable appear• to be nothi~ but the real aubatance of tht Critique, but now_ specifically 0Pn11dert4 ill 11R'ratelx ~ G laa• any otber, truly !WW ~ DSl •ace ~ At leaat it 11 difficult to 4lacover deteralnatlon in the conoept of -tter. The Mtt!Phvt1cal Found!t\ont ooaee in four ·parta which are eo11pletely parallel to the "Analytic of Princlplea• aad are pretenttd in the fora of propo1itlona and proofa follow1Jla fro• those principlt•• the ft.rat part. vblcb derive• froa tbe principle of extmalve quantity (tire Axlolq of Intuition), eatabl ishea tbe geo-trle treatlleDt of polnt •tl.ou. motion• la ter11a of It deals with the 0011po1t.tion of _..t.ng ooordlnate •Y•t••• or •1paoe1•, and, in refuting Newton's notion of abaolute apace, provld•• a �22 metaphysical foundation for so-called Newtonian relativity. (This is the principle that when bodies interact or are all subject to the same accelerative forces, they constitute a space for which absolute motion or rest are not internally discriminable. Principia, Axioms, Cors. v, VI). The second part derives from the principle of intensive quantity (the ~Anticipations of Perception"), which requires some degree of sensation in things and hence their reality. Thie part is headed "Dynamics" because it shows that the essential qualities of matter are forces, and dynam1s misappropriated by physicists for force. is the Greek word Tnis part is the most important to my purpose precisely because it deals with the most intimate nature of body. The third part, which derives from the principles governing the relations of things (the Analogies of Experience), is called "Mechanics" since in it are deduced the laws ~overnlng the interactions of bodies in systems, trose "laws of nature" by . which bodies are held in systems. In this part Newton's "Axioms or Laws of Motion" are, with certain suggestive variations, completely deduced as propositions. Here also Kant draws the physical consequence which follows from his understanding of substance as the steady spatial substrate of all alterations it is the law of the conservation of matter. * A note correlating the Propositions of Mechanics of the Metaphysical Foundations with the Axioms of Motion of the Principia Mathematica. Proposition 21 "First Law of Mechanics", the law of the conservation of matters proved, as just noted, by an application �23 to matter of the first Analogy concerning the permanent in space, or substance. It has no explicit counterpart in the Principia but is an implicit consequence of the corpuscular view of matter set out in the •Rules for Philosophizing• which introduce the third book of the Principia and contain the application of the previous mathematical results to the world of matter. For the hard impenetrable atoms there posited can neither come into nor go out of being. Proposition 31 •second Law of Mechanics•, a fora of the law of inertia, namely that every change of matter demands an external cauae1 proved py an application of the second analogy concerning cause and effect. Its counterpart is Newton's Axiom of Motion I, that every body continues in its state of rest or unifora 110tion unless forces are applied. Proposition 41 "Third Mechanical Law•, laying down that in all coll18Unication of motion action and reaction are always equal to one another1 proved by an application of the third Analogy concerning interaction. Corresponds to Newton's Axiom of Motion III, the law of equal and opposite action and reaction of bodies. Proposition 1 establishes as the operable quantity of Kantian physics the quantity of matter as measured by its •quantity of 110tion•, that is matter compounded with velocity (momentlDI •av). This proposition is formally parallel to Newton's Axiom of Hation II, in which the basic operable quantity la defined as force, coapounded of mass and acceleration (F-raa). Force aa seen in acceleration or change of velocity la simply absent from �24 Kant'• foundation of physics, and this omission coastitutes the aoat ·~•lflcant technical difference between Kantian and Newtonian physic••* Finally, the fourth part, which derives from the principle concerning the relation of things to the faculty of knowledge (the Postulates of Empirical Thlnklng).prescrlbes what propositions of physics are to be asserted as possible or aa necessary. . To returR to the •Metaphysical Foundations of Dynamics•, which deals vith aatter insofar as it fills apace. It ls in filling space that utter asserts its "reality", its power to affect the aenaea. The universal principle of dynamics isa •Atl that is real in the objects of our external senses ••• must be regarded aa a llOVing force." ( 523). "The concept of matter iareduced to nothing but 11<>ving forces1 this could not be expected to be otherwiae, because in apace no activity and no change ean be thought of but mere 110tion: (524). Force is the condition of possibility of matter whose possibility la not itself, in turn, explicable and whose concept ls not itself derivable fro• anotner. As ~ant puts it, force itself cannot be aade conceivable (513). IC.ant provea that matter ia in fact nothing but force by ahowing that all the appearances of spatial objects are accounted for by forcea and only by forces. In the course of these proofs i . abollabea solidity, understood as the ability of matter to occupy apace by reason of . .re existence (498) •• an implicit �25 part, I think, of the ordinary view of body. And he attacka a view he regards as the consequence of positing solidity, Descartes• corpuscular or atomic theory which asserts the l'lystery of mathematical and . .chanical iapenetrability, and requires mere blocks of extension to 110ve each other externally (502, 533). Hatter requires two original forcesa a repulsive or driving force and an attractive or drawing force, corresponding to the two possible directions of interaction between point centers of force (497).* The prlaary repulsive force is the force 11<>re inti.J'lately associated with our sensing of extended things. "Hatter fills space not by its mere existence, but by a special moving force• (497, which in resisting penetration is the cause of palpability. It is, hence, a •superficial" force, a source of surfaces and contacts, which nonetheless conetltutes matter throughout so that it is infinitely divisible -- there is always a new surface. On one force alone, however, matter could not fill apace but would,: by repelling itself to inflnt.ty, become dissipated and vanish• Therefore, 1.n order that body might become mncrete, as it were; 4 cotmtervailing original force it wanted. This seeond f orce cannot be imaediately sensed or even located in a body, out can only be notice<! in its effects. It is a penetrating force which does not need the agency of other matter but acts at a distance even to infinity and precisely where it is not (512). Whereas repulsion provides matter with its outside, so to speak, attract1.on gtYes it its inner cotEs:wace and ._.,. !!tie aegaeata crit:lqm of . 1.ant•a ~ltt la glvea - Hegel (Science of LggiC, Bk 1, See. I, cb. 3, para. 6, a, Mote). . * .A p'll-oH•l•l �26 of aatter close or dense. _ It - is therefore the force which, as it binds a body to . itself. also holds body to body in a system, such aa the planetary system. * The•e two forces equally and simultaneously constitute -tter -- a body b not as in Boecovitch' s Theory of Natural Philotophy (1763) a region in space where attractive and repulsive forces alternate> wit. the repulsive force prevail·ing and going h off to infinity near the center of the body while the attractive force similarly prevails but goes off to zero away from that center. Instead two field-like expanses of force are super- imposed and together give rise to regions of various density variously delillited, which correspond to bodies.* Let Kant himself concludea •tf we revlew all our discussions of the metaphysical treataent of aatter, we shall observe that in this treataent the following things have been taken into considerationa first, the real in space (otherwise called the solid) in its filling of space through repulsive forces second, that which with regard to the first as the proper object of our external perception ta negat1ye, namely attractive force, by which, as far as may be, all space would be penetrated, that is, the solid would be wholly abolisheda third the 1111.tation of the first force by the second and the consequent perceptible determination of the degree of filling of space: (523). Thia last •perceptible determination• is matter, while body is but aatter shaped between boundaries and therefore nothing but a figure inacribed into the continuous expanse of mattera body ••• is . .tter between determinate boundaries~ (525). •A Self- determining solid bodies are simply incompatible with Kant's system. That -tter does fill all of space and fills it continuously, ao that there la no empty space, is a possiblltty df such �27 consequence to physics that Kant concludes the Metaphysical Foundations with its consideration. Within this work the dynamic plenum remains merely a powerful posslbllty, and the ether as a special pervasive · "external" matter Which reali.mes it remains a physical assu11ption (523, 534, 563 ff.). But it seems to me that the fullness of space ts co11pletely deducible metaphysically from the very constltut ton of appearance. For i.t follows both from the continuities of nature requi.red by the principles of the understanding (.B 281), and from the fact that space, as the receptive form of sensation, can never in itself appear, which ls to say -that there can be nothing i.n appearance corresponding to ~mpty space (~, .B 261). I note here only in passing that if a plenum does require an ether, it may, as an ultimate reference system, well be incompatible wi.th the previously established prlnclpl~ of relativity. But this very inconsistency is proof that Kant's metaphysics of nature does not merely ground Newton's physical results retrospectively -on the contrary it looks forward not only to a physics of force fields, but also to the great - ether debate which ended only with the momentous negative experiments performed just a century after the publication of the Metaphysical Foundati.ons. Its sequel, the "Iransition ••• to Physics", shows that Kant was also concerned about the loss of independent body i.n the spread of dellmitable stuff. In the very pages in which he now undertakes to show that an ether of some sort ts indeed not 11erely a reasonable assumpti.on but a deductive necessi.ty of the system, he also tri.es to establish i.ts very contrary, na11ely natural, organic body (~, OP 21, 21R). The effort here i s to lntroduce a body �28 whlch ls not merely_, by a regulative fiction of reason) subjectively interpreted aa organized to serve an end, but which ha&- an objective principle of self-determinat~on (OP 21, 209 ff.), an "1nner force" or proper principle of motion, and may therefore be termed "a self-limiting quantum of matter having a certain fl~ure" (170)~ Kant regards thls task as properly belonging to the "Transition". But he also concedes that such bod 1es might wel 1 be "inconceivable" ( 570), that is, not derivable in the systems therefore, it seems to me, this effort must fails the system of well-founded matter called nature cannot, as Kant himself has shown in the letter on the organ of the soul, yield bodies fitted by reason of their self-contained unity to be the seat of life or soul. -- Indeed, how could nature contain such places, being itself the epiphany of soul1 7. The excesses of the system. Kant considers that the metaphysical foundations of matter and 1ts science have been laid, and the possibility of understood as experience ls forever guaranteed. knowled~e Henceforth eaplrical physics may be safely and infinitely pursued -safely because its principles lie !. priori in myself so that all experience ls self-experience, and infinitely because all of its occasions are excitations which flow to us, with ever fresh adventitiousness, from an alien source. But at this juncture a difficulty arises. In order for the systematic character of physics promised by its principles to be preserved throughout the enterprise, a regulative framework of investigation must be laid down. The great preoccupation of �29 Kant's later years was to assure the •rational coherence• (MFSN 534) of the science of nature by an ever-closer explication and specification of its basic concepts. soul as IUlture seems to require that The representation of the !ll aasuaptl"ODa and hypotheses either be soon converted into deductions or discarded. Less and less is left to observation. To give a prime exaaplea the law of the force of attraction, naaely that it varies inversely as the sqU4re of the distance between the centers of two bodiea, ia a specification, ~ observation, of innuaerable aathematical posaibilltiea antecedently set out in Newton's Princloia (III, i•vlii, particularly land ii). Kant too state• that •no law whatever of attractive or of repulsive force may be risked on a priori conjectures• (534). And yet Kant deduce• the inverse square law from the mode of diffusion essential to his attractive force together with a fact of Euclidfan geometry, namely that the surfaces of concentric spheres increase as the squares of their radii (519). This ever-growing regulation of observation insofar as lt ls attributable to the richness of the system in deductive consequences, might be ai.Jlply a credit to it. And so it would be, were it the case that nature, when arraigned before Kantian reason, the •appointed judge who coapela the wltneasea to answer questions which he has himself formulated• (B xiii)> always willingly and plausibly responded in the required terma. But the fact of the matter, worth far more consideration than has gone into this passing remark, aeeaa to be that phyaiciats have largely by-passed Kant's •topic• of forces and have super- �30 ceded bu -tapbyalce •• for ·exa111>le, its conatlt~tlonally Euclidean apace aa well aa the categories of causality and si11Ultaneity •• preauraably coapelled thereto by nature herself. And yet it la this very excess of doctrinal consequence which ult• the study of Kant's 11etaphyslcs of physics the indispensable pbllo1oph4.ctl CoJIDle11nt to the study of classical aechanics. For in attempting to account completely for all that ls found therein, Kant, even as he falls, unfailingly aide reflection' on the terms of physics. In any case, the failure to preserve the adventitiousness of nature and hence to become a viable guide for experlaental physics la only a derivative difficulty of the systea. . Hore radical and revealing questions arise about it, beginning with the excessive lllportance attached to physics as the sole self• atudy and ending only in questions concerning the nature of philosophy itself. Let . . conclude with the briefest formulation of auch questions by returning to the work with which I began, to Kant's essay invel~hlng against the "noble tone• in philosophy of which Plato la the unwitting progenitor. particularly Kant unalstakably alludes To one d1.alogue (.su.&,:., 1ft mentioning Mttypa, cf. Ti-eus 50 ca.) as the embodlaent of all that he 11Ust disavow in Plato's view of raatheaatlcs, of the world of appearances, of truth•telll~ itself -· the Ii.Jlaeu•• It ls al.,st as if the treatise on the Hetaphya1cal foundations of the Science of Nature were a specific response to the dialogue •• not, however, in the 110de of •i111>le di...trlc contradiction which Kant reserves for his closer opponents like Deecat:t. . , but by way of that aoat �31 radical contrariety which characterizes true alternatives. A parallel study of these two texts would raise the aforesaid questions in some such termsa Kant destroys bod ie@ to preserve the reality · :<~ . ~'Qpearances, and gives up the self-deter111ining coherence of 1 •, a i~ld· al natures for an assured perceptibility of nature • thi~s.. • understoo·.,~ "> ...a system of But may not the articulated and .. d·t:st: inct.,. beauty of natural bodies and configurations require the intellect to forego sensation-filled dynamic reality as well as ultimate 1.mpenetrability in favor of Timaeus' mathematical solidity (53 c ff .)7 Does not the inexhaustible originality of this mathematicised nature coapel us to reconsider whether our sensibility can possibly be the sole source of her f orms7 Kant denies the soul a seat in nature in order to preserve nature herself as the appearance of the soul and the · repreaentation of its rational operations. Thus nature becomes a system, an edifice founded on principles and constituted as well as soverned. throughout by laws derivative from the functions of thotJ8ht. But IWAY not the curious complex of regularity and irrationality which is the visible world suggest yet a third relation of soul to body, expressed by Timaeus as the girdling of body by soul (36e)7 Thus body would arise not as Sll!I. own outer appearance, but as the inner effects of ~world which is indeed intelligible, but not wholly so. Kant regards the continuing study of palpable 11tµre, the science of body, as the most serious hU11an theoretical activity, and its secure foundation in our own faculties as a COllpleted philoaophical labor. But uy it not be that the account of the �32 visible world ts, as in Timaeus' phrase, only .a . •1tkely story• .. (e1.kon mythos, 29 d), and that physics thrives on just those hypotheses., analogies, and likelihoods which Kant disavows in his essay? Then may not this perpetually tentative and open physics be a sort of high amuse11ent with useful effects rather than humanity's central study, and a model-making project -- the •story of likenesses•, to which Timaeus' phrase alludes-- rather than a well-grounded system~ Hence a metaphysics of physics may finally have to yield to an inquiry into the nature and being of models, which may require the playful poetry of mere philosophy as exemplified in Plato's noble dialogue, rather than the working prose of Kant's ayot!!lftic philosophy. �- 33 - Addendum_ to p. 24, top: ThP reason for Kant's substituti8n of mv for ma is, however, not merely a tPchnical matter. Kant's Proposition 3 begins with the words :"Everj change of matter has an external cause" (543). But, as I have noted, this cause is "motion" or "momentum," rather than the force of Newton's Law II. ThP reason forces Kant ~or this substitution is as follows. ~as The two posited in the section on dynamics constitute matter, but do not cause changes Q.f. ™' which is ·~' O say that thev do not affect the motion of "matter in motion." Now for Kant the causes of motions can only be other motions, since a cause is nothing but an appearance wh:i.ch determines another appearance later in time (B 234) -and the same kind as its effect. must therefore be of :But since effect is a change in space of a mass-, the cause must equally be such an "external" change, namely motion. Consequc-ntly in the context of the section on mechanics the dynamic forces function only as mediating mechanisms for the communication of motions. These latter momenta alone are Kant's "motiTe forces o" This explanation was deTeloped by the members of my preceptorial on the Foundations. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. 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Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 34 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 What is a body in Kant's system? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1974 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on May 8, 1972 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1974 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6c4aa0e35b97ae9214cb8b978b7d629e.pdf 8a878711332b5a6f432a3d2c9287fdcd PDF Text Text THE OFFENSE OF SOCRATES A Re-reading of Plat6's Apoloiy Eva Brann St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland prepared for delivery at the 1975 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco Hilton Hotel, San Francisco, California, September 2--5, 1975 �THE OFFENSE OF SOCRATES A Re-reading of Plato's Apology Eva Brann St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland 1. A first reading of Socrates' defense before the court of the Athenian people as handed down by Plato induces an exalted feeling in favor of Socrates. 1 That is my experience and, I think, the experience of most studentsa we hear a philosopher nobly coping with a persecuting populace. It is a perennial perception. To cite only two of the numerous testimonials; 1 one from the last and the other from this century1 John Stuart Mill, referring to the Apology in his essay On Liberty, says that the tribunal "condemned the man who probably of all then born had deserved best of mankind to be put to death as a criminal," and Alfred North Whitehead asserts that Socrates died "for freedom of contemplation, and for freedom of the communication of contemplative experiences." By and large the defenders of Socrate$ are to be fot.md among those who might reasonably be called liberals, both of the thoughtful and the lightheaded kind. Now a re-reading of the speech can check this first feeling and raise suspicions which subsequent readings confirm. I am taken aback by the intransigencew1.th which Socrates is shown to go on the offensive and to convert his defense before the court of the Heliaea into an accusation against the ''men of Athens." A small formality sets the tonea he never once accords the court the customary �2 address of "Judges;" he reserves it for those who vote for his acquittal (40 a). What is more, the speech intensifies in provocation toward its end. In that section, delivered after convic- tion, where Socrates avails himself of the opportunity granted by Athenian law for proposing a penalty to counter that demanded by the prosecution, he first suggests maintenance at the public table for himself, so that he might have more leisure for exhorting the Athenians, next a derisory fine about equivalent to a prisoner's ransom, and only finally, urged by Plato, Crito and other friends, a reluctantly reasonable sum thirty times as great. As a foreseeable consequence eighty juror-judges, evidently convinced that this Socrates, once convicted, must be executed, now vote for the death penalty (Diogenes Laertius II, 42). And yet later, after judgment, when Socrates is allowed to speak once more, he issues dark threats against the city through its children (39 d). · This perspective on the event, resistant to Socrates as it is, also has a lineage of testimony. Its sources range for the most part from respectably conservative through illiberal, even to reactionary writers, from Jacob Burckhardt who calls Socrates "the gravedigger of the Attic city," through Nietzsche and Sorel to the Nazi writer Alfred Rosenberg, who regards his defense as the degeneration of Greece. an intimation of This rough division of views will have a certain bearing on what I have to say. But the variety and bulk of Apology is itself significant. commen~ concerning the It shows :'\ow unlikely it is that I could hope to say anything new or anything binding, �3 the more so since the one discovery which might really startle us--what Socrates in fact satd--is totally beyond our reach, as it already was beyond that of a contemporary like Xenophon. In his own Apology, which both counters and complements the Platonic version, he calls all current accounts of Socrates' speech deficient (paYa..1) and says that the only aspect on which all agree ts its "grandeur of utterance." So we are thrown back on the consideration and re-consideration of the major version, Plato's--which is undoubtedly what he intended. 2. I can see two inferior and one pressing reason for undertaking this effort. The first lies in the speciaJ position which the Apology occupies in Plato's Socratic works. It is the only speech among them; the auditors participate only by shouting, and its single interlocutor, the reluctant witness M!letos, is impressed into a dialogue. It is the only work in which the author, who is explicitly absent even at Socrates' death (PhaedO 59 b), reports himself present, a fact Xenophon omits. I understand these circumstances to indicate that what Socrates said and did here is to be seen as casting its shadow over the other works, including those preceding the trial in dramatic date. I mean not only the dialogues explicitly associated with the Apology, namely its prologue, Socrates' conversation u.. about piety with Ethyphro; its complement, about patriotism, /\ with Crito; and its consummation, on death, with Phaedo and others. Nor am I particularly referring to the works which contain clea~ allusions to the trial, like Anytos' threats in the lifillQ (94 e) or the prediction of the �4 philosopher's death in the Republic (517 a). But rather, all Platonic conversations, even those at which Socrates is absent, are colored by his defense--in just what way is the question .ta bP discus~ed. 3. A second reason for attending to the Apoloey is that it belongs to a group of works which I would hesitate to call a literary genre because of the solemnity of their occasion, but education. w1io8~ subject does form a topic in moral . They are the accounts of the trials of rni::n who have offended the authorities by thinking or speaking, but .!lQ.t J2Y doing anything l~ the.gross sense. For example, two days before his conviction for hir:,h tn=!ason and less than two weeks before his execution Helmut von Moltke~ wrote a letter to his wife reporting on his trial before the National Socialist P~ople's Court. was smuggled out of prison, he saida In the letter, which ";ve are cleared of every practical ;i.ction; we are to be hang~d 'because we thought together." 3 IIe goes on to praise the othen.:ise despicable judge for his clarity of perception in this respect. Anyone who dies for his deeds also finally dies for his thought. But what distinguishes these deaths for thinking and speaking alone,,attended by no provable intention to incite particular action, is the acute form they give to_ ::-the question co~cerning the work of thought in the world. 4. First among these comparable accounrs stand those of the trial of Jesus. There is, in fact, a very long �5 tradition setting Socrates' and Jesus' ordeals side by sides it is done, to name a small selection, in the writings of Origen, Calvin, Rousseau, and G&nctbt\1 4 The apparent similarities begin with the very fact that there are varying accounts of what was said and done. As for the defendants both are the objects of th~mselves, popular passion channelled by a Group of implacable opponents, lA<i respectively by Anytos for the re-established democracy and Caiaphas for the Sanhedrin. Both are attended by a band of adherents, friends or . disciples, to whom they are suspected of imparting secret teachings, and both deny the charge. Both are intransigent in their refusal to defend themselves effectively. Both show a shocking unwillineness to evade death, and for both, their deaths only confirm their influence. A most striking parallel, furthermore, is the chief explicit charge, irreverence in Socrates' and blasphemy in Jesus.' case. also, however, It is at this pointl\that the utter incommensurability of the two cases begins to appear. Jesus "holds his peace" before the Sanhedrin and answers Pilate with "never a word" (Matthew 26,63; 27,14; a divergent account lets him answer with counter-questions and evasions). from his situation. His silence arises He is suspected of claiming the power and being of the Messiah. That claim is undeniably blasphemy if it is false. But the Jewish court has already prejudged its falsity, and since he has certainly asserted the claim in secret (16,15-20), his only course is to obscure its assertion publicly. Again, when the Jewish authorities represent him to the Roman goverrtor as seditious because he has assumed for himself a new .. �6 sovereignty, Jesus follows a similar coursea he admits and at the same time denies this assumption by putting it in the mouth of the governor--"Thou sayest it" (27,11), and by denying that his rule is pplitical--"My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18,36). So far there might still be a parallel between him and Socrates, for both withhold themselves from the court; both present themselves as less than they are. is this all-important differences But there the writers of the Gospeis believed, after all, that Jesus' claim was true; that the defendant at this trial was, acknowledged or not, God. So while both cases are the consequence of an irruption into the corrununity of powerful claims incompatible with its authority, they are quite incomparable in a way very revealing to the Apology. For Jesus, as the 1.ong- awaited Christ, is represented as fulfilling in his life and death a prophecy and a mission, while Socrates, who specifically denies having even super-human wisdom (20 e), is a man, and a man unheralded and unordained. Therefore, while the Passion is an inevitable consummation, Socrates' end is no part of a prefigured unique drama but a deliberate, human deed. It is consonant with this difference that Socrates speaks where Jesus is silent, and speaks boldly, if selectively, to his city, in this world. The Apology is part of a thoroughly political event. s. There is, however, another trial \.:hich is more permissibly comparable. Sir Thomas More. "our noble, new Christian Socrates," as his biographer Harpsfield calls him, �7 was brought before the King's Bench, indicted on a statute which made it treason to deny, or, in the court's interpretation, to refuse to affirm, the King as Supreme Head of the Church of England. Socrates' and More's conduct are similar in these pointsa Both have an opportunity for evading their trials as well as their sentences, Socrates by voluntary silence or exile, More by offering to "revoke and reform" his "wilful obstinate opinion." Both defend themselves before the court and b~th speak again, more bluntly and intransigently, after having been pronounced guilty, both revealing that they consider the real cause to be other than the stated indictment, but also that they are in spirit, at least, guilty as charged. Finally, both explain their conduct by reference to other-wordly considerations, More to "the hazarding of my soul to perpetual damnation," Socrates to his welcome among the heroes in Hades. Buts More makes a wily, subtle defense, standing on the letter of the law in claiming his right to silence, and revealing only after the verdict his implacable opposition to the king's heterodoxy. He saysa ••• ye must understand that, in things touching conscience, every true and good subject is more-bound to have respect to his said conscience and to his soul than to any other thing in all the world besides, namely, when his conscience is in such a so~t as mine is, that is to say, when the person giveth no occasion of slander, of tumult and sedition against his prince, as it is with mea for I assure you that I have not hitherto to this hour disclosed and opened my conscience and mind to any person living in all 5 the world .... More, then, as a statesman and a lawyer defends himself with all legal care, while as a subject and a Christian he, as did Christ, preserves inviolate his inmost thought•• �8 But Socrates, a private man who has never held office and has no experience of courts (17 d), handles his defense very cavalierly, while as a citizen and a philosopher he, unlike his Christian counterpart, has no notion of . privacies of conscience, The comparison therefore throws into relief his freedom in the Apology, His resolve derives from no hidden recesses of conviction, but from a ground which by its very nature is common and in need of communication. 6. The most vivid reason, finally, for re-studying the Apology is the desire to come to some answer to the questions was Socrates rightly convicted and rightly condemned to death~ It is a question of several aspects. First, why did the Heliastic court convict Socrates and accept the prosecutior&view that this had to be a capital case'? It is essential here to recall that Socrates himself not only considers irreverence and corruption of the young definable offenses and agrees with the authorities that such charges could lie, but that, as the Crito shows, he is in deepest accord with the Solonic fundamental law from which they arise. 6 Now in the absence of the case for the prosecution, this first questionJcan only be resolved by examining Socrates' defense, which I want to do later. That task is, however, complicated by the fact that Socrates turns his defense into an offense, into an accusation against his accusers and his fellow citizens. For :t would be ludicrous to attempt to examine the substance of hi: attack, which would mean trying to determine whether it is more true of �9 the Athenians that they are sluggish in self-examination than of, say, Thebans, Spartans, or Americans. Indeed, it might be argued that charges which are universally true of all humankind are, when pointedly levelled at one particular community, pernicious, so that his very attack might become evidence to the jury of his bad faith. A second aspect of the question concerning Socrates' conviction is this. Shortly after Socrates' execution a backlash seems to have occurred. Meletos may have been condemned to death and .Anytos to exile. 7 Socrates the persecuted philosopher was vindicated in the repentant city. How then ought a Heliastic juror have voted, had he been able to foresee subsequent events, particularly the most immediate result, that a convicted Socrates would cooperate with hjs accu~P.rs bv Amov~~to force the court into the death penalty? But the most important aspect is that framed in contemporary terms. How should I be disposed in analogous present-day situations7 For in spite of the fact that such cases can no longer arise with the judicial directness of the ancient city, the Socratic issue is always present when persons of more mobile intellect, more extensive education and more leisure than most people come into collision with the religious beliefs and moral traditions of those whom they are intent on serving. 7. To begin with, then, I must examine the sufficiency of Socrates' defense. Xenophon takes . Jocrates' "grandness of utterance," " a feature present a~ his poi~t of ~n all previous accounts of the speech, d~oarture. This tone must, he says, �10 appear as "rather mindless .. unless it can be shown that Socrates was in fact deliberately inviting death as an escape from the decay of old age (6). Here is the classic statement in. the tradition propounding self-euthanasia as an explanation of Socrates' strange conduct in court. For it is evident that Socrates' defense is a deliberate failure. Now Plato attempts to forestall Xenophon's explanation of this striking fact in the dialogue of Socrates' last day, the Phaedo. There Socrates himself argues that suicide is simply impermissible, no matter how desirable death might seem (62 a). To regard Socrates as manipu- lating the Athenians into killing him and to confuse his welcoming acceptance of death with suicide is to trivialize the events of that day in court. Only the fact that Socyates invited conviction stands. 8. Let me then present a critical rehearsal of Socrates' speech, stated in the least well-disposed terms. Socrates begins by accusing his accusers of lying when they warn the court that he is a skilled and formidable speaker. Unaccustomed as he is to public speaking he is · not formidable, "unless they call him formidable who speaks the truth" (17 b). This truth he will present, and indeed in the subsequent speech he is, "alien to the diction" of a crowd though he may be, complete master of the situation. He even contrives for a stretch to introduce his own dialectic mode into the proceeding, as he interrc~ates Meletos, a co-accuser, who is by law obliged to subrrit to examination. Anytos, his senior opponent, he wisely omits to call. �11 He attacks this inadequate young man, who, as Socrates puts it, goes running to accuse him "to the city as to his mother" (Ey.thyphro 2 c), with an ad hominem arguments Meletus himself does not care about the substance of the accusation. But what weight in law can that have, supposing it were so7 In any case, Socrates does not allow Meletos to answer his question--Vho, then, does make the young better7--in the only way Meletos and those behind him.£.!!! answer it, namely by asserting that the laws, but most of all the citizens, improve the young (24-2~). For in the Meno (92 e) he had already disallowed Anytos' answer that it is the respectable citizens of the city, its gentlemen, who transmit excellence from generation to generation. Now he wants Meletos to tell the court what particular person, like a horse trainer, exercises the youth of Athens into excellence, But, of course, this is precisely what Meletos' backers resist--the notion that their children's formation should be in the hands of such experts. As a part of Socrates' wider attack, on the good faith of his accusers he substitutes a charge of his own devising for the true formal indictment. In bringing his charge, he claims, Meletos trusted to an "old slander" (19 a, 28 b), a long-standing hatred in the city aginst him, which Socrates associates with Aristophanes' comedy, The Clouds, there are difficulties. But Not only does he himself later refer to the high esteem in which he is held in the city, where "the opinion prevails that Socrates is somet.hing more than most men" (35 a), but the relation of Aristophanes to Socrates in the Svrnposium and Plato's veneration for the playwright make it hard to believe that Socrates' friends �12 really saw that old comedy as working over near a quarter of a century toward his undoing. 9. Socrates, then, makes up a suppositious new indictment based on the Clouds (112, 117), which runsa "Socrates does wrong and meddles, searching into the things below the earth and into celestial things and making the worse reasoning the stronger and teaching others these very things" (19 b). By means of this reformulation he pretends that the real charge of irreverence--which he himself recognizes as such in the E§lthyphro (S c)--is directed at his supposed researches into the nature of heavenly bodiPs and similar matters. These he had, indeed, given up long aeo when still in his youth, for reasons set out in the Phaedo (96 b). Of .;uch matters, he plausibly argues, he no longer knows anything nor do they any longer concern him. And yet--in that very dialogue he gives a vivid _ topoloey of the things above and below the earth (198 e ff.) , as he does i.n the Republic and in other conversations. Can he really in good faith argue that he has no interest in eschatology, when he makes up novel stories and private myths about the upper and lower realms--the very enterprise that disturbs the Athenians 'l His chief defense, however, against the "old sl;:i.nder"-which is at bottom nothing but the imputati.on of 5ophistry-rests on a tale he tells (20 e). Chaerophon, his crony in the Clouds, had perpetrated a coup in 11elphi. 1-Ie had gotten Apollo's oracle to declare that no man "·'ls wiser than Socrates. Whereupon Socrates modestly undertakes to prove �13 the god mistaken, but, to his own regret, fails. He calls this undertaking "giving the god's business the highest priority" (21 e), and regards its mention as a sufficient defense against the old charge (24 b), 10. The correct indictment, as Socrates cites it, isa "that Socrates does wrong, corrupting the young and not respecting the gods whom the city respects, but other, new half-divinities" (24 b). Here is how Socrates meets the actual charge of irreverence, when he finally reaches it. The wording of its first point, if the meaning of the verb (nomizein) is translated very carefully, is that Socrates "does not regard the gods in the customary way." Against this point Socrates has no defense--he himself admits its truth to Euthyphro, for he tells him that he, Socrates, cannot accept the traditional stories of the gods, that is, the common myths of the Greeks; this, he adds, is the reason for his rrosecution (6 a). In cross- examining Meletus, however, he traps him into thoughtlesly agreeing with an altered formulation, namely that Socrates "does not regard the gods as existing" (nomizein einai, 26 c, d). Now he can defend himself, and he produces an argument as logical as it is ludicrous. Using the indictment itself, he argues that he who is accused of introducing new half-divinities cannot be charged with not believing in the full gods who must be their parents, any more than someone who acknowledges the existence of mules can be supposed not to believe in their parents, namely horses and asses (27 c). So much for irreverence. Ther~ remains the charge concerning the introduction of �14 new divinities. Socrates makes it clear in the EMthynhro (3 b) and again in the Aoology (31 d) that he understands the accusers to be thinking of his notorious daimonion, the "half-divine thing" within him, and that they regard him as a "me.ker of gods" on account of it. Nonetheless Socrates not only makes no effort to allay their apprehensions, but he even dwells more extensively on his "divine sign" here in court than anywhere else. 11. How next does Socrats defend himself against the corruption charge7 His version of it in terms of the "old slander" is that Socrates is a "clever one," the unique indigenous sophist, an excogitator who dispenses dangerous wisdom to a clique from within a cogitatorium. Of course, as everyone knows, Socrates actually has no establishment of his own, so the comic claim needs no refutation. Its serious counterpart in the real accusation, on the other hand, is that he has esoteric teachings. Socrates calls this charge a lie and asserts that no one has ever heard anything from him in private that all were not welcome to hear (33 b). Ha<l I been in that court-room I would simply have refused to believe him. Bot1'fing ·· is clearer than that Socrates does not say everything to everybody. Furthermore, Socrates knows very well that his accusers are not very precise in their knowledge of this intrusive travelling tribe of professionals. In the~ Anytos wanders into the conversation expressing a horror of these people, but readily confesses that he has neve:.· even met one. Socrates is in no position to ridicule h;m for that lack of experience. For in the Republic he himself argues that it �15 might be useful for a physician to have experienced disease in his own body, but that it is in no way good for someone who is to govern the soul by the soul to be experienced in corruption (409 a). A magistrate like Anytos might well claim that it is a staunch caution that keeps him from seeking acquaintance with those whom his good sense makes him despise. Since, therefore, the description of the sophists' co~petence is left to Socrates, he chooses to present them as people wh9 "might be wise with a greater than human wisdom" (20 e). That is, they are the ones who are expert in the things above and below, while Socrates has the reputation only of "a certain wisdom," which is "perhaps human wisdom." At this point the Athenians make a disturbance, for they know that this Socratic wisdom, thisnunwilling wisdom" (Ey:thyphro 11 e), has but one contents the knowledge of his own ignorance and the determined exposition of- the ignorance of everyone else in the city . (21 .d). Part of the charge of sophistry is the charge of "teaching." Teaching is not in the terms of the actual indictment, but Socrates imports it and tricks Meletos into amending the wording to include it (26 b). Why7 Because he · intends, in making the point that his activity is not teaching, to bring out these circumstancesa that he takes no money, that he conveys no subject-matter and that he accepts no responsibility . (33 b). But if he takes no money, that only means that he is uncontrollable--he cannot be engaged or dismissed, as a parent might hire or fire a professionalo And if he takes no responsibility for the careers of his young associates, �16 why, that is usually called irresponsibility. But if he conveys no positive matter to these young men, that is the very worst of all, in the light of what he shows them instead. For with disingenuous innocence he himself gives a vivid description of what it is that is conveyed to them 1n his companya he goes about engaging public men, poets and craftsmen in conversations which are really examinations and in the course of which it emerges that they do not, in truth, know what they are doing, although they think they know it well enough--while the young men stand by and watch and smile; for, he says charminglya "it he repo~ts, is~ unpleasant" (33 c). Afterwards, they range through the city imitatine him, presumably like those skeptical puppies who have inopportunely gotten hold of dialectic, which he himself describes in the Republic (529 b). This is what Socrates calls "not being anyune's teacher," and this is how he makes himself palatable , to his fellow-citizens. He . ompletes his defense aeainst the corruption charge c by pointing to the fact that no·.one --who either considers himself to have been corrupted or is a parent of a corrupted child is then and there coming forward to complain (34 b). But then, of course, aside from the unlikelihood that a parent would proclaim his child's corruption in public, the whOle town knew that the chief accuser Anytos considered himself to such a parent. b~ just Xenophon records this circumstance (Apoloey 29). 12. This then is Socrates' defense a~ Plato permits us to construe it in the mind of a Heliastic juror. There is i.ncr iia.i na t 1 ng undoubtedly something deliberately self-,..,. - -_- - about it. Socrates does not even scruple to use phrases to the �17 court which intimate in his own terms the equivocal nature of his own acti.vity. I am referring to the phrases which · in the Republic give the working definition of right or justice, namely "to do one's own business," and of wrongdoing, namely "to be busy at many things" (433 a), to meddle, ~ to do everything,h the latter being Socrates' favorite description of the sophists' activity (596 c). Yet for Socrates in Athens the two apparently coincide--he claims that in his private interrogations he is both "doing his own business" (33 a) which happens to be going about meddling in theirs (31 c), and that in doing theirs he is also doing the god's (33 c). So he intimates something possibly pernicious, while he never takes cognizance of the real fears of his judges. Those fears concern the substance of the citY, which is compounded of traditions, particularly the deep old myths about its gods and the established respect for the wisdom of its citizens, of whose collapse Socrates' scrutiny makes a spectacle for the young. So also, because he never ac- knowledges that he in fact teaches, he evades rendering a candid and comforting account of the essential loyalty of his intention~ such as even a very uncomfortAing citizen- teacher would feel obligated to give to apprehensive parents1 he never says that he and they in the end care for the ~ city. It is necessary here to recall that Socrates' indictment was judicially correct. Under these circumstances it seems to me that even a decent juror, realizing in the course of the speech that both charges had the same root, which the defense had in no way reached, might feel compelled to �18 convict, and, if he was a man of ftir~s; i'gb;t_, he might pray the while that it would not come to execution. 13. Indeed there is a case to be made for the convicting Athenians. Hegel, for instance, who of course takes a very comprehensive view of the affair, is their brisk defender, and some of the points that follow are, in fact, made in the History£! Philosophy (Vol. II, "The Fate of Socrates"). First, the common view that this was a political trial, the attack of the rabid returned democracy against a man with aristocratic views and associates, will not hold up. Socrates himself recounts at his trial how he had been in difficulties under various regimes, certainly under the oligarchical Thirty who included his own interlocutors Critias and Charmides (32 e). Furthermore, the chief accuser Anyt.Js was a moderate democrat, a "seemly and well-conducted man" of respectable reputation by Socrates' own account in the Meno (90 b). In fact the very description of Socrates as an antidemocrat is not very convincing. Read without prejudice the vignette of the democratic regime in the Republic, a dialogue itself set in the democratic stronghold of Athens' harbor, shows, for all its outrageousness, one vital redeeming features this regime is, Socrates says, a perfect supermarket of constitutions, and anyone who wishes to erect a city, ~~~doing," should go there (557 d). "~ Socrates' activity is at home in a democracy, not to speak of the fact that the Athenians regard Socrates as instigating that very forwardness in the young which he describ0s as endemic to democracies (563 a). �19 Now the Athenians have, 1.n fact, as Socrates himself observes in the Crito (52 e), borne with him for seventy years, in spite of the supposed "great hatred" against him (28 a). Even his two incursions into politics, for which, as he tells the court, he might "perhaps" have died (32 d), passed off safely. So that. the man who tells the Athenians that they will kill anyone who publicly opposes them (31 e), has himself been allowed to live a long life of semi-public resistance. Even this late conclusion need never have come. If they had managed better, Crito sadly observes, the ·case need never have come to court (45 e). Nor need Socrates have died, for voluntary exile was possible, as the Laws remind him when he makes them speak (52 e). Even in that court and in spite of Socrates' intransigence there were 220--nearly half--of the five hundred (or 501) jurors who either thought the accusation insufficiently proved, or were moved by a strong sense of Socrates' excellence, or agreed with him that the city could profit by his existence, or considered that the city would be better served by forbearance. him guilty. These 220 refused to find Their number surprises Socrates who has evidently not done justice to the quality of some Athenians (36 a). Again, once the verdict is in, Socrates is allowed to speak freely, as is the civilized Athenian cu$tom, and to reaffirm his partnership in the city by participating in the fonnulation of his sentence. Socrtites abuses this occasion in order to re-iterate his view of the incompetence of the Heliastic court. Yet more, once sentenced and in prison the Athenians allow him daily conversation with his friends and Accord him a bloodless death among friends. �20 Indeed his freedom to speak before the large public of the court-room or to the intimate circle of friends in prison ts complete. The formal issue of a mere right to free speech is of no concern to Socrates or to the Athenians1 ~ care only about the substantial question whether Socrates' speech does damage. In this light even Anytos' harsh recommendation that the case must either not come before the court at all or come as a capital case (29 c) can at least be taken to evince a state of mind the opposite of trivial, a state of mind Plato must respect. For in the Statesman, the stranger to whom Socrates has turned over the conversation says that in the absence of true statesmanship, the laws and the customs must rule. anc~stral Since, then, no one is to be wiser than they, if anyone is seen to be searching into the crafts which have been legally established, and waxing wise about them, he can be indicted on a charge of corrupting the young and made to suffer "the most extreme penalti?s" (299 b). In .sum the very seriousness with which they take Socrates' non-political activity gives the Athenians a claim . to our respect, wh ose mo d us viven di t. to regar d p h' 1 osop h ers i is i I\ light-heartedly. To be sure, it is not good to interrupt a speaker, but their clamor is brief and controllable--and it comes correctly, at crucial points. Here in effect the attention of a whole city has been gained by one man, a philosopher. Of what other people can that be said? 14. Clearly this Socrates, who confron~s and affronts such a city in this way, is Socrates in a very oblique aspect. This aspect is just that described by Kierkegaard in a �21 R passage from The Concept .Q.f Irony: ·· Thus we see clearly how the position of Socrates with respect to the state is thoroughly negative, how he ivholly fails to fit into it, but we see it even more clearly at the moment when, indicted for his way of life, he surely must have become conscious of his disproportion to the state, Yet undismayed he carries throueh his position, with his sword above his head, His speech is not the powerful pathos of enthusiasm ••• but instead we have an irony carried through to its last limit. By irony Kterkegaard means not what Socrates means when he uses the tenn laticrl, his ~ith respect to himself, namely his dissimu- preti::>1~ce of knowing less than he does, but a kind of self-levitation by which one is raised above all rositive knowledge. Such a zestful abstention from content does, in a way, characterize the Socrates of the Apology. At any rate, Socrates with his sword above his head is a man of neeation, and these are his featuresa 15. First and foremost there is that uncanny nay-sayer within him which he calls his daimonion, and which plays -a larger role in this than in any other genuine dialogue. He describes it (31 d) as a sort of inner voice which has been with him from childhood; that is to say, it is innate but not in need of "recollection," of being .searched out by thought. This "half-divine" and even "divine something," -· action. ... . never aids thought and never urges . '.' ;.·. It speaks only to warn him .!!.Q.!; to do a deed. To what realm of being this notorious daimonion belongs is unfathomable. But the role it has in Socrates' life is not beyond conception. Enthusiasm means literally the state of having a d~vinity within (cf. entheos)1 The daimonion is Socr .... tes' negative enthusiasm., a permanently ~--i~n~oA r~~~r~inin~ oower. Socrates is no enthusiast, �22 because the exaltations of thought are not due to a special agency, but he does need a special negative faculty. For it is his chief teaching that excellence is knowledge _ (e.g. Protagoras 360 e ff.), and that deeds of excellence are the direct consequence of knowledee. But then, by the inverse proposition, wrong deeds stem from ignorance anc1 are always in some deep sense inadvertent; no one does bad things in full consciousness. Consequently, since they are by their very nature beyond the context of reason, they require an uncanny power for their prevention. The daimonion is Socrates' ability to avoid wrong, his negative excellence. In particular the daimapjap makes Socrates refrain from engaging in politics (31 d) because that would have been tantamount, he says, to a futile sort of self-destruction. None- theless he describes himself in the Gorgias (521 d) as being the only man in Athens who does truly engage in politics. That ts to say, he has devised for himself a mode of being privately public (or the reverse); by his description it is a way of "conferring in private the greatest benefit on each citizen" (36 c). This mission he has devised for -himself he will not give up even if he "is to die many times over" (33 c). This is Socrates' neeative politicsa to deny that the public realm is the truly political realm and to assert his inner logos intransigently in the service of the city. mpqt differs from Tho~s More. FoT. Mpre ~ocratesJ\unwillingly It is 1n this respect that accepts : ~::_ but dutifully . . high public office, and yet asserts to the right to open his mind to no one. his'~ death It is, in capsule, the distinction in matters political between a Christian and a philosopher. �23 16. Last and most important, when Socrates formulates what is to be within this speech "the greatest good for man" it is in altogether negative termss "The unexamined life is 'for mC}n" not livable/\ l38 a); what people at present care for is nothing much (30 a); the truly worthwhile work is that of examining, testing, refuting, exposing impartially both hi~self and others. In this one respect at least he finds himself wise: that he knows he knows nothing (21 d); his fellow citizE?ns, on the other hand, fail totally under examination--and it is precisely' his offense that he publ ish~s these failures, He claims, however, without irony, that to fall silPnt would be disobedience to the god. To put it another -ways the first culmination of Socrates' non-didactic teaching is usually his notorious anori'1, literally "waylessness," a profitable perplexity or embarassment, i.nducP<l in the learner for his own sake (e.g. t-1 Ano 84). a public Insofar as sf'>rvic~, Socrat~s rr--prPsents his activity as however, his interlocutor is embarrassed not for his own sake but as an.object-lPsson, nor does the conversation continue to positive learning; in this setting Socrates is indeed a negative teacher. Here, then, the philosophic activity is presented as an entirely negative effort, without an end or a substance-sienificantly the substantive philosophia is never used, but only the verb philosophein, "to carry on the effort for wisdom." But most particularly, at thP. literal center of the speech (29 b), and again at its end, Socrates asserts his ultimate negative wisdoms concerning Hades, th~ his knowledee of his ignorance realm of death. �24 17. To offset clearly the negative Socrates in the dock, whose defense he appears to record, Plato writes a second defense for Socrates in prison. The conversations of the Crito and the Phaedo arE' the deliberately posittve cornp1Pments to the oratory of th~ A~olo~v. In the l:>eeinning of the Crito So~r<:1tes o.wakP.s from a deep blank sleep, 1 ik!J <:!1:-1 t so lo!1gir.3ly c!escribed at end of the Apoloey, to a conversation in which hP condemnation as he never would before th!? court, duly proceeding from the laws he has under all his life (53 a). V!~l.'Y th~ acc~~t~ I! l .J .::.s r1a:"t~ely willirie,1y \.-. liv~d In a tone thP very o_;:•I="osite of that in the Apology he has the laws upbraid him: the right thing is the same for you an~ whatever we undertake to do to you, you "•• for us, thin~ .r.o yo•..: •.:hir:k t!:=t t :.;0 it is ri~ht to do the same back to us1" (SO e). This other, positive Socrates is even more stronely del in ea ted in the Phae<lo, the dial oeue o:i his second and; he ho~es, more successful dP<t th ~,,h ich def~nse con ta ins (69 e). On this his last day he is not a harsh and offensive rhetorician, but a charming and attentive listener, as the narrator makes a point of noting (89 a). Here he speaks not as a relentless interrogator but as one who is prepared, if his interlocutor wishes it, to "talk it through in tales" (diainytb"ologei!!·•! . , 70 b). Here he does not present himself as proudly ignorant, but is presented as the one and only knower (76 b); nor does he pretend to be without a teaching, but he rather appears as one who--the recipient of Phaedo's account interrupts to remark--makes philosophical matters astonishingly clear (102 a). Here all the great Socratic notions are recapitulateda his �25 supposition of the eide, the invisible "looks" or forms1 the myth of r~collection; the true good beyond the merely human good of refutation in the Apology. In this conversation Socrates frequently refers to philosophia, and presents it as the inquiry into the rec:ilm of death, the "invisible Hades" (Ai~~s Aeides) which is also the place of the invisible eide (80 d), the place of being (76 d). of death but ~.;1?11-studied Here he is not ignorant in it, and the death the city confers on him is not an ahscon<'ling into sleep-like nothingness but an "immigration" to the realm of being (40 c, 117 c); a felicitous alternative to exile. So, then, there can be no question that before the court Socrates <:leliberately curtails and withholds himself. 18. Then the question becomes1 why? deliberately offend the court, why ~oes Why does Socrates he go on the offens- ive acainst the Athenians, why does he use his defense to document his offense against the city? Since Socrates actually lived and actually came before the Heliaea, there must be some aspects of Plato's Defense which derive from the actual circumstances. Once a defendant, Socrates became a resister, the defender of philosophy from the city's attack. He must have thought that this public occasion was a moment to display spirit, to confirm the lifelong business of words in deed, to be what Achilles, to whom he compares himself, was in war, 4hero for philosophy - (28 c). YT1 Again, in part his conduct must have been an accomodation " to the conditions of the occasion, ·namely the short time he has for speaking end the great crowd to whom he must address himself. Twice he mentions the lack of time for quie~ . �26 persuasion (19 a, 37 b). This lack of leisure and of intimacy is not a peripheral matter--~othing Socrates thinks can be expeditiously conveyed by public deliverance; it always be slowly engendered in lei.sur~ly with its accompanying inner dialogue. n ust 1 direct conversation Socrates' positive wisdom stated concisely in public would appear simply bizarre. The negative and the positive Socrates are obverses of each other. Refutation, the breaking up of an accerterl opinion, goes over into the search for a truth. But in IJUblic, whether Socrates has been summoned to court or has accostP.d a man who is not a friend, the transformation will not take place--the conversation is curtailed. The Apolo0v leaves aside the widest and deepest Qllf':'Stions conr.en1ing the rie,ht relation between the political community and the care of souls, but it implies this mucha when philoso;'hY comes upon the 8ity it comes as a threat. 19. Accordingly it is possible to surmise whv Plato ~ut on record for times to come so detailed and emphatic a statem0nt of the resistant Socrates. A startling moment in the Apology throws light on this matter. For the first and last time Plato himself irrupts into his own work (38 a). Socrates hears him raisP his voice to suggest a sober and sensible money penalty, to subvert as it were, Socrates' own proud and derisory proposals. The suggestion is very much like a rebuke, and Socrates accepts it. It is as if in this work, in which he does not so much speak through Socrates but represents himself as spoken to by him, Plato is recording something he h..\d heard in court which must cast its shadow over the other dialogues, and so �27 over the whole philosophical tradition. He had heard that Socrates' actiyity .ll publicly indefensibl<-?. 20. Let me conjr~cture. The nialogues proper, the Socratic conversations, would by and laree p.:iss into oblivion, the ~'ositive co11tent of Socrates' wisdom, its <leep suppositions and encompassing myths shrivelled into conformity with his succ8s~:ors' ci p:;'ea r in rnor~ ,~thens s tr1~!1uoos sys ter.is. OnP. succe1=rn or such"would soon • . the other hand, Socrates' speech, delivered before C:-i the 1ar!3E'St public of his life, would continue to be at work. Its heroic intransigence, which had driven the court to extrem0s c..:,2.inst him, would play a part in a revulsion endine in his re-est:abl i.shment. It would be the Socrates of refutations uho would prevail. In a softened popular col0.r_·ine. this . is thc-> Socrates of Cicero's "1-l'el 1-known 1escription1 Socrates was the first who cal lf'?d rhilosophy <1o"m from the b..eavens, SP.ttle<l her in the citiP-s and even introduced her into private houses and compelled her to ask questions about life and moral matters and things good ~nd ba~. (T1_1sculan !)isDutations, V, iv, 10) :2u t the so-cal led "Socr:.:l tic method" •vould also make 1.'3.rsher reappearances, as "rn.rlical doubt," as "enlightenment," 1 · as "critique," as the'\.e-examination of all values" or as a ~eneral affirmation of the questioning disposition. In each of these modes philosophy would penetrate the preit:ences to credit of yet another community. 'l 'lithout supposing that Plato could have foreseen all these developments, it is yet possible to imagine that he had intimations, that he was as apprehensive ahout the facile vindication of Socrates' way as he was about the learned ossification of his thought. To �28 prevent the lattcr--or rather to provide a per.manent possibility of revival--he wrote nu.~erous Socratic conversations. To forestall the former--or rather to put perennial obstacles in its wa.y--he wrote one Socr.atic speech. noble oration ~.,roul<l, This proud and at least on re-examination, reveal that Socrates had committed an undeniable offense against thi::city and that Socrates was it woulrl serve - is a : da~eP.rnus; warning to his future frienr:ls--and as an enticement. To append a mocern applications In our polity Socrates' offense is not a ~apital crime nor a.re his modern successors of his stature. Furthermore in a court of law an American citizen juror would be guided and restrained by the Constitution and its interpretations and law.s. The judicial issue is therefore much less excruciating--what is more urgent is to form some general opinions about such situations. And here the Apology makes a clear comment, which, stated most cautiously, is that the side resisting enlightenment also has something vital to defend. There is yet one more thought. Seer.ates . himself would, I am persuaded, live out his life among us doing no harm and receiving none. isa The great question then to be thought through ought such mutual immunity to be a source of high satisfaction or of deep misgiving 7 �29 Notes 1. Plato's Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates S!!.Q Crito, edited with notes by John Burnet (Oxford, 1924). References to the .d ialogues are by Stephanu1 page. 2. The Socratic Enigma, A Collection QI Testimonies Through Twentv-Four Centuries, ed. Herbert Spiegelberg (The Library of Liberal Arts, 1964)1 PP• 99, 112, 3. Helmut James von Mbltle 1 Verlag, 1971)1 ~43, 262, 203, 278. Briefe (Berlins Henssel p.63. 4. Socratic Enigma, .Ql2• .£..!.!;. pp. 43, 66, 187, 228, 285. 5. William Roper and Nicholas Harpsfield, Lives of Saint Thomas~ (Everyman Library, 1963)1 p. 157. 6. Burnet, .Ql2• cit. p. 103. 7. ~Meno 1.961) 1 8. of Plato, ed. E. Seymer Thompson (Cambridge, p. xxiv. St/>rP-n Kierkegaard, Constant Reference J;,Q ~ Concept of Irony, Vi.th Socrates (London, 1966)1 Socratic Enigma, .Ql2• cit., p. 291. p. 221. Cf. � 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. 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Deans Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bc116b6849eb1799c304798798c77304.pdf 24c6130e2736d2ded4b5550a99c58a5f PDF Text Text Plato' s Theory of Ideas Eva Brann* Ny subject for tonight is, as announced, "Plato' s Theory of Ideas". vlhether that subject actually in-terests you, or you think that it ought to interest you-- you \vill, I imagine, regard it as a respectable lecture topic . And yet I have to tell you that every term in the project is wrong-headed. Let me, therefore begin by explaining why that is. I mean that First, Plato' s Theory of Ideas·is not a subject at all. it is not a compact mental material to be presented on an intellectual pla-tter. Plato himself refrained from making it the direct theme of any of the twenty-five or more dialogues which he wrote. Ins·tead; the ideas appear in the context of conversation, incidentally and in scattered places. He gives the reason directly in a letter: There is no treatise of mine about these things, nor ever will be. For it cannot be talked about like other subjects of learning, but out of much communion which has taken place around this business, and from living together, suddenly, like a light kindled from a leaping fire, it gets into the soul, and from there on nourishes itself. (Seventh Letter 34lc). I t follows that my lecture, like all the similar scholars' efforts, is an outsider' s attempt to short-circuit a required initiation, u.n attempt which betrays my lack of genuine participation in the truth I veying as a molded matter. am con- On the other hand, there is also much in Plato' s works \vhich invites such an exposition of his doctrine: much explicit and provocative argumentation and many promises of an externally communicable way to insight. * Friday Night Lecture, delivered in Annapolis on September 14, 1979 and in Santa Fe on February 15, 1980. �-2- I have another reason for thus boldly ploughing in. Last summer there died that man, that teacher in this school, who, as it seemed to many of us, best knew the way into the Platonic dialogues . Jacob Klein . His name lS While he was alive, I, for one, resting secure in the fact of his existence, postponed a bald confrontation of my own with this ultlinate philosophical matter. But now, I thought, the time had come to be bold in acting on tpe advice Socrates gives to his friends in the course of the last conversation of his life. When he is asked where they will find someone to charm away their fears that philosophy is impossible once he is dead, he tells them that not only among the Greeks, but also among the barbarians-- that, of course, includes us -there are many good people who can do this for them. But then he adds: And also you must search for them among youselves, for probably you will not easily find people more �able than you are to do this . {Phaedo 78 a) . We speak of "Plato' s Theory", and let me now say something about that. . . Its chief source are, to be sure, the works of Plato, and he is 1 . J.ts u tJ.mate master . 1) Yet within his works, the·-:-. Dialogu�-��1 it is not Plato but his teacher Socrates who originates and maintai�s the theory . Plato presents Socrates as having.a life-long hold on it, though he speaks of it under continuously changing aspects . There is a so-called "late" dialogue, the Parmenides, in which the elderly author imagines a boyish Socrates�- a wonderful turnabout-- and in which Socrates' ' originating claim is elicited by the father of philosophy, Parmenides, . {130 b) . hlmself. v There is another dialogue, also written late in Plato' s life, the Sophist, in which an old Socrates, just a few weeks away from death, listens silently while a stranger brings the theory to its height �-3- with the solution of its deepest difficulty. And finally there is a "middle" dialogue, the Phaedo, in which Socrates, in the last conversation of his life, addresses the theory more directly than anywhere else. Plato, ) at least, wished the world to think of "Socrates Theory of Ideas". But then, more accurately, he would not have had us think of a "theory" at all. By� theory we usually mean a conceptual construction designed in principle to yield satisfying explanations for every problem . 2) . A theory ought to be falslfiable, which means it should brought to lt. be capable of being made to reveal its incompleteness or inconsistency by strenuous formal reasoning, so that it may be discredited and disTherefore it is its author' s responsibility to present it in carded. the most impregnable form possible. aplenty in the Theory of Ideas. Scholars do find such difficulties But here is a curious circumstance: they are all anticipated in their boldest form in that very dialogue, the Parmenides, which represents a boyish Socrates as first proposing the Ideas. 3) Can you think of another philosophical theory which is pre- sented at the very beginning in terms of a series of devastating difficulties, never to be explicitly resolved? The point is, the Ideas are not a theory. Socrates calls his bringing in of the Ideas a "supposing" (Phaedo 100 b); the Greek word for a supposition is a hypothesis. A hypothesis is, literally, an underpinning, a prop. 4) It comes to him and he comes on it at every departure and at every turning. It is a basis he ackr10wledges _so that he can carry on ___ as he must; not a conclusion presented for verification but a beginning which then becomes the end of inquiry. It is first the condition that gives him heart for a search, by making it possible for him to frame a question that has in it the arrow to an answer. One might say that it �-4- allows him to make a suspect of the unknown. {Meno 8 6 b). Thereafter, however, the Idea-hypotheses--for the hypothesis is not the proposition that there are I deas but each Idea itself--are to be used as stepping stones to their own conversion into something not merely supposed but truly beheld, "seen". {Republic 511 b. ). Such suppositions are surely not fruitfully accosted by formal hammer-and-tongs argument, though they are, of course, amenable to careful and critical inspection. I keep calling these Socratic suppositions Ideas . The word "idea" I is a transcription of a term Socrates himself uses, idea. it is an infelicitous term. For ask yourselves what we usually mean by an idea, for instance when we say: lecture ". Nonetheless "That' s her idea of a good Clearly we mean an opinion or a mental image or a concept, often in opposition to "the real thing ". This modern notion of an idea, the result of an earth-shaking intellectual upset, is that of a mental representation, sornet.):l_ing befm::e _or in the organ of ideas, the mind . The use of the term would cast my exposition into a false, albeit familiar, frame, and I would only make things worse were I to insist that Socrates' I deas are "real", and worse yet, "really exist". , Socrates' own chief word is eidos. - Like the word idea it is built on the simple past stem of the word to see, which signifies the act of seeing once done and completed . Scholars have collected the many meanings of eidos which flow continuously from the broadly ordinary to the narrowly technical: class, kind. shape, figure, face, form, characteristic, quality, But, of course, when we dwell on the multiplicity of Greek usages, we are standing the matter on its head, for they are all revealing differentiations from the dead-center meaning. Eidos means sight, aspect, looks, in that eerily active sense in which a thing that has looks or is a sight presents itself to our sight and our looking. �-5"Looks", then, and, not idea or form, is the most faithful rendering of eidos. 5) of eidos . But it sounds too curious, and so I shall tonight speak simply The plural is eide. for his hypothesis . Eidos, then is the word Socrates chooses For that choice he might, for this once, be called a "Greek thinker", one who cherishes and yet overturns the wisdom of his languageJwhich associates seeing and knowing: built on the stem of "I saw" . "I know" in Greek is Eidos is a choice full of witty depth, for the first of all those notorious Socratic paradoxes is surely that the eidos is invisible . So let me convert the falsely familiar title "Plato's Theory of Ideas" to "Socrates' hypothesis of the eide" . I shall pursue the eidos under seven headings, for it shows as many aspects as there are beginnings to Socrates' inquiry# Indeed, that is what makes his hypothesis compelling: "d that so many roads lead to t he el os . 6) I. II. Excellence and Commonness Speech and Dialectic III . Answers and Questions IV . Opinion and Knowledge v. VI . VII . I. Being and Appearance Same and Other Original and Image Excellence and Commonness "Philosophy" means literally the love of wisdom . Therefore it begins in desire (Republic 475 b, Symposium 204 a) , in desirous love, in erotic passion, the most acute of all passions . . . young beglmung or. ph"losophy . l 7) That is what we might call the It is that love which arises when another human being appears "all-beautiful in aspect", in eidos, as the �-6- Greek phra.>e goes . (Charmide� 154 d) . We might simply say that it arises when someone suddenly becomes visible for us . For beauty, Socrates says, has the part of shining out eminently and being most lovable, and of coming to us through sense, through the most acute of senses, the sense of sight. Beauty is brilliance, attractive visibility . Beauty is sight par excellence, and a sight is that which, without going out of itself, draws us from a distance . But such a sensual sight, such a bodily "idea" (Phaedrus 251 a), which draws us from afar, affects us with an exciting and utterly confounding sense of its being a mere penetrable veil, a mere representation Of some divinity beyond . such love as adoration. That is why we speak of It draws us not to itself but through itself-- the enchantedly attentive fascination with sensual looks goes over into something on the other side of that surface. Desire through distance is called love, and if what beckons is on the further side of surface sight, it is called philosophy . For, Socrates says, there is a road, whose first station is the beckoning irritation aroused by one beautiful body and which leads us to have an eye, first for all kinds of beauty and finally to sight its self-sameness everywhere in the world and in the soul . (Symposium 210 a). And that sight, the very source of visibility, is beyond sense, and is the eidos itself . There is another beginning in what is extraordinary and captivating, but its visible aspect is a little duller, though its luster is life-long . (Phaedrus 250 d) . It has to do with what is outstanding, excellent . Some time or other all of us are overcome by admiration for the fullness of being of certain people and their deeds, or even by an animal or a tool . (Republic 353 b, 601 d) . Such potency of being, such proper goodness, , is called in Greek aret�, which means effective excellence, potent capability. (Laches 192 b) . It is more than ordinary usefulness or �-7- humanity or sincerity. It is rather a kind of superlativeness--its I name is related to aristos, the best. It is competitive, "agonistic", as the Greeks say, and uncommon, although we speak rightly and yet paradoxically of a "standard " of excellence . Excellence and how to engender it is a topic of pervasive fascination . It interests the good, the crafty, the curious, parents, citizens, the corrupt--perhaps them most peculiarly (Meno), them and the young . But again, as in the case of beauty incarnate, every outstanding human being, every fine deed,appears as a mere instance, a mere exemplification of excellence. It is spurious for being only an instance and not the thing itself, deficient in being abstracted from the complete complex of virtues, deformed by being bound to a particular We all know that even the best-founded hero-worship eventually setting. looses its edge and luster as the admirer gains perspective, whereas the longing to see excellence and be excellent is for an ever-bright, undeformable shape, looming behind the tainted earthly example . The beautiful and the best, the fine and the good-- through these is the enthusiastic first access to the eidos . But there is also a more sober beginning, one whose implications Socrates himself was a little put off by in his first youth, feeling its meanness . (Parmenides 130 c) . For besides the high and shining eidos of what is beautiful and excellent, there is also a common eidos, or better, everything, from a small bee to a grand virtue, displays or "has" an eidos . (Meno 72). . Everything we see, everything tha·t appears in any way at all, looks (or sounds or smells) like somethin9;\ excellences, elements, animals, tools . Everything wears the aspect of being of a sort . Unless it has the looks of something, we cannot see it, for it has no �- 8- coherent shape to draw us; we cannot point to it or name it. To see is always to re-cognize; just imagine trying to focus on something -- I shouldn't Whatever even say "something'.!-which is truly unique and looks like nothing. One look wears a look at all wears that look in common with other things . presides over numerous things and that is why we can "identify", that is to say, make out the sameness, of things, of people, elements, animals, .. tools. It is not in their multifariou i and difference that we lay hold ...,c. .. _, , of things but "by their being bees" or beds or excellences, (Meno 72 b) . Socrates is far more interested in this common look than in what we call individuality, that inarticulable deviation from the common which he never thinks of as a source of particular fineness . He pursues the common eidos because it is more revealing than the world's idiosyncracies . For we do not learn of this eidos by looking at individual things; on the contrary, we can look at them only because they display this eidos, this look. For example, Socrates would agree that equal objects- - scratched lines, say-are needed to call u p i n u s the thought of equality. A (Phaedo 75 a) . But they do that only because they take part in that eidos which makes them look equal to us, even though they are but uncertainly, passingly, approximately equal, and from them we could never gather the sharply precise idea of equalitY; anymore than we can identify goodness by watching human actions from now till doomsday . That look of things which not one of them has fully or purely but which is common to all, that is a wonder to Socrates. And so both outstanding and common sights point to an invisible eidos beyond . II. Speech and Dialectic We have a surpassing strange power of reaching the things that share a look, all of them, at once . �ve can say the word, their name. When the �-9- eye sees a sight the tongue can utter a sound which is the sensual appearance of a word, of speech. . (Third Letter 342 b) . · One word reaches, picks out, intends what is the same in many things. word presides over many things. (Republic 596 a) . One A word 1s not a symbol for Socrates, for it does not stand for something by reason of some sort of fit between it and the thing; rather it reaches toward something utterly other than itself: it has meaning . thinks that what words mean is precisely that co�mon eidos. Socrates In fixing on speech he discovers what the panoramic familiarity of daily seeing leaves obscure: that the visible world, particularly the natural world, comes compounded of more and more encompassing visible sorts, rising finally into totally invisible kindred groups . The Greek word for a visible sort is, of course, eidos and for a kindred group, genos . The Latin word for eidos is species. Socrates discovers the organization of the world into species and genus, 8) . and that things can be placed, defined1by thinking about the meaning of names and connecting them properly in speech. All the world seems to be at the roots akin (Meno 81 d) , and that kinship is articulable in complexes of words. Such connected speech is what the Greeks call logos. It is, first of all, inner effort, movement, attention, intention; indeed, it is the same as thinking. (Sophist 263 e) . It is always an activity of discerning and picking out on the one hand, and comprehending and collecting on the other; in fact that is what the verb legein means: to select and collect. Socrates thinks that such speech can reveal the interconnections of the world, but only if it "looks to" (e.g. , Republic 472 b, 532 a) the interweaving of the invisible eide. true speech is speech in accordance with the eidos J.llleaningful and (Phaedrus 249 b) ; �- 10 - names reach for the eide singly and sentences for theit· interconnections. Socrates calls such reaching speech dialectic, "sorting through". But he gives that word another sense also, a wider one. ( 2 6 6 c) . Dialectic is serious, and, if necessary, uncompromising conversation with oneself or with another, argument. (I might say that if the enthusiasm of love is young philosophy, argumentative dialectic might be called the youngest philosophy because bright children make l•�.vely dialecticians. ) Now dialectic does not only reveal the articulated unity of the world. can also shake our easy acceptance of its oneness . the obtuse self-contradictoriness of things . It Speech can rake up Such self-opposition comes out when speech is used in a very original way, in "telling" as the old term goes, in counting. Take this index finger. thumb but smaller than the middle finger. It has both looks at once. It is larger than the It is both small and large . They coincide in the thing and yet we can tell them apart and count them as each one, and two together in the thing . Whoever takes the deliverance of words seriously will find this provoking provoking of thought. (Republic 523) . Socrates can account for this revelation only by supposing that the eidos greatness and the eidos smallness, which are each one and forever separate beyond the finger, can be fused in the finger . are pure and intelligible . III . Even if the finger is confounding, the eide This eidos saves the telling power of speech. Answers and Questions Socrates asks questions, of himself and of others, and he urges them continually: try to say the answer. His questions are not quite the usual kind, namely requests for information or provocations of acknowledgement. Nonetheless people see a charm or a dignity enough in them to try to respond. Socrates' kind of question is preeminently framed to elicit �-11- speech . He asks after that in things which can respond, which is answerable, .!."E!-�£9Jl_$il::>):� The Greek term for what is answerable in that / way is aitia, the responsible reason. Socrates thinks that such a responsible reason -- we sometimes say "cause" -- cannot be some external linkage of events . It is an trivializing answer to the question "Why II is Socrates sitting in prison� to say that he is flexing his joints in a certain way. Although he is too modest to say so, he knows he is there because of his peculiar kind of courage . "What makes this face beautiful"? Similarly, if the question is the answer he insists on is that it is beautiful not by a certain incidental shape or color, but "by beauty". He calls such answers unsophisticated but safe. (Phaedo 100 d) . They are indeed so simple-minded as to seem at first futile�-�hey are answers for those whose a�ition is not to go onward but inward . For their safety is in keeping us to the question, in directing us through its words to a word . To accept that things are beautiful by beauty means that the cause is not to be reduced or evaporated in inquiry but kept in sight and pursued; that granted, the answer elaborated. (Phaedo 105 b) . What is beauty-:-"orexcellence cn-rl then be safely For it poses a new and deeper question: .:X- or knowledge? I should say here that Socrates does not go about idly asking what scholars like to call the "What is X? question" . His questions are not one function with variable objects, but each is asked differently in each conversation for each is ) set differently into Socrates' life and each reaches toward a unique being. We all know that the answer to the question what something is can take many forms. Socrates sometimes begins by showing people that they quite literally don' t know what they are talking about and can't mean what they are sayin� ---a charming but dangerous business for the �-12- young . (Apology 33 c), Republic 539 b, Philebus 15 a) . Sometimes he proposes a startlingly revealing, seemingly paradoxica � and dubiously convertable identification, for instance that excellence is knowledge . And once in a while he does what, persuaded by Aristotle (Metaphysics 98 � b) people think of Socrates as doing first and preeminently: _ looks for a definition by genus and species and differentiae. Mr. Klein used to say: 1a d. 1ogues . 9) he so, as There is no one method for interpreting all the And yet it is equally the case that Socrates is always after the same end, on 1s a trail blaze . a trail of speech on which the one-word answer The trail, however, runs asymptotically to its goal; it approaches it without meeting it . This goal is the eidos named the simple-minded but safe answer to a Socratic question . in Ultimately the eidos toward which the word points cannot be attained through speech but only by itself and through itself. (Cratylos 439 b) Of it is not f . I speech which determines the eidos but the eidos which founds speech . (Parmenides 135 c). :···. ·.::: logos is utterly diverse from eidos since its very nature is to be merely about being; it might be said to climb along the eidetic structure, articulating, so to speak, the lattice of p an impenetrably c rystalline complex. Yet in the meantime the question which is steadfastly answered as it itself directs, focusses the soul on the eidos as responsible cause. IV. Opinion and Knowledge Socrates comes to grips with the strangest of human scandals: that we are able to talk without speaking and to believe without acting. Human life is peculiarly capable of heights and excrucia·ting falls, and it is these heights and depths we most avidly chatter about and have powerfully ineffective beliefs about. Indeed, public talk about them is obligatory,-- It is an incantation to keep spirit of excellence from fading. It �-13.- consists of certain partial lopsided truths whose deficiency is obscured by their familiarity. Socrates calls such speechless talk, such logos­ like utterance without present thought, opinion. (Our favorite phrase signal that an opinion is coming is: "I feel that . . . " . ) He thinks further that it is because we do not know what we mean when we talk of excellence> that we fail to be excellent . By "knowing" he does not mean being familiar with certain arguments and definitions or having a some sort of competence or canniness in getting what one wants. Minor 365 d). what truly is. (Hippias He means that our souls are alight with, are filled with, _ He means a knowledge so live and rich that it goes immediately over into action without leaving room for the mediation of a wavering or perverse will. So Socrated first interest in knowledge is practical, but I should say here that that knowledge vivid enough to pass immediately into deed will also be an end in itself, a realm in which to dwell beyond all action, and that this is yet another one of the great Socratic paradoxes. (Phaedo 66 b, Phaedrus 247, Republic 517 b) . To be cured of being caught in mere. opinion we must know how this state is possible . Socrates finds only one explanation plausible . What we have opinions about cannot be the same as what we think seriously about . (Republic 477) . The name may be the same, but we cannot have the same thing in mind when we talk and when we speak. We are using our powers so differently that they amount to different powers and must have different objects . - That is not really so odd an idea: \Je seem to switch gears when we pass from pontificatin�_; to thinking, and the · matter we have gone into deeply is no longer what it was when we "knew" it superficially, just as the friend well known is a different �-14- person from the friend of first acquaintance. The superficial glance is reflected by a surface that masks the depth in which thinking becomes absorbed. That first aspect of the world which is the object of opinion, whose whole character it is to seem and then to vanish before closer inspection, Socrates calls becoming, because it is always coming to be and never quite what it is . It is what is before our eyes. Our first fascination is with the shifting, inexact, contradictory things before our eyes, or with the obtrusive opinions of our fellows, and these are our unavoidable beginning. (Phaedo 74 a) . But as the visible surface is penetrated and those opinions are searched into, a new world appears, now to the eye of the thought, steadfast in being such as it is, of a powerful "suchness, ". shapely, unique . Socrates calls this world being. He understands it to be all that knowledge demands. For in knowing we have a sense of being anchored, rooted in something stable and lucid for the eye of the soul, (Phaedo 99 d). It is the world of the eidos as that which is to be known, the knowable eidos. (Republic 511 a). And however I have made it sound, Socrates does not regard the knowable eidos as his contrivance to grant himself knowledge. Rather he thinks that we are, all of us, capable of the experience of going into ourselves in thought, led on by the beckoning eidos, a process so vividly like the raising of a memory that he calls it, making pr;�·N>rcl;cd it, recollection, the calling-up of a memory. /'- a, myth of (Meno 81, Phaedo 73). The way to the eidos is by passage through our soul � not by penetration of outer things-- or rather, these two ways are one . I should add that the eidos is knowable but it is not knowledge. It confronts the soul and is not of it. To put it in modern terms: rt �-15- is a presence to the soul, but not a representation within it . He might say that Being is for us irreduceably aspectual: \./e look at it and move among its articulations for it has a power of affecting the soul and being known. (Republic 511, Sophist 248 e). Y7e may even, speaking figuratively, comprehend it, but we cannot pass into it. For Socrates philosophy, the desire for being,remains forever philosophy, an unfulfilled longing. V. Appearance and Being The eidos is steadfast and lucid . us. It is shifting and opaque. Not so the world which envelops Yet the Greeks call what appears before our eyes the phenomena, which means "what shines out", "what shows itself", for the things that appear glow and ensnare us in their kaleidoscopic spectacle; that is �hy we are all lovers of sights and sounds (Republic 475 d) . I should note here that although I cannot help talking of "things", the appearances are not things in any strict sense since they have no "reality" " (which is but Latin for thinghood) , no compacted)concrete character . ness", "affairs" I Socrates sometimes uses the word "busi- (pragmata) for our world . The "phenomena:' sparkle busily, but it is all surface . Now the systematic illusions and the serried variety of appearance can be mastered by various sciences, for example, sciences of perspective and classification, but there is still a recalcitrant residue. That incorrigible phenomenality show itself as a two-fold multiplicity . First there are always many of a kind, many beautiful things, many just acts . And second, no beautiful thing and no just act is that way perfectly. unbudgeably, purely, but each changes as our perspective on it changes in time or place. Appearance as appearance is scattered and shimmering, �-16- fragmented and irredescent. But most of all it is not what it shows, or to put it plainer: hppearance is appearance of something, it points beyond itself. is it whose refracted form is shown to us in appearance? must be for that very reason in itself invisible . What What appears This invisible eidos is what Socrates thinks of as the being behind apperance, and appearance is becoming regarded as a manifestation. This eidos which is a being, is all that appearance and becoming are not: not scattered but o� not '.) multiform but of a single look (Phaedo 78 d); not mixed but pure (66 a); not passive but potent (Sophist 247 e); not elusive and illusory but _ steadfast and true; not for busy show but the thing in its verity, the very thing (to auto pragma); not self-contradictory but self-same (Phaedo 78 d, Cratylos 386 e); not dependent and of something, but itself by itself, absolved from subservience, or "absolute", as later commentators render Socrates deliberately naive term "by itself"; unique, immortal, indestructible (Phaedo 78 d), outside time and beyond place (Phaedrus 247 b). Most simply, Socrates calls the eidoslthe just, the beautiful. Whatever has this characteristic of potent, shapely, and, one might almost say "specific", self-sameness is called a being. It provides , such "beingness" ('Ousia, Cratylos 386 e, Meno 72 b) as appearances have, and it does this by somehow "being by", having presence (?-3.rousia, Phaedo 100 d) in them. The eidetic beings are responsible for the fact that the question "What is it?" asks not only what the thing is but also what it is, that being accompanies every "whatness'.', all. quality. I should observe again that beings are not "real", for they are not things and do not move in the categories true of things, nor do they �-17- "exist", for to exist means to be here and now . 10) But they are not un- ' They are, in the way described, and as they real or non-existent either . (Phaedo 104 d) . appear they give things their looks, their visible form . VI. Same and Other The being I have named so often is not Socrates' discovery . It comes to him from those so prejudicially called Presocratics, in particular from Parmenides who entered{_�� sanctuary of being in a blazing chariot. Thus it comes to Socrates already fraught with .established controversy and difficulties . Even he has an inherited legacy of "problems", that is to say, of questions posed in terms of his predecessors' inescapable Questions posed in this way, as problems, notoriously have doctrines . resolutions which pose more and tighter problems, and so the tradition of professional philosophy is set . Socrates does not escape this unfresh beginning. This is the problem Socrates takes up when still almost a boy; being Father Parmenides discovered is and nothing else. The It is, one and only, without distinction or difference, for we cannot think or speak what is � not. There is no sentence which does not contain, audibly or latently, an1. "is", an assertion of the truth of being. attention to what speech always says is not primitive . Such austere Listen to a contemporary poet, W. H. Auden: Words have no words for words that are not true . (II ·, 11) \Jo(� S . What Parmenides says that what is, is and in merely being is all one� ��:liiOJJl;s:::!;):: is compelling St.?lc.:e. say it nay . I we have no immediate speech with which to But it is equally monstrous, for it negates both our o.,\ OV\5 \A; I 1-\11 multifarious \'lOrld, the one in which we are at homej 2j<;�� the very possibility of articulate speech itself. Because Parmenides' grand �-18- insight brings all articulating speech to a halt, his zealous follower Zeno has taken the clever way of attacking the opposition who continue to talk and say that being is not one but many. He understands this to have to mean that being is at once like and unlike itself, selfcontradictory,· unthinkable. Socrates knows that the visible world, at least, is like that and that yet thoughtful speech canno·t bear such self-contradictions. So he offers a supposition which saves both at the integrity of that which. speech is always about, this "is " once: which is the bond of every logos, and also the manifest multiplicity and inconsis·tency of appearance and its gathering in speech. He saves Parmenides from sinking into the white silence of being. Socrates' supposition is the eidos, which is not being itself but �being. His resolution is that being is many, but not confused. The eide are each self-same, as being should be, but they are also diverse from each other. The appearances somehow "participate " in these beings in such a way that the diverse beings intersect in them and are superimposed. Thus the appearances become self-opposed; they eide save at once the purity of being and the alloy of becoming. "What wonder?", says young Socrates to the Parmenidean problem with multiplicity (Parmeni� -129 b), the universal paean of those who have resolved �� another's perplexity,--An older Socrates will say that philosophy is wonder. Socrates' solution, that there are several and diverse beings, of course poses new problems. The most telling of these is that each being is also a non-being--at least it is a not-being; it is not what the other beings are, so that Zeno' s problem with the self-opposition of the world of appearance has been but raised into the realm of being. A few �-19- weeks before the end of his life Socrates is present at a great moment in the course of philosophy Hhen a visitor from Parmenides' country presents, by way of resolving this higher problem, a momentous elaboration of his supposition which, while turning it almost irrevocably into a theory, advances it greatly. For if Socrates had shown how we can come to terms with the self-opposition of the world of appearance, . the visitor will show how we can account for false and fraudulent speech, and even �or sp being. The stranger's bold solution to Socrates' problem is this. All the eide are beings, and that is taken to mean thay they all take part in being it���f; they belong to a highest eidos, the eidos Being. stranger boldly claims that there lS also anothe� unheard of, eidos which ranges in a peculiar way through all the eide. It is indeed not- being, but not-being rightly understood, understood as a being. 258 c) . He calls it the Other . The (Sophist The eidos of the Other runs through'all beings and makes them other than each other--not what the other is . By being scattered through all being it is the cause of its pervasive distinction and difference. It is a peculiar principle which relates fo\"" by opposition and unifies by diversity, since all have otherness in common; /' their very community makes them different . each other. It makes all beings confront It is the very eidos of relativity. It is not a new name for non-being that the stranger contributes but a new view of the world as articulated and bonded through difference. It is a world in which the fact that we take one thing for another and speak falsely, as we surely do, is accounted for. The stranger mentions in passing also another principle, evidently not itself an eidos among eide, but comprehending, surpassing and beyond all .being. He calls it the Same (25� e) , in antithesis to the Other. u r1ous �-20- It is that which gives the eidos of Being and through it all the beings J ) their steadfast abiding by themselves, their very own nature, the Same gives the eide their self- what they are through and through; It is the culminating principle. sameness. approached, 0.�1'\�\ vividness it is also called the Good, t;,\\·\1r·\C,'/\.:.S� "\ {Republic 509a), l their being Depending on how it is because it gives bein�their and in Plato's "Unwritten Teachings"--recall -t'h c. \�\ 0,\- that he declined to write down central things-- it seems to have been � called the One, because it is the first and final totality. speaks of it explicitly, though in metaphor, but once, Socrates likening it to the sun because it gives the eide their luminous sightlikeness.(507.o). Aristotle told a story of Plato's famous lecture on the Good which > he held at his school, the Academy. People came in droves, hear something fascinating to themselves, power. about health or wealth or But it was all about arithmetic and how the eide are a c ertain kind of number, Good expecting to lS the One. ending up with the just-mentioned revelation that the So they got disgusted and drifted off. Elements of Harmony II, 30). Mr. {Aristoxenus, Klein used to add--as if he had been there--that only one person stayed, comprehending and critical. That was Aristotle himself. What Plato spoke about then was what is called dialectic in the last and strongest sense, 532), thinking by and through the eide attending to their grouping, I (�yrnploke, Sophist 240 c). mingling, Such dialectic, and the philosophical activity proper, namely in the Sophist, it. (Republic' 511 hierarchy, C, "intertwining". the ultimate use of the logos appears in the dialogues but once, and scholars have not often succeeded in recovering I should say that there is a chapter in Mr. Klein's book on Greek mathematics which engages in true dialectic and tells how the eidos Being �-21- can be understood as the number Two. VII. ll) Original and Image There is one greatest, almost overwhelming perplexity about the eide which Socrates knows about from the very beginning. How can an eidos do the very business for which it is submi·tted 131 c) . to us? (Parmenides Is not the eidos-unit, being each one and ever the same and receptive of neither becoming 'A.t>l"idestruction, still steadfastly the same? And thereafter, must it not be posited a.\·t-'-'�v­ as scattered and having become many in the things that are becoming, or �:.etS:" yet whole but separate from itself, which would seem to be the most impossible of all--that one and the same thing should be in one and many? (Philebus 15 b) . hoW Then can the eidos be the source of the appearances around us, how can /' -- it have truck with what is always changing and multiple? This question can be called the "lower participation problem" since it deals not with the community the eide have with each other but with that which is below them . It is the question closest to us: now do we understand the working relations which the eide--once we suppose them to be-- have to the variety, the passages and the contradictions of our world of appearance. Socrates uses a number of terms to name this relation. He speaks I of the "part-hold", the "participation" (rnethexis, Phaedo 100-102) of the appearances in the eidos, but, of course, he does not mean a parttaking, as when people take up a part of an awning they sit under. (Parmenides 131 b) , He speaks of a community of the eidos and appearances, of their being named after it, of the presence of the eidos in them. Phaedo 100 c, d, 103 b) . (e. g. These terms signify that the two realms are strongly related, but they do not reveal what the appearances can have in common with beings, or why they merit being named after them)or how the beings can be with them. �-22- But Socrates does use one group of words which tell more. · He speaks of participation through similarity, likeness, imaging, imitation. (Phaedrus 250 a, Phaedo 74 e, Timaeus 39 e and, above all Republic 510 b). That our world should stand to the realm of eide as copy to exemplar (Parmenides 132 d, Timaeus 48 e) has a certain high plausibility. It conveys a falling off from the fullness of being, an imitative, derivative It suggests that one original eidos will have many image-appearances, mode. and that each appearance ought not to stand free, but be, like any image, in some stuff. (Timaeus 52 c). It indicates how every appearance could be doubly dependent, on the e idos for being visible, and on our sight for being seen. If the appearances somehow image the eide, their inferiority, multiplicity, materiality and sensuality becomes comprehensible--and so does the fact of their inescapably beguiling looks. Yet there are apparently devastating difficulties with this primordial imitation, of which the one most open to formal. attack is this: If the e idos is what is originally beautiful, and beautiful things are copies, and if the likeness of copies to their originals comes from their sharing the same quality, then both have the quality of being beautiful. Then the e idos of beauty is beautiful, as the eidos of justice is just, and Socrates does not scruple to say just that. 210 c). (Protagoras 330 c, Symposium But that way of speaking, that beauty is beautiful, is an insupportable redundancy� called by scholars "self-predication". Furthermore, if the function of the eidos was to account for the fact that anything is beautiful, then another e idos beyond will have to be pos�ted to account for the fact that the eidos itself has been said to be beautiful. Aristotle calls this dilemma the •;Third i:1an", because behind the man and the man-like _, eidos of mankind there must appear a third man-eidos . (Metaphysics 990 b). --- �-23- But in truth, these terrible perplexities, whose various versions and issues Socrates knows about (Parmenides 132 d, Republic 597 c), miss the point. �"-\""'r"'!>t. ' When Socrates so often chooses to employ "the beautiful" rather /' than the noun of quality "beauty", he is not simply misled by the fact that in Greek, as in English, the former phrase sounds as if it meant a beautiful thing, being an adjective turned into a substantive. When he speaks that way he means to make us face the self-same "suchness" of the eidos, to divert our desire from appearing beautiful things to a better but invisible beauty, to convey its greater desirability, to persuade us to "look to" it . The turns of speech that call the eidos verily beautiful, through and through beautiful, the beautiful itself, are philosophical rhetoric. They try to lever us into new way of being enchanted, namely not by that which appears as beautiful but by the very condition of our seeing and saying that it is beautiful. The eidos beauty is certainly not ugly, but no more is it adjectivally beautiful; it is rat�er such as to be itself the sole source of the attribute in others. The word "beautiful " does not describe this suchness, but it reaches for it . How then can beautiful things be images of beauty if it is not, as seems indeed to be impossible, by likeness in the sense of sameness of quality? It is because imaging is the deepest capability of being, the accompaniment of the pervasive otherness which haunts it, of the non-being which dogs every being. Each being confronts another as its other, and its own otherness is mirrored in the others. For the image nature of an image is not really caught when we point out similarities, say of conformation and color, between it and its original . The closest we can come to telling it is to say that an image is, in truth, not what it images, and then again it somehow is . �-24- For example, we are apt to say of a little statue of Socrates looking like a pot-bellied satyr: not. "That's Socrates", while we know that it is We mean that he is in some sense present in the clay--"represented", but not in truth. what it is; For an image is that which in its very nature is not it is an interweaving of being and non-being. (Sophist 240 c). Now among the beings, it is, the eide, each is self-same and truly what and also other than and not what the others are; is with respect to the other beings; But becoming, Socrates explains, (Republic 477a). and being; the interweaving is not a mingling. is an ru�algam of being and non-being. The appearances mingle within themselves non-being they have nei� her steady self-sameness nor fixed difference, and yet they are somehow enduring and distinct. nature not what they are. of being. its not-being They are in their very In that sense they might well be c alled images So here is a formal way of conceiving the claim that appearance images the eidos. But it must be said that it in no \vise solv�s our greatest problem: how the eidos drops down from the context of being to become entangled with non-being in a new and world-making way -- how there can be an eidos incarnate,(Phaedrus 25la). most startling to see Socrates ascribes to us an initial power i in children -- of image recognition (eikas a, we recognize at once the fact o£ in the imitation (Sldb). I Republic 51 �� ), by which a counterfeit and the original lurking In its developed form it is a sense for what I Mr. Klein once called of philosophy itself. \\ the duplicity of being", and it is the very urge �- 2 5I have said what I thi nk Plato ' s Socrates thought, this lecture to be what is, so I must now say what ! but I do not want wonde r fully , cal l e d an " academi c " exerci s e , think . But be fore I do that, let me make mention one las t time of the name of Jacob Kle i n to whom this le cture is mos t certainly dedicated in loving memory and who -- so good a teacher was he -- taught me nothing but what I could strai ghtway r ecogni ze as my own. Socrates hi m s e l f says of the e i de t hat they have become buzz-words ' ( Phaedo l O Q b); I there are even those known , a l i ttle absur dl y , frie nds of the e i d e " ' ( Sophi s t 24Ba) . drawn and fasci nated by Socrates ' them . Tha t kind of thi ng com e s from being s i ghts without havi ng ours e �ves seen �vhat i s more , Plato doe s not reveal, i ndeed conceals , dia logues the answer to the question: di d anyone eve r ? ; i n s hort : as " the in the did Socrate s himse l f view the e i de ? are there acces s i ble e i de ? The re fore our attention i s naturally turned to the Socr a te s through whom we hear of the se matters and to hi s trustworthi ne s s . And I fi nd the man who is commemorated in the Dialogue s trus tworthy beyond a l l others . I trust hi s s lyne s s and hi s s imp l i ci ty, hi s sobriety and hi s e nthusiasm, hi s playfulnes s and hi s s teadfastnes s , hi s eros and hi s dignity . Yet i t is not mai nly hi s character that I trus t , but h i s presuppositions, a nd I think that they mu s t have forme d him more than he di d .them. I make Socrate s ' presuppos iti ons out to be these : i n human l i fe \vhi ch stands out, them , an a s ce n t . that there lS that. that there are heights and there is a way to That what is de sirable i s a t a di stance , by i t s e l f ......., and i n i t s e l f and there fore s i ght· · li ke and yet i nvi s i ble, a n d that there ..___._ must be a means f or reaching i t . That this mediating power i s spe e ch, which �-26 net-orrl-y-r-a-i-ses--tJ. s-·but �Jr ., \· o-x\- � '-') \ .;, � '­ a rouses that irrita bly wonder a t common things . . which wheH-��ulated is ca lled a question . . 1\ . And f irst and last, that where ther e is a question, an answer has a lready been at work , and it is our human task to recollect it _ These presuppositions are not at all n ecessary. Our specific human work does not have to be thought of as arising from en thusiasm about the extraordinary or marvellin g at the common, I 1 does . ( Theaetetus 15 d ) . p as Socrates says philoso hy I t · can· come from a cool , sober sense tha t the ,, •\T$ ways of the world should be exposed and explained, myths dismantled and \h /· depths made plane� that not what is best but \vhat is individual, is common but what is ordinar � should preoccupy our efforts ; should not view but master , not play but work, not ask but determin e , not what that we not suppose but certi fy , not long but draw limits. I am describing that self-controlled matur ing o f philoso phy which is responsible for all that we call modernity . I do not think for a moment that we should play truant from this severe and powerful school . But I do think tha t Socrates ' suppositions are that beginning which can be forgotten but n ever superseded. �N 0 T E S 1. Let me add here that the next mo st important sourc e o f the Theory o f I deas, very difficult to use, is Aristotle, who reports its technic al e laborations and problems and looks at it, as it were , askanc e . I 2. The meaning of theoria in Greek is , s ight s e en , 3. however , that of a viewing, a contemplation, and in that sense the I de as are very muc h a 1' theory " . I am thinking o f the so-called problems o f p ar tic ip ation and separation , o f s e lf-pre dic ation, of the Third Man , and of eide tic structure. Incidentally in the Parmenides Socrate s is portrayed as the s upporter of that very version of the theory -- that the ideas are " s ep ar ate " from things -- whic h Aristotle explicitly dehies he he ld . Aristotle makes this c laim in a pu z zling passage which is t he prime source for all denials of So crate s ' theory . 4. a authors hip of the (Metaphy s ic s 9 8 7b) . A Socr atic hypothe s e s is unlike a post-Baconion hypothe s e s in not b e in g conj e cture to be verified by ob s ervational experience . It is a little c los e r t o an a s tronomic al hypothe s e s such a s Pl ato i s said by Simp liciu s to have fir s t demanded, n amely an inte lle c tual con struction, to " save the phenomena " , a mathe matic al theor y , devise d that is , to display the anomalous appe aran c e s as grounded in regu l ar itie s acc eptable to r e ason . On l� a Soc r atic hypothe s e s is in no way a p o s tu lated construc tion. 5. Nor is the tran s lation " form" quite good , becau s e it is too reminisc e nt o f the Aris tote lian distinc tion between form and matter. ' a form in a thing (Phaedo 1 0 4/d) I 6. The e idos may "work " but it is not its form. I have given this pr e s entation a questionable c oherence by ranging through the dialogues as if Plato ' s works constituted a planned-out whole . then I b e lieve that they do , • 1\ But , and that what scho lars c�nslder the development· o f Plato ' s thought from e arly t o l ate dialogue s is largely the advanc ing o f one o r �-2the other of these different beginnings and aspects. Accordingly the Phaedrus, 7. �minently pr " set out, was once, in which th i<>. beginning of philosophy is probably wrongly, thought to be Plato's earliest di alogue . Of course, 8. the visible things do not constitute the eidos, eidos their concept, that is, the definition which selects the members. I want to mention also that, although does refer to the greatest eide as gene, it is not his fixed u sage , genera, kindred groups indicating that in the highest reaC.111cs eidetic thereby nor is the Plat 9 (Sophist 254h), I shapeliness yields to associative characteristics. I For Socrates _'n1ethodos means a path of inquiry to be follow·ed 9. I 533b), not a pre-set investigatory procedure. ' 10. The word ousia did play a role analogous to modern "reality" in (a) A s we speak of "real" estate, common language. property, Scholars attribute to Socrates the distinction between two u s es the verb "to be", u se "is" what i s Greek s u sed ou sia to mean one's s ub stance . (b) occurs acts as the predicative and the existential. a copula, said of it, as in a coupling between the j not S o c rate s ' aim. "j ustice exits". of discourse and The existential "is" meaning is to be found sometimes, But di stinctions in verbal When we say that "the face i s bea u tif u l " occasion for asking what beau·ty is, I y-c, Greek pp. and when we assert that "justics exists" Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra 79 ff. usage are it is for him the want s to know in what world -- and it will not be one which ha s time 11. of In it s predicative subject "This face is beautiful". in the chopped-off sentence " ustice is", somewhere in the world: 1968) (Republic ( T he he and p la c e M.I.T. . Press, �-3I n brief , i t goes l ike this : Being is composed of two eide, a ccording to the stranger the eidos of I ch!3 nge and stillness � (Sophist 2 5 4 ) , 5ince first I of a l l everything that i s , at once; is either 1n motion or at rest , these eide never mingl e . though n ever both Being i s not either o f these a lone, or their mixture, but precisely both together . That , however, is j ust how number assemblages b ehave ; Socrates himself draws attention to this in that favorite formula : f 4 7 6,a , ! each one, b oth too . 7f (Hippias h\ayor 3 0 a , � I Phaedo 9 a, Republic I Theaetctres l 4 6 e ) . ! Each unit in a number r emains what it was, one, b ut b oth together have a new name and nat ure, is by i tself . Be ing, two ; they are together what neither the highest eidos, would then be the eidetic �wo -- not ' anything above or beyond the two erdetic units, constitute i t , b ut simply thei� � ei�� t oqeth�£· change a nd sti l l ness, Aristotle reports the interest i n the arithmetic organization of the eid e . , a lso points out that the eidetic units a r e not , wh ich Ac ademy ' s (Metaphysics 9 8 7b ) . He l ike arithmetic unit s , indif f erent, capab l e o f being added and " thrown t ogeth er" any which way ( l0 8 l a ) . They can only a ssociate into eidetic numbers uniquely , according to their nature; such eidetic counting, proper . which drives speech to and then beyond its limits, is dial ectic O. >"� J. se � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. 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Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1979-09-14 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/eea3e779d9235dca0cfc64ac799a2926.pdf 89fef65059b523582c3e667104a90ce3 PDF Text Text Against Time* Eva Brann •Given as two Friday Night Lectures at St. John's College in :\nnapolis on February 18 and 2; , 1983. THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW 65 �Contents I. Approaches to the Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 67 Time Language Time Puzzles Time in Science Temporal Sensibility The Philosophers II. Aristotle: Time as the Number of Motion 73 1. Time and its Measures 2. The Now 3. Memory III. Augustine: Time as the "Distention" of the Soul . . . . . . . . . . . . Husserl: The Phenomenology of Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 80 1. Retention 2. The Diagram of Time IV. Kant: Time as Inner Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 82 Inner Sense Understanding Imagination Time and Space Temporal Thinking V. Heidegger: Temporality as the Meaning of Existence 86 1. Ecstatic Temporality 2. Difficulties VI. Time and Imagination 89 1. The Non-Being of Time 2. Time as Noticed Passage 3. The Phases of Time a. b. c. d. The Present The Past The Future The Past as Paramount Phase Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 I. II. III. IV. Main Texts Supplementary Texts, Studies, Commentaries Collections Time in Science Notes 1-37 ................................................ 101 �Against Time That time has no being and no power, that the- past is most to be cherished by those who have least taste for bygones, that our own temporality is the work of the imagination-these are the reflections that I want to articulate and confirm in the following inquiry, for I believe and hope to show that opinions of this sort are necessary for thinking of ourselves as free and for filling our lives with substance. I. APPROACHES TO THE INQUIRY* Given this purpose, the first question is where to begin an inquiry whose object appears to be both ubiquitous and nowhere. There seem to be so many likely approaches to the topic of time: through attention to our all-pervading talk of time in ordinary life and through the neat enigmas which even the lightest musing upon time generates, through the science of nature which claims to determine its concept, and through the observations of poets, novelists, and psychologists concerning our temporal sensibilities. All these efforts provide necessary grist to the mill of reflection, but Time itself does not seem to be revealed in or through them, and the very profusion of speculation bears witness to its elusiveness. There remains the way through philosophy, where time is treated in conjunction with the question of being-and particularly of human being. Here the nature of time becomes at last a direct theme. I shall, therefore, after a brief review of the other approaches, devote the middle section of this study to an interpretation of the five philosophers who seem to me to have given the most coherent and pregnant answers to the question What is Time?, and conclude with a section of my own thoughts on, or rather against, time. 1. TIME LANGUAGE The first and obvious way to get to the nature of time might seem to be through examining the mentions of time in ordinary language, through attending to what everyday speech says of time, for example: My watch tells the time, and I can give you the time. Do you have the time to give • ..\II references are to books listed in the Bibliography. Eva Brann recently published Pau1doxes of Education in a Republic.(University of Chicago Press, 1979). THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW me some time? I am wasting my time, while having the time of my life. Time is money, and the times are bad. At this point in time he has no comment, but time will tell. Time heals.and at the same time, time destroys. The time is coming; the time is now; the time is past We live in time and through times, are on time, race against time, kill time, donate time, are true to the end of time, and imagine once upon a time. _ · Now the very profusion of usages, although it is an index of the great frequency of our references to time 1, seems to me to preclude the discovery of a central meaning without our falling into the error of decreeing which of these usages is canonically ordinary. Certainly, how time occurs in daily speech is suggestive: Augustine, for instance, begins his inquiry by asking how it is that we can speak of time as long or short (XI 15), and Heidegger refers to the observation that we speak of time as passing away and not as coming into being (Logik, par. 20). It turns out, however, that both authors, far from being guided by what is said, conclude that ordinary speech obscures the nature of time. · It seems, all in all, that from listening to the use of the term time one, but only one, crucial conclusion can be reached: Time is always spoken of metaphorically or figuratively. It may be treated as a spatial dimension with length and points, or as a possession to have and to give, or in a personification, as an agent of multifarious potency. Its power is sometimes benign but far more often hurtful, as in the insistently grim time-figures of the Shakespearean Sonnets: devouring Time, confounding Time, decaying Time, swift-footed Time, sluttish Time, Time's injurious hand, Time's fell hand (19, 55, 63-65). Most time references are well-worn and mean little; they are time-honored phrases, once perhaps heartfelt, for disposing of the mysteries of change. When we talk of time as healing we consign to a hackneyed phrase the miraculous restorative power of nature and the blessed oblivion of which memory is capable. Poets, on the other hand, tend to give time injurious epithets, because, I think, they speak more often and more accurately of the high, intense, and vulnerable configurations of life than we do in ordinary speech. · The word "time" is not, of course, remotely all that language says of time.·All our sentences requfre tensed verbs, particularly "is," "was," and "'shall be." But can their use tell us their meaning? Or must we not rather know what is meant by present, past, and future, the three phases of time, to understand the use of aspects and tenses? 67 �2. TIME PUZZLES A second start might be made from the puzzles about time which can be so copiously and near-spontaneously generated. For example, why does time seem to have a forward arrow and a leading edge? 2 Does it progress in a continuous flux or in atomic jerks? Is it within or outside of us, in the soul or in the world? What is the "now" in which aloQe things are present and which reason reduces to a point between past and future? And above all, how is it possible that anything be in that past which is no longer, or in the future which is not yet? There are many more such problems, even excluding those concerning temporal continuity, which belong primarily to mathematics. Such conundrums are easily disposed of by the positivist, who obviates them by pointing out that in ordinary life, before the onset of a philosophical seizure, no one is at all inconvenienced by them, so why concoct enigmas? 3 To be more than idle puzzles they must arise in the context of a well-grounded inquiry into time itself. They are not its beginning but its by-products. 3. TIME IN SCIENCE In view of the fact that time is the basic independent variable of all the physics accessible to laymen, it would seem reasonable to turn first to the science of nature, that is, to physics, for help in the search for the nature of time. Reflective physicists and philosophers of physics have, accordingly, propounded powerful theories of time. At the very beginning of the science of dynamics stands the most extreme theory of the reality of time, Newton's self-subsisting, equably flowing, absolute world time-and its equally extreme opponent, Leibniz's relative time, a mere order of phenomenal succession. 4 Newton's theory of an absolute temporal flux may well be integral to the theological purposes of the Principia, but it does not seem to be operational within its physics. It is a philosophical rather than a physical requirement. In contrast, the plain statement by a great physicist of the most minimal notion of time conceivable is fairly recent, namely Einstein's wholly operational or instrumental definition of local time as "the position of the small hand of my watch" (p. 39; an instrumental definition is one in which the term is defined through the instrument and the operation which measures its magnitude). Although it may seem strange at first that after two and a half millenia of arduous exploration of the question "What is time?" the outcome should be that time is what the clock tells, one soon sees that this definition is the cleanest and clearest reflection on time that a physicist can give. For in physics time must be positive, that is to say, it should be no more than an observable quantity the method of whose measurement is defined. There is then an enormous and intellectually most 68 acute literature about the philosophical implications o. time in nature, or more accurately, in the science of nature. (For all references see Sec. IV of the Bibliography.) Three branches of physics seem to be especially amenable to philosophical interpretation: Thermodynamics seems to have implications about the forward motion, the socalled "arrow" of time and its irreversibility. Relativity theory appears to have exploded the common sense notion of universal time or the simultaneity of the present moment throughout space. Quantum theory throws in doubt the continuity of time. But intriguing as such theories are, because they are bent on interpreting with ingenuity and vigour the unignorable discoveries of physics, they help only incidentally and negatively with the question: \\!hat is time? For in these theories time is invariably understood as a privileged 9r process or motion, either a macro-motion_ an atomic vibration; the temporality of these timing-motions is itself left unexplained-as indeed it should be since such an explanation would no longer be amenable to verification by observation. The implication is that time really is an aspect of motion to be got at only in telling time. But time-telling is commonly taken to be a three-cornered affair, involving an observable event, a timing device, and an observer who can distinguish and relate the two and communicate his findings. And though a physical theory may include the observer with respect to his relative motion or his unavoidable interference with the observation, it is regarded as the part of psychology to deal with the distinguishing and rt lating itself, that is, with the internal observer. In sum, in physics time itself is the name of a fundamental motion, while the telling of time is not ultimately explicable in physical terms. Furthermore the philosophical interpretation of physical time is by no means univocal, any more than ate those of philosophy in the wider sense, with which the philosophy of physics does, after all, eventually merge. Therefore, through this approach a clarification of the concepts of time implicit in various physical theories is the most that can be expected. Let me give very brief versions of three accessible cases in point. _ I. Eddington introduced the phrase "Time's Arrow" to sum up the observations of thermodynamics. Let there be a partitioned container, isolated from outside influences, and let one part be filled with air, the other empty. Now remove the partition, and the molecules of air in their individual random motions will over time spre~d through the whole vessel (while the probability that they will ever again simultaneously collect at one end is so vanishingly small as to make the case practically impossible). The aggregate of molecules as a whole will then have less organization and will be said to show increasing "disorder," by which is meant here a certain kind of homogeneity. Its measure is called "entropy." The large-scale phenomenal effects of this statistical law of nature are quite familiar in lifr SUMMER 1983 �Things Jeft to their own devices tend to fall into sprawling disorder. Now Eddington interprets this irreversible process of nature as an intrinsic forward tendency of time itself. If he is right, physics is indeed capable of revealing the nature of time. There are, however, many and much debated difficulties, for example, whether the universe is an isolated system, whether a probable event and a process subject to fluctuations can be imputed to the steady underlying action of time, whether to show that time is "anisotropic," that is, directed, is necessarily to show that it advances, whether the physical law applies as well to life. But the most telling difficulty for present purposes is this: An observer can assert that time is reversible, for example, that if the time coordinate were imagined as reversed the planets would exactly retrace their orbits, only if .h e also imagines his own time as maintaining its direction so that he can compare the two successive motions. Would not the same hold for an observer of irreversible processes, so that he would have to say not that physical time itself was advancing, but that "disorder" was irreversibly increasing with time, namely his psychological observer's time the question of whose advance is no longer a matter for physics? There is a counterargument, to be sure, namely that human memory itself, the condition of time-telling, is an entropic process since it has an entropic physical basis. But that leaves us with the question, certainly no longer in the realm of physics, whether the human observer of nature can logically himself be subject to its law (Eddington, Ch. IV; Gruenbaum, Chps. 8, 9; Schlegel, pp. 55 ff.; Whitrow, Ch. IV 3, 4). 2. Einstein begins his 1905 paper, which sets forth the special theory of relativity, by defining what the common sense of mankind had so far taken as a natural given, namely what it means to say that it is the same time at places very far apart. His need to do so follows immediately from his definition of local time as what the dock tells, and that, in turn, embodies a deep reflection on the nature of physical knowledge. For nothing is to be counted as scientific theory which does not ultimately refer to possible sensory events. So to tell what time it is at a fixed place somewhere far off we must have a dock and an observer there and sensible signalling between him and us. Now even the fastest signal, light, takes time to go there and to be reflected back; we all know that the light from the star we now see is not the light being emitted by the star now. That means that a procedure for synchronizing both clocks must be established so that we here can say what time it is there now. Einstein defines such a procedure. The time for the light signal to come and go is taken to be equal by definition. We signal our time !o the remote observer who sets his clock by it just as he reflects the signal. Upon receiving it we set our clock to a time exactly half way between our sending and receiving the signal. The two clocks are thus said to be synchronized, and when an event occurs at the 11-IE ST. JOHNS REVIEW · place far off it will be said to occur at the same time or simultaneously, with our clock-time for the: arrival of its signal. Further, clocks which are synchronized with a third are said to be synchronized with each other: Therefore simultaneity is not universal "nowness" but merely what it is defined to be by the synchronizing process. Next Einstein lays down two fundamental axioms. The first of these is the principle of relativity itself, which says that the laws of physics governing a system are not af· fected if the whole is put into uniform rectilinear motion. The second is that the speed of light is absolute, namely the same whether the light is emitted from a stationary or a moving source. Within a page Einstein has shown that two clocks which are affixed to the ends of a moving rod and which have been separately synchronized with a clock in the stationary system, and so with each other from the point of view of the stationary observer, will not appear to meet the criteria of synchronicity from the point of view of the moving observers. What the stationary observer sees as simultaneous the moving observers do not. That means that what one observer takes to be the same moment comes apart for another observer into different moments. There is no absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity. The now is not universal. This result is usually interpreted as confuting the com· mon sense notion qf a universal contemporaneity, the feeling we have in ordinary circumstances that our now is everyone's now. But I wonder if that follows. The theory means by "the same time here and there" an operation definable in terms of observations, namely, the relating of clocks by a signal which takes time to travel back and forth. The speed of the signal, namely the speed of light, is the crucial element in the formula which shows that events simultaneous in one system will not be so in another relatively moving one. If that signalling speed were to be in· creased beyond all bounds, an impossibility in physical theory to be sure, simultaneity would be reinstated.5 But are we in our thinking and imagining bound by the physicist's requirements? Can we not in our thoughtswhich are as swift as the ships of Homer's Phaeacians, namely instantaneous-extend ourselves over all space at once? If our thinking were in principle incapable of coming under the requirements of science we might well imag· ine any number of friendly extra-terrestria1s, moving and stationary, all thinking of us and of each other simultaneously, now. A concord of consciousnesses is not inconceivable. I cannot think that the deep-seated human sense of a universal now can be confuted by a definition of time and a canon of knowledge not its own (Einstein, I 1-2; Reichenbach, par. 19; Dingle, pp. 460 ff.). 3. In Plato's Sophist the debate between the proponents of being and bec9ming is called the Battle of Gods and Giants. This battle rages between interpreters of relativity theory and furnishes my last example of the difficulty of extracting a clear philosophical interpretation from physical theory. The argument arises over the interpretation of 69 �the Minkowslci diagram, which is a geometric representa· tion of a world in which the space coordinates are interde· pendent with the time coordinates. A number of authors claim that the relativization of simultaneity and the in· volvement or covariance of space and time so spoil the objectivity of the temporal order, that is, the unambiguous and universal separation of past and future, that one can no longer speak of becoming in the world. The world is a four-dimensional continuum of three spatial and one "spa· tializing" time coordinate, spatializing in the sense that in this geometric diagram the motion of any substantial point is represented by a stationary curve. This world is already "written." It is and does not become, though it appears to us successively, like a prepared cartoon strip we read by moving our eyes. Thus the only change is that in the per· ceiving consciousness of the observer, and if there is real time it is only his psychological time. The defenders of becoming argue, on the other hand, that the perturbations of time pointed to by proponents of being do not occur for causally related events, whose suc· cession is preserved in all frames of reference; only the suc· cession of causally unrelated and of simultaneous events is relativized. So nothing, they claim, stands in the way of positing real, that is, causally conditioned, becoming. Aside from self.contradictory use of the term "being" to mean static appearance and the too-narrow use of the term becoming for causally related succession, the diffi· culty in drawing philosophical conclusions about time and the world, even supposing the physicists came to terms, seems to me to be that the interpretation really concerns only the representation of the theory, that is, a model of its world, not the world itself (Frazer, pp. 415 ff.; Whitrow, pp. 227-228; Gruenbaum, Basic Issues, 195-228). It seems that while the study of physical theory is indis· pensable to an understanding of process and motion, it can be no more than suggestive with respect to time. But that really implies that time properly speaking must be· long not to nature but to the observer. 4. TEMPORAL SENSIBILl1Y . Sometimes it is the matter itself which arouses wonder and perplexity, while sometimes the world's preoccupa· tion with it excites curiosity and concern. In the case of time the two motives for starting a study seem to me to coincide. There is certainly plenty of external evidence for our world's pervasive fascination with time. In the decades close to us there is no getting away from observations to the effect that the rate of change of the human environ· ment has increased stupendously, and this increase is usually expressed as a speeding up of time itself. "Innovation" is the incantatory term which people feel they must utter to keep time from outrunning them. Complementing this 70 general sense of the urgency of our situation there is al~~ _ flood of scientific work on time; for example, intriguing bi· elogical experiments on the_ temporal rhythms of animals and jet-setters, psychological studies of time perception and estimation, sociological accounts of time management in different cultures (e.g., Zerubavel). But this overwrought sense of time's power did not arise only after the First World War. It had been in the offing, one might say, for tw9 millenia, but it first broke out acutely almost two centuries ago, in Hegel's writings. It in· fected common opinion with the notion that the times are informed by a supraindividual force whose laws human science can divine and with whose ends human beings must, on pain of merciless punishment, cooperate. There was the widespread sense that this movement of time was coming to a culmination, either in an earthly paradise or in a man-made apocalypse. There was a passionate elevation of personal time in its vitality over space in its dead exter· nality (Bergson, Note 27, 3). There were discoveries of the interdependence of space and time (Einstein, Alexander, Note 6). And, as was to be expected, an irritated reaction against this "time-mind" soon followed (Lewis, Note 7). But most weightily, there was the claim that the philo· sophical situation of our time forces us to view the ground of human being itself as temporal (Heidegger, Logik p. 267). . Although cataloguing the elements and sources of what everyone is saying is a dry and dubious business, I car · °' help speculating, or rather summarizing the speculatio .. _ ) others, on how time, having been dethroned from its mythical majesty by Aristotle, returned as the demon force of modernity. Four root references seem to me discernible, four causes to which the temporal preoccupation oflate moder· nity is referrable. First and fundamentally this preoccupation is the secu· Jar residue of Christianity. Christian time has a beginning, an end, and an internal epoch. These are the Creation, the Final Judgment, and the birth of God as man. Our other· wise apostate world retains a secularized sense of impend·. ing doom, of a man-made catastrophe (which long ante· cedes the concrete fear of nuclear annihilation), and, alternately, of coming salvation through progress toward a divinization of mankind or a return to an original crea· turely equality in a terrestrial paradise. A second cause is the simple fact that we come late in history, not in the sense in which Greek philosophers pos· ited innumerably repeated cycles of the discovery and loss of art and wisdom (Note 13), but because we have behind us a minutely documented civiliution, classical antiquity, uniquely brilliant and irrevocably bygone, to which we have a peculiar relation. For modernity begins with a seJf. conscious, systematic transformation of the classical cate· gories of thought and conduct. Hence the shape of mod· em preoccupations is not quite intelligible without ·e reference to their ancient origins. At the same tim SUMMER 1983 �seem to have every reason for forgetting those origins as being superseded. For we have more power over nature and are, in the modem West, better governed than were our intellectual ancestors. Such forgetfulness, however, in· duces a vague feeling of discontinuity and leaves us with the contradiction of a chronic sense that our situation is utterly new. Third is the temporal effect that goes with the sheer massiveness of modernity, its human numbers, informa· lion, organizations, wars, crimes, and instruments of plea· sure. The motion of magnitudes so far beyond human per· spective appears to us to be attributable to an agency less than divine and yet suprahuman; we call it time and con· sider its effects inevitable. the Finally, and most to my purpose, is _ special modem propensity for a kind of psychological introspection which, in contrast to philosophical self-knowledge, consists of a prolonged pursuit of intimate affective subtleties. It seems to me to stem from two sources coincidentally: from that secularization of the anxious Christian interest in the sal· vation of one's soul which motivates Augustine's Confes· sions, and from that sophisticated reaction against the early modern view that human subjectivity is ultimately rational which is called romanticism and whose founding work is Rousseau's Confessions (Note 7). Naturally such introspection-it is really an ingenious kind of musing-is especially rich in observations about the sense of time and ready to luxuriate in the aroma of temporality. Those of us who were born in the first third of this century participate in these affects by birthright. For then a sense of decadence and fin de siecle, climaxed by the First World War which realized all the worst forebod· ings and indeed closed an era in civilization, had worked the temporal sensibility into an acute state, which was the psychological complement of the new interest in the phys· ical time. Three novelistic masterworks of the early century which, although demandingly voluminous, found avid readers, are at once a sign and a source of this sensibility: The first is Proust's novel, literally entitled Toward a Search for Lost Times. It is an account of the ennui· infected author's quest for the catalyst of his art, which he finds in the last part of the novel, Time Retrieved; it comes in the form of an instantaneous, time-annihilating recov· ery of certain paradisical childhood moments. The second is Mann's Magic Mountain. It is a book described by its au· thor as intended to induce in the reader that same "subli· mation of time," a warping of the sense of time in accor· dance with the intensity of life, experienced by its solidly bourgeois yet physically tainted young hero. The book contains several phenomenological expositions of time, in· eluding a whole "Digression on the Time Sense." Finally there is Joyce's Ulysses, an Irish odyssey, whose hero is a Jew, an ordinary man and an outsider, who enacts within one Dublin day the adventurous Mediterranean voyage performed over a decade by his Homeric original. Joyce THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW learnedly interweaves mythical, historical, personal time; the book is a recollection of European civilization. • • • Let me describe some of these experiences of temporal· ity-a mere personal sample of temporal affections indica· tive of our time-under the interlaced rubrics of pacing, routine, and skewing. l. By "pacing" I mean the phenomenon that our inter· · nal time seems to undergo drastic shifts in tempo. We modems are so acutely subject to these, it seems to me, because the rhythms of modem life are not long-breathed natural periods, punctuated by public ritual, but tightly scheduled stretches interrupted by private vacations. The characteristically modem art forms, like the novel and symphonic music, seem tQ me peculiarly expressive of our habituation to sharp changes in pace. We modems are a). most congenitally expert in the central temporal experi· ence of the Magic Mountain-the periods of apathy, sur· feit, distraction, and boredom which are long to live through but vanishingly brief in retrospect, "wastes" of time, poor in feature and welded in memory; they alter· nate with times of intense eventfulness, accomplished at breakneck speed, while depositing memories so close· packed and vivid, that today seems aeons from yesterday. A similar experience is that haunting sense of its expanded or contracted availability which makes time seem like money to be prodigally spent in one phase and anxiously hoarded in another, always with a guilty sense that one's lifetime is being mismanaged. Again there is that pecu· liarly modem drivenness which prevents us from ever "having" time-and its complementary lethargy when the possession of no amount of "free" time avails: our time devils either ride or bind us. There are, similarly, those oC· casions of wild anticipation when the present moment, overburdened with the concentrated desire that time should pass, stalls in a bad imitation of the "standing now" of eternity, and will not give way to the next second. Then again, though, time suddenly takes off and shimmies away, as in periods of nervous distraction. Perhaps the latter af· fections are not peculiar to our time, but here is one that surely is, the strangest and most characteristic of modem time experiences: our watchful subjection to that ubiqui· tous little face on the wrist which, -through all internal tempi, equably shows the time. It is somehow, I suspect, the cause of our loss of temporal equanimity. _ 2. Next, "routine": Routine is that organization of our time economy which causes periods of time to be end· lessly reflected as in facing mirrors, so that our memory can scarcely discern whether it contains an infinity of times or just one moment. Almost everyone who works in the modem mode, according to a nonseasonal repeating schedule, has some sense of the enigma of the time· constrained round. How are such calendar days additive? What memorable difference could be powerful enough to 71 �now! But is being in the same place at the same time _.., ) distinguish each of the ten-thousand times of hastening up certain a remedy for remoteness? Can it not equally be its these particular brownstone stairs at the sound of the bell from every other? The memory is curiously cavalier about cause? Cannot the absent soul be more vividly a presence the routines of life. It abstracts one event and remembers than the present body? One writer on time illustrates the that schema, modified by the mere knowledge of its multicommon claim, that the feature which most distinguishes present from past is vividness, by· referring to his colleague tudinous recurrence, its mere temporal heaping. The duX who is, he asserts, more acutely there than Plato; I wonties of each day, when done in the present, at the front of der, or rather I doubt it. On the other hand, there does time, as it were, are vivid and absorbing enough, but when seem to be a special bond of awareness-if only of disilluwe tum around to face the past an enigma stares back: There has certainly been living but has there been a life, sioned awareness-that links not only those who live in that complete shape which the Greeks call bios, as distinct neighbourly contiguity but also those who coexist in spa· tially distant contemporaneity. from mere vital process, zoe? Can a temporally bureaucratized life become a whole unless the routine is no more To extend the speculation from spatial to temporal relothan the thorough·bass of some atemporal melody? Again, cation: If it is sometimes, though perhaps rarely, possible the complement of clock-bound business is the vacation, a to go back to former places and presences, and to reenter vacancy of time, "free" time, and this_ whole temporal contheir continuity, why should it be an interdicted purfiguration of engaged and disengaged periods is subject to pose-as the common opinion of our age con'siders it-to a curious inversion of background and foreground, as in go back to former times by internal recovery and an external reconstruction? Such a collective return, or rather re· certain optical illusions, such that work time, in which life's energy is, after all, primarily invested, feels like the trieval, such a going back which means a bringing back, mere backdrop to the periods of "off' time. No matter has, after all, been attempted, and always these renaishow contentedly we are enmeshed in the cocoon of daily sance times are also the newest of times. Similarly, why should not individual retrievals of our private lost times be absorption, let there be a.break in busyness, and the inertia which is strong in the scheduled spirit exerts itself to resist a possibility? That is, after all, Proust's project-just as the not only all duties but all actions, and the released soul Renaissance revives antiquity in grand vignettes, so Proust drinks deep draughts of diversion. relives his childhood in paradisical tableaus. Could it be, 3. "Skewing" is my term for the overpowering sense indeed, that such retrievals of time, public or private, a1e which befalls us moderns especially in historical settings, the modem replacements for the ancient periodic ri ) thie sense that space and time can be at cross purposes. I enactments of mythical moments-these being the ·~ · have been in Athens, at a place where my path crossed spective modes of bringing the then and there into the that of Socrates, not conjecturally but precisely, since arhere and now and of undoing the skewing of time and place? chaeology, that quintessentially modem discipline, has fixed the exact location, for instance, of the court where I have only described some time affections which seem he was tried. Nor was I. on the spot in plane coordinates to .me particularly acute in modern life. But such diverse only, for again archaeology, which brings back the past by musings while expressing the mood and providing the madigging down, had laid bare the level of his time. I was, terial for the inquiry into time have no end and lead to no resolutions. then, correctly located in all three spatial dimensions. I was in the right place but at the wrong time. That melancholic sense of the irreparable loss of what we have never 5. THE PlllLOSOPHERS had which is induced by written histories of bygone splendours-for histories induce memories of the never-experiWhat is left, in the end, for someone anxious to clarify enced-that temporal nostalgia, is many times intensified and test certain iiitimations about time, is the way through. when no space intervenes to compound the temporal disthe philosophers. It is, after all, their proper and specific tance, when here and now are directly at odds. It is, after business to ask boldly and set out coherently what Time all, to bask in such melancholy that we visit "historic itself is. The five writers I have chosen are those who seem spots." · to me to present the most deep-reaching, well-grounded, The apprehension of this skewing of space and time inand mutually responsive thematic treatment of time. vites much rumination. Take, for instance, the common Aristotle defines time as the number of motion. His is inverse experience of the case above: being contemporathe first thematic treatment in the West, unsurpassibly neous, even precisely simultaneous, with another chercomprehensive and therefore the natural reference for all subsequent expositions. ished human being, but apart in space. How does the case of spatial distance differ from temporal separation? Appar· Augustine, in his effort to comprehend the temporal ently by the fact that the latter seems to be remediable; by creature's relation to his eternal God and Creator, discov. ers time as the "distension" or worldly dimension of the an investing of available time in transversing space I can come again into the other's presence-incidentally itself soul. His ardent and original inquiry first establishes t~-o:i­ porality as at the root of human existence. ) the strangest business, this going into and out of another's 72 SUMMER 1983 �On this Augustinian discovery Husserl bases a phenomenology, namely a description, as presuppositionless as possible, of the internal appearances of time, that is, of time-consciousness. · Kant finds time to be the "inner sense," the sense in which the self becomes an appearance to itself; here time, as the form of human sensibility, is of the soul without belonging to the ultimate subject, the self. Heidegger understands the very ground of human existence as temporality, inverting Kant's relation of the self to time and driving the notion of time to its most extreme distance from Aristotle. There are, of course, other writers on time who are of great stature. Of these my chief omission is Hegel, whose writings, (except for the paragraphs on time in nature, _ Note 27, 2) are just not capable of a dissevered thematic _ treatment of time. For his system is the account of the spirit in its necessary appearances which is Time.8 Plotinus (20), Leibniz and Newton (4), Locke (24), Nietzsche (13). Bergson (27, 3) and Whitehead (16 and 32) are briefly treated in the Notes indicated. As for the absence of Plato, it is not really an omission because there is no extended treatment of time in the Dialogues except in myths (See Notes 12 and 13) and, significantly, none of these are told by Socrates himself-whose images are reierved for the atemporal. Finally, I should say that it is not so much the gist of the theories here presented that is instructive for my purpose but the exposition of their motives and principles, the tracing of their explicit and implicit consequences, and the formulation of those oppositions and analogies which mark them as belonging to one tradition. Using the texts in that way, I shal1 in the last section (VI) try to formulate my suspicions against time. II. ARISTOTLE: TIME AS THE NUMBER OF MOTION Time, Chronos, is endowed among the _Creeks with vividly various shapes and widely diverse, even opposite, powers; he is monster, god, and heaven itself, all-seeing, healing, and all-destroying. 9 Sophocles, for example, says once that "omnipotent time" confounds and· destroys all, and then again he calls him "a gentle god" (Oed. Col. 609, Electra 179).·Time's attributes are evidently fluid, but he is always a potent being. In the fourth book of the Physics, the first extensive thematic treatment of time, Aristotle suddenly and drastically reduces it to the lowest possible status. This epoch-making triumph of thinking over myth-making has not prevailed. · Indeed, the dethroned god has been resurrected as God himself by Aristotle's modern counterpart, Hegel. So much the more, it seems to me, should the overthrow accomplished by Aristotle be recalled. 1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW 1. TIME AND ITS MEASURES* Aristotle begins with the suspicion that time is "either wholly not, or scarcely and obscurely" (217 b--34). For many perplexities arise if being is ascribed to time, chief of which is that some of it is gone and is no longer, some of it is to come and is not yet, while the now is no part of time at all. He resolves the difficulty-like this: Time is a mere affection or aspect (pathos, hexis, 223 a 19) of motion: "Time is the number of motion with respect to before and after" (220 a 25). The Loeb translators comment ·that Aristotle "enters into no profound metaphysical speculation as to its essential nature" (I, 378). But the profundity of his speculation lies precisely in his showing that time has no essential nature; an interpretation of his treatment ought to show what the deep-lying reasons for this determined trivialization of time are. Not only is time a mere aspect of motion for Aristotleit is not even a necessary aspect, since not all motions are temporal. Two kinds of motion at least are prior to time. They are the motions at the two limits of the natural world, so to speak, and they are timeless because they are themselves the source and principle of time. The first is the ultimate, primary rotational motion of the heavens, the second is the motion of the soul apprehending time. I shall say more of these later, but I must mention right now that to identify these motions as pretemporal is by no means to say that they cannot be timed. We can clock the heavens and we can time our cogitations-but we have clocks only because of the regular continuous motions of the heavens, and we can tell time only because of the counting motion of our soul. Time is the measure of motion, and therefore motion can in tum measure time (220 b 24). Up to the last book the Physics is about inner-worldly motions and these alone are the motions affected .with time, the number of motion according to before and after. Where there is no physical body, there is no time (On the Heavens 279 a 16). Motion (kinesis) includes every kind of change (metabole) of qu~ntity, quality, place, and the process of becoming (218 b 21, though not becoming as simple coming into being, Met. 1067 b 32): How can motion possess number, that is, come in ordered units? Motion has a quantitative aspect; it is a magnitude; we may say that it has extension. Motion derives its sequential extended character of before-and-after from this aspect which is merely a property in the motion although separable in thought (219 a 22; see Loeb Ip. 384, n.b.). (Strictly speaking, as we shall see, the motion derives its magnitudinal property from the thing moved, the mobile.) In other a •Tue section on Aristotle was worked out during year of learning with and from Anderson Weekes, then a senior at St. John's College, Annapolis, who during that time developed a coherent and illuminating account of Aristotle's theory of cognition. 73 �words, the category of continuous quantity is predicated of motion. 10 To say that time moves is meaningless; rather motion is temporal, and from motion time derives all its properties·· and problems. As motion is continuous, so is time, and all the problems continuity offers to reason, time does likewise. First among these is its relation to the now, which is analogous to that of a point to its line. !\fore of that later. A second difficulty is that since motion is continuous, so is time: Whence, then, come the unit measures, the periods, through which time can become the number of motions? Time, therefore, pertains to motion insofar as motion is a continuous quality or quantity, which always has a before-and-after. The primary before-and-after, according to Aristotle, is that of place (219 a 16), and therefore locomotion is in all ways the primary motion: It is the condition of all other motions, and it is the motion of a completed being, and it is temporally prior to other motions since it initiates them (VIII, 7). But it would be false to conclude that motion is continuous because it is spatial, as if it were the covering of extended space by an indifferent point-mobile. That would be an importation of the modem physical view that a motion is sufficiently understood through its "quantity,'' which is called momentum and defined as the measure of the mass multiplied by the velocity of the moving body. Aristotle rejects the possibility of a motion indifferent to the nature of the mobile and its proper places. I I Indeed, as was said, motion itself is defined in terms of the mobile, as its state. He says clearly that motion is continuous because the thing moved is continuous and not because that in which it is moved is so (Coming to Be 337 a 27). He does not, of course, mean the continuity of the present extent of the thing, for example, its length, but rather that continuity which a mobile has by reason of possessing a matter which remains continuous through change, the substrate or subject of the motion (Met. 1042 a 32, 1044 b 7). The magnitude of motion, and derivatively of time, is an affection of a divisible subject which is not the momentary present movable thing itself but "what was moved" (Met. 1020 a 32), which must mean the mobile in its_progressive changes of place. In this continuing-through-its-phases the mobile displays that extension which is reflected in the motion and which, when counted, is called temporal durations. In brief: what is countable in motion is its continuously phased development, its "before-and-after." It should be noted here that, accurately speaking, the magnitudinalaffections are so-called "proper affections"; they belong to the mobile not essentially but yet necessar· ily, just as a human being is not essentially either a male or a female and yet is necessarily one of these. Temporal duration is therefore not of the essence of the mobile. From this fact follows the crucial distinction between Aristotelian and modem physics: To Aristotle the science that leaves out motion and magnitude is closer to essences, more intelligible, and therefore more accurate than that 74 which includes-them (Met. 1078 a 12); therefore physi~ a subordinate science, and not Science simply, as it is with us. Locomotion, then, is prior in all ways to the other motions. Of locomotions, rotary motion alone is continuous in all senses: It has no beginning and it does not end through having completed its process, nor does it abruptly double back on itself; it can be regular, smooth, uninterrupted, and eternal (Phys. VIII 8-9). The first heavenly sphere is the uniquely perfect embodiment of such rotary motion. It comes as close to being at rest as a mobile can be, since every point in a circular motion is equally a beginning, middle, and end, so that in a certain sense it has no before-and-after (265 b l~ It is in motion, but not toward an end; its movement is rather a steady state which imitates in its regularity the pure activity of completely fulfilled being, Cod (Met. XII 7). This is the motion which is the cause of all other inner-worldly motions, and so, indirectly, of time (Phys. VIII 9). IZ Beyond the heavens there is no time (On the Heavens 279 a 15). The continual character of time, its endlessness and its uninterruptedness, is therefore derived from that of the ultimate motion. Because of the heavenly motion, time is one and the same throughout the world (Phys. 218 b 14). The discontinuous motions of the terrestrial world, which come to an end with the reaching of their goal, are all fitted into continuous cosmic time. And since everything within the world is mobile and subject to timing, time i~ · everything (223 a 17). As the heavens are the source of temporal continualness, so they provide the measure of time. The cycle of rotation is the best unit of time, because it is easiest to count (223 b 19}-a continuous quantity must have a unit measure in order to be countable. The unit measures of time in the terrestrial world of be· coming are provided by the ·sun's oblique motion along the ecliptic. Just as the movement of the whole heaven is responsible for the continuity of motion and time, so the sun, the "generator,'' by its approaches and withdrawals causes each life to have its span: "Every life and time is measured by a period, though not the same for all .... For some the measure is a year, for some a greater and for others lesser period" (On Coming to Be 336 b 13 ff.). Hence the period or cycle is the natural time unit (Phys. 223 b 28). God has made this somewhat irregular but uninterrupted cycle of becoming perpetual so that it may come as near as possible to eternal being (336 b 35); becoming approaches being in a kind of Eternal Retum.13 To tell continuous time over such annual cycles it would seem necessary that -each cycle should differ somewhat from the next, as, because of the accidents of matter, it certainly will be. Time, then, belongs, strictly speaking, only to the sublunar world of change, of becoming and of linearly advanc· ing motion in which before and after are distinguishable. Such motion, defined in Physics III (201 a 11), 14 is to be ) understood through Aristotle's two fundamental tf a SUMMER 1983 �potentiality or capability for being (df11amis) and actuality, activity, or being-at-work (energeia; also entelecheia, fulfill· ment). Motion, then, is the fulfillment of a capability; it is the actual exercise of the potentiality that the mobtle has for being what it was meant to be, for achieving its full form (eidos). Each motion is a unity, governed by its .o wn end and ceasing when that end has been fulfilled. Its time is just the measured course of this activity of approaching full being. Since a terrestrial mobile, unlike the heavens (On the Heavens I, 3), has a corruptible material substrate and is subject to accidents, it cannot hold its perfected state. If it is an animal it will instead have generated a new animal, different in number but the same with itself in form. And so as a member of the species it will participate in eternity, in spite of the temporary life of each genera· lion (On the Soul 415 b 4). Such generating is the terrestrial complement to the work of the generating sun: "Man is begotten by man and by the sun" (Phys. 194 b 13). The father as progenitor comes before the child in time, but because he contributes the form toward which the child is moving he is prior not only in time but also in being. That toward which as an end the motion is, the actual· ity, is prior in dignity (Met. 1050 a). This priority is time· less. When a moving thing has come to the state of beingat-its-own-end or fulfillment it straightaway cuts out of the continuum of time and becomes, with respect to its being, timeless. What is actual, fully in being, is present (hypcir· chon, 1048 a 32), in a state imaginable as a kind of motion· less vibrancy. One must say of it that it has been and is at once (1048 b 24); it is not temporally determinable or articulable. But just as for pure eternal objects "to be while time is is not the same as to be in time" (Phys. 221 a 19), so worldly things which are composites of form and material can have temporal duration in their actuality. For their having come into their own form does not preclude lheir informed material from being in time. Thus the men of Troy cannot be said to be either before or ~fter us with respect to their form, and yet the Trojan War in which they served certainly occurred long before our day (Prob le· mata 916 a 18 ff.).15 It is just because every motion is one and terminates in its own end that time is powerless as a cause. For this end is always discontinuous with the motion that leads up to it. Aristotle separates the concluding moment as no longer belonging to the motion but to its completion and fulfillment (Phys. 263 b 15). So while a motion and its time are yet in process, none of the moments of this continuous span is determinate or complete enough to be the suffi· cient cause of the next moment. When mere time inter· venes between a cause and its end, that is, when the motion is not a completed unity, the end is merely contingent (Post. An. II 12). Thus, while a cause may be in time, it can never act through mere time: That means that there is no mechanical causation, which is a causation where each momentary state fully determines the next. Furthermore, Aristotle notes that the mere ]apse of time is never responTIIE ST. JOHNS REVIEW sible for a thing being made new or beautiful. If anything, we say that time destroys, but only because motion itself is, from one perspective, "ebtatic" (a word Heidegger will raise to central importance~ that is to say, it is a destabilization and a "standing forth" from the status quo (Phys. 221 bl; 222 b 17). Time is but the number of motion-the objective number, the countable parts themselves (219 b 9~ Motion is potentially numerable, but it has an actual number or be· comes temporal only when it is actually counted. It is the soul that counts motion. How? By noting change, of course. When we have no awareness of change, as during sleep, we say that rio time has passed, for we fit ·the earlier directly onto the later now (218 b 26). (Because of the continuity of motion the opposite case, that there should be no change to_ perceive, is apparently impossible.) So time depends on distinguishing nows. 2. THE NOW If time is thought of on the analogy of a continuous directed line whose parts have an intrinsic order (though of position rather than of before-and-after, Cat. 5 a 30), the now corresponds to a Eudidean point, namely a point which is not a constituent element of a line but merely lies upon it (Elements, Def. 4). For the now, Aristotle is at pains to show, is not a part of time but its very "continuity" (220 a 19, 222 a 10), at once the pivotal link of before· and-after and the possibility of temporal division. This mathematized now reproduces whatever perplexities a mathematical point raises, and so, since time depends on motion and motion on the continuous magnitude of the mobile (219 a 12), time shares all the problems of geometric continuity. For example, the nows are the limits of seg· men ts of time without belonging to time and are therefore not attainable by dividing time, just as the point is a part· less element which indefinite divisions of a line approach but do not reach. Further, the now is always the same in function but never in "position" (219 b 16), just as any ·point which produces a cut in the line is indistinguishable from another except by location; similarly, as a point divides a line everywhere potentialJy, but actually only when a cut is made, so the now does not divide time actually until a temporal c, t is made. µ How is that temporal cut made? As time accompanies motion, so the now hovers, as it were, over the moving thing (219 b 24 ff.) It is by the now alighting on an object that before-and-after in motion are first distinguished, for "the now is most apprehensible." We conclude that the now must be the presentness of the perception 16 of a moving thing; and that the cut in time is niade by the act of perceptual attention to a moving object: "Perception is necessarily of a this and a where and a now" (Post. An. 87 b 30). Perception is "an innate distinguishing power" (99 b 36) which is actualized by the external and the particular 75 �(On the Soul 417 b 21 ), and the now-cut in time is actualized with it. But, on the other hand, how can there be perception of the point-now? If perception itself takes time, then how can it cut time except in time, which means, not at a now. But if, on the other hand, perception as the activity of the faculty of sensation (On the Soul II 5,12) is, like all actuality, essentially not in time (though it can be accompanied by time), then what does it have to do with the now which makes the temporal cut? What Aristotle says of the activity of pleasure exemplifies this problem: "It is a kind of whole in the now" (Nie. Eth. 1174 b 9; a 14). 17 Is this psychic now which is capable of atemporal substantial fulness formally identical with the now of physical time? Similarly for perception: What is perceived in the soul's now is the atemporal actuality of the object-the .soul perceives its form through the sensing of its shape. How then can the soul simultaneously perceive the partless point-now of the mobile's temporal extension? Aristotle does not say. He does indeed try to make provision for the perception of lengths of time (see below, 3). But even then it will not be clear how the soul cuts time, and this is a crucial difficulty since "time is what is determined by the now" (Phys. 219 a 30). It is this difficulty which later philosophers solve by taking time into the soul so that the now becomes identical with its noting. When the soul has pronounced "now" twice (however it does so), namely before and after a motion-stretch, we say that a certain time has passed (219 a 28). Since time is that by which motion has number, it must be possible to count the stretch between the termini, which requires reference to a standard measure. We have, as was shown, such universal measures given us by the heavenly spheres: days by the revolution of the starry sphere, years and seasons by the sun, months by the moon. With these natural passages and their more minute subdivisions we compare the stretch of time and, counting the bounding nows-for the now corresponds to the unit in number (221 a 16)-we count the substretches which they mark off. There is no time without soul, for time arises where countable motion is actually counted, and only a soul, by means of the perceptive intellect (nous) can count (223 a 23 ff.). What, then, is counting? We must cast loose completely from latter-day Kantian notion that counting is the articulation of an inner stream of consciousness, an internal time-flux. The soul, for Aristotle, has no original psychic time because it has no one continuous underlying flow or motion; nor does thought run through or touch on a continuum as it counts: "The motion of reason is not a continuum and in an underlying matter, as is that of a moving thing" (On Invisible Lines 969 a 32). When the soul thinks time it does not actually run through the temporal continuum but takes its sections atomically, as it thinks its successive thoughts discretely, like numbers(On the Soul 430 b 7, 407 a 9). . The soul, locomotive, affective, or rational, cannot well be said to be in physical motion (408 a 34 ff.). 18 But in some 76 other manner, never quite defined, it must be spoken ot as moving. For example, thinking is motion for "without continuity and time it is impossible for us to think even those things which are not in time" (On Memory 450 a 8). Coming to know is a motion for it requires experience, repeated and remembered perceptions through which the universal is suddenly established (Post. An. 100 a 3 ff.). The attaining of a good condition takes time, for the human intellect, being composite, needs a continuous approach to perfection (Met. 1075 a 9). So there are psychic motions, but they are discontinuous, in fact in two ways: Motion is not always present and each motion proceeds discretely. I think it can be shown that the human soul does have an everpresentness, namely its first actuality, analogous to the un.intermittent thought of the pure intellect, but it is not the continuity of an ever-advancing, ever-incomplete homogeneous flux. The continuity of time is entirely external and physical. Its source is the heavenly local motion with which the intermittent inner motion of the soul has only this in common-that it, too, must be in a strict sense achronic; for how, without infinite regress, will the soul count its own counting?l9 3. MEMORY Without the now, then, there is no time, and no t;.,,e without a now (219 b 34), but as we have seen, then. .s not a part of time. Indeed its mode of being is quite ditrerent from that of time, which is to say that it comes under a different category. Time belongs to the category of "how great" or quantity; the now belongs to the category of "when" (Cat. 2 a 2, 11 b 12) along with "yesterday" and "tomorrow." Except for an isolated chapter on the usage of "when" words, nothing is said of this latter category in the Physics nor is it elucidated in the Categories. This most significant and strange disjunction of time and the now is implied by Aristotle's problematic theory of the role duration plays in perception and perceptible being: The perceptive intellect comes into contact with the continuously moving physical world always at a here and a now; the here may stay put, but the now passes on along with the motion, and from that, derivatively, arises the perception of time. But the now has another relation to time besides generating its perception: Each present now forms an impenetrable limit between all the nows that have passed and all the nows that are to come (234 a 1). Or perhaps since there are, strictly speaking, no past and future nows, one should say that the now separates time before from time after. Therefore there is a past-or rather, we humans have a past (as do certain animals, On Mem. 450 a 15). The inanimate physical world has no past or future, although it has a before-and-after, which simply means that it is in a prior or a posterior phase of its approach to being. Nor has r ~ a _ past, for having no sensory perception he has no nL _ 1 How then is it possible for us to have a past, that is to SUMMER 198l �say, passed nows? Aristotle deals with this most humanly soul, resulting from the activity of perception, by which we have images (On the Soul 429 a 3). No human being, as interesting of temporal problems, the triune character of the category "when," in the brilliant little essay On Mema composite of matter and form, can think without images; ory and Recollection. We know even beforehand that we for example, one cannot do geometry without at least internal diagrams. For the image is an accommodation of must have a capacity for retaining nows drained of present material objects to the thinking soul, a holding of their perception. Without such an ability we could not tell time, since we could not interpret what we had counted up. Nor form and their continuity without their matter; the human could we learn, since we could accumulate no experience. intellect needs this form to go to work (On Mem. 450 b 31 For it is many memories which make one experience, and - ff.). memory is of past perception (Post. An. 100 a 4). Memory and imagination, then, both belong to the About the three "whens" Aristotle says succinctly: "Of same part of the soul, that "primary organ" of perception what is present, there is perception, of what is to come, which receives deliverances incidental and common to all expectation, of what has been, memory" (On Mem. 449 b the senses, namely magnitude, motion, and, consequently, time (450 a 8 ff., On the Soul 425 a 14 ff.). Memory is the 28). The present (pciron, being-at-hand) is the perceptionaffection of this power when time has gone by (On Mem. filled now. It is immediate: Of the now in the now there . 449 b 26), a kind of perception perpetuated past its cause. can be no memory (449 b 26). Enough has been said of it. All things imaginable can be remembered (450 a 24); indeed it is hard to think what sense-derived image would Heidegger will subject it to a fundamental critique. It is the imagination which makes the two non-present not be, strictly speaking, a memory, since all images arise phases of time possible. The future arises when the soul, from perception as soon as the actual sensing in the sense organ has ceased. in present deliberation about what is to be, projects images (On the Soul 431 b 8). Aristotle observes that we appear to Only what is no longer present can be remembered. But face into the future since the before of the past is more how is that possible? Aristotle never tells hows imagining works, except by analogy. He likens a memory-image to a remote from the now than the after, while the before of the future is closer (Phys. 223 a 9). But beyond that he seal impression, a simile which expresses the crux of his treats the future mostly from the logical point of view, askdifficulty: Imaging compounds the mystery of perception: ing what it might mean to speak now the truth about what how can a material somatic organ receive the physical obwill be. For if futural assertions are always either true or ject extendedly and yet immaterially (On the Soul 424 a 18 false, just like assertions about past and present, then conff., 427 b 29 ff.)-and then hold it through time ready for recovery? tingency and chance are excluded-the future is determinate. But that cannot be, since both human choice and the But he does tell what it means to be an image. The memvagaries of matter work to make future events contingent. ory recovers the perceptual trace or memory-image in the So while it is certainly necessary that tomorrow there must soul. However it is not the image we remember but the be a seafight or not, it is impossible to say which of these is thing itself, and therein lies a problem. Aristotle resolves it the case (On lnterp. 9). Therefore, in order to judge of fu. by pointing out that· that is just what it means to be an ture propositions, one must know which things will be by image: to be all in one an affection present in the soul and necessity (either because they are part of a necessary cycle a likeness of an object, just as a picture is before us both as of becoming, Post. An. 95 b 38 ff., or because they are ala physical object and as a likeness of a person. Aristotle is ways or never), and what things are within human choice. here prefiguring one of Husserl's central conceptions, that Then one can say either "it will be" or "it is expected" (to of "intentionality," which is the defining characteristic of esti, to mellon, Coming to Be 337 b 3 ff.), knowing that · consciousness as always consciousness of something. these sentences really refer to two different futures-the We have a past, then, by virture of memory, and we foreknown and the merely anticipated. have memory by virtue of our threefold receptive power. But Aristotle never intimates that there is anything in These are its facets: 1. perception (aisthesis), which is rethe future as future, some innovation or fulfillment to be sponsible for the actual present sensory event; 2. imaginacredited to mere futurity. What will be necessarily in the tion (phantasia), which is the capability of being affected by the continuities of place and motion abstracted from future is what has already always been (Note 13). Even human affairs run· in cyCles: "It is likely that art and philosotheir matter; and 3. memory (mneme), which permits rephy have often been discovered as far as possible and pertention of images and their revival together with an awareished again" (l<.Jet. 1074 b 11). So the future is of no great ness of the time elapsed since perception (452 b 23). Arisinterest to him. It will be otherwise with Augustine to totle supplies a not quite intelligible explanation of how whom prophecy, as the foreknowledge of the apparently such elapsed times are gauged (452 b 7 ff.): Just as one esticontingent, is a serious matter, and with Heidegger for mates a great external object not by actually reaching for it · whom the future will become the spring of time itself. but by representing it in a proportionate figure in the field It is the past which Aristotle treats most significantly. of the imagination, so one does not actually go back a long There is a past because there is memory and memory is a time to estimate the age of a memory-image, but one repmode of the imagination. There is a kind of motion in the resents it proportionately in a speeded-up motion-for exTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW 77 �ample, by running through a decade in a second. What is hard to see is how such a scaling of time can given more than a very impressionistic comparative judgement of its length, since temporal extent cannot be panoramically surveyed in the imagination-for it does not appear-so as to give some sense of a scaling factor. As I have said, the chief difficulty in Aristotle's account of time is his insistence that duration itself can be perceived and imaged. Aristotle, nonetheless, summarizes: "Only those animate beings who perceive time remember, and by that part by which they perceive time" (449 b 29). This might seem to be a circular outcome: We have a past, because we have memory and memory because we have a sense of passed time. Yet with all its difficulties it sets the terms for future debate-the past can be only for animate beings who have an imagination with a temporal dimension, that is, memory. What is entirely missing in Aristotle's founding account is any sense that our triple temporality is humanly significant. The reason for this omission is that not time but timeless actuality is life in the full sense. This view is plainly expressed in this passage from the Nichomachean Ethics, which may serve as an epigraph: · Pleasant is the activity of the present, the hope of what is to come, the memory of what has been. But what is truly pleasant and lovable in these is their being in the way of actuality. (IX 1168 a 13] * * * The vulnerable places in this magnificently detailed and dovetailed theory of time which can be culled from Aristotle's various works are patent. They occur, I have argued, at its outer and its inner termini: the continuous celestial revolution which is the cause of all motion and the perceptual now, which is the point of tangency of natural motion and the soul. Happily the central thesis, the reduction of time to an affection of motion, is not, I think, exclusively bound into Aristotle's terms. (See Sec. YI 2.) Before going on to Augustine, who fully makes good Aristotle's lack of temporal pathos, let me at least refer to the intervening grand psycho-cosmological theory of the Neoplatonist Plotinus. (It is briefly sketched in No~e 20.). III. AUGUSTINE: TIME AS THE "DISTENTION" OF THE SOUL Time and the soul's temporality is transfigured in acreated world. Augustine bums with curiosity, expressed in ardent language, to know how the temporal human creature can reach beyond creation to the creator so as to find God's will "before" the world. He begins by throwing out an impetuous barrage of time quandaries and reflecti ') (Confessions, XI 14-19). What is time? How can there ht d ·past when what is gone is now no longer and what will be is not yet? And yet, did the present not pass, it would be eternity. Again, how can I say that is, whose cause of being is that it shall be? And how can I measure times when those gone are no longer and those to come are not yet available? If I do it, it must be while it is passing. But then what of the "three times" -how can I preserve them concurrently? Augustine thus begins, in some faith of getting satisfaction, with just those questions which Aristotle cites as perplexities arising from the error of giving time substantial being. In the course of his passionate inquiry some truths do come clear to Augustine. He thinks he can affirm boldly that if nothing were passing there would be no past time; if nothing were coming, no future; if nothing were, no present. So there must be a motion of the world; God's creation has passage. Further he sees that he always faces time: It does not come up from behind and out of the past, and he cannot, like Aristotle, go along with it, but it comes toward him from the future. As Aristotle, in Greek, calls the past "that which has become" (gen6menon), so Augustine calls it what has gone by (praeteritum). For there is a real future, not merely a necessitating cycliCal return, but events-to-be, contingent to human apprehension, yet revealed to the prophets through God's omniscience. A real future is the human consequence of God's foreknowledge. However he approaches the perplexity, Augustine j s sure of this-and here begin his wonderful resolutior ) that past, present, and future, wherever they are to ~i found, are only as present (20). There are not, properly speaking, three times (Aristotle's "whens"} called past, present, and future. Rather there is "a present of what is past, a present of what is present, and a present of the future." Such three are indeed in our soul (anima) and elsewhere I do not see them. The present of what has gone by is memory, the present of what is present, eyewitness (contuitus), the present of what is future, expectation. [20) Augustine is not describing an Aristotelian faculty for sensing what is before us, for reviving images with their accrued times and for projecting them in planning. He is speaking of time itself, and he is placing it within the human soul. The problem of measuring this psychic time leads him on (21-22). His mind "is set afire" by it, by the burning perplexity of the dispersal of time into its three phaseshow to lay them together for comparison, in what space, in what dimension to do the measuring. For time is not the measure of a motion but what is itself to be measured: While the sun stood still, time yet went on for Joshua. · "New," he exclaims, .. is the discovery of these things!" The discovery is this: "In you, my mind (animus), do I mea- . sure my times" (27). Times can be measured in the mind ) 78 SUMMER 1983 �because they are co-present there, and hence comparable. Thus is resolved the great puzzle of primary time measurement: ml1ike a length of space whose rigid measure can be transported intact and made congruent with another length, times and their measures flow away and are incapable of superimposition. (One must keep in mind that clocks measure and compare times only derivatively, through motion.): But in the soul times do coexist. The soul's collection of all times into its present proceeds, I infer, as follows. Worldly motion passes, so to speak, under the attentively apprehending soul. The soul perceives each moment as it goes past and absorbs it into its own temporal dimension, its memory. Thus the now remains fixed in its context but sinks ever further down as new moments of motion are perceived. At the same time that the soul remembers, and at the same juncture of the world's motion and the soul's present, it also expects. The difference between remembering and expecting is only this, that whereas present moments drop into memory, fu. ture moments drop, as it were, out of the dimension of expectation into the world. The future, therefore, is not a long time, for it is not, but the long future time is merely a long expectation of the future. Nor is the time past a long time, for it is not; but a long past time is merely a long memory of past time. [28] Augustine has referred to this co-temporaneity of the times as being in the mind. But now he goes further. Time is the dimension of the soul. Here is how Augustine putS it: " ... It seems to me that time is nothing else but a stretching out in length," [distentio is his word] "but of what I know not, and I marvel if it be not of the very mind" (26). Note that here time is not in the mind but it is the mind, or rather the dimension of the mind: The soul is the "space of time," that is to say it is drawn out into a temporal longitude along which memories, perception, and expectations are copresently arrayed. This "distention" can therefore be visualized as a kind of vertical elongation, an ordinate in a diagram. The horizontal axis represents the world's motion coming from the future towards the soul's "eyewitness." That moment is the origin, the perceptual present, where the soul's "distention" intersects, or sits astride, the world's motion and turns its sensation-events into memory images. These con· tinually drop down, preserving the order of entry, into the memory segment of the soul's distention, falling deeper with every passing moment. At the same juncture expectation or foreknowledge is drawn down from the upper segment to meet the real moment, to become realized in a perceptual present. The whole ordinate, the expectation and memory segment joined in the point of perception, constitutes the soul's triune present. The diagram expresses three significant elements of Augustine's temporality. First, since time is the soul's ver· tical dimension, the world's horizontal axis is timeless. It is Expectation (Future) Past (memory) indeed implicit in Augustine's understanding that the external creation has events but no temporal succession; it is the world as God sees it, all at once. It is the "standing now" (11) which becomes fluid only to the finite creature: Whatever God doth, it shall be forever .... That which hath been is now, and what is to be hath already been, and God requireth what is to be. [Ecclesiastes iii H-15] Second is the real futurity of the projections and previsions of the expectation segment; prophesies, as Godgiven visions of what is to be, meet their own realizations in the world, when the moment of their juncture with it arrives. Finally, the diagram points to the plenitude of memory for Augustine. He has indeed already devoted a most beautiful book (X) to its power, its "ample and infinite inward· ness (penetrale)," its "fields and spacious palaces," whence he can make present to himself by their images things he has seen and learned, including himself as he was, and which he traverses to come to God (8, 9, 17, 25). Augustine's passionate interest in temporality has its reason in his faith. He wants to discover the condition under which a temporally diS"persed being can approa<:h union with God. Having collected time from what might be called its horizontal extension into the vertical dimension representing the cotemporaneity of the phases of time, he has achieved a human present which is analogous to God's "standing now." But he prays further that his soul's stretching apart, its "distention"-William Watt's vivid translation of 1631 says "distraction" (Loeb}-should be gathered in, so that he might be not stretched apart in time (distentus} but stretched forth (extentus), not. in distraction (securidum distentionem) but in concentration (se.. cundum intentionem) toward the delights of the eternal father "which are neither to come nor to pass away" (29). This "extention" out of and beyond the world is represented by the third dimension in the diagram. 79 1liE ST. JOHNS REVIEW ' �Temporality, then, is the wordly dimension of the created soul, namely its capacity for taking in and containing the world, that is, was, and will be. And so time is also the soul's "distraction." HUS.SERL: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF TIME Husserl's abstruse, intricate, and subtle description of the sense of time, The Phenomenology of Internal TimeConsciousness, begins with the praise of Augustine as the unsurpassed master of the problem of time. Indeed, Augustine's "distention" furnishes Husserl with his guiding schema, and Husserl may be-regarded as Augustine's expositor, with this difference: Husserl's analysis is intended to require no act of faith or philosophical thesis at all since he aims to write a phenomenology, a presuppositionless description of the phenomena of temporality and of temporal appearances. He therefore requires a rigorous "abstention" from all substantializing assumptions. He suppresses what might be called ontological greed, not in order to gaze about aesthetically, but to develop a penetrating analytic insight into the deep constituting structures of phenomena seen as phenomena, namely as they appear to consciousness. To put time before oneself strictly as a phenomenon hence requires the exclusion of objective or world time insofar as its existence is posited, and a transfer of attention to the fundamental phenomenon of immanent time, the flow of consciousness from now to now. This flow is the "temporally constitutive flux," the "originary" stream, in which temporal phenomena and, remarkably, the consciousness of time itself are simultaneously constituted (par. 39). In the end, to be sure, this flux is interpreted as consciousne!;s itself, as absolute subjectivity or self (36). But that is a leap beyond simple phenomenology, forced by the irrepressible human need for more than merely descriptive accounts. The early section, entitled "The Analysis of TimeConsciousness," is, however, rigorously phenomenological, and from it I shall sketch some findings: apt new coinages, illuminating discriminations, and, as the centerpiece, a diagrammatic synthesis of the elements found in the · analysis. 1. RETENTION Although each now is a source of fresh perception and the spring of the living present, temporally enduring objects are not perceived in a pointillistic mode, but in longer presences. This is a fact of temporal phenomena seen as phenomena. They have enduring_presence, even though the flux of time has an instantaneous leading edge. (To overcome the perplexity associated with this observation, 80 which Aristotle had left unresolved, namely how anythinb can be perceived in the partless point-now, the so-called . "specious present," an unintelligible notion of a finite, enduring now, had been introduced,21 but Husserl admits no such constructs.) How is an appearance, say of a melody, which develops over time as a unified object, to be understood? The term "intentionality" was mentioned in reference to Aristotle's understanding of the memory-image as an image of a thing. Husserl develops intentionality into an indispensable element in the description of consciousness. Consciousness is always also consciousness of something: it is always intentional. "Truly ... it pertains to the essence of the intuition of time that in every point of its du· ration ... it is consciousness of what has just been and not mere consciousness of the now-point of the objective thing ... " (12). Every now-consciousness is also a yetconsciousness, like a comet's tail of a previous perception. ·Thus besides the veritable perception, the content present in consciousness in its own right, there is also a consciousness of the time gone by-not a faded perception but something quite different: a past tone present as a past tone. This mode is distinct from ordinary memory, and Husserl calls it retention, or primary memory. It is the consciousness in the present of what has just been, discovered through the analysis of the phenomenal fact that an experience has duration within the immediately superseded now. Every present impressional consciousness "sha· ) off' into an everfresh retentional consciousness of ti •., temporal object's immediate past. But when the spring of tonal impressions gives out, the melody is over and sinks back to a vanishing point, passing into ordinary, or secondary, memory. Secondary memory is distinguished from primary, or retentive, memory by these features: Perception has the distinguishing character of "self-givenness" which means that it stands there, uncalled-for, in its own right. So too is "originary" time-consciousness self-given, for one cannot inhibit time's running-off. What we can do is to re-produce or re-present sections of temporal experience. Husserl employs the term "representification" (Vergegenwaertigung), "making present again" (Appendix II). Retention, then, yields the immediate past which is present; memory yields the remoter past which must be made present again. Husserl makes numerous other acute observations about memory phenomena (See Note 22). Memory is a mode which posits, that is to say, requires, a previous perception. The intentional reaching for the past is fulfilled in the presentification of a perception which is no longer self-given. The phenomenon of memory as a whole is precisely that of a present givenness of the past as past-but it is no longer a question for phenomenology how the past can be. Thus the present is characterized by perception, the past by an "intention" or a reaching for a previous percPl"\tion, and the future by a "protention," that is, an exp( ~1 SUMMER 1983 �tion of fulfillment in a perception to come. Protention is therefore inverted memory: Perception succeeds proten· tion but precedes memory (24-28). 2. THE DIAGRAM OF TIME Husserl's famous "Diagram of Time" (10) displays the phenomena of these three phases of time in their conjunction with the phenomenon of the "running off' or coursing of time in a coordinate schema which had been suggested by William James (Ch. XVII, end). One might say that it accomplishes the junction of Aristotle's two distinct categories of "when" and of "how much," or duration. Husserl is careful to state that the diagram is not a repre- sentation of objects as they appear in time, that is, of temporal appearances, but rather of the phenomenon of temporality itself. Here is an elaborated composite version of Husserl's schemata: +f' ' •' ' I \. I .I \ \ I '' I _:._~L---~~~ ~ - f ' ~,- - - - - - - - I '' \ '' \ \ I I \~ P" I I I The horizontal axis represents the originary flux of now points in consciousness. E is the now. PE is the span of the temporal flux of one temporally perceived object, for example, a melody, and it is therefore one retentional episode whose beginning was at P. 0 is some now before the initial now of the melody and belongs to the time of an event now past. Fis a future now. The oblique lines PP', 00' represent the "shading off' or "sinking away" into memory of the consciousness of P THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW and 0 as the perception-filled now has advanced to E. The line FF' represents a protention to be fulfilled in a coming perception at F. The vertical axis F'EP'O' stands for Augustine's "distention" of the mind, namely present consciousness encompassing perception, memories, and expectation. lrito it flow the oblique parallel memory and protention lines which fix past events and future expectations into the .memory and expectation order of the present. The present therefore contains a continuous and unperturbable time-order; the latter feature is schematically guaranteed by the parallelism of the oblique Jines. EP' is the present retentional memory of the temporctl event-object which occurred over PE. The triangle PEP' js the whole melodic episode in its "double continuity": the horizontal line represents the continuous flux of ever new perceptual nows, while the broadening triangular surface composed of parallel paths which fall out, as it were, from the flux, stands for the continuous memory lines of past nows feed· ing into the present memory. . The horizontal through P marks a variable threshold between retention and secondary memory, below which the melody would have outlasted the retentiona] span of that consciousness and would cease to be a unified temporal object. When F is now, the melody will have to be deliberately or spontaneously recaUed, being by then a secondary memory at P. . Husserl's diagram differs from tlie schema I have drawn for Augustine in that the horizontal axis of the former stands for the internal temporal flux rather than for the external motion of the world. Husserl regards that inner flux as the fundamental temporal phenomenon; an external time-consciousness would be for him a contradiction in terms, because to be conscious of a phenomenon temporally is just to constitute the temporal flux in consciousness. Therefore Husserl uses one time coordinate to represent the simultaneous presence of all the phases of time in consciousness and another to stand for the advancing temporal flux whose front is the now-consciousness. But whether this flux is really a primary phenomenon is just the question. (See Sec. VI 1.) • • • Aristotle's understanding of time as the number of motion counted by the soul follows from his theory of motion as actualization. Augustine's view of time as the dimensionality of the soul follows from his desire to relate the three phases of human temporality to the eternity of the . Creator. Kant's theory of time will serve to ground the new science of dynamics, particularly its causal relations. Insofar as the temporal relations of nature are contributed by a faculty of the soul, its formative ·sensibility, Kant is Augustine's heir, but it wiU be more interesting to see his theory in terms of an antithesis to Aristotle. 81 �IV. KANT: TIME AS INNER SENSE I. INNER SENSE The first and all-determining discovery Kant presents in the Critique of Pure Reason is a truly revolutionary understanding of what it means to sense ("Transcendental Aesthetic"). Recall that Aristotle had said that time is sensed, or better, perceived, in the primary sensory organ, because whatever is sensible also has duration. Now Kant claims that time is not sensed but is the form of sense. That means that the sensibility is not only a receptive but also a formative faculty; and the first form it gives sensation is temporal form. What is behind this claim? The immediate purpose of the Critique is the grounding of the knowledge of nature, above all of the new science of motion, Newtonian physics. "Grounding" means setting out the conditions of possibility of such a science, which guarantee its necessity and its universality-which make it certain. Aristotelian physics was the science of individual motions by which an indeterminate material, which is only potentially, is formed into an independent, fully actual, natural substance. Newtonian science, in stark contrast, studies the motion of a system of bodies homogeneously constitu.ted of massy matter and moving inertially through space unless deflected by interactions with other masses, interactions which are governed by universal mathematical laws of force. For the former, time was the counting of the actualizing motion, for the latter it is the independent variable in the expression of natural laws. Kant assumes that knowledge of this system of nature requires the cooperation of two faculties. One is active, law-giving, spontaneous (which means that it originates with the human subject itself); it is the thinking function, and the faculty is called the understanding. The other is a receptive power which must be affected by something given to it from outside; it is the sensibility. The latter is needed because human thinking is for Kant purely formal, that is to say, it has a merely rule-s.u pplying function. Therefore it is incapable of conceiving its own objects of thought without being supplied with matter; for it to try to do so would be like a hand grasping its own grasp-less than an empty form. Therefore, thinking requires that a material be given to it, and the faculty in which such givens are received as representations-since Kant con· siders everything before consciousness at all a representa· tion-is precisely the sensibility (B 33). Kant also calls this receptive faculty the intuition, and he applies that same term to the original pure content which he ascribes to it and into which sensory affection is received. Now all physical experience in fact occurs in terms of space and time, and these are understood to be the pri· mary dimensions of physics. Therefore, if it is to be a cer· tain science, there must be neither absolute, independent, 82 external substances in space nor adventitious develop· ments through time. For both of these could be known only a~er the fact of experience, and that means they could not be known necessarily or universally. The only knowledge which can be certain is that which is condi· tioned from the beginning through the observer himselfwhich is, in Kant's term, a priori. Therefore, not only the conceptual side of physics but also the invariable components of its sensory aspect, namely space and time, must proceed from the knower. Accordingly Kant assigns to him an original formative re· ceptivity-on the face of it a contradiction in terms, but an unavoidable one. This actively receptive capacity is Janus· . faced. One face is turned outward and shapes sense material into spatial configurations; the other looks inward and forms what it receives into temporal sequences. The sen~i· bility, then, is dual; it has an inner and an outer sense. Kant presents the outer sense first, significantly, as it turns out. This sense receives in the mode of outsideness, in two meanings of the word. First it receives those sensations which are alien and adventitious, which come to us as they will from outside ourselves. But then it also re· ceives them in the mode of outsideness, of extemality, namely as spatially extensive. The outer sense is therefore the reason why external sensations always assume spatial form. Furthermore, because the spatial form has inherent formative characteristics, namely those of Euclidean ~ometry, spatial appearances are certain to be amenabk ) geometric treatment. Hence the outer sense guarantees the applicability of mathematics to science. The inner sense, on the other hand, faces toward the innermost parts, the very subject or referrent of all representations, the Self. The inner sense receives the self as if it too were a given, namely as it presents -itself to its own intuition. Within the ·inner sense the subject itself becomes, by definition, an appearance, for whatever the sen· sibility receives and forms is called an appearance. The inner sense is called time. It is not that time is an inner sense, but that the inner sense, and the self appearing within it, are temporal in character. In so presenting inner sense Kant is therefore not saying what time is but only why it is the inevitable form every appearance takes. Nevertheless, a new understanding of the nature of time will come out of Kant's discovery, one aspect of which has already emerged: Contrary to Aristotle, for whom time is not an affection of motion, Kant will argue that motion itself is possible only under the form of inner sense. Indeed it is only under the form of temporality that motion is even conceivable for Kant, since it is only the succession of time which fluidifies the law of contradiction so that opposite predicates can, at different times, belong to the same ob· · ject-that being the much reduced post-Aristotelian con· cept of motion (B 48). But why is the inner sense given the name of time? And what does it mean to say that the self appears withir' . ~. ) The paradoxical fact that the self, the ultimate subjec SUMMER 1983 �representations, is somehow also an appearance to itself is taken as given, and, Kant says, is equally a mystery in all theories (B 68, 152). But to learn how it happens we go to that part of the Critique which deals with thinking ("Tran· scendental Deduction"). 2. UNDERSTANDING All conceiving is steadfastly accompanied- by an "I think," a kind of pervasive prefix to all thinking, which is, however, purely formal in that it adds nothing to what I think. Furthermore, the prefix tells me at most that I am but never what I am (B 157). Kant calls this consciousness "apperception," a term that had . previously meant self. consciousness. He, however, indicates by the term not self-knowing but only the inmost subject or self of a rational being, the ultimate knower. The apperception is "transendental," which in Kantian terminology means that it is a faculty, not an object. So Kant does not mean that the self is self-conscious in the sense of having itself as an object; it is not, like Aristotle's pure intellect, thought thinking itself. Nor is the self my self; indeed its self-hood is not in the ordinary sense personal. The self might as well be an "it" (B 404), for it is simply the hidden subject underlying all thinking func· tions. (Heidegger will criticize the lack of "my-ownness" in the Kantian self.) Moreover, the transcendental subject cannot be known to itself, because its strictly formal, that is, rule-giving thinking functions cannot, by their very character, become objects of thought to themselves (A 402). Collectively these conceiving functions (the word "function" is taken statically, as in mathematics) are called the understanding, which is therefore the self as it is diversified into certain definite enumerable functions or "categories." Each of these accomplishes certain syntheses or unifications proper to itself. Besides these operations the categories are nothing and mean nothing. What do they synthesize? Sensible givenness is assumed to be in its very nature manifold, spread out, various. Accordingly, the sensibility must be capable of receiving such a manifold. In the case of the outer sense there must be ready a transcendental space for its reception. This sense therefore contains a "pure manifold," the pure intuition mentioned above, which is the form-giving content affected by sensationthe pure space of geometry itself. The nature of this pure content of inner sense will be addressed presently. It is this pure content of the sensibility that is unified, or determined, or structured by the understanding in definite ways, as many ways as there are concept-categories. What the understanding determines first is the content closest to it, so to speak, namely that of the inner sense. That is how the thinking functions first obtain their required object, although a pure, not a sensory one. rnE ST. JOHNS REVIEW Objects represented in the sensibility and unified by the understanding are called phenomena or appearances (A -429 ff.). Kant claims that when the pure content of inner sense is determined by thinking, the resulting appearance is that of the apperceiving subject itself. Kant takes the word appearance seriously-only that which is not itself on the scene can have appearances. So the self, which cannot know itself in itself, appears in the inner sense, and since every appearance is an appearance for the subject, the self appears to itself. The primary example of self-appearance is the act of attention, in which thinking, having determined the inner sense according to laws of connection contained in the categories, appears as a succession of moments (B 155)-our ordinary awareness of the now-succession. The transcendental self, then, the inaccessible rational source of thinking, can determine another part of the soul, and though it cannotJmow itself, it can at least represent itself to itself as an appearance. Note; however, that the situation is peculiar in that the self can hardly be said to affect the sensibility as sensory material could affect it: it cannot materially fill but only determine or unify the inner sense. The motive for establishing an inner sense is, on the face of it, to ground the temporal or causal dimension of physics, but its deeper role is that of providing for self. appearance. The reason why this sense, or rather its content, is identified with time now emerges. This content is the steady, unceasing, underlying flow which we always come to in self-inspection: "Time does not pass away but in it passes the existence of what is changeable." Time it· self is unchangeable and permanent (B 183), for it is the original flux-content of the inner sense itself; it is this flux· content which our thinking determines and structures. The thought-determined inner sense is consciousness, , but it is emphatically not self-consciousness in the sense of self-knowledge, since the self has not affected the inner ' self so as to produce the kind of real knowledge Kant calls experience. For experience requires more than that the subject should work on itself: it requires a material object (where "material" refers not to physical matter but to a real sensory content). 3. IMAGINATION The configurations to which thinking determines the inner sense are the work of that most central power, "an art hidden in the depth of the human soul" (B 181), the imagination. For ~ristotle, the activity of the imagination, identical with that of the primary sensorium, is not hidden in the depth at all; it is, in fact, on the interface of soul and nature and has a physical base. Kant rightly considers his discovery of the original contribution of the transcendental imagination quite new (A 120 n.). For him thinking and sensing are too heterogeneous to come.! together without 83 �some intermediate agency; it is the imagination which is the meeting ground of the two. It performs what Kant calls a "figurative" synthesis (B 154), which produces schemata through which thinking can determine sense and accomplish the mystery of empty, meaningless thought interpenetrating with pure inner flux. The schemata are essentially rules for sensualizing concepts or, equally, conceptualizing sense content. The imagination makes time thinkable or, as we have seen, conscious. But much more importantly, it does the inverse: it makes thought temporal. Here are just two examples of the schemata which are the work of the imagination. (Oddly, and significantly, this work is always presented as picture or figure-making, although it is supposed to be primarily temporal.) l. The inner flux, the pure intuition of time, is, as was said, assumed to be an even, primary flow. (Recalling that Kant's project is the grounding of Newtonian physics we can recognize in this flux the internalization of Newton's equably flowing absolute world time.) Kant calls it the pure picture of quantity, applicable to all objects in general. The first schema or conceptualization of this continuous forward flow of inner quantity is number. Number is the imaginative scheme of a countable succession of units, that is, of articulated, measured internal duration. In cotmting, the understanding is continually unifying the undifferentiatedly fluid manifold of pure Time, and generating pure, conscious, temporal succession, or the pure sense of passing: counting is not so different from the pulsing of mere consciousness itself. (The spatial analogue to the difference between Time as flux and conceptdetermined time would be that between Space as a whole and measured space.) 2. Another imaginative configuration brings toge~her pure inner intuition with the concept of necessary connection in the schema of before-and-afte.r. Thus is added to conscious advancing time a necessary, unperturbable time-order, the ground, for Kant, of the principle of cause and effect in nature. All the schemata together-there are as many as the understanding has concepts-circumscribe thoughtinformed temporal flux, or speaking more familiarly, temporal thinking. It was, after all, to be expected that when the rational self cast itself into inner sense to become an appearance the result should be thinking in time. What are its features? 4. TIME AND SPACE For Aristotle, the external world with its continuity of places defined by movable substances is clearly prior to being in time, which is merely the countable aspect of motion. Kant, on the other hand, at first, at least, presents time as the sense of senses, the first formal condition of all ap- 84 pearing objects in general, both self and nature. Time -. ceives all representations, everything which is there for consciousness at all; it is the ultimate relating receptacle and the condition of all connectedness. Space, on the other hand, is the condition of outer appearance, namely of nature, only (A 99, B 177). The reason is that time belongs immediately to the soul and is the place of consciousness itself, while space must wait to receive material from the outside. But then, in a crucial section added to the second edition of the Critique, the "Refutation of Idealism" (B 274279), Kant totally inverts his new order in a doctrine surprising in the context but also quite unavoidable. Space is again the condition of temporal experience. In the "Refutation" Kant explicitly aims to prove that mere consciousness of one's own existence-thoughtdetermined inner sense-proves, in being affected by outer sense, the real existence of external objects in space. Implicitly, however, he shows that objects in space are the necessary condition of self-experience. The internal flux of unfocussed attention, he argues, is absolutely featureless, indeterminate, a mere fugitiveness . To determine time and give it steadiness it must be projected on something permanent; it must be represented in terms of perceived permanence in space. Spatial appearances seem to stay put while time has no aspect that stands but its flux itself. Time supports only the alteration of determinations, but no determinate steady object: · . the soul "everything is in continual flux" (A 381). Tht. ) fore the representation of time is always spatial; if time is to appear at all it must be in a spatial form, most appropriately as a one-dimensional straight line (B 156): Time appears as space reduced by two dimensions. It is now also clear why the self cannot really properly appear in time. The inner intuition admits no material affection except through space. (Indeed, it is only this geometrization of appearing time which makes possible the primary measurement of physical motion, namely velocity. For velocity is conceivable only as a ratio of homogeneous magnitudes, namely space lengths and time lengths. But as I said, that means that time, insofar as it is apprehensible at all, which is to say, insofar as it is representable, is only a dimension abstracted from space: Bergson has a point when he accuses Kant of confusing time with space (Essay, "Conclusion"). Yet more follows: There can be no full consciousness without the appearances of three-dimensional externality. For the linear representation of the determinate inner sense, while it may be formally adequate, is also utterly poverty-stricken and unrevealing (Foundations of the Metaphysics of Nature, Preface). T9 appear to itself, the self must put the inner sense in the way of spatial appearances which then represent to it ·its own formative powers and that of its sensibility. The system of such revealing thought-informed spatio-temporal appearances Kant calls nature and its science is Newtonian physics. ·· \ SUMMER 1983 �Inner experience is, then, only mediately possible through space. That is why, I think, space is treated before time in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" and why the imagination is fundamentally figurative. Time·began as the formal (or better, formative) condition of all appearance whatsoever, but space turns out to be the condition of the appearance of time. A self having only an inner sense would have no representations of itself at all. If it were conscious it would be conscious of nothing; it would be at most a forever-idle capability of a possible experience. 5. TEMPORAL TillNKING To recapitulate: 1. Self.consciousness: Of the self which underlies all thinking and sensing there is no knowledge. There is no immediate representation of it; it cannot become an object to itself beyond the indication given in the universal prefix "I think." There is therefore no self. consciousness in the sense of reflective self-knowledge. (It is one of the mysteries of the Critique how any of the re· flective terms necessary to critical analysis of the self obtain their meaning.) 2. Consciousness: Consciousness, awareness, belongs to the thought-determined inner sense, or better, is identical with it. That time is in the soul and that the soul is in time are converse propositions (A 362). Both claims mean that the. self is ready and able to receive an external material. But to be merely aware in this way is no more to know oneself than it is actually to experience an external object. Time, even when determined by thought, yields no formed object but merely the schemata of relations of possible representations within the soul (B 50). It is the mere capacity for thinking objects. 3. Self· experience: If self-knowledge in the reflective sense is impossible to the self, it can yet experience itself, that is, its own powers, in inner sense-but only if that sense is spatially represented and determined by real objects. Then the self can appear to itself as a temporally thinking subject and behold its formative faculties constituting nature. Self-experience begins23 when temporal thinking, namely the time-informed categories, such as number, perma· nence, and causality, is exercised on-spatial material. A great question arises. The explicit motive of the Critique was to find what the human constitution must be if physics is to be a science. From this point of view the temporal sense was established primarily to secure the causal ordering of motion. But is it plausible that Kant's view of the soul should be so altogether a mere consequence of this motive? Indeed, there might well be other ways to ground physical causality than by means of the original flux which, as has been shown, is in itself insufficient to account for self-conscious thought. 24 A deeper reason, · namely Kant's thinking about thought itself, seems to me to be at work. It is best phrased in terms of the conse· quences following from his very modem rejection of Aris· totle. rnE ST. JOHNS REVIEW For Aristotle knowing is a motion of the soul, an actualization, which achieves actuality as the intellect achieves its end and becomes the thing thought. That final activity is true life. For Kant, knowing, as the conceiving of material objects, cannot be such a motion, since motion is itself generated by thinking, when it determines space through time (B 155, note). Nor can it be an activity, for thought is not fulfilled in its object: It simply determines or unifies the manifold and, so to speak, fits itself about the object and constitutes it. Truth is no longer the simple luminous identity of the intellect with its intelligible object, but rather the "adequcition" of thought with the material object (B 82). 25 Therefore Kant's thinking has neither motion nor life; it has no actuating principle. The pure flux of inner sense can now be seen in the light of a deep though inexplicit need. Time is needed to float thought, as it were. It gives thinking a spurious kind of motion, a pseudo-activity. . In themselves the thinking functions are merely empty, static forms; cast on the stream of inner sense they assume fluidity. Time is the animating principle of that kind of thinking which has no end in itself, and the Kcintian temporcility is the substitute for the lost life of thought. "' "' "' Kant's treatment of time is the focus of Heidegger's deep, engaged, but also strained reading· of the first Cri· tique. Heidegger calls this kind of interpretative reading a "recovery" or "repetition" (Wiederholung). It is meant to bring to light the unspoken, and for the author unspeakable, implications of the text. It attempts to reveal not what the author meant and failed to say-an author worth "repeating" is quite able to express himself-but rather the inexorable ultimate outcome implicit in his thought. This interpretation yields very striking-if not quite persuasive-results especially with respect to an aspect of time markedly missing from Kant's account, namely its three phases. Heidegger reconstructs these from the first, superseded version of the Transcendental Deduction. (See Note 26 for a summary of Kant's text with reference to Heidegger's interpretation.) I have just argued that Kant has deep reasons for making time the primary sense, namely to vivify the inert functions of his concepts, but that his almost inadvertent, yet inescapable tendency is the spatialization of time. How· ever, Heidegger, who sees in Kant his predecessor, views the whole critical enterprise as centered on the unexpressed fundamental temporality of the human being. Heidegger understands that hidden art of the imagination, to which Kant assigns the function of temporalizing thinking (or, equivalently, of thought-determining time) as the "temporalizing," the time-origination which is the being of human existence. Kant drew back, as it were, from an opportunity he was not ready for, the possibility of seeing the imagination not as a third and mediating faculty, the 85 �·meeting ground of thought and sense, but as the common root of both. He could not yet abstract from its figurative character to see it as transcendental temporality simply. Kant's failure to explain the "my-0wnness" of the self, together with his inability to see the imagination, the meet· ing ground of self and time, as anything but a mystery are Heidegger's clues to a new understanding of human exis· tence. Heidegger owes debts also to Hegel and Bergson (see Note 27), and most certainly to Augustine (paras. 9, 81 end), who anticipates him in the essential temporality of the human being and in the primacy of the future among the time phases-indeed one might almost call Heidegger a godless Augustine. But he goes beyond all of them, as far as one can go, I think, in the exaltation of time. If for Kant the inner sense is a mysterious mirror. for the unknowable self, for Heidegger time will be the very meaning of being human. The answer to the question ''What is time?" will fall out of the analysis of human existence. V. HEIDEGGER: TEMPORALilY AS THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE 1. ECSTATIC TEMPORALilY Heidegger's starting point in Being and Time is the old question concerning Being. However, he does not ask: What is Being?, since he considers that question a fateful wrong tum into metaphysics. He rather asks: What is the meaning of being?, What makes a being possible?, What is the being (Sein) of Being \Seiendes)? Assuming that there are different beings, he chooses to pursue the question by analyzing the being most expressive of the inquiry itself, the being that exists. To exist means to position oneself beyond oneself so as to understand one's own being. The being that so exists is also the being that is there, that finds itself involved in the world, not merely present in it. It is, further, that being which is in each case mine, which has "each-his-0wnness," in contrast to the unowned Kantian subject. Heidegger names it by the ordinary German term for existence, Dasein, "there-being." It is the human being. The larger first part of the book is devoted to an "exis· tential analysis," an interpretative description of the phe· nomena of existence which will reveal its basic structure. These original modes are called "existentials," and the structure so revealed is called "care." The "meaning" of care, that is to say, that which makes it possible, will be temporality. In the following abbreviated account of "care," the prodigious originality and ingeniousness of Heidegger's analy· sis will perforce be blunted. 86 Care has a threefold constitution: 1. The being tha cares, understands. Understanding~sharply distinguished from theoretical knowing-is its ability to project before itself its own possibilities. It is aware of being able to be (not that it has that possibility but that it is that possibility). The being that exists is always "ahead of itself." For what it is, its essence, is just that it exists, that it understands itself as a being that is able to be. 2. This being, Dasein, also has moods, "existential moods," which are the ground of ordinaiy, familiar moodi· ness. These moods are testimony to the condition in which it already finds itself (Befindlichkeit). They attest to its "facticity," to the bald fact that it always finds itself al· ready cast or thrown into an alien world. Heidegger calls the existential condition of existing always already in the world, "thrownness." 3. In this world Dasein is always already preoccupied with what it finds there, alongside itself, namely other existences and things. It is its lot to sink into a state of self· forgetfulness or "fallenness" as it busily "takes care" of this world. This .state of "inauthenticity," literally: "unone's-0wnness," is as genuine a possibility of existence as its opposite, authenticity; Heidegger disclaims any invidi· ous connotation in these terms. In sum, then, the being that cares is a being ahead of itself in projecting its own possibilities, which finds itself involved in a world along with other existences·and enti· ties, and which can lose itself in being busy about them. -. Now Heidegger asks what it means for Daesin to be : this way. This question belongs to a deeper, that is, an on· / tological, level of analysis, for here is discovered the mean· ing of care, namely the condition of its possibility. The an· swer is: temporality (Second Part, Chps. 3-6). The existent being is one about .whom there is always something yet outstanding, something still .to come, namely its death. So also is it an "ecstatic" being. "Ecstatic" is a word used by Aristotle in his chapters on time (Phys. 222 b 17) to describe the self-unsettling of motion. Heidegger uses if for the primordial "being out of itself" of Dasein, namely its temporality (par. 65). 28 The word has, of course, the connotation of being transported and rapt away. Dasein is "out of itself" in three ecstatic phases, each of which accounts primarily but not exclusively for one of the aspects of care in either its inauthentic or its authentic version. Hence the ontological analysis covers a large num· her of combinations, of which I_ shall sketch only the primary ones, reversing Heidegger's order so as to begin with the ecstasis to which Heidegger assigns the least standing (par. 68). l. The self-forgetfulness of fallenness is in its nature al· ways inauthentic. It is the mode of-note well-actuality, of fact, of mere presentness and nowness, greedy for satis· factions which hold no further possibilities, The !'.>ntologi· cal ground of this existential mode is the ectasis of the present. Heidegger understands the present not in the tr:J,, . SUMMEJt 1983 ) �tional way as the phase of perceptual vividness, but as a derivative mode, abstracted from living involvement-the mode of "presentification," .the grasping attempt to tum the possibilities of existence into present actualities. The ecstasis which yields the present, the phase which is traditionally the front or fulcrum of time, is the one most dependent on the other phases for its authentic version (68 c~ 2. Just as in English there is a periphrastic past perfect "I am gone," so in Cennan one says "I am having been" (Ich bin gewesen). Human existence always is as having been, for it always finds itself already cast into the al_ien world. It is this fact which makes it moody. An existential mood is a condition in which Dasein finds itself coming back to or brought before the · mere fact of its own exis· tence.29 Heidegger gives as a cardinal example the authentic mood which he calls dread or anxiety (Angst; the inau· thentic counterpart is ordinary fear). In anxiety Dasein discovers the world into which it has been thrown as uncanny, unhomy, unmeaning, unamenable to being taken care of. Anxiety brings Dasein back to the fact of its own isolated thrownness, and this "being brought back to itself" apprises it that it can return to itself, that it has the possibility of "recovering" or "repeating" itself. What ac· counts for the possibility human existence has of finding itself already in a state of mind or mood and what brings it face to face with its own recoverableness (Wiederholbar· keit; sometimes translated "repeatability") is the ecstasis of the past, in which Dasein goes out of itself to be as having been (68 b). Through this ecstasis human existence comes back to itself as an ever-antecedent fact whose possibilities can always be repeated. Therewith is also revealed the possibility of authentic existence. It demands the introduction of a future element into the repetition of its past. 3. Therefore the primary ecstasis of primordial authentic temporality is the future (65). This future is not an indeterminate "not yet.'' It is, as the German Zu-kun~ suggests to Heidegger, that toward which Dasein goes, but it is also the tenninus from which Dasein comes back into the situation in which it finds itself, to face the present resolutely. The future thus comprehends and makes possible the other two ecstases. Futurity accounts for the aspect of care called understanding, since to understand means to project one's own possibilities. Future means an· ticipation; rather than being propelled by present urgencies that need to be taken care of, futuraJ Dasein cares authentically: It Jets its own possibilities for being come toward itself. The future, too, enables the human being to repossess its past properly; it is in facing its possibilities that Dasein is brought back to what it already was. The futural ecstasis of coming toward oneself accounts for authentic existence (69 a). The dominant case of authentic futurity, understood as resolute anticipation, is Dasein's facing of its own death (46-63). The human being is that being which lives as a being which is going to die. Dasein discovers among its ex11-IE ST. JOHNS REVIEW istential possibilities the ultimate one of not being, and this discovery makes it focus on the wholeness of its existence. Death is what it escapes from in the inauthentic present; death is what it is already inescapably saddled with; death is what it resolutely anticipates. Death therefore has the threefold structure exhibited by care and time, and conversely. The inference follows that our temporality is finite and that primordial existential time comes to an end. What then of ordinary time, the common time human beings have, spend, puzzle about? Heidegger undertakes to show that, strange though it seems, time is tempora~ namely that ordinary time falls.out of primordial temporality (79-82). . . Dasein finds itself in the world, and it is in dealing with its "gear" or "equipment" (Zeug~ iil circumspectly taking care of its affairs,That ordinary time shows itself. Affairs in the world can be dated: "Later, when ... " or "now, that ... " or "formerly, when ... "-that is the language of worldly management. This datability of the world is derived from ecstatic temporality because "later, when" can be said only on the condition that there is possibility, "now, that" only if there is presentification, and "formerly, when" only if there is repeatability. So Heidegger has grounded anticipation, ·presence, and memory-for that is what he -is talking about-in the primordial temporality which is human existence. Precise public datability must refer to universal 0ccurrences, originally to the sun's rising and setting. People say, for instance, "now, that" the sun has set it is time to turn in. This public reference enables people to make and set clocks, and thence "vulgar,'' worldly time comes to be what the clock tells, What the clock sho"'s is a perfectly levelled and indifferent equable succession of jerks called nows, going forward from what is no longer to what is not yet, and spawning many puzzles. Such time passes rather than arises; the very use of clocks is witness to the attempt to hold on to the not-yets and the no-Jongers by making them all in turn present, as the clock's hands are followed while they tick off the nows. What is worst of all for Heidegger is that this meaningless derivative clock time is theoreticalJy infinite: It is the time of fallen, inauthentic humanity because it masks the radical finitude of mortal human existence.JO 2. DIFFICULTIES Here is the extreme of opposition to Aristotle. Actuality, fulfilled presence, is interpreted as human fallenness. Possibility, a notion even Jess determinate than potentiality (which is always a.specific "potentiality for") ·is raised to being human existence itself. Time, which was for Aristotle merely the measurable aspect of a being's actualization, is for ~eidegger the very meaning of existence. And, 87 �tradition, that is to say, the going back into a Dasein t' ) finally, time ends in actuality for Aristotle, but for Heideghas been there." Authentic repetition means that "Daseiri ger, in death. Being and Time, in its potent and coherent originality chooses for itself its hero" on the basis of an anticipatory resolution. What Dasein thus recovers is a possibility, not a (though originality in the pursuit of being may well be a state (74). disability) deserves at least the tribute of not being treated Dasein takes over such possibilities as its heritage. How? like a lending library of terms and notions; one must enter Heidegger begins his analysis of the historical past with a its world or stay out-the latter I think. The reasons are discussion of real antiquities, the objects of archaeology. sketched below. These are things which were once "to hand," by which 1. The first is a mere intimation of a possible argument: Heidegger means functional, in a world that is gone. They That actualizing motion has temporal duration which is measurable by the soul, or that time is a dimension of the are now present in our world. They are not genuinely but only secondarily historical because insofar as they are created mind, or that the lawful causality of nature has a "equipment" they are not in the past but in this world. As ground in the observer's temporality-these theories of the being of their own world was wholly conditional on Aristotle, Augustine, and Kant respectively can be apprethat of a past Dasein, so its passing is wholly a matter of hended and judged directly, although their context illumihuman temporality. nates their motive. It is otherwise with Heidegger's underNow here is the difficulty: If Dasein is to recover its heri· standing of time, which is more inextricably and originally implicated in his approaches: in the problematic formulatage, the possibilities of an existence that has been, it must do so by way of the surviving "equipment" of the past, tion of the question concerning the "meaning of being," through ruins, pots and manuscripts. Heidegger suggests in the doubtful insistence that the human being is the beno other way (73). ing of choice for such an inquiry, in the interpretation of human being as existence, in its analysis in terms of care, But how does it recognize these as testimony of antecedent existence? The ecstasis of the past was formulated and in the grounding of care in temporality. The doubts one might have about any of these elements or about their in terms of the indivual, unique, and separate being. What concatenation would make questionable the notion of a can it mean to recognize in the stuff "to hand" in the primordial ecstatic temporality. present world the possibilities of other, past existences, not to speak of making them one's own? 2. The interpretation of human existence as the being which is its possibilities leads to its essential futurity, the The problem points to what seems to me a crucial h : ecstasis which accounts for living in possibility. Dasein's cuna in Heidegger's account of the past. The ecstasis : ) ultimate possibility is that of being able not to be: it is be the necessary condition of ordinary temporality but 1( death (50), the extreme possibility. In requiring of the hudoes not seem to be a sufficient condition. The "ontic" man being that it face at every moment this end as its own, consequences, namely human beings with their past, do Heidegger deprecates-I am disregarding the pretense not immediately fall out of the "ontological" ground of that these are not terms of judgement-as inauthentic and past being. To lay down that Dasein must have a past befallen the perennial wisdom of humankind that the dread cause it is in its being temporalizing does not tell how the of death must not dominate life. The question arises individual human being comes back to itself, that is, rewhether the stark and unspecific resolution to face one's members. And yet, the additional element that is needed own death can at all be the basis of public decency and to complete the account, namely what is ordinarily called even inner dignity. I shall argue that the future is of the memory, may change the whole complexion of the acthree phases the most impotent for human action and that count. our death should be allowed to exert its power only as a Since Heidegger considers existence to be possibility he remote and indefinite limit of life. cannot ascribe a nature or faculties to .human beings. In3. The greatest problem and the one with most bearing deed, in his "recovery" of Kant he had suppressed the fig· on the final section of my inquiry has to do with Heidegurative, primarily spatial, imagination, Kant's faculty for ger's treatment of the past. Human existence has a certain having objects without their presence. But how is the reself-antecedence which is grounded in the ecstases of "beconstruction or recovery of one's own possibilities, or of ing as having been." The defining characteristic of this the possibilities of the past world of historical remains, to mode is that it brings Dasein back to the "repetition" of its take place without such a faculty for reconstituting re· own possibilities and to authentic being. This ecstasis natmembrance of the past, personal, or historical? urally plays the chief role in the constitution of "historicalOne final point:.Repetition, the authentic appropriation ity"-although the most fundamental role is still played by of past possibilities, seems to be most practicable for writthe future. For true historicality ultimately arises from a ten works, records of past thought. The mode of resolute repetition of the past which is motivated by the resolute purpose, however, in which such a recovery is to be carried projection of a life span dominated by "being-unto-death." • on seems to invite a certain wilfulness of illterpretation Dasein can explicitly repeat possibilities of existence which leads to highly pointed constructive readings. Such that have been handed down. Such repeating "is explicit repetition may be incomparably more serious than ? ' · 'c ) 88 SUMMER 1983 �toricistic approach, but it is also very constricted, since, being grounded in the stark mood of the past ecstasis, it excludes less harsh modes of pastness. In particular, there is no authentic mode of panoramic revery or imaginative contemplation,31 though these, I shall argue, are of pri· mary importance in human temporality. try to capture its being, though time-terms there are aplenty. For, I claim, time as a distinct object of inquiry, or rather our sense of its being one, comes about when we block our usual mental activity and try to concentrate on time itself: · - • Die Ziet • • So I now come to some reflections of my own about time. Naturally, I shall draw on the philosophers just studied for the terms of the inquiry, for insight into the con· texts implied in certain answers, and for examples of what seem to me fertile errors. Since I shall argue that time has no being and that to think otherwise has harmful conse· quences, I should not attempt to present a theory of what time is, but rather an intimation of what it is that induces the illusion of temporal being. And, of course, I should explain why, for all that, I think of the past as the prime phase of time. Es gibt ein sehr probates Mittel, die Zeit zu halten am Schlawittel: Man nimmt die Taschenuhr zur Hand und folgt dem Zeiger unverwandt. Sie geht so langsam dann, so brav als wie ein wohlgezogen Schaf, setzt Fuss vor Fuss so voll Manier als wie ein Fraulein von Saint-Cyr. Jedoch vertraumst du dich ein Weilchen, so ruckt das zuchtigliche Veilchen mit Beinen wie der Vogel Strauss und heimlich wie ein Puma aus. VI. TIME AND THE IMAGINATION 1. TIIE NON-BEING OF TIME The beloved text of writers on time is Augustine, Con· ) fesSions, XI 14: For what is time? Who is able easily and briefly to explain that? Who is able so much in thought to comprehend it as to . bring forth something in words? Although what do we more familiarly and knowingly mention in speaking than time? And' we understand surely when we speak of it; we also understand when we hear someone else speaking of it. What then is time? If no one asks it of me, I know; if I want to explain it to the one that is asking, I do not know. At first thought, Augustine's observation seems to be no more true of time than of any other matter: Questioning always makes the familiar strange and precipitates perplexity. Yet there is this difference: Though we sometimes quarrel about the management and the worth of time, we deal with its ubiquitous appearances not only with perfect, practical aplomb but also without anxiety to defend a doctrine concerning its being. I think that is because we have an intimation that our dealing with temporal affairs and our speaking in temporal terms has, as it were, nothing to it, no object of inquiry whose name is time. We sense that the bold question "What is Time?" itself drives the answer implied in our unimpeded behavior out of sight. But from another aspect, what Augustine says seems not quite right. We really do not know what time is when we are not asked; we only know how to live familiarly with watches and words and our sense of time. And therefore we do not know it less when we ask ourselves about it. On the contrary, there is not even any Time to know until we THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW Und wieder siehst du auf sie nieder; ha, Elendel-Doch was ist das? Unschuldig lachelnd macht sie wiedcr die zierlichsten Sekunden-Pas. Christia_ Morgenstern, Zeitgedichte n Ti11ie There is a good and proven way To strongarm Time and make it stay. Just take your wrist-watch by the band And concentrate upon her hand. Then she goes slow enough to keep The pace, as of a well bred sheepCoes step by step, as mannerly As any high-bred miss could be. But if you daydream for a while The shrinking violet with guile Makes off on legs of ostrich length And with a puma's stealthy strength. Now you look down just as before0 wretched watch! 0 curious chancel With guiless smile she steps once more · The very daintiest second-dance. E.B. What we find when we concentrate on the- passage of time is the repeatediy frustrated impulse of our inten· tion to perceive time, indeed an iteration of attempts, orchestrated by the beating of our hearts and the coursing of our blood-a kind of internal perception 89 �called by psychologists prioperception, self-perception. As soon as we leave off trying to find in ourselves empty time · we see images of spatial .passage. Indeed even Kant finally admits that inner sense, to be actually affected, needs spatial appearance. The pure underlying flux seems to me, therefore, a philosophical construction which is the result of ulterior motives, and a phenomenon which is the effect of self-interference. So when Husserl claims such a flux for the first phenome· non of time-consciousness he is observing accuratelyhis own observing. Internal time flux is the first effect of attempting a phenomenology of time-consciousness. What of external time? Newton is alone in positing a genuine external time flux, absolute, equable time antecedent to all motion, physical, yet not apparent-a notion whose motives are as understandable as the concept is confusing. All the others who appear to believe in physical time turn out always to mean either some designated physical process or the "passage of nature" as a whole.32 It seems to be impossible for them to point to time itself or to refer to it except by spatial metaphors. From the physical point of view, time appears with as many natures as there are motions and ways of studying them: It is a discrete quantity for quantized micro-motions, a covariant of space for remote places, an anisotropic progress for irreversible processes, an in· dependent continuum for the local motions of bodies, and a numerable dimension for motions which are developments. I do not think it is possible to decide which of these conceptions should primarily determine our understanding of motion and thus time. It may just be impossible to give a single account of physical time, and therefore it may be best to say that various kinds of time seem . to occur in the world, depending on where our attention is fixed, whether on the statistical conceptions of aggregates, or on signaling to remote clocks, or on watching the formation of completed beings, or on the comprehension of human affairs, This last perspective raises yet another possibility. What if time were worldly but not of the world, not one of its physical dimensions, but rather the very life and moving principle of the world? Such a doctrine makes the appearances coherent, as the monolithic grandeur of Hegel's System shows, but so thoroughly coherent as to put an end to human freedom under· stood as .our possibility of thinking and choosing independently of our situation in time. It seems to me pernicious. The claim is that the appearances of nature as well as of human thought and action are manifestations of the substance of Time. Now the chief property of ap· pearances is usually thought to be that they are a becoming: variable in themselves, perspectival for us, in alterable passage, contingent. If, then, the being behind them and expressed in them is itself a primordial be- 90 coming such as Time must be, the variability of · pearances must be governed by that deeper beconu. . Time; appearance is the manifestation of the logic of becoming. But that means that we must give up the thought of a loose connection, of room for play between the world and its grounds, which supports our efforts at independent thought and free action, and submit to our time-determined fate. Human beings and nations must fulfill the historical role assigned by their time or be consigned to parochial impotence. Time is a tyrant, and the philosophy of time is a tool for tyrants: our time has seen the consequences. These, in sum, then, are the charges against Time: As an internal flux it is a philosophical or psychological illusion, as an external elapsing it is no more than the measure of motion, and as the fated logic of becoming it is a coercive myth. Aristotle, who first wrote a sustained- exposition of time, also introduced its most radical de-substantializa· tion, more complete even than that of the later great relativist of time, Leibniz, for whom time is at least an idea in the mind of God (Note 4). In that dethronement of time, in the · claim that time is only the counted measure of motion, it seems to me that Aristotle was simply right. But why, we must ask ourselves, if there is time neither within nor without, it is so copious a topic of talk, and whence oomes our ever-fertile feeling about time? The related words time, tick, and German Zeit, pear not to be specifically temporal in their etymolo& ) origin. They are connected with Greek daiomoi, "I divide or distribute," which has to do with all sorts of divisions, like that of the people, demos, and the portioned meal, dais. Originally "time" seems to refer quite neutrally to the dividing of certain passages of na· ture into stretches, just as Aristotle · says. The timefigures of poetry and ordinary speech, on the other hand, are usually strongly affective. Let me take as ex· amples two complexes of time figures which seem to me best to reveal why we speak of time with feeling. First, phrases like "the womb of time," "the ripeness of time," "the fullness of time." The Greeks have a word, kair6s, which although son:ietirnes used interchangeably with chr6nos, has the specific meaning of a special, critical, or opportune moment. n There was a famous statue by Lysippus, showing Kairos with a long lock over his brow and the back of his head shaved, as a figure for the fact that foresight is needed to seize opportunity by the forelock and that once gone it cannot be pulled back. In the New Testament the word has assumed great theological gravity; it means both the individual time for turning or doing the appointed deed, and the day of judgement "The kairos is near,'' the fulness of time is at hand, John 5ays in the opening of his Revelation (1,3). Leaving aside theological elaborations, what do such phrases betoken? They seem to me all / SUMMER 1983 �ways to mean at bottom this: We feel that there is something in the world's becoming which peculiarly concerns us, that something is in the offing, something to monitor, to watch, to prepare for. The second example is quite opposite in flavor, namely, the image of time as a tread-mill or a conveyor· belt on which we plod or are wafted willy·nilly past scheduled events and holidays to an unscheduled but sure cessation. For terrestrial beings this coursing of time has what biologists call a "circadian" rhythm, the natural twenty-four hour periodicity of the sun's circuit, imaged on the faces of our watches and iterated by the predesigned routines of our business lives. It is the pa· thos of the daily round-no matter whether it whirrs or grinds-that makes us time-conscious, conscious, that is, of a fleeting stillness in the countable accretion of our accomplished motions, of a flux that stays while it flows, since it ever bears the same event. Were our lives either totally mutable or total1y monotonous we would, I imagine, attairi neither to a sense of time nor to intimations of timelessness. The tread~mill figure of time, at any rate, expresses the mood in which the pas· sage of life seems at once inexorable and aimless, fugitive and onerous. Time, these figures show, is our word-and this is the meaning elaborated by Heidegger-for the world's passages insofar as we care. We speak of time often, because the world continuaJly concerns us; we speak of it variously, because our mood or concern shifts; and we speak of it always in figures because there is no other way to give shape to our sense of the world. 2. TIME AS NOTICED PASSAGE Time, I say, is noticed passage-besides that it has no being of its own. Perhaps I might have said that time is our noticing of passage, but it seems to me better to locate our sense of time where we feel it, in the changing world itself. But what is this "passage"? When we speak of the passage of time we cannot mean (although we say) that time passes, but rather that something, something primarily spatial, is going on. Indeed, passage is not, to begin with, a temporal word. It means a passing, a going from here to there, as in "pacing"; there even seems to be an etymologi~ cal connection to "space.'' It has a meaning similar to, but even wider than, Aristotle's "change," kinesis, which is it· self a wider term than locomotion, while preserving its spa· tial undertone. I am using the term to express my under· standing that appearances in their variability, however caused and however regu1ated, are as appearances spatial. Two views of motion seem to me paramount: Aristote· · lian motion, which is the actualization of the thing moved, and Newtonian motion, which is characterized by the time rate of change of a body with respect to space. For Aristotle the individual mobile is everything-the substrate THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW which undergoes the motion and the substance which is the aim and completion of the motion. For Newton the mobile is qualitatively indifferent to the motion it under· goes, though as a mass it figures at once as the cause of change in other bodies and as the cause of resistence to change in itself. Thus for both motion is dynamic, that is, it is regarded in terms of an indwelling cause: form for Aristotle, force for Newton. But consider that there are, to human discernment, apparently aimless motions which, like motes in sunlight, show some pattern only in the aggregate, and also that it is possible to regard bodies as moving not because of their own inertia or gravity but by reason of their location in a force field. In some of its appearances, motion is neither compellingly Aristotelian or Newtonian. So as a kind of exercise, let me try a wider view of passage and of time, a view less focusseCl on mobile and cause and more on field and configuration, a spatial view. By space I here mean not the abstracted infinite contin· uum of geometry but our extended human environment, ground and figures equaJly. I think of it as just that which is such as to be capable of being passed through and of containing passages. But even before it is the scene of pas· sages, it is the opening, the room for appearances, the place for patency, what.Keats caJJs "the World or Elemen· tal Space.'' The Cree~ word for the appearances, phenom· ena, means what shines out, and the appearances seem to me to have these four connected characteristics: They shine out, they spread out, they vary and they are for us. Patency, extendedness, multifariousness, and perceptibility-that is what makes space. The spatial scene is in its very nature variable, and variable in the nth degree. Its spread-out, variegated conformations themselves vary: variably or differentially-and those are the passages of space. Some passages are lawfully developing fulfillments, some negotiations of distance, some random dancesthese are the varieties of the variation of spatial variable· ness. It is not becoming that causes this display but just its remaining what it is-various; and our discerning and noticing only make it more so. We commonly think of the present configuration of space as being an aggregate result, the outcome of many separate paths of becoming. The world is full of forms which seem explicable by their genesis. Spa~ and its fig· ures, appearing space, seems to be the frontal face of be· coming, the advancing surface, so to speaJc, of the temporal succession. But now let us cut the world in another way, as it were, across the line of advance rather than lengthwise along the lines of its genesis. Then the passage of time no longer appears responsible for the configuration of space nor is its history what makes the world appear, but space with its present and passing appearances lies fully there and openly displayed befor~ us, in aJJ its immediacy, a pan· orama which is not the result but the Scene of time. I mean that the appearances are not apprehended as the current 91 �state of temporal becoming, but the reverse-that the world appears as a space, a room, a theatre of events and happenings. These goings-on may be recurrent or continuous or periodically culminating, fascinatingly lawful or astoundingly unique. But the study of these passages tells us only the route, not the reason for the panorama of appear· ances and directs us only to its elements and not to its integral sum. Let the contemplation of the world in this mode (which is analogous to the field notions of physics) be, to begin with, an exercise of the imagination in concentrating on the phenomenology of spatial passage. Accordingly I describe motion-passage now more particularly as discerned variation. I do not figure such motion to myself as being borne forward by time. By "being borne forward by time" I mean the sense we allow ourselves to entertain that each and all motions ride on some primary vehicle (describable, to be sure, only by spatial metaphors such as the flow of a river) which, when related to space by a ratio, yields their rate of change or velocity, for example 55 miles per hour. In such a rate we normally take time as the independent variable, precisely because we think of it as the steady ubiquitous reference-spatial location varies in three dimensions and two directions, while time only advances. But to the time-disencumbered eye, motion is not through space in time, but time, no longer equably universal, arises in different places and tempos as this or that passage is noticed: felt in the observer or referred to other motions, for instance to that of our natural clock, the sun. A passage can be noticed by us, in the sen.se that we care about it, when a distinguishable variation has been discerned within the variegated field of appearance. Such discerned variation, or perhaps better, differential variation, of course always requires that the observer be himself in the picture,H an appearance among appearances. Consequently certain kinds of passage arise from the relation of the observer himself to the appearances. For example, he can stay still and concentratedly look into the field, search it by scanning, or himself bodily pass through it to obtain varying perspectives. So, for example, little children some· times gaze into the world pressed up against their grownup and.sometimes run out to circulate and inspect. The world, on its side, also offers to observation various configurations of motion: There are distinct and isolated motions that occur against a still background: runners running along a ridge. There is the scene which vibrates everywhere with localized variation: the town-square on market day. And then is the still center of an indifferently varying field: the cynosure of one's eye in a crowded room. We are moving or still figures in a still or moving landscape of appearance, and all passages can be distinguished in tenns of the various combinations between the discerning viewer and the passing scene, and, if we wish, timed by means of some designated accompanying motion .. This primarily spatial way seems to me a particularly apt way to come upon the world. To begin with, there is the evidence of a common experience, namely that temporally 92 extended acquaintance dims vision, while sudden, ~ oramic sights make for poignant perception. Then there is the unfailing testimony of our spatial time-language. A "moment" of time is really -a "movement," as of the clock; the "passing" of time is a "pacing"; the "space of time" is never converted into the "time of space," and the words "time," "past," "present," "future," themselves all have spatially interpretable etymologies. Again, we have external organs for sensing all sorts of spatial motion, sights, sounds (which come out of space), and internal organs for sensing our own spatial position, and we have a capability for perceiving perspectival transformations. But we have no discernible organ or power for perceiving the mere elapsing of time. Our estimate of time depends on the spatial passages from light to dark, from fresh to worn, from full to empty, and if we are deprived of their sensory evidence our sense of time becomes totally confused. Moreover, time is somehow more accessible than space. We can "spend time" to gain space. Time serves to pass through space: Now when Joseph had named his underworld name to the Ismaelite, and had indicated to him what he wished to be called in Egyptland, these people trekked on, some days, several and many days, at an indescribably comfortable pace and full of serenity concerning time, which would one day, they knew, manage to overcome space, if one cooperated .but a little-and would do this most surely if one didn't fuss but ·). · gave in to its progress, each of whose advances might be c.. . account but which would, quite incidentally, run up a large sum, if only once carried on and reasonably maintained one's direction. [Thomas Mann, Joseph in F.gypt) One may even recover, in some sense, one's former place in space. But it is only in a figurative way that one can regain lost times by going down through space, as in archaeological exposure of earlier levels of life. Then, too, time's effects can be fugitive-a moment of bliss can sometimes obliterate a season of suffering, but a ravaged place cannot be healed without the investment of laborious motion. In brief, spaces and places contain the passages that concern us, that is, they contain time, but not the reverse. I take all that as suggestive, though of course merely circumstantial, evidence that time is not even coordinate with space, as a form of appearances, not to speak of being prior. Proof of such an assertion there cannot be beyond its possibly convincing consequences. But I can, at least, in concluding my brief collection of the evidence against time and for space try to invalidate the chief presumptive mark of their separate and coordinate standing. That is the supposed difference between the here and the now: The here, it is said, is repeatable; the now is not. The claim certainly holds for the mathematical repre· . sentation of space and time, though merely by definition. In a graphic coordinate system with a time-axis the space coordinates can return as often as you please, whilf' · · , ~ SUMMER 1983 �time coordinates must increase monotonically. But is it so plain in life that the now never returns? Is it so certain that a d~jA vue is always a pathological incident? But even if, in publicly corroborable fact, no now is indeed ever repeated because chances are overwhelmingly against the world's passages ever returning to the same state, yet it is imagin· able that we might, by a slightly different route, come back to the same moment. For if events had the cyclicality of a circle, as- Nietsche daims (Note 13), every now would be antecedent to itself and to all others, and if events moved as in a figure eight, the same now would be on different approaches. Whether we then said that it was the same now because its perceptual content was the same, or a different now because it had different antecedents, would depend on our desire to make the configurations of the world tell time or to make the advance of time distinguish its configurations. In principle and in imagination a passage which is an extended causa sui is not impossible, and therefore neither is the return of a now. I leave out of account here that unmodern "defence against Time" (Eliade) constituted by the celebration of the timeless, original, and ever-repeatable moments of myth. Similarly, as far as the here is concerned, is it so obvious that we can always come back to it? It seems to me that there are three kinds of here: There is the local mathematical point given by an origin and three coordinates, which is exactly repeatable but is only the abstraction of a here. There is the physical situation determined by reference to a system of moving bodies which can be only relatively recovered as one system moves with respect to its next larger . containing system (as does the cluster of people on the boat on the ocean in the solar system, and so ad infinitum). And finally, there is the human place of our lives which probably cannot in effect be regained because, no matter how stable, the world's passing affects its colorations and conformations, as well as the mood of the returning perceiver. Therefore it seems to me that, insofar as they are separa· hie notions at all, the now can be as repeatable as the here and the here as irrecoverable as the now-which is to say that time and space are not distinguishable, at least by that mark. That melancholy of the -missed rendevous described above (Sec. I 4), when we come to the right place at the wrong time, is, then, not the unavoidable consequence of the inherent skewness of space and time, but rather a temporal affection, a mood of diminution, the ebb tide of our awareness, when we can take notice of nothing which does not flaunt itself in front of our eyes. For if time is noticed passage, the vitality of our sense of time and of our sense for times past and times future will depend on the scope of our receptivity. The object of the foregoing exercisejn suppressing our image of time as ·bearing onward the shapes of space was to quell our propensity for insinuating time into our speech as an occult nature and into our lives as a flux bear· ing us from oblivion to oblivion on the narrow raft of a THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW present floating out of the mists of time gone into the murk of time to come. It seems to me that the world so purged of time is a more patent world. In it shapes pass by us, but also we, at will, pass by them. Sometimes it is in our power to recognize appearances; we are able to tum baclc, to revisit the scene, to follow its figures as they pass by or to ascend to a higher viewpoint so as to survey the whole panorama simultaneously. Appearances which carry that possibility we call spatial. Some variations, however, we can only remember; they go past us and are beyond perceptual recovery. They back out of our sight, so to speak, by changing not so much their place as themselves, so that we can no longer train our sensory vision on them at will. So the golden solids oflate afternoon plane out into the dusky silhouettes of early evening, and no one can hold them. Such perceptually irrecoverable passings are usually ac· companied for us by a sense of loss or relief or, at least, of watchfulness. These we call temporal. But if we do not care enough about their passing, not even enough to glance at a watch, then, there being no one to feel or tell time, the passages remain untimed. Of course, to attempt to imagine this untimed world is a contradictory undertaking, that of trying to attend while not attending. Nonetheless, we could try to reach untimed passage. It would amount to thinking about appearance in its variability as distinct from being involved in it. It would mean being on the approaches of tl)e mystery of Appearance. Here, it seems .to me, would start the real pursuit: What appears? What principles of self-sameness and ever· otherness can account for the determinate shapes appearance manifests in its endlessly varying variety? Must appearance be perceived to appear? Is it nothing or something in itself? And what is perception? What is space, that field and frame in which, or perhaps, as which, appearance shows itself? What rules, causes, ends govern that distinguishable variation of appearance called motion or passage?-This is the great battle ground to which leads the skirmish against time. The results of a substancial reflection are sometimes a bit bizarre, and their justification lies in their intention. Mine is to give an accou.nt of the three phases of time which lend to human life much of its pathos. 3. THE PHASES OF TIME Let me begin by readmitting the absurdly unavoidable thought which I had earlier proscribed: that if things had not come to the present juncture they would not be here. Sequences of appearances commonly seem to have, if no humanly ascertainable drift or even much recollectable continuity, at least a certain longitudinal connectedness. But how ·do we know of that connection? Space lies open before us in brilliant extendedness. It has no before and after, being, all that there is of it, there. How can it also display the past variety of its passages? How, in short, does 93 �the present worH bear witness to those of its states that have passed, to its past? What lets us interpret a fossil as testimony of life's evolution? What compels us to ascribe a tender babyhood even to the most desiccated adult? What makes a place revisited a place almost regained? What reconstitutes the sherd at the bottom of a Greek well into a goblet from a world gone by? The answer is that we do it, we give the world its past because we have the power of memory. For itself the . grandest mountain range, which to us expresses in its majestic presence the dignity of having been shaped by the passage of aeons, has no past and no world, and neither does the little loom-weight which once put tension on the warp of Penelope's loom. The depth of space is ours because we have memory. It makes time and its phases possible. Not as the poet says: ... only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smokefall Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time time is conquered. T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" I, from Four Quartets but the opposite: the moments of memory first constitute past and future. What is memory? The past-rriaking memory is of the imagination. (I omit consideration of rote, short-term, motor, and verbal memory, and of those electronically stimulated, hallucination-like replays of the "memory-tape" which attest to the physical basis of the human activity of remembering.) The imagination I understand to be in the first instance the power for absorbing the world's variety into assorted shapes and coherent processes, a discerning receptivity riot at that point distinguishable from the power of perception. It is, in this aspect, a faculty universally and subconsciously exercised. (Kant, in his own context, calls it the productive imagination because it first produces those unities of thought and sense which he calls "phenomena.") Secondly and properly speaking, it is a capacity for holding the form of things without their matter, as Aristotle says, or the object without its presence, in Kant's terms; both formulations come to the same thing when one recalls that for Aristotle the material is a required element of the substantial presence of a physical object. Its dematerializing power is indeed what makes its holding capacity plausible. For one psychic space Qeaving aside the physical basis of memory) seems able to contain myriads of memories. I am not speaking of psychic space altogether figuratively but describing the interior experience of imagining which seems to be primarily visual, or better, pseudovisual, presumably because sight is the sense most adequate to the extendedness of space (cf. Note 35). And although images are extended, they do not seem necessarily to displace or occlude one another; images are, so to speak, transparent to images. How the imagination (and thus the memory) might its work is a question Aristotle tacitly sets aside and Kant answers by saying that it is a rriysterious power hidden in the depth of the soul. It seems to me of all philosophical questions the most engaging, but for another occasion. (See Note 35 for a formulation of its aspects.) In the meanwhile I will mention one-most crucial-feature of its work: In holding objects without their presence it is always intentional, for the retained form is an image of, or intends, the once present thing, and therein precisely lies its memorial power, its ability to re-present, to present the absent. (There may indeed be moments when remembering passes into reliving, when the memory-image intends its object not as an object that was, but as a present object, but such states are, like hallucinations, extraordinary.) How does the memory-imagination bring about the three temporal phases or present, past, and future?__ a. The Present The now is also called the present, and nowness is associated with presence. A "presence" (Greek: parousia) means a being that is by us, a confronting being which is immediately there. Let us call it perceived being, leaving out of account here the whole problem of perception itself. In this phase the imagination works as the involuntary power described above, which shapes sensory mater:-1, into perceived appearances, though some argue that ) world itself delivers fully shaped appearances (Gibson). People whose imaginative power is exhausted in this first function accordingly live in the present and prefer adven-. titious stimulation to memories and projects. It is this nowpresent which Heidegger combats. Being perceptible defines what is in the present, but I think its marks are not those usually stated: vividness, self. givenness, uniqueness. For the present can be dim and dreary, like a city parking lot on Sunday; and sights of things by no means present can come to us unbidden and adventitiously as do phantasms and hallucinations; . and many a present scene is worn out with repetition. What is peculiar to the present, then, is that it is perceived, that it declares itself to us through the conduits of sensation with a normally bland-though sometimes stunningimmediacy. Indeed, it is one of the mysteries of perception that our intermediary senses can leave us with so strong a sense of the immediacy of appearance. Besides being char· acterized by being right there, before us, perception also promises a certain completeness of perspective and detailing. The present picnic includes those garbage cans behind the bushes and the proverbial ants on the blanket which the past idyll has simply occulted. If the present is defined by the immediate presence of appearances and their passages, ·we should speak of the now not as an ever-new moment, but rather as the unvarying condition of being and having a present. This nr :s I ,' 94 SUMMER 1983 �our ability to be in and with the world. That ever-other, ever-same now of the time-flow which is thought of as be· ing at once the leading edge of time and also the cut be· tween past and future arises when we stop the passages of appearance to take notice of our relation to their passing. The present becomes a flux-now when reflection brings the world up short-the now arises from self-interruption. This is the now which our mathematical reason is com· pelled to whittle down to an unextended ·point. Percep· tion, on the other hand, insists on its elongation. From this conflict arises the bastard notion of the "specious present": When we consciously represent our time· consciousness, we do it by means of a line which underlies a set of dimensionless points, while we observe that our actual perceived present is an extended "space" of time, composed of a braid of retentions of just-passed passages. (That the actual present "takes time" accords with com· mon experiences, for example the curious exchanges of present and past at the moment of receiving sudden bad news; the shocked consciousness oscillates for a while between the apprised now of the present and the yet unsus· pecting now of the immediate past.) In sum, when left to its own devices, the present is not now but always, or better: It is always the present. This ever-present present acts nonetheless as a pivot between · the two other phases of time because through it come the images which stock the memory, although the memory it· self integrates and frames the scene. All that we have there by way of distinct forms came first through the senses. (Or perhaps not everything: Augustine regards the memory as a space furnished not only with likenesses of all the world, but also inhabited by imageless memories of intelligible objects. The question really comes to this: which domain is the larger, imagination or memory? All images, it seems to me, are at least in their elements memories, but Augus· tine must argue that some memories are not image-like, namely those belonging to intellectual learning. It seems to me a question not here soluble whether such learning is essentially memorial and I have therefore left it out of account.) In going on to the past, let me say something concerning the relation of flux-time and phase-time. Flux-time, cur· rent time, whose being independent of our attention to passage I am denying, is precisely not, and for just that rea· son has no power to bear off lapsed passages into nowhere, it flows not into the past but into oblivion. Instead, phasetime supervenes: As soon as passages are beyond percep· tion and out of sight, they come to a standstill, so to speak; they are laid away and accumulate as the permanent stock of the memory-imagination, available for recovery, and the more readily available the more we cared at the time. The hidden work of their consignment to this. permanent mode, called "consolidation," seems to demand the inter· vention of other passages, that is, it seems to take some time, apparently for physiological reasons. Consequently the recent past is often inchoate compared to more re· Tiffi ST. JOHNS REVIEW mote events, especially if it has been a monotony of mi· nute differences. What, then, accounts for the being of past passages, for a passing that has ceased to pass? . b. The Past The past is the work of the imagination proper. Had we no such power we would have no past-there would be no past. It is what Kant calls the "reproductive" imagination. It makes a world of re-presentations, of secondary occur· rences, which are distinguished from perceptions first of all in this: We move and have our place within the world of perception, but the world of the imagination is felt to take place within us. (Though there ·are memories which approach the sense of presence of a perception; they are usually triggered by one of the two contact senses, smell and touch, whose deliverances, as it happens, are also hardest to make into memory-images.) Aristotle thinks that we sense time, and therefore that the imagination, which holds memories, also holds their times. The difficulties of this view seem to me insuperable. (See Sec. II 3). For first, it is hard to conceive what such a time storage might mean. Does it mean that to reach a memory we must recount the time back to it, so that to remember a childhood scene we must reproduce the intervening decades? That would make remembering in principle impossible, because while we were working our way bade into memory, the present would carry us for· ward at a clip equal but opposite. Does it mean that we have, as Aristotle claims, an internal time-scaling capacity, a kind of speeding up of the inner temporal flux with an index of its ratio to the actual time? Not only is there, L have argued, no such flux, but pure time (as distinct from · its count) is, unlike space, incapable of proportionality because its stretches cannot be compared to each other by congruence. Precisely that mysterious property of the memory-imagination which makes it capable of containing the world, namely that its spaces can, so to speak, contin· ually be rescaled, that very property makes it incapable of containing the world's time, which cannot be scaled. Besides, the phenomena of memory are all against a temporally flowing memory medium. Memory is notori· ously discrete. The forgettable, a mere temporal stretch· ing, is forgotten. Memory-images float up or flash on in isolation, and time is remembered, if at all, not by being condensed but by being excerpted. At any rate, although the physiological basis for recalling every instance of our life may exist, it would not only be impossible in principle, as I argued above, to recover the continuum of our life· time, but it would be in practice a waste of oilr present to try _o recover even parts of our past temporally; Indeed, I t thinr - is plain impossible to rememb~r the passage of it time through time. . . Consequently, the time-keeping performance of memory is, in fact, quite unreliable. BetWeen the first and the 95 �final instance of a daily routine we merge the recurrent events into one schema; it is that summary foreshortening of an orderly life which is the source of so much distress and so much comfort. We lose days from our calendar, but we also multiply moments and think that we did often and long what we did skimpily and briefly-exercises, for instance. The shades of the remembered dead are nearer than the persons of the unregarded living, and in old age our childhood is closer than our middle age. By the public clock our unchecked memories can be relied on neither for the length or the continuity or the unperturbed succession of time. How then do we through memory constitute our past? Primarily the past is, I think, a series of timeless scenes, obtained by eyewitness or borrowed, acquired immediately by our own perception or through material images, for instance, pictures of historical events. These inner, immaterial sights, animated perhaps by unheard sounds, are marked as memory-images by our awareness that they are of a once present perceived passage, which has done what passages do-gone by. That is why memories, unless we deliberately mobilize them by passing them before our inner vision, have a certain immobility. What T. S. Eliot says of history holds a fortiori for memory: It is "a pattern of timeless moments." We remember not the coming and going of a motion but a representative frame-it might be called its configural gist, something like in feeling to pictorial representation of motion by means of flow lines. Memory-images do possess, secondarily, succession, and duration, which are therefore characteristics of the past. Memories have succession because passages leave various, usually discrete, traces, which we retain in their context. Certainly not every memory is well and accurately fixed, and its relations are subject to outside correction by those who have better recorded, more coherent, memories. But by and large memories lead into each other or hang together. It is this context character which makes recollection possible. Aristotle in On Memory and Recollection dis· tinguishes between this methodical recovery of a memory and remembering itself, which is conspicuously capricious, illuminating and occluding scenes uncontrollably. Remembering seems to be dependerit on fortuitous associative triggers (once much studied by Humean psychologists); the most famous literary example of such a memory trigger is Proust's taste of a tea cake dipped in a tisane which retrieves for him the bliss of childhood. The second temporal effect of memory is that of duration, which it achieves by means, so to speak, of its thickness, its lamination. This way of marking a long or a short time is, of course, highly deceptive by ·the clock, sincethis is the time theme of The Magic Mountain-full and eventful but fast passages leave thickly layered images, while passages long drawn out but eventless leave only sparse scenes. Of course, the order and the measure of memory time is subject to correction by correlation with external clock movements and with others' memories. But 96 the pacing of the original past, our past, can be made e ) ble only by extrapolation and abstraction, since itis constituted in the most inhomogeneous of spaces, our imagina· tion. (I want to add that the reason certain animals show very precisely paced behavior seems to be not that they have, any more than we do, an original sense of time but that they are themselves clocks.) The memory-imagination, then, is what is alone respon· sible for the past, for the past as a whole is what is poten· tially remembered, what the soul has noticed and could recall. The memory-imagination is where the world's passages find permanence and whence the present can learn of its own perpetuity; through the memory, space can testify to time. But even if space were devastated, if the accumated treasury of civilization were annihilated, if the present were a void-as long as human memory survived the past would exist. It should be clear that to say that the past is our doing by no means implies that it is our invention, to be manipu· lated for pleasant or pernicious ends. What is our doing is that there is a past, not what is past. The above-mentioned intentional ch3racter of the memory makes that distinction possible. A memory-image intends that thing or event o; which it is the memory. What our memorial capacity con tains is in one sense something of our own, namely insofar as it is simply a memory, but in another sense it belongs to the object remembered, namely insofar as it is a memory of the object. This double-sided character of memo,.... '--.is just what makes possible-and therefore obligatory )e effort to remember truthfully, an effort which feels, at least, like trying to pass through the memory to its intended object. Something similar holds for that reconstitu· tion of public memory called history. Historical truthfulness seems to me to consist of scrupulously using · the evidence to construct a history-image which is compellingly of something, namely of the way it was. An analogous effort, finally, seems to play a part even in poetry, for memory is said to be the mother of the Muses. Before I conclude by arguing that the past is the most humanly defining and consequential of the three phases of time, let me dispose of the future. c. The Future The future is said to come toward us, and we are sup· posed to face it. This seems to me to be a misleading figure of speech. Wherever we face, we confront the present, and nothing is coming at us or by us but that. The future, I say, is entirely derivative from the past. Huss.erl describes it formally as the inverse of memory. The future is that mode of the memory in which the image anticipates a perception, whereas in the past it follows. The future is projected memory. How is" that meant? ·There are, it seems to me, at least four ways to think of the future. The first defines the future as the realm r r -in. ) SUMMER 198.l �tingency. On the hypothesis that there "are" indeterminate events, the. future is that part of the world about which it is in principle impossible to make true-or-false statements. This is the future understood in terms of the use, in the present, of the future tense. (If, however, the future is supposed to be predetermined, that is to say, if all passages have an absolutely tight nexus, then future and past are indistinguishable: It is in principle possible to · make true statements about either and in fact extremely difficult.) The second way is that the future is an imageless, calculated projection of present trends, a way as necessary as it is fatal to bureaucratic planning; this future is the present elongated according to rules of conjecture. The third is the "futuristic" future. Its imagery bears the marks of a forced attempt to represent the never-yet-seen, the absolutely novel. This future, which comes out of a wilful subversion of the past, is usually antiseptically inhuman and terrifyingly technical. {Note, for example, that recent futuristic space movies, like Star Wars and Star Trek, tend to be humanly hollow and visually weird, while space movies in a contemporary setting like Close Encounters, E.T., and the Superman series are suffused with nostalgically homey, lovingly comic, all-American romance.) All these futures are, of course, present thoughts and images marked, as it were, with a future index. I cannot even conceive what it might mean literally to think future things, that is, to be with one's thoughts in the future. There is a fourth future, our lived human future. It is the projected past, and thus also the past as a project. This future is always a possible image_.:_not an image of possibilities, for that is an impossibly indeterminate notion; nor a formulation of possibilities, for that is merely a logical exercise; nor even a prospectus of possible images, for that is conjecture and contingency planning. The actual future with which we live is a settled envisioning of a scene we deem the world capable of harboring. Such a scene always comes from memory, not only because without memory there is no experience with which to judge what visions are capable of realization, but also because memory is the space in which diverse perceptions are first transformed into coherent patterns. For it is from memory-images that we shape our aim-images. Indeed, Bergson claims that memory is primarily action-oriented, though that "to call up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream." However, I hope to show that memory has even deeper work than future-dreaming. Such memory-projections may come to nothing and return to memory, closed out and abandoned: Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. T. S. Eliot "Burnt Norton", I llfE ST. JOHNS REVIEW But if they are held desirously and vividly enough, they immediately go over into projects: Every real action in the world, no matter how modest, has as its formal and its final cause an image, and those acticms are most felicitous whose projected image is at home in a Colden Age. A small but apt example is the making of a garden-every garden is conceived as a comer in the Garden of Eden, though its beginning be with the loan of a pickaxe. (I might add here that it is a blessing for us that every terrestrial paradise requires continual maintenance or we would fall into the taunting melancholy of the completely fulfilled imagination.) One more observation about a projected image which seems to be kind of a limit of our living future and which concerns the one event sure of realization, our death. We come on our death, it seems to me, in various ways, for example, as a shapeless terror before an unimaginable termination or as an imagined scene in which we are called on to play a leading role. That ultimate image will be and ought to be the occasional subject of meditation. But why should we, as Heidegger demands, face resolutely, at every moment, the fact of our own death, understood as the possibility of our not-being, in order for our existence to be authentic? That death is the end of our being is a mere surmise, and it is an open question whether the imagination, which like Dante's journeys in the middle of this life to bring back visions of the next, is delivering phantasies or memories. Be that as it may, the aspect of the great futural fact of our death which is most effective in life seems to me to be that notorious gift of Prometheus, namely our blindness concerning its exact date, and that is how our end governs our future. For death has us on an elastic tether, with give enough, we may always hope, for. the well-paced play necessary to the perfection of any project, .and with tautness enough to snap us eventually back from diversion to work. Before proceeding to the past, I want to forestall an objection which might be raised-that in considering the future as projected past I am attributing the order of my awareness to the order of worldly becoming, with the antic result that things receive their futurity from my projection, for instance that an old place to which I now first envision visiting is therefore a place of the future. But it is not the sequence of knowing and being that, as I argue, makes the future, but my present apprehension of a sequence of modes of awareness: I call future what I expect to perceive. This view, to be sure, detracts from the pathos of futurity, from both its inexhorableness and its contingency and implies precisely that there is no future-being. Indeed such being is an unintelligible notion, for what will be is not. By being in the future can be meant no more than this: that the image is posited as coming before the perception, where "before'' is not a temporal relation at all, for the "coming before" is now; it is in my present "expectation''.. To give the future no beinB is, however,.not to deny that 97 �"shall" and "will" have a strongly effective meaning. To resolve that "it shall be" is now to recover in the imagina· tion an image-appearance, perhaps to modify it, and to will to bring it to perception by the proper action. When the perception becomes actual it is future no longer but present. To prognosticate that "it will be" is now to antici· pate an external appearance and to have well-grounded ex· pectation for perceiving it. We are warranted in such an· ticipations because the passages of the world usually show a certain symmetry about the pivotal present, a symmetry we establish by attending to each memory specifically as a by-gone present. The shape of ordinary passages, we then conclude, is distorted very slowly about the perceived present. In fact, most passages which are important to us are either cyclical or monotonic, and therefore continu· ously predictable. There are, or course, moments of crisis, catastrophic discontinuities which teach us that every "logic of becoming" so far discovered is unreliable. But it stands to reason that were the variations of appearance ei· ther totally monotonous or totally multifarious, we would have no sense of a coherent future at all. What room, one might ask, does this view of the lived future as projected past leave for newness? The present is in a superficial sense always novel, because no matter how accurately it was foreseen or how effectively it was planned, the world's passages will bring out in us and will bring before us the unexpected and the adventitfous. The question really concerns a deeper newness: not whether human beings can put into the world what has merely never been before, but whether they can establish a well· founded new way, a novus ordo seclorum. The vision behind such an epoch cannot help but come from the imagi· nation. (I leave out the element of thought because it is so doubtful that thought is rooted in the phases of time at all.) The imagination finds the materials for such a vision in the storehouse of memory, but its affective shaping seems to come from the power of phantasy. Now both aspects of the imagination, memory and phantasy, are past-oriented. The memory is the very source of the past, while phantasy characteristically works-as a matter of observation-in the mode of "once upon a time," of primeval, ancient pat· terns. Therefore genuinely imagined new beginnings, as distinct from those that are light-headedly contrived, usu· ally take the form of a rectification, renewal, rebirth-in sum, of a return to "that time" (illo tempore) which is to be recovered in a new paradise, a new Colden Age, a New Jerusalem. d. The Past as Paramount Phase Memory-image and phantasy-image, the image arising from perception and the image made in the imagination, are distinguished from each other by certain marks. The intentionality of memory is that of being of an original per· ception of which it is precisely the memory. A phantasy· image lays no claim to being the memory of a once-pres scene except in play, in the well-circumscribed space, whose proper phase, I have claimed, is the past, of "once upon a time." (This distinction between the reality claims of phantasy and memory can, of course, be confounded in very fascinating ways.) Consequently memories have a fairly fixed temporal context, while phantasy and fairy tales take place in a floating time frame. But in certain fundamental characteristics, memory and phantasy are the same: Both are representations without the material presence of the world and subject to the same transmutations that such absence sanctions. With that deep bond between the realm of phantasy and of the past in mind, let me now enumerate reasons why the past, constituted in memory, is the humanly preponderant of the three phases of time. First, the past is, of necessity, thicker in texture and longer in extent and therefore weightier for us than our immediate present. For while we have indeed always a present, not everything that we have is always present. Why then should we be willing, having put ourselves to the trouble of living, to lose our life to oblivion? Even more, the past contains not only all our own accomplished passages but is indefinitely extended by the memories we absorb from the common store, from that derivative mem· ory called history. The past can be an ever-widening pan· . orama, so capaeious and so Vivid that it may sometimes seem as if it were, after all, not within us but as if we wan~ dered in it, as in our own interior space. That is h ·.) Augustine speaks of it: I come into the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images drawn from things of whatever sort by the senses . ... And yet do not the things themselves enter the memory; only the images per· ceived by the senses are ready there at hand ... . For there I have in readiness the heaven, the earth, the sea, and whatever I could perceive in them. [X 8) Whether we think of our memory-past as an increasing freight or a widening space, it must inform our life in action and conversation. The past is present as those se· lect memories which the present has called up to comfort, goad, or illuminate it. From these memories are distilled not only the projects of the future but that experience which enables us to envision the transformation a project will undergo in the course of realization and its unintended consequences: most unsound judgement is, after all, a failure of the latter aspect of the projective imagination. Besides being the source of experience, memory-past has secondly a clarifying and shaping power. It is often said that the present is fact, the future possibility, and the past is necessity; Presence may be called bald fact, though what the fact is, is rarely known in the present, Tue future may be thought as possibility, but it is lived as a vivid picture. . And the past may be in certain gross features unalterable, but the inner sense of passages is revealed as memory P" / 98 SUMMER 1983 �gressively revives and reviews them; just as in space proxi· mate objects are invisible until we have gained perspective on them through distance. So if the past is the necessary, meaning that of which memory cannot be otherwise (for we cannot say that past things are necessary, since they are not at all, being gone), it is so first of all insofar as it has been laid to rest, as when we say, "let bygones be by· gones." Indeed it is yet another power of memory, to for· get the best-forgotten, and the price for not exercising it is the paralyzing repetition of a worn-out present. (I do not mean that we can expunge the brute fact but that we can deprive it of its effectiveness. The religious term for that effort, when it concerns our own deeds, is "repentance," which "seeks to annul an actuality," Kierkegaard, Philo· sophical Fragments, "Interlude 3, The Past.") And sec· ondly, the past is necessary as far as the grossly designat· able events and their calendar dates are concerned: for example I believe it was Clemenceau who observed concerning the shifting interpretations of the Great War, that whatever is said, no one will ever claim that on August 4, 1914, Belgium invaded Germany. With respect to such brute facts, memory merely records. But for most past passages, memory, when it is called upon, shows itself to have been active. It has purified the once-present of its obscuring passions and clarified its pat· terns. It is this shaped and rectified past which most strongly colors and directs the present. It is what the poet means when he speaks of Time which takes away And taking leaves all things in their right place An image of forever One and whole. Edwin Muir, "I have been taught" It is our frequent experience that we do not realize what is going on before our eyes, that the present is shapeless and imperfect, that appearances must reappear in mem· ory to show what they were meant to be. What is ongoing has presence merely, but what is past shows its essence. Third, the panoramic, projective, and purgative capacities of the memory-imagination make it the great propaedeutic power for philosophy. For example, out of its store are fashioned those cosmic visions which complete the ar· guments of reason, as do the myths in the Platonic dialogues. Again as the room which holds the world without its material presence, it provides the field of a first encounter with immaterial form. And further, because of its recti· fying, schematizing, canonizing tendency, the memory acquaints us with ideality, whether in the schemata of geometry or in the types of excellence. Finally, the mem· ory is a training ground for philosophizing, because concentratedly pursued remembering, or recollection, has features analogous to searching thought. Fourth and last, the memory-past has a power of trans· figuration, of enchantment. Its force is such that those un· der its spell may melt with nostalgia even for hell on earth. THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW In this mode memory saturates with feeling what it has purged of passion. Now its scenes float up fragrant with an illumination of inexpressibly familiar mystery and its set· tings are suffused by an enigmatically musical aura. Proust describes these atmospheric colorations as turning the memory-world into a hieroglyphic of happiness whose de· cipherment is an enthrallingly exigent task. Proust is both the painstalcing initiate and the exploiting connoisseur of the magic of memory. His acute temporal sensibility presents him with an absorbing problem: He has discovered that on the one hand, "the true paradises are the paradises we have lost," while on the other, only the immediacy of perception can add the last perfection, that of real existence, to these paradisical memories. He finds that he can su<:eeed in his search for Jost time only when a sensory trigger perceived in the present, and iden· tica) with so.me element of the past such-as that taste of the teacake, revivifies his memory. Then past and present become one and the past is literally relived. This fusion of temporal phases he calls "pure time." There is something fascinating and something repellent in Proust's self-immured pursuit of the past not as a tem· plate for the future but as means to momentary bliss. What he describes is, as it happens, the most magical of temporal experiences-when the past lies upon the prese.nt as a luminous-transparency,or behind it like a vibrant backdrop, or within it like animating music. In spite of, or better, precisely for the sake of, the magic, it seems to me sounder not to importune the past for golden moments but to let them come as they will, and when they come to let them do their proper work, which is not only to bring delight but also to be the source of ardour for a worldly project. So profiting by Proust's case, we should probably avoid . too direct a preoccupation with our paradise-producing power. Otherwise much more might be said, particularly about its dose relation to music. For music is the most memorial of arts. It occurs only min"imally in the present and · the whole burden of its being is on memory, since the apprehension of a musical whole depends on retention, as Husserl has named the quasi-perception of passages just now past, while the recognition of its intention depends on the memory of alJ the music heard before. But mosl to my point here, music is the art which best aids and intensi· fies the significance-producing function of our memoryimagination because, as can no other art, it suffuses space with feeling and vivifies it with intimations of schemata of the body which stand for gestures of the souJ.36 But of such musings there is no end. • • • ·To conclude: The soundness and the fuJness of our existence seems· to me to begin with a right" relation to the three phases of time. Of these the present with its passions is loud enough in its own behalf, and when it is dimmed it 99 �is very often because of our improvident preoccupation with the future. Here I have brought forward the past and its images not only because it is the forgotten phase of our time,3 7 but because I really think that it has the dignity I have ascribed to it: It is the depth of the present and the shape of the future. The wholeness of life and half of its happiness comesand its coming depends on good fortune and work, and above all, on single-minded desire-when the present world is perceived against a deep, luminous background of memory, which is at once also a prospect into the future and a project. That temporal whole (it cannot rightly be · called a present and I have no name for it) will sometimes-not often-submit itself to thought and invite contemplation. That is, I think, the complement of temporal completeness and a consummation of human happiness. Let my witness be, one last time, Aristotle, speaking of that human being-perhaps a little beyond our meanswho will be the best friend and live the happiest life (Nie. Eth. IX, on friendship, 1166 a 14 ff.): He is in harmony with himself and has the same desires throughout his whole soul ... Such a one wants to be in his own company since he makes it pleasant for himself. For he has delightful memories of what he has done and good hopes for what is to come, and finally, his mind abounds in objects of contemplation. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1787) B 46- . ' "Transcendental Aesthetic: Of Time"; A 98-110: the three syntheses; B 150-159: "Of the Application of the Categories to the Objects of the Senses in General"; B 176-187: "Of the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding"; B 274-279: "Refutation of Idealism"; B 399-432; A 341-405: "Of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason." II. SUPPORTING ThxTS, STUDIES, COMMENTARIES Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (1916-1918), London 1920, Bk. I, i-iv. Staffan Bersten, Time and Eternity, A Study in the Structure and Symbolism of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, New York 1973, III iii. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, English version of An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), F. L. Pogso!'l, trans., New York 1960, Ch. II and Conclusion. Otto F. Bollnow, Das Wesen der Stimmungen, Frankfurt a.M. 1968, Chps. IV, XII. Santa Fe, Summer 1982 Albert Einstein, and others, "On the Electrodynamic-. Moving Bodies" (1905), The Principle of Relativity Dover 1952, par. 1 BIBLIOGRAPHY I. MAIN TExrs Aristotle, Physics IV 10-14 (time); III 1-3 (motion); VIII (primary motion); On Memory and Recollection I (phases of time); On Coming to Be and Passing Away II 10-11 (cyclical time). Also: Metaphysics IX, XII; On the Soul III; Posterior Analytics II 12; On Interpretation 9. (4th cent. B.C.). Augustine, Confessions (c. 400 A.D.) X 8-26 (memory); XI 10-31 (time). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans., New York 1962, First Part, Second Section, paras. 65, 68-69, 79-82. · Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal TimeConsciousness (1905), Martin Heidegger, ed~. James S. Churchill, trans., Bloomington 1964, Sec. II "The Analysis of Time-Consciousness"; III "The Levels of Constitution of Time and Temporal Objects." 100 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (1957), P. Mairet, trans., New York 1975, Ch. I: "The Myths of the Modem World." J. N. Findlay, "Time: A Treatment of Some Puzzles," Logic and LAnguage, Garden City 1965, pp. 40-59. Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," New York 1970. James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Boston 1966. John G. Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time, Middletown 1968, Conclusion. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia: Philosophy of Nature (1827) paras. 257-260; Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), Preface. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysic (1934), James S. Churchill, trans., Bloomington 1962 Logik (1925-26), Gesammtausgabe, Bd. 21, FranV a.M. 1976, Sec. C. SUMMER 198 �William James, Psychology, Ch. XVII: "The Sense of Time." G. W. Leibniz, "Reply to Bayle's Reflections on the System of Preestablished Harmony" (1702); Third and Sev· enth Letter to Clarke (1716). Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927), Boston 1957. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Bk. II 14-15. Phenomenology of Memory, The Third Lexington Confer· ence on Pure and Applied Phenomenology, E. W. Straus and R M. Griffith, eds ..t. Pittsburgh 1970. The Problem of Time, Berkeley 1935. The Study of Time, Proceedings of the First Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time, Vol. I, 1969, Springer 1972, and subsequent volumes. Time and its Mysteries, New York 1962. The Voices of Time, J. T. Frazer, ed., New York 1966. . Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924, begun 1912), Ch. 4, 2;.~'Introduction to The Magic Mountain," Princeton Lecture (1939), (Preface to Fisher edition, 1950). IV. TIME IN SCIENCE M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Colin Smith, trans., London 1962, Part III 2. Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928), London 1947, Chps. III-IV. Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philoso· phy (16871 Scholium to the Definitions. Adolf Gri.Ienbaum, Philosophical Problems of Space cind Time, Boston 1973, Chps. 8-9, 12. Plato, Timaeus 37-39. Hans Reichenbach, The Philosophy of Space and Time (1927), New York 1958, Chps. II, III. Plotinus, Ennead III 7 (3rd cent. A.O.): Plotin ueber Ewigkeit and Zeit, Werner Beierwaltes, trans. and ed., Frankfurt a.M. 1967. G. J. Whitrow, The Naturcil Philosophy of Time, New York 1963. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1926), Time Retrieved Ch. 3. W. 0. Ross, Aristotle's Physics, Text, Introduction, Com· mentciry, Oxford 1955. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), Pt. II 2-3. Most of the collections contain articles on time in sci· ence. In particular, Voices of Time: H. Dingle, "Time in Relativity Theory: Measurement or Coordinate?", p. 455 ff.; 0. C. de Beauregard, "Time in Relativity Theory: Ar· guments for a Philosophy of Being," p. 417 ff.; M. Capek, "Time in Relativity Theory: Arguments for a Philosophy of Becoming," p. 434 ff.; R. Schlegel, "Time and Thermo· dynamics," p. 500 ff. Charles M. Sherover, Heidegger, Kant, and Time, Bloomington 1971. Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, H. Oiels, ed., Berlin 1895, pp. 829-832. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nciture (1920), Ann Arbor 1957, Ch. III. Eviator Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms, Schedules and Calendars in Socicil Life, Chicago 1981. III. COLLECTI_ ONS ) Bcisic Issues in the Philosophy of Time, E. Freeman and W. Sellars, eds., LaSalle 1971. 1liE ST. JOHNS REVIEW 1. A supporting curiosity: the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations reveals a 24: I ratio of time to space sayings. (Study of Time I; p. 313~ 2. Merleau-Ponty (p. 41 l)presents an analysis of the pu~e. If time were like a river it would indeed appear, on its own, to flow from the past into the future, namely from the source toward the distant mouth, in the di· rection a twig floats. But a river unobserved really has no events or tern· poral direction, for these require ari onlooker's perspective: "Time pre· supposes a view of time." So no unwatched river can represent time. Now introduce an observer, and the "motion" of time is straightaway reversed: The waters flow from the source at the observer and pass him, so that time comes toward him as he expects it and passes out of sight, that is, it flows from future to past. 3. Findlay, p. 41 4. Newton distinguishes "absolute, true, and mathematical time," which is a condition of motion, from relative or apparent time, which is the common time measured by motion. His physical motive for positing absolute time appears to be his belief that rotary motion is absolute, an as· sumption criticized by Leibniz in De Motu. Leibniz speaks of mathematical time as "ideal." It is nothing in itself 101 �but an idea in the mind of God (Seventh Letter to Cfurke). namely that of the order of mutually inconsistent possibilities (as space is the order of possible coexistences); it expresses the order-relations of phenomena which cannot be simultaneous but are connected-note well, the relations of phenomena, not of the substances themselves. His chief reason for objecting to absolute time is the principle that contingent truths, i.e., truths of fact, must have a sufficient reason. Now if time were absolute and instants existed in themselves, one might reasonably ask why God did not create the world a year sooner, and claim that by choosing this particular beginning he acted without reason, arbitrarily. But if time is a mere relation of phenomena, the world made a year sooner is in every respect indiscemibly different from the later world, and the question is obviated (Third Letter to Clarke~ Augustine partly anticipates this argument: If any giddy brain should ask why God forbore creating the world for innumerable ages, the answer is, Cod does not in time precede time (XI 13). Time arises simultaneously with the creation, or better, with the creature. See Sec~ lll. 5. Of course, physically speaking, to ignore the finiteness of the speed of light reduces relative to classical kinematics. 6. Alexander's work, Space, Time and Deity, a very large book of lectures given from 1916-1918, has as its beginning thesis the interdependence of space and time: "There is not an instant in time without a position in space and no point of space without an instant of time." (1, p. 48). Although Alexander had read of relativity theory, his treatment, which is purely philosophical, is quite independently conceived. 7. Wyndham Lewis interprets the preoccupation with time in all departments of human activity as a romantic reaction; he understands by romanticism a fluid, indeterminate, sensation-seeking, sophisticated rebellion against distinctly formed reality (Ch. 1). 8. Phenomenology, Preface, par. 45 (Miller, trans.). In the passage Hegel draws attention to the fact that there is no temporal counterpart to geometry. Space is the existence into which the Concept writes its distinctions as into an empty, dead element. Time, on the other hand, is the pure unrest of life, absolute differentiation and negativity. 9. See "Chronos," Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopaedie. Cronos, the father of Zeus who devoured and later disgorged his own children, was sometimes identified with Chronos, Time. 10. Simplicius is right when he shows at length that time does not move, but mistaken when he gives that as the reason why Aristotle does not include time among the categories in which motion occurs (on Phys. 225 b ;). Aristotle does in fact include the category of "how much" or quan· tity, in which time, as it happens, belongs. \\'hat he omits is "when,'' which is the category not of time but of timing-of which more below. 11 . Aristotle discusses his analogue to space, i.e.. "void" just before motion (213 b ff.). He regards its pure infinite dimensionality as a physical absurdity in which all motion becomes impossible for lack of any natural direction toward a place. For Aristotle things are contained in demarcated places, not spread out over a continuous substrate of infinite extension. 12. When Timaeus-not Socrates-tells how time arose, simultaneously ~ith the heavens, as a moved image of "eternity" (a-ion, the un-going), a "likeness of the ungoing, going according to number," he is giving the m)·thological anticedent of Aristotle's treatment of time in terms of the number of motion and of the heavenly motion as providing the measures of time. 13. The logical possibility of such necessary cycles is given in Post. An. (II 12). Those cycles of becoming are non-contingent whose events imply each other. Aristotle's cyclicality is indeed a forerunner of Nietzsche's "Eternal Return:" "That everything returns is the most extreme approach of a world of becoming to a world of being: Summit of the inquiry" (Will to Power, no. 617). In the Eternal Return the impossible is accomplishedto be in the same now twice and so to be causa sui (if causation is temporal). Consequently every moment is, so to speak, a discrete eternity. composed of all the previous identical moments, and the future comes at the now out of the past. The difference from Aristotle's theory is that this cycle is not conceived as an approach to God and has no final cause be· yond itself, but is intrinsically necessitated. In the Statesman (269 ff.) Plato lets the Eleatic Stranger tell of a yet 102 more curious cyclical sequence. It is a time-fable playing on the possib. ties of time reversal In the primary age Cronos, i.e., Time (see Note 9). takes the tiller of the world. Human beings spring grey-haired from the earth and grow into childhood, fruit ripens without culture; animals are tame and human beings understand their language; there are no families and no cities. In our present age the god has let go and the world uo~inds itself. We are no longer the wards of the god, but are hurnanJy generated, meagre, and exposed. Prometheus and Athena have given us arts and wisdom to make this life bearable. The Stranger declines to decide which age is happier since he does not know what was the disposition of the Cronians with respect to knowledge and philosophy. The fable means that the era of human independence is more diverse and more difficult than the cycle guided by the god and that its temporality is, as it were, fallen and inverted since the phases of imperfection are prior to the states of perfection. Yet the fable also implies that in the Cronian age philoso. phy may be an unwanted superfluity, while in the human age it .is an ineradicable need. A story of immense cycles, repeated through an "infinity" of time, a serial sequence of development and destruction in human affairs is told by the Athenian in lAws (676 ff.) 14. For a fine exposition of Aristotle's definition of motion"See Joe Sachs, "Aristotle's Definition of '.\lotion," The College, Jan. 1976, pp. 12-18. 15. Gunnell, p. 232 16. I use the term perception to distinguish the work of the facultv of sensation from that of the sense organs. As Aristotle does implicitly, so Whitehead explicitly distinguishes between the point-now which he calls "moment" and thr. duration yielded by sense perception. The "moment" is defined in terms of "abstractive sets" of duration. An abstracfo"e set is all the nested durations converging to the same limit, and a moment is defined as the class of all such sets converging to the same limit, each set being a different "route of approximation" to the same moment (pp. 5762). 17. The relation between time and eternity is similarly quasi-contemporaneous; in distinction from the temporality of human thought, div· thought is the same with itself through the "whole" of eternity (Met. L a 11). The scholiast on Nie. Eth. 1174 b 9 wrongly but understandably speaks of the now as an "atom of time," that is, a minimal of time, a moment. This is a notion Aristotle takes pains to reject (Phys. 220 a 27), though he does speak of the limiting point of a period of time as "indivisible" (223 b 34). 18. Aristotle refers to motion "in" the soul in the absence of sensation (Phys. 219 a 6). to -imagination and opinion as "a certain kind.of motion" (254 a 30). and to "changes" of mind (218 b 21). 19. Interestingly enough, such double consciousness is just what Husserl observes in that internal time flux which seems to him the basic temporal phenonmenon (par. 39): While we are conscious of the passing of a tern· poral object like a melody we are also conscious of the time flo,.- itself. 20. Taking his clue from Plato's Timaeus, the Neoplatonic Plotinus elaborates a grand ontological cosmology in which time plays a role quite the opposite from that in "Aristotle (Enneads Ill 7). The two relevant elements from the Timaeus are these: The cosmos is an image of being and the soul encompasses it. Time, says Plotinus, "fell out of eternity" (11, 7) because of an original flaw in the soul, a kind of grasping busyness which keeps the soul from abiding in self-sufficient quiet and causes it always to look to the next thing, to something beyond the present. For the soul is itself a variable and discursi\·e image of the intellect (Beierwaltes, p. 54). Hence it falls into a sort of motion, a kind of self-displacement. As it accomplishes a stretch of its journey, time is produced as an image of eternity. Speaking less metaphorically, the- soul "temporalizes" itself (echronesen, 11. 30), making time instead of eternity. Within time it produces the place of \·ariability, namely the sensible world as an image of eternity. Therefore the world, which moves within the soul, is, not altogether metaphorically, in · time and serves time. Time, in opposition to Aristotle, is not the number of motion but that in which and by which motion is possible (8; 9, -t). Since time comes from a lcind of greed for continual self-exceeding, iUs in its very essence futural; the soul looks ahead and draws the ft ·1 through the now, which by nature always goes out of itself, into the~ ) SUMMER 1983 �it is continually cancelling the now. This passage defines time: Time is the life (zoe) of the soul in a transitive motion from one life-phase (bios) to another ( 11, 44~ But as time is only an image of eternity, so temporal life · is merely homonymous with the eternal life of the intellect (l l, 49~ The time of the world soul and world time are the same, and since all souls are one, the same time also appears in each human soul (13, 67). The first question about time must be: Is it of the soul or of the world, is its source consciousness or reality? Plotinus' grand scheme, in making time the life of the soul and making the soul the animating generator of the world, collapses this distinction: It is precisely in being of the soul that time is in the world. 21. \Vhitrow, pp. 78 ff. 22. For example: that we can reach a memory, either randomly, by a "glancing ray," or systematically, by a process of attention (a distinction roughly the same as that made by Aristotle between remembering and recollecting, On Memory and Recollection II); that the clarity of a presentified object is distinguishable from the clarity of the presentification; :hat there are memories of memories, and also memories of objects we 'tave never perceived such as historical scenes; that every memory is fixed in an unalterable temporal environment even as it runs off from the ;>resent; that the perception of time and the time of perception corre;pond; that memory is distinguished from phantasy by a factor of"positmg," i.e., by being given a definite temporal position with respect to the ;>resent. ?3. I have omitted in this account that connecting of concepts called udging, which is required to complete experience (B 187 ff.). !4. Locke, for example, presents a theory of time in which there is suc:ession without an underlying flux. Our mind contains a "train of ideas," 1 succession of objects of thinking, from which we derive our idea of du:ation by reflection. Duration is "fleeting extension," the perpetually perishing part of succession (Essay II 14, I). The theory neatly takes a middle ground between Aristotle's psychic counting of external motion and Kant's original, undifferentiated inner flux. 25. Aristotle distinguishes, under somewhat shifting terminology, between thought or intellection (n6esis) which is the immediate apprehension of form, and discursive thinking (dianoia, e.g., Met. 1027 b 25). In a comparison with the Kantian faculties, pure intellect (nous) would be contrasted with the transcendental apperception or pure reason, human noesis with conceiving or understanding, and dianoia with judging. 26. In the original Transcendental Deduction (A 98-102) Kant distinguishes three phases of the unifying synthesis performed by the apperception and assigns to each a faculty: I. The synthesis of apprehension in intuition, an original taking-up into awareness and temporal ordering of the manifold of sensation. 2. A synthesis of reproduction in the imagination, an original associati:ig or connecting of representations of objects in their absence which makes remembering possible. 3. A synthesis of recognition in a concept, by which what is successively sensed and then remembered is recognized and united in one concept. On the face of it the distinctive temporal phase-if the syntheses are indeed to be temporally interpreted-would seem to be the past: cumulative apprehension, reproduction, re-cognition. Nonetheless Heidegger makes a fascinating case that Kant has implicitly prefigured his own account of the origin of all three phases in the future by showing that the syntheses correspond exactly to his three temporalizing ecstases of human existence: The apprehensive · synthesis corresponds to "originary presentification," the reproductive synthesis to "repetition" of what has been, and the synthesis of recognition to the "anticipation" of understanding (Kant and Metaphysics par. 33; Sherover, pp. 186 ff.; for Heidegger's reinterpretation of the imagination as understood in the Critique see Sherover, pp. 142, 150). 27. I. Plotinus anticipates Heidegger in the central notion of the selftemporalization of the soul, and in regarding the future as the essence of time (See Note 20~ ·· . Hegel's abstruse dialectical exposition of time in the Philosophy of Nature (paras. 257-260) is meticulously but critically interpreted by Heidegger (Logik, par. 20; Being and Time, par. 82 a). Its gist is as follows. In his dictum that "the truth of space is time," i.e., that space in being thought reveals itself as time, Hegel is opposing the commonsense apprehension of their disjunction. Space, for Hegel, is the indifferent mµtual z. THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW extemality of the manifold of points: "Space is punctuality." Each point in this manifold is a negation insofar as it discriminates a difference in space, although the point is not distinguishable from space. That is how space represents itself to us, to begin with. Now .w hen the point-space is subjected to thought, when it is not merely represented but actually conceived, that is to say, when its truth is brought out, the point, or rather each point, is determined. For thinking is determination, i.e., delimitation and distinction. So each point is distinguished from the manifold and set for itself: It is this point, not that point. Hence negativity, space, has in turn been negated. This negated negativity is the "truth" of space, namely the point conceived, and it is time. For in being so determined for itself, the point's indifference with respect to other points is cancelled; it steps out of its own indifferent condition, although it maintains its indifference to its neighbors. Thus it no longer lies in a paralyzed quietus of space but, so to spealc. gets a move on, rears itself up, outdoes.or succeeds itself: It becomes a now. And the successive determination of this now and that now, the continual negating of spatial negativity, that is time. '1n time the point has actuality," namely as no~. The.complementary positive concept of time is "intuited becoming," by which Hegel means the disappearance of specifo::ally experienced nows. Heidegger is critical of Hegel's understanding of time as the mere nowsequence of which his own work is a critique. (See Sec. V l~ He does note that time as negating negativity is formally identified by Hegel with subjectivity (self-Overcoming~ but he fails to mention at all in the Logik, what in Being and Time (omitting reference to the later lectures on the Phenomenology,) he discounts as a mere formality, namely that in the Philosophy of Spirit, which goes beyond the physical time of the Philosophy of Nature, this identification raises time to an all-encompassing stature: Time is the existent Spirit itself, the Spirit externalized. Here time is no longer a mere succession of nows; indeed, the notion that time is subjec· tivity is at least a way station to Heidegger's temporality as the ground of human existence. 3. Bergson gets short shrift (Logik, par. 21~ but he too anticipates Heidegger in certain elements: A first such anticipation is Bergson's emphasis on the essential temporality of human life which is in accord with his understanding of time as a vital, non-discrete, non-numerable qualitative and interpenetrative heterogeneity called "duration proper." A second is in Bergson's understanding of the origin of quantified, countable time as externalization, that is to say as a spatialization of true duration, brought about when consciousness introduces succession into the dead simultaneity of spatial phenomena. (Spatial phenomena, even when so modified have no vitality of their own; they only have an unaccountable property of presenting to consciousness change at successive moments.) But above all, Bergson precedes Heidegger in the notion of an externalized variant of life which is permitted to unfold in space outside rather than in time within, and iii which "we speak rather than think, we are enacted rather than ourselves act" (Essay, Conclusion). This externalization of time is surely an anticipation of "inauthenticity." 4. Because of the complex transformation of the meanings I merely· mention Kierkegaard's theological terms "repetition" and "the moment." (For Heidegger's acknowledgement of the latter see Being and Time II 4, n. iii.) 28. Plotinus, who has a way with words not unlike Heidegger's, uses the word dillstaris-distance-as a designation precisely of that quantitatively apprehensible succession of time through which its qualitative nature, the unity of its phases, is also displayed as the future continually passes into the present and the present into the past (Beierwaltes, p. 65). In the word ecstasis Heidegger expresses the denial of this diastatic or sequential unity; for him there is no temporal continuu.m since past ;md present both come directly from the future, though of course not through a temporal succession but through an ontologieal derivation. 29. Bollnow (Ch. IV) criticizes Heidegger's existential interjlretation of mood because it posits the "depressed" moods as exemplary and takes no account of the elevated moods. He seems to me to be right, because the understanding of "moodiness' (Stimmung} as a disclosure of "having been" is entirely derived from the mterpretation of anxiety as a being brought back to one's thrownness. But why should the other moOds be similarly grounded in the ecstasis of the past? 103 �30. Heidegger claims that the concept of this vulgar, infinite now-time which he has established is nothing but the existential-ontological interpretation of Aristotle's definition of time (par. 81~ This critique gives no weight to the fact that this countable continuum is for Aristotle only an aspect of motion undentood as the actualization of being and that its infinity and its now-present are precisely regarded as expressing the approach of becoming to being. to its eternity and its presentness. 31. The lack of an imaginative mode shows up especially in Heidegger's discussion of the relation of practice to theory (paras. 15, 69 a, b). Each has its own temporality, but that of the latter is entirely secondary to the former. Do.sein fmds itself always already involved in the world and bound into a context of instrumentality, of "equipment," which is "ready to hand" for use. Heidegger gives the example of a hammer: The less the hammer-thing is merely gaped at, the more Douin seizes hold of it in a primordial relation much more revealing of its being than any contemplation would be. Only later, usually when some deficiency is encountered in the tool, does that speculative stance arise, in which Dosein "presenti· fies" objects to itself as things independent of their use, so that they are merely "present at hand." Recall that the present is the least prestigious of the ecstases. Thus practice is a more primordial mode than contemplati Ve theory. The phenomena seem to me to be misobserved here. From the wideopen receptivity of a baby's eyes to the slow contemplative inspection which precedes any proper tool-using, every appearance of satisfying human activity seems to begin with imaginative viewing. 32. Whitrow, a very perspicacious writer on natural time, concludes that from the viewpoint of natural science time is real (pp. 288-290) on the grounds that the past is determinate, that the present is the moment of determination or becoming, and that the future is a mathematical con· struction subject to correction by observation. Then "time is the media· tor between the possible and the actual." However, I cannot see why this mediating power is called time, rather than, for instance, becoming or the passage of nature (See Sec. VI 2~ Whitrow himself names numerous writers among scientists who deny the reality of time, The general difficulty is that in most of these treatments time is either already defined so as to enter the discussion as real or that the issue of its reality is not even raised. Whitehead, on the other hand, is careful to refrain from using the word time for his "fundamental fact," the "passages of nature," which includes spatial as well as temporal transitions. The passing of a temporal duration is an "exhibition" of this passage of nature, which is also respon· sible for the uniqueness of each act of perception and for the terminus, · i.e., its object (pp. 54-5 5~ 33. The etymology of chr6nos is unfortunately obscure. Both Greek words for time are masculine, and so, naturally, are the representations. In English. time, perhaps under the influence of feminine German Zeit, is sometimes given female attributes: "the womb of time," "sluttish time" (Sormet 55~ though we also speak.of "Father Time." 104 34. A difficulty about making perceived motion precede time might seem to be raised by the well-known discovery in the physiology of perception that there are quanta of perception, i.e., minimal times, below which events remain unregistered or subliminal, and threshold speeds above which the individual position of a mobile cannot be discriminated and its path appears as a streak. These temporal effects might seem to imply that time underlies them and is their condition of possibility, were it not for the fact that this time is itself measured by micro-motions observable to artificially refined perception. 35. The literature concerning the imagination, physiological, psychologicaL and philosophical, in this century is enormous. Of the last the most interesting writings seem to me to be those of the phenomenologists. They take their departure from Husserl's Ideos (1913, especially par. Ill~ The fullest and most original treatment is Sartre's Imagination (1936). The chief and most absorbing questions about the imagination are: Is it a faculty? How can it hold sensory objects without a material substrate? Are images likenesses? Whence comes their special affectivity? What is spatiality such that we can have an inner space-consciousness? Why are images primarily spatial and visual? What is the relation of voluntary to involuntary memory-images? And above all, how is the imagination related to thought: as object, product, instigator? 36. For a lovely study of the dance types of music and how they convey bodily schemata which in tum express the soul, see Wye Jamison Allan· brook, "Dance, Gesture and The Marriage of Figaro," The College XXIV, no. l (April 1974~ pp. 13-21. 37. The past is not given priority, at least not by any philosophical writers on time that I know of. For Nietzsche it is the future with its possibilities that conditions the present, since out of it come all valuations, including the true as that which is destined to be. So also it is in the future that Heidegger grounds authentic human existence. However, for the most part some kind of present is favored. For example, Sartre transforms Heidegger's analysis so as to place the ontological present at the center. He understands it as the phase in which consciousness makes itsr · present to all non-conscious beings, thus originally uniting them as c present in a world (Being and Nothingness II I b). Hume gives primary place to the vivid presence of sense impressions, of which memory and imagination are but pale residues (Enquiry Il~ As for the ancients, Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, they honor an atemporal present, and of them Aristotle with the most authoritative explicitness: Speaking of the divine intellect he says (Met. 1072 b 14-18): Its way of life is lilce the best we have for a brief time. For that being is always in this state (which is impossible for us~ since its actuality is also a pleasure. And because of that, wakefulness, perception, intellection ~e most pleasant, and because of these, hopes and memories. This view of the phases of time as reflecting divine eternity is of course compatible with the claim that the past is primary in human life. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. 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Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1983-02 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/263">Audio recording (part one)</a><br /><a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/316">Audio recording (part two)</a> Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/57b75698a1fc9344d68a44c4dba01829.pdf 68b54b68294159bfb3c23e406c145907 PDF Text Text MENTAL IMAGERY (The College and Contemporary Cognitive Science) Eva Brann Homecoming Lecture September 1985 �Mental Imagery (The College and Contemporary Cognitive Science) Homecoming Lecture September 1985 I am very much alive to the fact that this is Homecoming weekend-homecoming not only for the alumni out also for me. I've been gone from St. John's far and long-- as far as Delaware and as long as a year . So I look on the place where I've spent exactly half my life as an astronaut in outer space looks on the very small planet which is home. That, together with the nature of tonight's subject prompts me to indulge in five minutes worth of looking backwards. When I came to the college well over a quarter century ago, I entered a fresh and heady world of learning, leaving behind what I felt, rather than understood, to be a hide-bound, dreary academia, the academia of the decade after the Second World War. The college, then only existent in Annapolis, was less than a third the size it is on this campus now, and it had a kind of guardian spirit, a philosopher king, as one might say (provided one said it with a smile), in Jacob Klein, th~ Dean. It was conveyed to me that he had described me as behaving like a fish in water, and that was just how I felt-- like one who was disporting herself in her element, to whom understanding came as she breathed. largely for the freshmen among you. I am recounting this For as it may for you, it turned out for me that one cannot glide along in freshman glory forever-- there followed the notorious sophomore slump bringing sophomore sobriety and with it a second beginning, the exchange of a weightless exhiliration for a betteranchored interest. One can't be forever tumbling about in one's element; �2 the time comes when the thronging intimations of truth have to be turned ·into precise questions and problem.s. the way: The program itself offered. twenty-eight hundred years' worth of commentary on fundamental questions, not excluding the question whether these are always the same or subtly or even cataclysmically different in different ages. So, like most of my colleagues at the college, I paid only very passing and largely aversive attention to the contemporary state of affairs. (I mean intellectual affairs since ignoring politics for very long is what a citizen does at her peril.) At the end of tonight's lecture I mean to make a principled argument for living in isolation from "current thinking", from vogues and trends, for long stretches of time. Nonetheless, a moment eventually came, and happily an opportunity too, for catching up. saying. the I simply felt a certain avidity to know what the world was I did a lot of reading, but of course I haven't begun to master matter~- no one could, anyhow. Yet I think I have certain inklings concerning at least one area and its associations which I'll come to in a minute. Let me, though, repeat to you in the largest and vaguest terms my first impressions: Our contemporaries have verve and sophistication. Quite a few of the best are, not to mince words, charming (or not so charming) smart-alecks. Their intellectual mode has explicitness, precision and often a kind of purity. All the possibilities which used to remain obtusely unconsidered in the mid-century have been articulated and worked over. The engine of invention has been producing faster and faster, and the mill of rational speech has been grinding finer and finer. I hear that there is a Chinese curse: "May you live in exciting times" and also a Greek counter-curse: "May you hear nothing new". Well, we're �'" 3 afflicted in the way of China and blessed in the way of Greece-- at least on the face of it. I want to claim right away that this condition of affairs can't help but draw in the college. It may and ought to affect the program in only a limited way, but I think it might put us in a new position vis-~-vis the intellectual world which I want to sketch out in a broad and somewhat undigested way later on. Consequently my lecture will have two parts, which I will call, with grand simplicity, Psychology and Philosophy, the first to set out what I learned this past year and the second to be a sort of coda of conclusions for us. So then: I. Psychology Again, I must begin with a bit of intellectual history, both personal and public. For a decade now my thoughts have circled about the theme of the imagination. In fact, I have collected so much stuff that my ideas are beginning to sink under its weight-- the time has come to carve out some conclusions. As for the theme itself, I have been drawn to it along several approaches-- and, as I've learned, when all roads lead to Rome, to Rome one must go. One of these approaches is bookish. The imagination plays the role of the missing mystery in a number of philosophical texts, by which I mean that a faculty by that name is given a central task while tts operation is left sanguinely unexplained.. depth of the human soul." As Kant says, it is: "a hidden art in the I might say here what is, broadly, meant by imagination in the philosophical sense: It is a faculty which presupposes that somehow or another two worlds of objects are present to us, one of �4 which St!ems to us to be outside, the other inside ourselves. The inner world, in turn, appears to consist of two realms, one of which, though lacking a certain feature of "thereness" which belongs to the external world, has at least one characteristic apparently and yet elusively in common with it: it is shaped and colored and, in short, space-like; the other realm is non-sensory and word-like. Philosophical texts have much to say on the role the imagination plays in cognition, that is, in knowing. Lately they have said quite a bit about the unintelligibility of imagining, but what has rarely been confronted head-on is the question: "How is such an ability possible?" And that is what intrigues me. Another approach is through politics. The imagination is a puzzle not only as a universal cognitive capability but also as a general human gift which may be abused either through hyperac.tivity or desuetude. I've become convinced that most political catastrophes are connected to a fault in imagination: the inability to imagine accurately the minute daily detail which any large vision might entail. So I became interested in what one might call "imaginative coherence", or the projective powers of the imagination. The third and last approach I'll mention is through the fact that the imagination is usually regarded as the source of made-up realms such as dreams and fictions. Since by my reckoning I spend about 62.5% of my day betwixt the one and the other of these, I wanted to learn something about the power that is behind these non-existent and all-important worlds. But tonight I haven't got much to say about that topic. In search of a clue to my theme I set about reading the shelves of the excellent research library at the University of Delaware where I am teaching. It turns out that there is a new and burgeoning science called �5 cognitive psychology and in it a fiercely embattled area called mental imagery. The title of tonight's lecture, "mental imagery", betokens the translation into the new science of the old mystery concerning inner, space-like representations ("re-presentations", as opposed to the original external presentation, though our juniors are about to learn that most philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century think that representations are all we have). The newness of the science that studies mental imagery is expressed in the fact that most of what I am about to _report to you was published within the last five years. its method: That it is indeed a science can be seen from It tortures nature, as Kant puts it, or teases out the facts, as psychologists like to say, by simple but clever experiments. the slippery and intrigu~ng As for business of turning a philosophical question into a scientific problem-- what changes the issue undergoes on the way and which endeavor ends up guiding which-- I hope to say something about that at the end. To introduce cognitive psychology and to explain its special interest in mental imagery, in what actually goes on when we see images before the mind's eye, I must one last time go backward to give you a thumbnail sketch-- written on a tiny thumb at that-- of the history of psychology. The state of psychology represented a considerable part of the afore-mentioned intellectual dreariness of the mid-century. In the half-century which lies between about 1910 and 1960 the discipline was dominated by two schools, a soft one and a hard one, so to speak. former was psychoanalysis. framework~- The Freud proposed as a provisional theoretical ultimately reduceable to biology-- a model or topography of the soul, in which the most extensive territory was assigned to the �6 unconscious, a pandemonium of anti-social passion, which a skillful analyst might nonetheless tease out into the open and render less harmful. Although its founder did not think of psychoanalysis as primarily therapeutic, it eventually became almost wholly the province of psychiatrists. The imagination played a role in psychoanalysis since the interpretation of dreams was thought to give access to the unconscious. However, the interest was in e~tablishing a symbolic interpretive vocabulary for therapeutic use, and that turned out to be scientifically soft, that is to say, not extensively amenable to verification. At the same time the imaginative agency that did the dream work, that turned the passions into symbolic representations, was not itself a central subject of study. images. The interest in their symbolism suppressed the interest in the (Freud also had a theory of the origin of imagining in infantile wish-fullfilment hallucinations.) The hard school was behaviorism. It was very much driven by what post-Freudian psychologists refer to as their irrepressible "physics envy". Its crude but forceful tenet was that to be a science, psychology must deal with what is verifiably observable. Therefore internal events, being ipso facto unobservable and at best known through the unverifiable reports of introspection, were excluded from its field of inquiry. No event is more internal than a mental image, and so Watson, one of the founders of the school, uttered his notorious dictum directed at reports of "reminiscence-imagery": "Touching, of course, but sheer bunk". Sir Arthur Eddington summarized this mind-set, which at once bedevils and buoys up the sciences, in a sarcasm which might well stand as the epigraph of this lecture: "What my net can't catch isn't fish". In the sixties both empires waned, psychoanalysis because as a theory it was unverifiable, as a therapy it was expensive and as a world view it �7 had become established. Behaviorism, on the other hand, choked by the huge accumulations of quantified experimental results unlevigated by any interesting overall theory, more or less died of tedium, though its method, too, had seeped into general opinion. But mainly it was a new and vigorous interest that usurped their place, the interest in cognition, in the temporal stages of learning in childhood and in the patterns and processes of cognitive events in adults. Piaget, who pioneered the former investigation called "genetic epistemology", had long had a special interest in the imagination because he thought of it not as a congenital ability but as a symbolizing function developing in the second year of infancy, intermediate between mere perception and rationality and responsible for the first interiorization of representation. The concern with imagery in adult cognition sprang from several sources. One was a recollection of the fascinati n'g imagery studies undertaken by experimental psychologists in pre-behavioral times. Another was the spectacular new discipline of Artificial Intelligence, the attempt to write programs which would, when run (sometimes rather incidentally) on computers, simulate human cognition. Cognitive functions involving figurative features turn out to be both rather recalcitrant to simulation and theoretically intriguing. The effort fed a very old philosophical debate concerning the distinction between space and thought, for which the contemporary computer terms-- I will Just throw them out for the moment-are given by the pair "analog" and "digital". Yet another source of the new interest in images is the burgeoning new brain science. The gist of the problem here is that, contrary to earlier expectations, the brain events which appear to be the accompanying conditions of, or to mediate, the cognitive function of imagining show absolutely no evidence of any formations of the sort that used to be �8 called "engrams," formations analogo·,1s to the imagery reported by subjects. That is to say, there are no pictures in our brain, although the whole scientific community, with no significant exception, suppose that in some, often rather sophisticated, sense cognition is just brain states and events. (Note, therefore, that when I spoke before of computers merely simulating cognition and brain events merely mediating it, I was speaking far more conservatively than do most cognitive psychologists.) The most pertinent source is, finally, philosophical, not however insofar as the imaginative faculty is acknowledged but precisely insofar as it is denied. In this century was written the first full-scale thematic treatment of the imagination that I know of in the history of philosophy, namely by Jean-Paul Sartre. He was inspired largely by Edmund Husserl, who founded phenomenology, a philosophical school which is interested in the description of experiences as experiences. However, it is not that work which most cognitive psychologist take account of but rather Ludwig Wittgenstein's scattered and, above all, Gilbert Ryle's systematic attack on the possibility and significance of cognition through mental imagery. Ryle's Concept of Mind is one of those bold books which mask the obscurity of their position by the hard-hitting clarity of their opposition. What Ryle attacked is what he identified as the essence of Cartesianism, namely the very idea of internal mental representation which I spoke of before: the notion that we have something-- ideas, thoughts, symbols or pictures-- in or before our minds. What Ryle found absurd in mental representations, and so rejected on logical grounds, was that they required a mind's eye, a mental mannikin before which to appear; he dubbed it "the ghost in the mind's machine". What he objected to in the interiority of mental representations was their lack of public �9 evidence; here "le followed the methodological requirements of the behaviorists-- but he went fu~ther,converting the requirement of observability into a conclusion of non-existence. fishy argument all over: It's Eddington's What my net can't catch, just isn't. Naturally, mental images were included in this annihilation. I want to interject here a comment on the attitude of students of cognition toward ordinary experience. Their method-driven mode sometimes makes them cavalier about what they nowadays call "folk psychology", meaning everybody's natural suppositions, for example the distinction we . all ordinarily make between ourselves and our bodies, and, most to the point, the fact that we all just do seem to see pictures in our head. For my part, no theory is plausible which, yielding to mere logical squeamishness, fails to begin by honoring and to end by grounding what we naturally say and believe. This, happily, is the hypothesis of the book from which most of what now follows is taken (from it, I should say, with the aid of about six-hundred and sixty-six other texts). a cognitive psychologist at Harvard. The author is Stephen Kosslyn, The title of the book, published in 1983, is, pertinently, Ghosts in the Mind's Machine. Its impetus was the sense that, Ryle notwithstanding, we do have and also use mental images, and that methods might be devised for teasing and tricking truths about them out of subjects-- in short, to make mental imagery somehow observable by devising experiments which would make the protocols of introspection more reliable. ( I should say here that Kosslyn has succeeded in developing a detailed theory of the structures and processes underlying mental imagery, but it would go too far to try to describe it tonight.) �10 The problem proposed itself in three parts. first was: The part investigated do people use mental imagery in solving some problem? answer was yes, the question: been implicitly answered. "do people have mental images?" If the would have The second part was to determine what the distinctive features of such imagery might be. The third part, which shaded confusingly into philosophy, was to determine the essential nature of such imagery. You might think these are plain enough questions, but to ask them clearly and to answer them productively turns out to be a, possibly bottomlessly, complex business. The first problem, then, whether people have mental imagery, was attacked by Galton a century ago by the naively empirical method of sending round questionnaires to great men, asking them to describe their breakfast tables. It was partly the surprising response of a number of the scientists among the respondents that sent the subject into eclipse-they claimed not to have such imagery. No one regards this result as very significant nowadays; experiments presuppose that subjects can and do follow the order: "Visualize (or imagine) x 11 ; the result of the experiments is taken further to corroborate the assumption. In the seventies Alan Shepard and his associates devised a series of experiments designed to reveal the mental representations of subjects by seeing if they actually used imagery in doing certain tasks. (I want to note two items on the way. First people under the constraints of an experiment are called "subjects" by psychologists. It is obviously a major question whether a subject is coextensive with a full human being. Second, in order to avoid the distracting bustle of visual aids, I shall choose from a horde of experiments those most easily describable in words, and I shall omit some of the complicating control �11 features.) Shepard presented the subjects with pairs of pictures of somewhat complicated three-dimensional block shapes. In half of the pairs the two shapes were slightly different, in the other half they were the same, though differently oriented, at increasing angles of rotation. The subjects were asked to look at the pictures and then to judge whether each pair included different or identical shapes. The hypothesis was that the response time Nould be a linear function of the angle of rotation, that is to say, subjects would take longer to answer in proportion as the second member of the pair was farther rotated from the original. The results startlingly confirmed the hypothesis, and were interpreted to mean that the subject mentally performed a rotation on the second member of the pair to see if it would be brought into coincidence with the first, taking twice as long for a doubly large angle. Consider how remarkable it is that the participants, who had been looking at mere drawings, apparently did the mental rotation of the depicted solids not flatly in the picture plane but through mental space, mimicking depth-perspective. (I want to point out here that "reaction times" is the bread and butter of cognitive psychology, used in boring cases to festoon with numbers a dull fact no one disputes, but in interesting ones to make cognitive processes reveal themselves. It means, of course, that in the most telling cases subjects are required to report on some kinetic aspect of pre-given imagery. Since it seems to me that when most itself, most absorbing, our imaginative capacity tends to self-produced timeless tableaus and transformation, it follows that the imagery processes clocked by cognitive psychology are characteristically of a narrowly mundane sort-- but that is the price to be paid for hard results.) �12 It is the second part of the problem, concerning the distinctive marks of mental imagery, to which Kosslyn addressed himself. Here much ingenuity was required first to articulate the features which an internal image might display and then to devise experiments to make them manifest themselves. Kosslyn, too, fell back on the very hypothesis attacked by Wittgenstein and Ryle, the notion that our imagery has something depictive, something picture-like about it. Let us stop to see what in our experience of imagining might drive us to the picture analogy. First of all, people do in fact experience themselves as viewing their images "in their heads." --Much as they inspect scenes and portraits and still-lives outside, they seem to be gazing on appearances in inner space. (In fact, there is a curious and beguiling theory that the earliest art images are cave paintings because caves serve as a physical representation of the black internal space that appears when the eyes are shut.) Furthermore, they don't think that the landscape or persons or objects themselves appear but their likeness or image, just as happens in a picture. call it "imagining". That's after all, exactly why we Not to be what it represents is the hall-mark of any image, be it on mirrors, reflecting pools or photographic plate, as you can read in Plato's Sophist. And finally, mental images share with artificial images the fact that they are shaped by and imbued with the author's knowledge and feelings, and sometimes even more: It seems somehow to be possible to imagine and to paint what the eye of perception has never seen. Guided by some such considerations (and helped by the new field of visual information processing), Kosslyn could frame a first precise question: Do we actually scan our interior images? To elicit an answer he devised the following double-checked experiment. Subjects were shown �13 a picture of an island containing seven unevenly distributed features, a rock, a tree, a beach and so on. They were to inspect it until they could hold it before their mind's eye, and fixing on a given location, they were to determine whether or not a certain announced feature was on the island by making an imaginary black speck move to it at top speed, and when it had arrived, they were to press a button. reaction times bore out Kosslyn's expectations. The The little speck took proportionally more time to reach more distant features. Subjects were evidently passing mentally over the intermediate distance, that is to say, mentally scanning their images. To explain the double check part of the experiment I have to begin to say something about an old battle of latter-day gods and giants that rages in cognitive psychology. These days the antagonists are called "imagists" and "propositionalists", or, for fun, "iconophiles" and "iconophobes". The former claim that we both have images and use them cognitively along with propositional thought. The latter (whose chief proponent is Zenon Pylyshin) argue either that we don't have them, or that if we have them we don't use them-- that they are merely along for the ride, "epiphenomenal," and that all cognition is propositional. I won't attempt to be pr:ecise about what is meant by "propositional" (except that it implies not-figurative and non-spacial representations), but let Kosslyn's double-check indicate the distinction. After having had his island experiment criticized by the propositionalists because, they claimed, reaction times could have been the same had the subjects run through mental lists of features rather than scanned their mental images, Kosslyn simply instructed a second group of subjects not necE7ssarily to use images but just to answer as quickly as possible, on the supposition that seven features could easily be kept in mind as �14 a list. Lo and behold, reaction times were indifferent to the distances of the features from base. Apparently the task could be done either by scanning mental images or by consulting a word-like mental list. Next Kosslyn investigated the mental image as object. First he posed a rather startling question suggested by the picture analogy. As opposed to sculpture in the round, picture images, be they mirror reflections, newspaper photographs, paintings or wax impressions, are all manifested on a medium: silvered glass, newsprint on paper, paint on canvas, wax. The question became: imagery in general? Do mental images have a medium which underlies all What is the inner picture plane like? For example wax takes impressions differently if it is dry or soft (here Kosslyn cites Plato's Theaetetus where the mental medium is compared to a wax tablet), and paper can be coarse or fine grained. too set a limit on the resolution of images? Does the mental medium If so, it would underwrite the picture-likeness of the imagery, since pictures are distinguished from their real originals precisely by the fact that.we can expect real objects to offer almost infinite prospects of detail, bounded only by the acuteness of our sight, whereas a picture has an inherent limit of resolution past which we are no longer looking at the im~ges it carries; for example, a· human being can be inspected down to the pores of the skin and beyond, while a newspaper photo presently dissolves into mere dots. To test the grain of the mental medium, subjects were asked to commit to memory pictures of a rabbit next to an elephant and of a fly next to a rabbit, so that the larger animal would in each case take up most of the mental space. They were then asked to report the features of the large and the small animals. The latter took consistently more time, as if the small features were harder to see, or as if the viewers had to zoom in on them. Since many people have a favorite familiar rabbit while few have a favorite �15 fly, they were also asked to look at a tiny rabbit next to a large fly, lest they be reporting features from mere verbal memory. animal's features took longer to make out. Again the tiny Kosslyn concluded that the mental medium had a definite grain which makes small objects harder to discern-- perhaps somewhat dubiously since the result might be equally attributed to the resolving power of the mental eye. But then he didn't consider the mind's eye to be an organ of sight, as we will see. (I must inject here a doubt I feel about Kosslyn's procedures, which is that he always has subjects memorize objects which are pictures to begin with, that is, he works with mental images of real images. There may be a predisposing factor in that, but let us set it aside for this lecture.) Again the propositionalists demurred, claiming that subjects were not inspecting mental images but verbal-like lists of features. They would look at the larger animal, which also had more features, f°irst and store its description in their short term memory. (Short term memory is the kind of memory where we "keep", say, telephone numbers we have just looked up between the book and the dial.) Now experiments have shown that the short term memory can hold only plus or minus seven items. the small Consequently animal!s features had simply been crowded out, and subjects would have to dig into their long term associative memory files, where· general coherent knowledge about flies is stored, to answer questions about them, and this would take longer. Again Kosslyn devised a double-check. When subjects are asked without a picture whether cats have claws they can answer just as immediately as when asked if they have heads. In fact, claws which are spatially small, have as much associative memory strength as heads which �16 are comparatively large, but when subjects are asked to answer the question by inspecting a mental image, they nonetheless take longer to ascertain the presence of claws than of a head. The medium does seem to obscure small features, and furthermore, in general, we seem to be able to solve memory tasks in two ways, through mental images and through verbal registration. your house. (Ask yourself, for example, how many windows there are in Most people answer by taking a mental walk through the place. Now wait five minutes and ask yourself again. Usually the answer will come in a word-- fourteen in my case.) Finally, Kosslyn considered, a medium has a size and a shape. real pictures these are given by the dimensions of the frame. For For our perceptual window on the world the size is given by our angle of vision and the shape by the fact that our eyes are set horizontally side by side-- consequently our visual field is roughly elliptical. the size of the field-medium, Kosslyn had subjects m~morized ment~lly To measure walk toward images of animals of various sizes, a rabbit, a dog, a cow, until they overflowed the mental field. The subjects then placed a real tripod at a distance from a real wall which they judged equal to the mental distance of overflow of each animal. That distance, it turned out, increased proportionally with the size of the animal. The. angle of sharp central mental vision, was calculated with a little trigonometry to be rougly 25°, similar to that of the perceptual field. Furthermore, subjects were to imagine walking toward a foot-long ruler held first horizontally and then vertically. The vertical ruler overflowed the field sooner than the other, showing that the inner medium 0 too, is roughly elliptical in shape. Most people suppose that seeing and imagining have similarities. That they can be confusingly alike was shown in a famous experiment made �17 by Perky in 1910 on the eve of the. great eclipse of imagery studies and replicated more recently in improved format. She seated subjects before a screen in a well-lit room and asked them to project the mental image of, say, a banana on the screen. psychologists.) (There seem to be animal and vegetable Unbeknownst · to them she projected a faint slide image on the same place. Subjects declared themselves a little surprised that while they were thinking of the banana as lying on its side, they kept imagining it as standing on end, but no one caught on. Kosslyn considers her results as well . as his to indicate that perceiving and imagining .. share certain cognitive processes: For him that means, of course, that they share brain mechanisms, (his book has the subtitle "Creating and Using Images in the Brain"), those namely which take place well behind the organs of visual perpception, as suggested by the fact that people who lose their eye-sight in·youth continue to have mental images. So much for a small sampling of the experiments and their results. Now comes the serious business, the effort to say what all this might amount to, in itself and for us. II • Philosophy I hope I have not left you with the impression that the so-called propositionalists have been repulsed. All the conclusions have been called in question, though for my part, I'm p·a rsuaded by the design itself of Shepard's and Kosslyn's experiments that introspection can be tricked into yielding disciplined, hard information about internal, that is, psychic, states and events while the results indicate first, that we have an internal space-like receptacle which resembles in some respects the medium of pictures and in others the field of perception, and second, that the images therein �18 are cognitively effective, that they are at least s0metimes used in the act of knowing and are not merely epiphenomena-- idle accompaniments of cognition. That's what I am persuaded of, but as I mentioned, in cognitive psychology the battle continues to rage-- some say ad nauseam. I think, however, that the combatants show good instincts in carrying on, because although within cognitive science it may be that as the formulations become more and more refined the issue becomes more and more obscure, and perhaps finally recalcitrant to experimental resolution, from the philosophic point of view the question won't go away. Before sunnning up what, in rock-bottom terms, that question is and why it matters, let me just quickly run through some of the. subsequent perplexities concerning the imagination. There is the great dual question about the relation of perception and imagination: could we perceive .if we didn't imagine?; can we image what we haven't perceived? Then we might ask whether we inspect our mental images passively or whether in beholding them we are actually producing them. Then there is .the question of the difference between real images and imagination-images: what is the distinction between perceiving an image such as a portrait, and imagining a perception, such as the visualization of a friend's face? ask about'composition of images: Then we can are they wholes made of parts?; for instance, can they fade in sections or are they fragilely integral, generated and lost as are they? a whole?; and in general, how sturdy or evanescent Are they altered piecemeal or by so-called blink transformations? Do they obey compositional laws like the "law of good form" proposed by the Gestalt psychologists? And since mental images, whatever else they are, are somehow images, there are all the questions about the way they mix being and non-being first raised in Plato's Sophist and now treated in logic under the heading of fictional or non-existent objects. These are the �19 enticing inquiries which would come next. But for now let me state the two terms which seem to sum up the debate, as I said, in the most rock-bottom and revealing way, namely: depiction vs. description (Ned Block). The pictoralists say that some of our mental representations are picture-like. Aristotle's famous remark that "the soul never thinks without images" would seem to be the founding dictum of this camp. (Though that has been doubted, in fact by Martha Nussbaum, who lectured here a couple of years ago, in her commentary on the De Motu Animalium.) The descriptionalists claim that all our mental representations are language-like, that our inner representations although about the world are never like it. I am now going to conclude by trying to show what matters about this controversy and how it might affect us in part.icular. First, you might think it was pretty obvious that the debate would drive its proponents smack into such questions as: what is depiction? What can it be but the representation of an object as a space-like image (not, by the way, necessarily visual)? is space, what is an image? But what is representation, what Well, the psychologists mostly do what I've done tonight, skirt around these questions. But when the moment comes to take them up a student of this program should be way ahead. What is the inner point of the sophomore study of analytic geometry, for instance, but to think about just these issues? the text and an equation on the other. There is a picture on one side of The diagram is spatial and figurative and appears to image something. The equation consists of letters and signs and seems to symbolize something. Are they two manifestations of the same object which they represent differently? the equation closer to words or to logic than the figure is? Is What is the difference among figure, symbol and word, and what difference does that �20 difference make? A successful sophomore mathematics tutorial cannot help but be a rather deep introduction to the depiction-description debate. In fact, come to think of it, our study of prime introduction to the issue: Apo~lonius already offers a Remember the propositions where figure and words jibe at the beginning and at the end, but in between you are required to follow letter manipulations, which are geometric nonsense (or are they?) while on the otner hand, Apolionius' very understanding of his curves as conic sections can't be adequately rendered in symbols (or can it?). Images, however, are only a subheading of the category representation, and mental images come under mental representations in general. Cognitive psychologists are one and all committed to the existence of mental representations-- else what would their experiments be forcing into the open? But as I mentioned way back in this lecture, stud~nts of philosophy in this century have taken to attacking the whole notion of representation. Recall that the title of Kosslyn's book Ghosts in the Mind's Machine was intended as a rebuttal of Ryle's attack on mental representations, images, of course, in particular. Kosslyn could take this position because he thinks he has solved the very problem of that mind's eye before which the images appear whose necessity made mental imagery an absurdity to Ryle. Of course, the mind's eye is just a sub-problem: all mental representation requires a self, or subject or, derogatorily, a "homunculus", before whom the representations are present, and that fact always leads to bottomless difficulties-- though, in my opinion these ' are mysteries we' 11 just have to live with. I mentioned earlier on that Artificial Intelligence, or computer simulation of cognitive processes, was one of the impulses behind the new study of mental imagery; Kosslyn was able to construct a computer model of his theorY, and it is indeed through a �21 computer analogy that he means to dispose of the question: watches the pictures of the mind?" "what or who The answer is simply that the imaginal medium of a computer, the display screen, is actually an array of dots, and that the computer's central processing unit, the analogue of the mind's eye, can "interpret" the imagery because it is immediately translatable into words and numbers like: there is a dot in row 5, column 7. So a computer can both gene:rate and read images without benefit of a mind's eye. "Good-bye homunculus" is Kosslyn's chapter heading for this solution. Now, to my mind, it is both a surrender and an evasion (though, I should add, Kosslyn seems to know exactly what he is doing-- I just can't make out his explanation), it is a surrender of the notion that imagery has some ultimate cognitive independence or value, because it implies that an image is only what is called an "emergent" whole, or as he says: a display "does not have to be a J?icture to function as one". That is to say, the image emerges from non-figurative elements, namely from dots marking coordinate positions. Furthermore the interpretation, so called, of the image, the computer simulation of its comprehension, is nothing but just the stored matrix of these points expressed in words and digits, or even in digits only. In short, images are at the bottom "digital", and not "analog", a pair of terms from computer science which I've mentioned before, ref.erring to discrete word-, digit-, or symbol-like representations as opposed to continuous, figurative or space-like representations. What we know when we ap~rehend Descartes first implied in his an image is finally its algebra, just as Ge~metry which, as I mentioned, we study so carefully for that very reason. The evasion in Kosslyn's solution to the mind's eye perplexity is simply this: As he explicitly says, cognitive science is not competent to deal with experience, with the conscious sense we have of our .cognition, �22 (although Dennett has tried to provide cognitive science with a theory of consciousness). As a science it is bent on turning the interior into an exterior, on making inner processes observable, and consciousness is hopelessly and recalcitrantly and essentially interior. (It is this conscious experience to which the phenomenological school of philosophy which I mentioned before specifically attends.) Consequently, the computer analogy simply circumvents the perplexing sense we have of an inner vision-- an evasion which is practiced throughout the Artificial Intelligence community, only that generally the "what my net can't catch isn't fish" principle is in full force. What is evidently possible, though hellishly complex, is to devise equipment and programs which will "perceive" simpre scenes, and image them, or put images having the established features of mental imagery on the' display and read them off-an accompl~shment which is then hypothesized to give insi~ht into human imagining. If you think about it, what the fish principle does is to put philosophy under the domination of science-- with the whole-hearted concurrence of what might be called the hard-nosed branch of academic philosophy. The cognitive scientists decide what method of theorizing will keep their inquiries within the concerns of science, and then more or less knowingly move to exclude from being what their canon excludes from notice-- that after all is just what it means to turn human beings into experimental subjects. And they do this without let or hinderance, not to say·with the connivance, of a large part of the contemporary academic philosophical community. For the contest about who asks the questions has been won by the scientists, in this case the cognitive scientists ("Cognitive Science" being the overall name for "Cognitive Psychology", "Artificial Intelligence", "I;nformation Processing", and �23 so on), and they sit inside calling the digital tune, while th,e professional philosophers skulk at the windows making comments. This state of affairs can't help but eventually arouse our community's anxious interest, because, while our program is built on the trust that the important questions are perennially the same however diverse the attempted answers, the capitulation of philosophy to science makes urgent the question of questions I mentioned in the beginning, namely whether the terms of the questions themselves may be transformed radically and beyond translation from age to age. For science itself, by its very progressive nature, undergoes periodic revolutions which appear to some to consign the old problems and terms to irreducible incommensurability with the new ones, and perhaps philosophy should reflect this discontinuity. We could do the intellectual world a great service by rousing ourselves to a"rigorous debate with the very clever contemporary proponents of this point of view. Lest I seem to have gotten away from the significance to us of the imagery debate, let me quickly show how it fits in. On the one hand there is a bunch of terms like "imagistic", "pictorialistic", "analogous" and "analog". On the other there is "propositional", "descriptional", "symbolic" and "digital". As we have seen, even the scientists who have devoted themselves to discovering the precise characteristics of mental imagery soon abscond into the camp of those who believe that all cognition is finally to be characterized by the second complex of terms, although somehow the first keeps intruding itself on experience. Why is the battle so drawn out while underneath the profession is so unanimous? reason is this: The chief Human experience may speak for the significance of our imaging power, but the underlying impulse of cognitive scientists is to turn the mental into the physical (forgetting, by the way, that their heroes, the physici~ts, are meanwhile busy turning the physical world into �24 .an intelligible one). Specifically they expect to explain all cognitive processes in terms of the sort of logical functions which can be realized as a physical machine, be it computer or brain. Now as I mentioned, brain science apparently has at present no evidence that well accommodates picture-knowing, although there are basic facts of the brain's functioning which would lend themselves to the "digital" cognition. So it is plain that the impulse in cognitive science would be to explanations in those terms. Now I have a deep-felt though not yet very well-grounded suspicion that it is our imagining capacity which will turn out to be the impregnable center of our embattled humanity-- embattled, because it appears to be infernally difficult to articulate in principle the difference between the activity of a perceiving and reasoning human being and the behavior of a sophisticatedly programmed machine, that is if the factor of self-consciousness or inner experience is disallowed, while the purely and precisely rational argument for hanging on to what I might as well call the soul, are confoundedly elusive. We might talk about that in the question period. My inklings that the imagination will be crucial in finally distinguishing human cognition from its computer simulation do have some evidence and some ' arguments in their favor. The evidence is chiefly in claims from critics of the Artificial Intelligence project that it will come to its limits in capturing just those functions which have analogue character. The arguments I can only gesture toward by bringing up, belatedly, a pair of pertinent terms which is conspicuously missing from the imagery debate: imagination and intellect. It is one of those old thought complexes whose meaning is supposed to be hopelessly inaccessible to us once its transformation into the current terms has been accomplished. �25 Well, since I can believe that only for a minute at a time, I think there is a world of light to be gotten from carefully retranslating the debate into these terms, since we can then re-ask (without ignoring the new contributions of cognitive science) old but unanswered questions concerning our strange double power to bring the looks of this world into ourselves while leaving its stuff outside, and to bring forth within us figures which were never of the outer world and yet can act potently on it. One of the chief boons will be that the traditional pair, unlike the contemporary set, is not an opposition but a conjunction, and that whenever imagination and intellect are considered as equally and unseverably necessary to knowledge, reflection on thinking, reasoning, acting intelligently, takes on a very different coloration than when the faculty of imagery is regarded as an analytical embarrassment. What I mean is: to my mind what the contemporary intellectual world needs most urgently is a revision of its mode and its understanding of rationality. Early on I described the thinking of our more interesting contemporaries as being smart, precise, pure. That begins to catch its flavor, but of course not the serious impulse behind it, which is, to think of thinking as essentially analytic and formalistic, symbolic, logical rather than analogical. I am using somewhat opaque buzz-words because I have not yet quite come to grips with what is going on, except for a sense that sweet reason requires the curbing of this rampant rationality, requires, if I may put it this way, a logically legitimate way of respecting the mysteries. Now I can imagine that it might be one of our students who is destined to work out such a revisal, having been prepared for the task by a program which does not segregate works of the imagination from works of the intellect and which contains many texts honoring-- and also despising-the appearances in a way wholly different from that of current cognitive �26 science-- a way in which our environment is not under$tood as a source of information to be processed but as a world of figures sending us significant looks and speaking to us in intelligible tongues. And in general, it is because of the temporal cosmopolitanism of the program, its intention to make a serious attempt at empathy into radically diverse human possibilities, that the St. John's program can be a protection against the regimented seduction of the bubbling Babylon which constitutes our contemporary intellectual world; were I a child's mother I would not wish to send it out there unprepared in some such way, because for all its vaunted multiplicity and its vigorous polemics, the marchings and wheelings of opinions take place in amazingly close formation-as is perhaps not so surprising considering the temporal parochialism of university training. When I said in the first couple of minutes of this lecture that I hoped to give reasons for maintaining distance from "current thinking", enticingly brilliant though it be-- practically I suppose this means clearing only a very modest and very deliberately designed space for it in the program-- I had in mind mainly this phenomenon of ll homogeneity. It has recently been givenvsophisticated rationale under the heading of "the social justification of belief" by Richard Rorty, (who lectured here a couple of years ago) and has been joyfully taken up by para-scientific disciplines such as Anthropology (Geertz) and Educational Studies (Bruffie). "We understand knowledge," Rorty says, "when we understand the social justifica.tion of belief," meaning that . knowledge arises not from taking in and testing for oneself what the world has to give, but from devising language for obtaining the concurrence of the community accredited to judge, while learning means being absorbed into that society which carries on the pertinent, essentially terminological conversation. To me this view of a community of learning seems like �27 philosophy's self-imposed revenge for its voluntary subjection to science, for it is modelled on the current philosophy-of-science-view of science as a social construction (which, by the way, apparently infuriates practicing scientists, insofar as they pay it any mind.) Now this college is not only a program but also the conununity designed for the study of the program, and those of our students who were self-aware members of the former should make peculiarly discerning judges of the pervasive and potent view I've just described. For the conununity Rorty projects is a spatially scattered league of competent professionals whose largely written communications are aimed at the fixation of shared belief, while St. John's is a living community of people of carefully guarded amateur status who converse with each other face to face, to save their souls, and, standing somewhat apart, prepare for four years to grapple with a present that has been twenty-eight hundred years in the making. To conclude: Under these circumstances it is not so surprising that, while in the sciences hopes are high, the dominating philosophical mood is, according to temperament, either a rage for finis-writing or a lugubrious nihilism-- a zealous anticipation of an end to philosophy which is no consummation but either a self-destructive bang or an unravelled whimper of mere endless argumentation. But I imagine that some of us can think of an understanding of philosophy by which it escapes these ignominies. If philosophy is directed wonder then we need not follow the lead of the sciencas in asking only warrantably pursuable questions or abandon answers because their complete formal justification proves elusive. Then we are permitted to assume that when something arouses such wonder in us it is given to us, first and last, as wonderful, however relentlessty we may work it over in between. �28 A practical illustration : Close your eyes and summon the image of some attractive shape-- an elegant object, a familiar face, a significant scene. When you have it before your mind's eye, ask yourself, perhaps vaguely at first but then more pointedly, what might have to be true for that wonder to occur. How could such an inquiry, refreshed by frequent recurrence to the inner experience itself, peter out into mere argumentation? It seems to me to consist of continual beginnings, impulses toward a truth which is just out of sight. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 29 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 Mental imagery Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985-09-27 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the homecoming lecture given in September 27, 1985 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1985-09 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Deans Friday night lecture Homecoming Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/33acaf358c64e8c6acd99724881018db.pdf 822a5c33efa63ce2b8b7229eb3fa0a7d PDF Text Text WHAT IS A BOOK? EVAT. H. BRANN Dean's Lecture St. John's College, Annapolis August 30, 1991 �It is our tradition that the first lecture of the year should be dedicated to our freshmen. They have newly joined a community whose program of learning centers on the scheduled reading of a pre-set list of books and on the twice-weekly discussion which takes place in the seminar. They have come to us chiefly because that is what we do here. I have read each of their applications, and I can vouch for the fact. Then what sort of impression will I be making on them if I ask an absurd question like "What is a book?" - and in public? Don't we, known to the world as a Great Books College, know what a book is, even what a great book is? I was friends once with a little boy (we are still friends, but he is a . big strapping lawyer now, a public defender, no less) who told me he was making a rocket to send into space. In the proper adult spirit of annoying little children I asked him "What do you mean, space?" He looked at me in big-eyed amazement (he was used to grown-ups having more answers than he had questions) and said incredulously; "Don't you even know what space is-you know, outer space?" So don't I even know what a book is, a great book? Well, I do and I don't I don't say that to create confusion. Contrary to what some of your upperclass colleagues may try to tell you, confusion is not our business, but rather clarification, an10ng other things because clear-headedness is one condition of open-mindedness. A slowly developing, limited clarity of mind does seem to me to be our business. Nor, for that matter, is reading books our primary activity, or even thinking about them. Our primary purpose is, in my opinion - I say "in my opinion" because not everyone agrees-to reflect, which means literally "to bend (our thought) back" - on itself and on ou·rselves. When you leave us in four years you may well have chosen a career. The word "career" is related to "car" and connotes taking off on a track, straight, speedy- and upward, we hope. The years immediately before you are, on the contrary, years of leisure, of slow progress in a rising circle (such as is called a spiral), of reviewing your points of origin1 �2 one of which is yourself-from different vantage points. It is significant that we never ask you to "take a course" but always to "be in a · tutorial." We invite you not to course along a set track of organized knowledge, but to be active in a community protective of learning wherever it goes, even in circles. That, incidentally, is why your teachers are not called professors but tutors. These are both Latin words. A professor is "one who speaks out assertively in public," but a tutor is "one who safeguards and watches" over things. A tutorial, then is a safe haven for learning with fifteen or so members, one of whom is the special guardian of learning. It is often said that there is yet another presence in the tutorial or the seminar, the one that brings us together, the true guide and teacher, namely the great book being studied. We often say that, and I think it is true. Not for nothing does our college seal display seven books. Let me take out a minute here for an interjection. You may be surprised by my vehemence, butl want to warn you of what seems to me a very bad blight. Countries, congregations, colleges - all have their verities, truths they keep telling about themselves. When a truth has been told and heard very often, it loses, by a very natural process, its sap and its savor. Then there is a type ·o f person who concludes that because the truth has lost its savor for them, it is unsavory, and they affect ennui and disdain toward it. They think the truth is flat and falsified when it is their souls that have gone flaccid. I am not speaking of those who vigorously oppose the truthfulness of the truth: They are the tonic that keeps truths healthy. I am speaking of people- ourselves in certain 11\oods- who let the soul slip from the words they speak and then blame the words. The cure for this condition seems to be to cultivate the habit of reverence. By reverence I here mean the disposition to grant at least provisional significance to words and sayings from which the meaning seems for the moment to have withdrawn and to . �3 have become remote. The next step is then the effort to recover that meaning. In that spirit I say thatgreat books are our teachers, and this lecture is one attempt to recall the meaning of this truism. There is a man- you will spend much of your year arguing with him - who intimates that it is foolish to talk about the quality and purpose of a thing before asking what it is. In the manner of this man Socrates let me then put my title question, to which we all know some obvious answers that tum increasingly unobvious under reflection: What is a book? Books as Bodies A book appears to be, to begin with, a bodily thing. In an old college film, which I hope you get to see sometime, there is a dorm sequence ofa student shouting upstairs to her friend: "Throw me down my Iliad." Down comes the Iliad. Or it might have been her Paradise Lost, I've forgotten. Is the Iliad then a thing subject to gravity, gaining distance as the square of the time? Is it her Iliad or Homer's Iliad or Achilles' Iliad? Where is the place of this Iliad? In a book, in the mapsode 's literal line-by-line memory, in the student's impressionistic memory, nowhere, in Troy, in Hades? I say Hades, because as you will soon read in the Odyssey, it is to the blood-drained invisible underworld that you must go to learn the great tales on which poetry works. Again, when is a book's time of being? When the story called the Iliad happened, in the twelfth century B.C.7 When it was told, in the eight century B.C.7 When an Athenian commission first produced an official written version in the sixth century B.C.? Or whenever Johnnies read their seminar in the twentieth century, or, for that matter, in 1808 when the freshmen of this college (then called the "noviate class") first read Homer - in Greek? (T. F. Tilghman, The Early History of St. John's College in Annapolis, p. 36). Or whenever Homer's poem is at work influencing lives, as the vision of Achilles once, in the fourth century B.C., drove Alexander the Great to the deeds that made him so? Or whenever the Iliad stands on a shelf waiting to be opened? In that most thought-provoking of children's books, Michael Ende's Neverending Story, the boy Sebastian, about to open the magical book he has stolen, says to himself: �4 I would like to know what actually goes on in a book as long as it's closed.... One has to read it to experience it, that's clear. But it's already there beforehand. I would like to know,how7 These are tricky perplexities that push themselves forward when you approach this book-thing with questions such as: whose possession, in what place, at what time? Let me nonetheless stick for a while with the crudest set of solutions, those that take a book as a physical object. Paul Scott, the author of the Raj Quartet, the work I think of as the most considerable novel of the time between the Second World War and our present, was much impressed by the following prosaic account of what it is to be a book: A small hard rectangular object, whose pages are bound along one edge in.to fixed covers and numbered consecutively. (On Writing and the Novel, p. 211, quoting Bergonzi). As I flesh out this bare-bones definition of a bound paper book, do, please, compare what it means to read such a book with the unrolling of a papyrus scroll on the one hand, and the scrolling of a computer display on the other. Books, says the passage, are small and hard, which means they are safely carried hither and thither and can even be thrown down the stairwell. As sophomores you will read Augustine's autobiography in which he confesses first his life of sin and finally his conversion to faith. He tells how his landlord let him use the garden of the house Augustine was renting, and there he and his friend one day carried a book, or codex, as Augustine calls it, which means a set of wooden tablets, a sort of proto-book. It was not just any book, but a codex apostoli. It was a part of the The Book, to bib/ion, in English, the Bible. (Let me take out a minute to say that the Greek word bib/ion means a thing made of biblos, which is the word for papyrus, while papyrus itself comes into English as paper.) Augustine was, at that time, in great agony over his sins and his doubts. Suddenly, in the garden, he heard a child's voice saying over and over in a sing-song voice: "Tolle lege, tolle lege," "Take it and read it, take it and read it." So he took the book and read what he found, and at that moment it was, as he says in his beautiful Latin: �5 Quasi luce securitas infusa cotdi mea, omnes dubitationes tenebrae diffugerunt (Confessions VIII, 12). "As if a light of assurance had poured into my heart, all the shadows of doubt fled away." If the book had not been in the garden there might have been no voice, or if there had been a voice, Augustine would not have heeded it, or if he had heeded it, he would have had nothing to take up and read. And he would have missed the moment that made him, his conversion. It is because books are portable that the ready reader can sometimes come on the word fitly spoken To descend from the solemn to the ordinary: The bound paper book can be carried about more conveniently than can most other containers of valuables except wallets: in a pocket, handgrip or knapsack, to bed, bathroom, beach or waiting room. How many of you spent months in high school carrying around a book until the time was ripe, and you took it and read it? Besides being small and hard, the book of the definition is normally rectangular. Its rectangularity betokens the self-effacement of the visible lay-out of the text. Let me explain. There is something called pattern poetry. An example is the Mouse's saci Tale in Alice in Wonderland, which looks like what it sounds like, a tail. You see here only the tail end of the tale: ' Such a trial dear sir, With no . jury or Judge, would be wasting our breath.' 'I'll be judge, I 11 be jury,' Said cunning old Fury: 'I'll try the whole cause, and .condemn you to death.' �6 This sort of innocent typographical game, a kind of printed calligraphy, has, I should tell you, recently been used as a jumping off place for grave reflections on the latest of intellectual revolutions. A famous ·. French intellectual has said: Thus the calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read. (Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, p. 21). The traditional book, it is true, suppresses the looking in favor of the reading. It is rectangular because it breaks the narrative into optically convenient and semantically arbitrary stacks of lines. In some traditions these are arranged horizontally, in some, like the Chinese and Japanese, vertically; some are read from left to right, and some like Hebrew, from right to left so that the book begins where an English book ends. The earliest Greek writing is sometimes read back and forth, which is called boustrophedon, meaning ox-turning, as. in plowing. I am sure that all these conventions carry significance with them. For instance the fact that Western reader's eyes survey the page in the plane of the horizon back and forth, while Oriental readers nod vertically there must be some meaning in that. Next, Scott's quotation says that the pages of a book are numbered consecutively. This pagination is, so to speak, the street address of the narrative. That address system makes it possible to revisit locations in a book. For worthy books are meant to be read in a double way, so that the first reading is somehow already the second reading. One way is to follow the stacks of lines and the sequence of pages straight through. Of course, while we are barging on with the inexorable clock- say it is 6:30 on a seminar night- the time of the narrative warps back and forth. For example, the centerpiece of the Odyssey, Books IX-XII where Odysseus turns poet and tells of the ten years when he seemed losrto the world, is all flashback; it is only with Book XIIl that we return to · the present of the story. But there is a second way to scramble the time of reading. It is made possible by the fact that a book is a bound stack of numbered pages. That means you can put slips of paper or fingers in the pages you have passed. As a visible, weighty, numbered thing, a book is all there at once, and we can treat all its tale or argument as simultaneously accessible. �7 Literary theorists have in fact invented a word for the writing that fully exploits the non-linear property of the book format They call it "spatial" prose. (l Frank in Spatial Form in Narrative, 1977.) It is spatial because it depends on continual back-reference, on always holding the text present, as if it were all there simultaneously just as space is - while time is al ways either gone or yet to come. It seems to me that the physical format of the bound book invites the writer to make spatialist demands on the reader. That does not mean that authors who may not have been writers at all, like Homer, or who wrote in scrolls that show only one place at a time, did not compose spatially: All great texts demand continual back- reference, but book texts make it mechanically easier. The theorists I have mentioned thought that the so-called "Modernist" writers, above all James Joyce, were peculiarly spatial, but you will see that every Platonic dialogue (for example) requires you to refer back all the time - a demand which you cannot, of course, fully meet until you have studied your way through the text once. We might conjecture, on the other hand, that a people that values time and its sacred cyclical order might keep its scripture in scrolls, as do the Jews their Torah. The other place where events that are strung out in time are kept simultaneous is memory. A book ' is indeed a memory analogue: an external memory. This seems to me a wonderful thing. The last dialogue and the last book you will read this year - in May when all reading is a drag- is called the P haedrus. In it Socrates will claim that any written text is pernicious because it can't answer back when questioned, and also because it acts as a pharmaceutical pacifier: It keeps you passively reminded and prevents you fTom being actively mindful (275). Readers of dialogues might point out to Socrates that the texts in which he appears do answer back, and readers of books might say that a paginated book does keep us actively casting back and forth. Finally, a book, in Paul Scott's quotation, is bound along one edge between fixed covers. This physical fact means that books have spines; they are upright vertebrates. They normally stand on shelves next to one another. (I can't help telling you that in my private library at home only the books I respect stand up; the indifferent ones have to lie prone on the top shelves.) Only the spine shows, so a book is known by its backbone. That fact in turn means that a book is identified by author and title. In ·antiquity titles were evidently not always given by the author. Who knows whether Homer would have called his song about �8 the wrath of Achilles after the name of Hector's city? Or what Aristotle would have called his lectures on being, later called by the ambiguous title Metaphysics, meaning either "the book that follows the Physics" or "the subject matter beyond nature"? In modem times, on the other hand, titles are almost always carefully crafted announcements of the author's intention, and they are the first thing to think about as soon as you have finished the book once. Some titles reveal, some retract, some complement the contents of the book. For example, as a rising senior you will spend a glorious summer with Tolstoy's fourteen hundred page novel entitled War and Peace, of . which 1340 are devoted to war and sixty to peace. What did Tolstoy mean by his title? Did he mean that those last pages of peaceful family life, the so-called First Epilogue, have as much gravity, as much cosmic significance, as all the tunnoil that went before? I think so, but you may find that your seminar divides around that question, which is made more interesting by the fact that the Russian word for "peace" also means · "world." ****** That concludes my unpacking of the definition of a book as a small hard rectangular object, made of paginated leaves bound along one edge. So far the answer to the question "What is a book?" has amounted to this: A book is the kind of artifact we call a medium. It is made to mediate a text to us. In his I' hysics Aristotle will observe a fundamental two-foldness in the human world. Some things in it grow, or at least move by themselves, and these, he says, are natures. Other things are made by a human being out of some material according to a plan, and these we call . artifacts. (I might say, incidentally, that one of our modem perplexities is our capability for turning natures into artifacts.) Now to figure out what a natural being or what a given artifact truly is- a house, a marble image, a tool - is complicated enough. But to think about the kind of artifact called a medium requires special subtlety. For a medium is meant to come between the receiver and the source in such a way as to convey a message while being itself overlooked. Telescopes, telephones, television sets, whose names mean respectively things for scanning objects that are far off, for hearing voices that are far off, for seeing images produced far off, are not the focus of the user's interest when they are transmitting, and go dead or empty when not in use. But �9 as the book is not a mediwn that plays or replays some performance far off in space or even in time, so it is not like a tape or disk that goes inactive after it's been played. Sebastian's question, What goes on inside a book when it is closed?, is not purely phantastic; even an unread book seems to have a sort of secret vitality just because its text is all latent significance - imageless squiggles. I ask the seniors if there has been a single seminar book in your three years here that would gain very much from being illustrated. The solemn last paragraph of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit speaks of Spirit in time as presenting a languidly moving "gallery of pictures." Ask yourselves, when you come to it, whether you would wish someone to take Hegel at his word and to produce an illustrated Phenomenology. In the image-smashing disturbances of late antiquity, the iconoclastic opposition to depictions of God and Christ was countered by the notion of a "Pauper's Bible." Religious images, the iconophiles argued, are scripture for the illiterate. Perhaps they should have conceded that for those who can "take up and read" the written word is antagonistic to depiction because pictures fix the narrative in its flow, specify its intimations to the imagination, and rivet the eye on the page. In short, illustrations turn a book from a medium into a presentation. They capture the imagination and thereby drain the word. I have only mentioned book-illustrations to set off the peculiar wonder of the verbal book as a mediwn-body, a mediwn that harbors its content without presenting it- I mean, as I said before, that we are not caught by images, and we read right past the print presented on the page. To me there is something elusive and mysterious about this unpresented yet ever-present life of books which makes the question what happens within them permissible and plausible. Of course, I am too much of a coward seriously to propose that arguments go on developing and characters go on conversing all over my library- and yet! And yet - they do seem to have done just that from reading to reading. The mystery here is that of mental life encased in a hard rectangular object. A book, then, is a peculiar kind of medium, a mediwn not unlike a vessel of the spirit - that is what makes it understandable that people might kiss a book or swear on it or carry it always along. Yet although it is a peculiar medium, it is still a medium. Being a medium means that it mediates between senders and receivers, in this case, between the writers and the readers. Let me start with the readers, since that is what we are - and there are, thank heaven, more of us than of them. �10 Readers as God-Parents I call this section of the lecture "Readers as God-Parents" because · I will later liken writers to parents. A god-parent is the sponsor of a rite of spiritual regeneration; a reader sponsors the rebirth of the bookbody's soul. The first step toward this revival is, of course, to tum the spatially all-present text back into real, live, passing time. There are many perplexities and complications to the conscious reading of a book. The study of these problems is called "hermeneutics," named after Hemes, the ,god of messages. It seems to me far more important to read books than to engage in this study. I once offered a · preceptorial on it which left us all unclear whether anyone could in fact · read a book. Let me proceed on the sensible hypothesis that books are readable. Then the first practical observation to be made is that there are different kinds of books, and that they should be read differently. It would be plain eccentric not to quote from Frances Bacon's essay "Of Studies" here: ' Some Books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; That is, some Books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Let me give you examples. Some people will be outraged right away and that was part of my pleasure in writing this lecture. 1. Mysteries. When you are about to invest a portion of your life in reading one - on the hypothesis that you will get to be eighty and that it takes three hours to read the mystery, that would be .0000042 of your life, but these things add up-do the following. Turn to the denouement and find out whodunnit If you still care to read the book, start at the. beginning. Otherwise, forget it. 2. Scholarship. Read the preface. If it is clear what will be proved and why, go on. Otherwise, forget it. �11 3. Minor novels. Apply the sortes Biblicae, an old mode of reading. Sortes is a Latin word for "chances." ''The chance of the Bible" is exactly what Augustine was bidden to take when he was told to "take up and read." If the passages you find at random are entrancing, begin at the beginning. Otherwise, forget it. Notice that these kinds of books are not the ones you will read for seminar, though it is true that one of the novels on our list is, among other things, also a murder mystery- Dostoyevsky' s Brothers Karamazov; however it is scarcely a minor novel. Notice also that the books we do read for seminar all have one thing in common: None that I can think of has an index, at least not one made by the author. Why do great books have no index? Because you are bidden to read them whole and as a whole at least once, from their pregnant beginning to their well-delivered end. Because you are not to look up subjects that interest you or follow through topics you specialize in. Because understanding is not an encapsulated result but a way, the way through the book. Because a book of stature, be it philosophy or fiction, is not about - round-and-about - something, but is the presentation of a matter most adequate to it in the author's judgment. (I might say, incidentally, that Hegel gives similar reasons for arguing, in the long and famous Preface to his Phenomenology, that prefaces are impossible.) · When you are reading a book for the second time you may want to do the following to the text, provided you own the book bodily. You may want to take a marker of the color children use when they draw the sun, and highlight passages. How is highlighting compatible with reading the whole well? It seems to me to be permissible for four reasons: 1. Some writers occasionally stop to put their whole meaning in a nutshell. Whether you have come on such a nugget, you cannot really know until you have read the whole book. If you mark such a nutshell for yourself, then when you come on it you can crack it and re-develop for yourself the argument, which grows as an oak from this acorn. An example of such an acorn is Kant's epigram, in the Critique of Pure Reason (B75): "Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind." Whenever you recall that sentence, you can recover the whole Critique for yourself. �12 2. Often you will notice, some time into the book, that a motifkeeps recurring and that you must at some point collect its incidences and figure out its meaning. An example is the returning vision of large blueness in War and Peace. 3. A third case of occurrences inviting highlighting is the significant mystery. A book will say things that you don't yet understand, that are pregnant enigmas for you, and that you want to talk about in seminar. One example for me is the second half of the fourth line of the Iliad: t'tW(E'tO Pou A.ft ... Dios d'eteleieto boule . . . and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled. . • • dtOc; li' What plan? When fulfilled? That is the puzzle dominating the epic. 4. Last among the occasions for highlighting I can think of, are the passages of personal import - those that penetrate to your heart and that you want never to lose, the ones you keep to yourself or show to close friends. I won't give an example now, but I will tell some, if asked. Let me say again: Highlighting, whether in sky-blue ink or in sun-yellow marker, is for the second reading. I think that though the books may look defaced when you are finished, the writers are rejoicing in your reading of them, be they still on earth or in either of the other places. That brings me to the author. Writers as Parents We speak of"Homer's gods." "Homer's gods," we might say; "are frivolous creatures -just compare the lightness of their invulnerable immortality to the gravity of his death-expectant heroes." Homer's gods, Homer's heroes, Homer's Iliad: How is the author related to the book? Auetor means literally "progenitor, parent" And like a child, the .·· book goes forth into the world, sometimes falling into hands the parent may shudder at. But like a good parent, the author knew that this would happen and gave the offspring what it needs in order to be on its own: self-sufficiency, a certain replet~ness. Here is what I mean. �13 In the course of the year you will be writing at least five small papers in your language tutorial and several more in your other classes. On some of these you will have conferences with your tutors. Your tutor will ask: "What are you saying here, what did you have in mind?" And you will tell all the things that you thought but failed to say in your paper. That is what distinguishes an accomplished writer: the ability to make the book independent, to tum it loose, to find a way to get the reader to ask not "What was the author thinking?" but "What is the book saying?" Ailllie Dillard, a very fine contemporary writer, who has thought much about composing a book, says in her essay The Writing Life (p. 4): "Process is nothing; erase your tracks." She is attacking a current school of writing teachers who exalt process over product, writing exercises over perfected expression. Here you will almost never be asked to write merely for the sake of writing. We take a leaf, so to speak, from the books of real writers and ask you to think about a matter that really does make you think, and then to say on paper, as perfectly as possible, what you have thought. That is what the authors of our books have done - they have thought and found the right words. "Thought" is a noun, but it is also the past form of the verb "to think." Thought is thinking that has been done, thinking perfected. So Annie Dillard should not have said "Erase your tracks" but "Absorb your tracks; make your product point the reader to your tracks." For writing is thinking frozen in its tracks by speech, speech crystallized so as to make the point of origin visible within. A book is a translucent product containing its process. That is how Homer's Iliad can become our Iliad. It preserves within it the world that Homer meant with each word he said. (Incidentally, it is because we want you to write papers somewhat as real writers write them - first think, then say - that you will have such a devilish hard time writing, but at least the task will dignify rather than degrade you.) So no more than we ask your parents what they meant by producing you, need we ask what Homer meant in his epics. The off-spring in both cases are amply provided to speak for themselves. Or rather, you are amply provided to read it. Even the Iliad, the one that is not a material thing to own, is yours, the reader's. You bring it to life, melt its frozen state. Again I quote from Bacon, this time from his Advancement of Learning (Bk.I): But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of �14 perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seed in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages: so that, if the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much . more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass through the vast sea of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions the one of the other? Now the notion that you bring the book to life seems to be close to the claim of a currently very busy school of thought: that the reader is the author. But what I mean is in fact a world apart from the notion that you may tease the text into any meaning your brilliant wit devises. On the contrary: It is the book's will, not yours that is to be done. , There is a book by Joseph Conrad (whose novella 'The Heart of Darkness," to my mind the greatest short story of our century, you will read as seniors). The book is called The Mirror of the Sea. It tells of the difference between going to sea in sailing vessels and on steam boats. A steam boat plows through the water; it conquers the ocean. Its progress is mechanical, though its route is wilful. The sail ship on the other hand respects its element and responds to its every indication. From departure to landfall, it is engaged in a fierce and loving battle .. with the sea. Its course is contingent and its arrival uncertain. A great · writer, to extend Bacon's nautical figure, provides a book that is more like a sea for sailing than an ocean for steaming. And that brings me to my final reflection, on the greatness of books . . Before I finish let me say that I know full well that I have been speaking in similes and metaphors and that I expect to be held to a more literal account in the question period. �15 Greatness in Books St. Jolm's is known as a "Great Books College," and, as I said early on, I know from your applications that you came because you want to read books that raise you rather than demean you. Mr. Curtis Wilson, a retired tutor who was twice dean ofthe college, used to wish that we would stop talking of "the hundred great books," and instead speak of "some very good books." I agree with "some," but, though I see his point - greatness is not a very sensible sort of classification - I can't quite agree to dropping "great," not at this moment in America. To begin with, I want to prognosticate that the more books you read, the more you will find that there is greatness, that it is an emergent quality that some books just have, and that each reading confirms. The community that has in common the reading of these books and the acknowledgment of their greatness is bound by two powerful bonds: first, the fact of a shared judgment, competently come by and continually confinned, and second the fact of a practical willingness to reverence what is high as expressed in a daily schedule of study. Some of you may know that nowadays these are fighting words in academe. How, they ask, can any communal judgment have been fairly atrived at when we are a people divided by a diversity of hopelessly opposed interests - who are playing, as they say, a zero sum game? How, again, can any one human expression be higher than another, when every text is a testimonial to some human condition, and the tradition of chosen books merely represents the winner? In other words, the present trend is to want democracy without commonality and equality without excellence. To me the wish seems outrageous - and again I am yours to question in the question period - but doubly outrageous because it contains the seed of a fair dream. The fair dream is that the human being in us should be universally respected and that all our works should be universally appreciated. The forced version is that we should live in a society in which, without admitting a common humanity, every last group discrimination based on extrinsic properties, such as race and sex, is outlawed, while all intellectual discriminations based on intrinsic criteria of quality are proscribed as having ulterior motives. �16 Let me offer two rules for choosing books to read that take some account of what is fair in the desire for universal appreciation. Here is Law One of the Discriminating Reader: Devour everything you can swallow with relish, indiscriminately. Test texts as I recommended before, but give everything a try. There are dozens of wonderful genres and fine works within them: Science fiction, utopias and . fanstasy; children's, ethnic and women's literature; Westerns, adventures and thrillers, book reviews, political flyers and literary criticism. (If you come to see me in my office I will be delighted to tell you my loves and hates in each category. I also know a lot of rather pleasing trash, including comic books.) Law Two of the Discriminating Reader then goes as follows: Read only a limited number of books, perhaps a hundred and twenty or so; discriminate severely; while attending to a text allow a little voi~ on ; the sidelines to say: "1bis is great and worthy of my best time; that is . not" Far from being at odds, Law One and Law Two are complementary. . Obeying the first shows you to be a lover of books, a bibliophile; obeying the second makes you a student, a reader. But how will you judge that a book is great? I had a teacher, forty years ago in Brooklyn College, who said that some books made her hair stand on end, and they were great Much as I like this criterion, which, I have since discovered, was not original with her, I see some flaws in it. But there are many other diagnostic marks, signs and indices of greatness, that people have listed, and we might talk about them in the question period. Let me add to that multitude one observation of my own, which does not so much pick out greatness as distinguish greatness in woiks of fiction from greatness in woiks of reflection: ) In a great epic or drama or novel, if any word were different, the tale told would be other than it is; in a great philosophical treatise, every sentence could be paraphrased and the truth told would be the same. To make myself clearer, let me take the counter-example, that of lesser books: A mediocre novel tells a tale coarse-meshed enough, with characters gross-grained enough, to be equally presentable in language only approximately equivalent A mediocre piece of philosophy, on the other hand, can't be told to its advantage in other tenns: It is all idiosyncratic jargon and its ordinary language paraphrase puts it to shame. That is why trying to say exactly what the book says in another �17 way is the useful initial exercise in seminar when the work is philosophical, but is love's labor lost when the work is fictional. And that is why it is usually harder to read a novel than it is to read a philosophical text - except perhaps when that text is also a drama. I am referring to the Platonic dialogues, the first of which you will be reading right after Homer. They are the hardest of all, since they are philosophical plays - you will decide whether tragedy or comedy. Let me end, if not conclude. My question for myself and for you was: "What is a Book?" My answer was: It is a special kind of body made to be inhabited by a curious kind of frozen but fusible soul, a body fitto mediate its own peculiar life. It has a parent, the author, who equips it with all it needs to live on its own, and god-parents, readers, who can revivify its printed life. The books that realize their book nature most perfectly may be called "great", and it is from these that we at St. John's College have selected a number for study. Both because it is a strenuous and wearing business to be constantly in their presence, and for reasons of inclusive humanity, it is good to read many lesser books as well. Have I answered the question I post>.d for us? Not remotely. Let us try again in the question period. � 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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Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 18 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 What is a book? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991-08-30 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 30, 1991 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1991-08-30 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e6f1157139bf924ec9e93794c6868746.pdf eade299c139b39789a4f60b3f51922b8 PDF Text Text Eva T. H. Brann Dean's Lecture August 25, 1992 THE SEAL WITH SEVEN BOOKS You have all heard of the book with seven seals. It is spoken of in the Book of the Apocalypse, or, as it is known in English, the Book of Revelation. Its authorship is attributed to st. John the Evangelist, who had on Patmos a vision, which he reports in obedience to a great voice behind him, that said: "What thou seest, write in a book." He turns and sees many amazing sights, but the climax of his vision is this: "And I saw," he says, "in the right hand of him that sat on the throne, a book written within and on the backside sealed with seven seals" (5: 1). And because no man in heaven or on earth can open the book, John weeps until he is told that the Lion of Juda, the Root of David, the Lamb of God, will open it. Unsealed, the book releases seven categories of catastrophe, a multitude of figures signifying a swarm of scourges presaging the redemption of the world. Among these figures are the infamous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, symbolizing conquest, war, famine, and death. There also spill out seven trumpets, and from the sixth falls a little open book that John is bidden to eat, and "it is sweet in his mouth but bitter in his belly." To my mind John's big sealed book is the great Book of History as it happens, while the little �2 open book stands for all the books that are written about history and are pleasant to read but hard to digest. The John who foresees history in the epoch we call the Christian era is also the apostle who wrote the gospel that begins "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God," the text on which so many sophomores and seniors write their essays. I have been paper advisor for enough students to have a sense of the reason for their choice. They hope that John's text will bring together for them the meaningful word, called in Greek logos, with the vision of God. (I want to interject here for our freshmen, to whom the first lecture of the year should speak most directly, that logos, a word that signifies both the thought and the speech it fathers, a word you will soon talk about in the language tutorial, is to my understanding the most important word in the tradition you are now setting out to study, the tradition of reason.) This John who writes, sees, and eats books may, I am sorry to tell you, not be our John, the John of St. John's. In the last century people thought he was, because they thought our college had been named after st. John's College in Cambridge, which in turn was named after the Evangelist. In the previous century, however -- you should realize that you have come to the third oldest school in the country -- the students here thought that their John was st. John Chrysostom. Francis Scott Key, an alumnus of the class of 1796, in whose hall you are sitting and who, as you know, was to write the words to the Star-spangled �3 Banner during the War of 1812, received in January 1807 a letter from another early alumnus. It said in part: I am in great haste, and in no less of our Saint's assistance .... o Sancte Chrvsostome! ora pro nobis! (O Saint Chrysostomos, pray for us.] I have examined the college library and find ma!!Y; valuable books in it. There is an edition of Chrysostom, in twelve volumes, three of which are wanting ... (Fletcher, 43) This Chrysostom, a Greek nickname that means "the goldenmouthed," lived in the fourth century. He was a preacher at Antioch and, very unwillingly, Archbishop of Constantinople. He appears to have been a very nice person who was continually in hot water with the establishment because he tried to get the rich to be more charitable -- but his congregations loved him. He was a lively, humorous, humane, clear and pleasant speaker, as his name betokens. We still have a couple of volumes of a later edition of his homilies. I took out the volume that contains his commentary on the Gospel of St. John, and found in the second homily a wonderful commentary on a current mania. This mania is to explain or expose an author's opinion by reference to his social origin. twist. John Chrysostom gives this nasty trick a new He begins by chiding those who won't pay attention to the Evangelist's social and family origin. This son of Zebedee from Bethesda was an illiterate barbarian, without learning, a man who fished not even the sea but only a small lake, a man poor and rural. How, John Chrysostom asks, could such a man have known why man exists and why the world exists, what vice is and what virtue is, matters about which even Plato and Pythagoras, who were better than other people, said the most ridiculous things? �4 It is necessary, our saint concludes, to know a man's background to understand just how little it matters if only the spirit be upon him. That's a new twist to the current preoccupation. The preacher then begins a line-by-line commentary on the gospel and raises a question none of my advisees ever thought of, nor Had I, until now: Why does the evangelist pass over the Father in his opening line and go immediately to the son, whom he calls the Logos or Word of God? If any students ever ask me again to help them with an essay on the fourth gospel, I shall surely send them to "our" saint, the Goldenmouth. There is yet one more saint who is a candidate for being our name-saint. This is John the Baptist, who was from the Christian point of view the forerunner of Jesus, but from the Jewish point of view the last of the Jewish minor prophets. The Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote in the first century A. D., describes him as a sort of holy hippy, clothed in patches, eating fruits and nuts and preaching freedom from all authority but that of God (The Jewish War, Appendix after I, 110). Our connection with this John is established through our seal, the one that will appear on your diplomas four years in the future. This seal was adopted in 1793. �Masonic Apron. Jacques Cbailley, Tbe Magic Flute, Masonic Opera Seal of St. John's College 1793 Our former librarian, Miss Charlotte Fletcher, has interpreted its symbolism, which had long been identified as a Masonic figure. She did so in an issue of the St. John's Review devoted to her researches into the prehistory·and early history of st. John's College. And she was able to do so by means of her participation in the St. John's program. She was preparing for the senior seminar, which opens with that novel of novels, Tolstoy's War and Peace. She came on the description of the initiation into the rites and rituals of Masons that Pierre Bezuhov, the hero of the novel, undergoes. Tolstoy gives a description of secrets revealed to Pierre, a description that precisely corresponds to things seen in our seal (Vol. I, Bk. ii, 3) • You see a mound of stones in seven courses forming steps, leading up to a pillared temple. A person is climbing. up the hill, carrying not, as you might think, a cross, but a T square, the symbol of the Masons. temple of wisdom. The temple is Solomon's Temple, the The steps leading to it re.present the seven �6 Masonic virtues, first of which is discretion, the keeping of secrets. You can see the theme in a Masonic apron of the nineteenth century as well. It appears that Tolstoy scorns the first virtue of Masonry, since he is evidently exposing the secret rituals of the order. How did this college come to have a Masonic seal? On December 16, 1784, the subscription list, the list of contributions necessary to make a beginning, was filled, and the draft of a plan for founding a college on the Western shore, on our side of Chesapeake Bay, was released. This college, together with Washington College on the Eastern shore, was to be the University of Maryland. So you see that you have actually come to the real University of Maryland. The committee that worked out this draft was headed by three clergymen, a Jesuit-trained priest, John Carroll, from the great catholic Maryland family after which two of your dorms are named, William Smith, an Episcopalian and a Mason, and Patrick Allison, a Presbyterian. Forgive me for injecting here an irrelevancy charming only to people who like birthdays. a day of wonders. December 16 is a dies mirabilis, Beethoven was born on December 16, 1770, Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, and St. John's was born on December 16, 1784. Make of it what you will. In any case, Miss Fletcher thinks that the following is what happened. On December 16 the college was ready to go. Toward the end of the month George Washington, was here in Annapolis to negotiate a fairly momentous agreement, the first �7 post-Revolutionary cooperative legislation between two states of the United States, concerning the use of the Potomac. The bill was passed in the State house, across from us, on December 27. great dinner was given to Washington who had resigned his commission as general before the Continental Congress right in that place a year and four days earlier. (The room in the Statehouse where he performed this, one of the momentous acts of history, when a man chose to be a citizen rather than a king, is still to be seen up on the other hill of Annapolis.) Now December 27 is the feast day of St. John the Evangelist, the patron saint of the Masons. And George Washington, himself a loyal Mason, may have thought of the dinner as a double celebration. When two days later the legislature chartered our school they named it in honor both of the event of having Washington back in town and of the feast day. Add to this circumstance that local freemasons had cooperated with local catholics -- a thing unthinkable in Europe -- to establish this, one of the oldest non-sectarian schools in the country. The charter approved that day said: ... Youth of all religious denominations shall be freely and liberally admitted ... according to their merit •.. without requiring or enforcing any religious or civil test, or urging their attendance upon any particular worship or service, other than what they have been educated in, or have the consent and approbation of their parents and guardians to attend. (Charter, Article II) And that is how we got our Masonic seal of 1793. It is an emblem of the spirit of that year of the Treaty of Paris which ended the successful Revolution, an emblem of the spirit of A �8 religious pluralism, of the sects making room for each other. If Miss Fletcher's conjecture is right, the saint of the book of seven seals is ours after all. To me it seems, as I have said, that this book of seven seals is the book of history and of the terrors time releases. It is a book of catastrophes. This college, however, was founded at a felicitous moment when there was hope that a new order of centuries, one released from the doom of catastrophic history, could begin on this continent. And in its two hundred years (or three hundred if you include its predecessor the King William School, with whose stock of professors and furniture st. John's opened) the college has seen many minor miseries but only one enormous catastrophe, the Civil War. This war was the only time when the school was closed and the campus became a military hospital -- though even then one lone professor carried on a class, so as not to let the charter lapse. On this continent history has, then, not been incessantly apocalyptic. But whether the great book of John of the Apocalypse has one or seven seals, it is not a book for reading. It is, as I said, the Book of History, of events, to be lived through, endured. It contains history before the fact. There are, of course, also books of history written after the fact, ex post facto history, the little open books. Those books are for reading and for study, but we do not read or study many of them here. �9 This little school that has endured through much great history, that has inspired four little books of its own, that bears witness to the past above ground, in its Colonial and postRevolutionary buildings, and below, in its artifact-laden land (of which we may soon be doing an archeological survey) -- this historical college harbors a program that excludes the study of history. I hope to tell you -- I mean our freshmen why we do not study history by telling you what we do study. Underfoot, let into the same ground that probably contains pieces of pipes smoked by the gentlemen and "mechanicks" who made the Revolution and buttons of the tunics of Union soldiers wounded in the civil War, there is a seal. You walk over it every day, when you descend the steps·. from the hill of McDowell Hall to the Francis Scott Key building. Johannine book of seven seals. It is the reverse of the It is a seal of seven books, seven books round about a scale. This seal is not the historical and legal seal of your college chartered in Maryland, but a new design, which appears in the earliest catalogue of the present Program to which eventually two campuses would play host. It is the catalogue of 1937. Seal of St. John's College 1937 �10 (Incidentally, many of you will in time give some thought to the differences between this college as it appears in Annapolis and the same college as it appears in Santa Fe. Well, one difference to consider is that in Annapolis the Program was fitted into the place while in Santa Fe the place was made for the Program.) seal has a nice jingly saying in Latin: Libris Librague. it up. The Facio Liberos ex Liberis No one seems to know what inspired punster made It plays on the Latin root for "free," as in liberty, or in "liberal arts." On the seal the college announces that "I make freemen of children by books and a balance." You have come to a school of the liberal arts. You will, if all goes well, participate in a liberal education. But to be a school that offers a liberal education is not at all the same as to be a school of the liberal arts. indicated by this fact: The difference is If you ask "What is a liberal education?" the answers lie on a field whose axes are not easy to articulate. But if you ask "What are the liberal arts?" the answer is discrete and definite: There are traditionally seven in number and they are divided into two groups. I should say that by tradition, a word that will occur often here, I mean that aspect of the past which is actively effective in the present. here. I also want to make a marginal remark In this school the Dean gets to talk to the whole college five times. This will be my third and middle time. it as the central moment. I think of On this occasion I really ought to talk about the arts that guide our curriculum. �11 The lower group is called the trivium, a Latin word meaning "three-way." These arts are traditionally: Grammar, Dialectic or Logic, Rhetoric. The upper group is called the quadrivium, or the four-way. These arts are traditionally: Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Music. They are all traditionally studied from books. The first set of books is concerned with the arts by which human beings order and express their minds and hearts, that is, with language. The second set has to do with the arts by which people approach the learnable structures, abstracted or sensuous, of the world. A school that wanted to institute learning by means of the trivium and the quadrivium might well turn out to have a language class and a mathematics class. But not all that is to be learned is studied through written books. Just as history may be thought of -- I don't know whether rightly -- as a book that precedes the written history books, so the people, such as Galileo, who discovered what we now call science -- the mathematical study of nature -- thought that there was a book of nature whose decipherment preceded the writing of books of physics or biology. To read that material �12 book, that book of reality, one had to look hard at the appearances, or, as the Greeks say, the phenomena. engage in disciplined observation. One has to Now the property that most consistently distinguishes the things of nature from the things of the mind is weight, heaviness -- and all weighing involves a pair of scales reaching an equilibrium position. Therefore we have a scale, in Latin called libra, in our seal; unlike the scale of justice it is a scale in equilibrium. A school of the liberal arts should add an eighth, not so traditional, activity: science as done in the laboratory, by means of observation and measurement. The state of equilibrium, which a scale must reach if it is to measure anything precisely, and which is a crucial phenomenon in nature, will consequently occupy a large part of your first-year laboratory. Let me expound, as succinctly as I am able, the subject matter of the seven old arts. by calling them arts: But first let me say what is meant They are skills, forms of know-how we get good at by practice, by doing problems, proofs, translations, analyses, regularly, several times a week. Consequently one understanding of the Latin word for arts, artes, was that it came from arete, the Greek word for excellence. Another understanding comes from the fact that the compendia of the liberal arts from late antiquity on were collections -- rather dreary ones, incidentally -- of terms and rules. Hence the principal medieval writer on the trivium, John of Salisbury in his Metalogicon (I, 12), suggests that the word artes comes from artant, meaning �13 "they bind,'' because the arts delimit, constrain, discipline us through their rules. These are both fanciful etymologies. The "liberal" in "liberal arts" was, on the contrary, traditionally and rightly understood to refer to freedom in several ways. In a classical context the liberal arts rescue us from banal pursuits. earthly bonds. In a religious context they deliver us from And in a modern context they set us free from inherited prejudices. What appeals to me as revealing is John of Salisbury's implication that the liberal arts free us by binding us. For that is the nature of education in a nutshell: Education forges the bonds of freedom. I won't leave that paradoxical epigram just hanging there; I'll return to it at the end, and we can talk about it in the important part of this evening, the question period. To get back to the contents of the seven bookish arts. As I said, these arts were handed down in compendia that served both as the depositories of all knowledge and as course outlines. Cassiodorus, who wrote in the sixth century A. D. and seems to have been first to use the phrase "the seven liberal arts" (Kimball, 23), wrote one such handbook, which was in use for a millenium. Here is a sketch of the contents of the arts adapted and expanded from his pamphlet: Grammar includes the kinds of subjects of which your Greek manual is full: features. the parts of speech and their syntactical Every modern language manual derives its terms and topics from this tradition. �14 Rhetoric includes everything having to do with verbal composition: the parts of a whole, the poetic figures that enhance it, the informal arguments that make it persuasive. These are matters you will take up often in the language tutorial. I might tell you that very recently rhetoric has again become a lively university subject. Logic includes the study of the categories of knowledge and the types of inference, such as the various sorts of syllogism. These subjects too will turn up in the language tutorial. Arithmetic deals with the nature of unity and the kinds of numbers and their ratio relations. You will get a taste of what is traditionally meant by arithmetic in the freshman mathematics tutorial when you study the seventh book of Euclid and when you read a book called Introduction to Arithmetic by Nicomachus. Nicomachus agreed with Plato that arithmetic is the root of all the sciences. Geometry is the mathematics you will study more extensively here than any other liberal art whatsoever, and I'll come back to it in a moment. Astronomy, which is, as we study it, geometry adapted to show the intelligibility of phenomenal motions in the heavens, is a liberal art you will study here through three years, and in various combinations of versions: geocentric and heliocentric, mathematical and dynamical. Music, which is sometimes listed at the top of the liberal arts, is put by Cassiodorus right after number. For, taken as a �15 liberal rather than a fine art, it begins with the study of the natural consonances and dissonances associated with numeral ratios, and with the modes and scales arising from the composition of these ratios. In your sophomore year you will study these rudimentary facts and much more: rhythm, melody, and harmony, using modern examples complex beyond anything the ancient tradition imagined. Each of the three trivial arts, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, has been in turn the leader. (Incidentally, the term "trivial," used as a contemptuous reference to the trivium first as trite and soon as paltry, appears late in the sixteenth century.) In the days of early imperial Rome, rhetoric, oratory, public persuasion, was the all-encompassing art, for which the quadrivium was the preparation. This is what Quintilian says in his work on the Education of an orator (I, 10), one of the great texts on education. In the earlier Middle Ages grammar, then interpreted as the reading of great literary texts, was valued above all (Paetow, 33). But with the rise of the universities and scholastic philosophy in the thirteenth century, dialectic drowned out all literary studies. They returned with the advent in the fifteenth century of the scholars, who called themselves humanists because they studied the antique poets who cared about men rather than the medieval theologians who wrote of God. The trivium then became what we now call the "humanities," just as the quadrivium, on the whole neglected in the middle ages, returned as "science." In our day, rhetoric is making a serious �16 bid not to replace but to be philosophy, as the art of the construal of texts. I want to warn you that this kind of flamboyant historical gesture drawing I have been engaging in is too crude to do events justice. In the age unjustly suspended by historians between antiquity and modernity many renascences and returns took place, learning was preserved, and discoveries were made that set the stage for the great Renaissance. All I mean to do is to point out that, just as the learning of language is not an orderly linear progress but the simultaneous acquisition of various skills, so the trivium is not naturally ordered. It is otherwise with the quadrivium, a much more ancient, and, moreover, an intrinsically ordered, set of studies. The word itself was a translation, made by Boethius in the early sixth century (I, i) of Nicomachus's term tessares methodoi, meaning the "four ways." The word trivium was a much later derivative. It is first known in the ninth century (Lutz 76). Both groupings of the arts are of course much older than their names. The quadrivia! studies will become known to the freshman as a course of education through the Republic of Plato, where the higher liberal arts curriculum of the West was first expounded. It is the higher learning because what we call literature, namely, poetry and drama (novels hadn't been invented yet), are used in the Republic for the moral and civil training of children. But it is also not the highest, because for Plato �17 dialectic is not mere logic but philosophy. And so dialectical inquiry is above all mathematics, pure or physical. Why those three and those four arts? If we grant that it makes sense that there be two kinds of study, those of sayable thoughts and those of learnable objects, yet why just seven and why just these? The tradition, which loves number magic, saw seven as the virgin number, called Minerva, the Latin name for Athena, because within the decad it is the only prime number that does not "beget," that is, act as a factor of another number in the first ten. It is the sum of three, the male, and four, the female number, as Athena is a man-like woman. There are seven phases of the moon, seven planets, seven days of the week, and many more sevens including the seven openings of the human head (Stahl, 152-54). It was Martianus Capella who first fixed the number at seven (Lutz, 74). This is wild and woolly stuff, but perhaps we can do better. The arts of speech are three because speech has three aspects. There are rational and empirical rules of language in general and of language in particular, of Language itself in the singular and of languages in the plural, such as English, Greek, and French, and these constitute grammar. Then there are formal structures of reason -- of concepts, propositions, and rules of inference and these make up logic. And finally there are the precepts of persuasion, by which words grow -- as Homer so beautifully says -- wings. words that reach the hearer. Winged words, epea pteroenta, are Rhetoric is the art of making words �18 fly. I think with a little trimming and shoving all language study (as distinct from studying languages) does fit under these headings. The four arts of learnable objects, however, are ordered not as were the three aspects of one thing, speech, but as a dimensional development, as a genetic sequence leading to a complete object. At least that is how Socrates presents the quadrivium, or perhaps I should say the quintuvium, since he wants his philosopher kings to learn not about four but five mathematical subjects. I should say something here for the freshmen who have not yet read Plato's Republic, the book to which I am referring. It appears to be about the best political community, but turns out, at its center, to be a book about education, the program of philosophical learning that will educate those who might be fit to rule this polity. These four or five studies are called mathemata, which might be translated as "learnables." Mathematical studies are those which are by their nature learnable. about mathematics? What is so learnable Well, partly it must be the fact that it is unlike language learning, which has no given natural order (though that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done in an orderly fashion, though the order will be conventional). Mathematical learning builds up systematically, just as mathematical objects can be ordered genetically. There are, of course, several other features that makes mathematics more learnable -- and more teachable -- than language, among them the clarity and �19 distinctness of its objects. The truth of this claim will probably become clear when you compare your language and your mathematics tutorials. Socrates begins with arithmetic (522c). Arithmetic is the study of the unit, the collection of units called arithmoi, numbers, and the study of calculation, the Greek word for which denotes the use of the reasoning power, logistike (525 b). The unit is zero-dimensional; you will in fact find it defined as a point without position. Next the philosopher-kings- to-be are to study geometry, not only plane geometry, which deals with one-dimensional lines and two-dimensional surfaces, but also solid geometry, which rises to the third dimension, the dimension of depth. Next these geometrical solids are put in motion, and studied especially in the circular revolutions of the heavens. That is astronomy. Besides the visible geometrical figures of heavenly motion, there are also the audible progressions of numerical ratios. And that is harmonics or theoretical music. For Plato it is the crowning study of the quadrivium, especially insofar as the tones produced belong to the octave sounded by the heavenly spheres (617 b). It is qualitative number moving in figures, or, you might say, rational bliss. I should tell you that in accordance with the Platonic scheme, in the early days of our program books on physics such as you will be studying in your junior year, for instance books on the motions that produce light and sound, were to be found in the �20 King William Room of our library under the heading "music." Those were the days! You might well ask: With the enormous burgeoning of the sciences in the past two centuries, and particularly in the past half-century, does the quadrivia! ordering still make sense or is it purely antiquarian? Of course there have always been subjects regarded either as too technical or as too advanced to fit in the quadrivium, such architecture, medicine, and jurisprudence. But though the number of descended specialties is now enough to swamp the originals, I can think of two ways in which the "four-way" still makes sense. First, the ordering of mathematical and natural objects by dimension still yields a plausible progression. As you know, the basic quantities of science are called dimensions, meaning magnitudes that give scope to measurement. The fundamental physical quantities are the three dimensions of Space, which give the configurations of bodies, and then Time, which is the measure of bodies in motion, and finally Mass, to which bodies owe their sensory effects and which is in fact the magnitude measurable by the scale at the center of our seal. So we can still say that dimensional progression is an ordering principle of science, especially of physics. I should add here that there are other ways of organizing the quadrivium, by the discontinuous or continuous, for example, or the absolute or relative, the unmoved or moved character of the objects (Merlan, 89-91) . �21 Second, you should realize that we carry on our studies in a way that makes the liberal arts expecially fit for our use. This is our way: We do not present you with fields and subjects that we try to cover in an introductory sort of way. Our tutorials and laboratories are not introductory but elementary. Here is what that distinction means. Introductions are overviews of extensive fields of information in which high points are presented in a cursory way with some explanations to hold things together. Introductions are of necessity superficial, but they are not necessarily elementary. On the other hand, Euclid's book on geometry, the one that you have begun to study, is called the Elements. Elements are that on which, and also out of which, learning is built. The elementary studies are usually both simple and profound, and they are not extensive bodies of information, but basic skills and practices. elements is different from getting on with it. Dwelling on studying beginnings is different from being at the cutting edge. Advanced studies and breakthrough work are wonderful activities, good for graduate study. We, however, dwell on and in origins. It is a wonder of human learning that these beginnings often have a special perfection and elegance. It could well be that first things are nondescript and insignificant and that only through progress does quality arise. For example, in the evolution of mammals, the scurrying eohippus, which means the "dawn-horse," is a little ugly thing and the galloping modern horse a large and noble being. But it is not so for the dawn of �22 learning. First discoveries are often well-shaped and grand and make good paradigms and exemplars. decided to do: And that is what we have not to cover the field but to choose fine elementary examples for study in our tutorials and laboratories. For that is what the liberal arts are: the basic skills of learning taught through the elementary but grand discoveries of the human intellect. To return for one more minute to the Republic. We found laid out there the quadrivium in a plausible development. find the trivium there as well? Can we Yes, but divided and wrapped, so to speak, round about the quadrivium. The children's character is trained by means of poetry, by the same works, epic, tragedy, and odes, that will later afford the material for the trivial studies of grammar and rhetoric. Logic, called dialectic in the Republic, is not, however, a study for children. It is rather the high point of study for the young philosopher-kings-to-be. They take it up in their early thirties. Dialectic teaches the way of rational argument, not however as a formal science of the schemata of reason, but as a road to final knowledge, up to the highest structures of being and even beyond. Dialectic is for Socrates what we call philosophy. I might say here that the project of tracing the uses and exchanges of the terms logic and dialectic, their fate in connoting the highest or meanest, the richest or driest of studies, is almost coextensive with the project of following the vicissitudes of learning and thinking in the West. You might �23 want to write your senior essay on it. Let me just say here that dialectic is soon demoted to a mere counterpart of rhetoric -Cassiodorus, the author of the sixth century I mentioned before as writing one of the best known handbooks on the liberal arts tradition, says, borrowing from the Stoic Zeno (Stahl 95): "Dialectic and rhetoric are as with respect to a hand the contracted fist and the extended palm -- the former completes its arguments in brief speech, the latter roams the fields of eloquence with abundant talk; the one abridges words, the other stretches them out" (Ch. III) . Yet even when dialectic loses its grand sense, the liberal arts tradition steadfastly preserves the notion that the culmination of the liberal arts is philosophy: Cassiodorus says: Philosophy is homoiosis theoi kata dynaton anthropoi, "the assimilation to God as far as is possible for a human being" (1168). One of my favorite writers on liberal learning is a monk of the twelfth century, Hugo of st. Victor, the director of his monastery's school, who wrote a book called "Manual on Learning Through Reading" (Didascalicon de studio legendi). I like him especially because he tells me, with modest clarity, things I have discovered and lived by over the years: That to study books you have to know which texts to read and in what order and how. That diligent study from books is quite different from meditation, which is careful and repeated thinking through, and that meditation in turn differs from contemplation, which is a kind of collecting, comprehensive insight -- and you have to do �24 all three. That searching for wisdom is not the same as having it, wherefore we are to be called not sapientes, sophai, "wise people," but amatores sapientiae, which is the Latin rendition of the Greek words philoi sophiae, philosophers, "lovers of wisdom." That pursuing empty stuff strenuously is worse than plying good things negligently. That reading has three stages: the letter, or construing the grammar, the sense, or getting the first meaning, and the significance, or penetrating deeply. That the wisdom for which the soul burns is not in the first instance technical and good for accomplishing things in the world, but theoretical and good for illumining and bringing us back to ourselves. What gives me pleasure is that this experienced teacher can reach back over a millennium and a half, and say old truths with unselfconscious freshness. Hugo holds that the seven arts are "indeed the best tools and beginnings by which to prepare the way for the mind to a full appreciation of philosophical truth" (III, 3). It is in our seminar that we realize Victor's way. We read for the seminar and our trivial studies have prepared us to construe the sentences, to follow the logic, to appreciate the style, and to understand mathematical and scientific references. Together we try to work out the simple sense of the text, and to prepare for the deep interpretation that we search for later in meditative privacy. Sometimes we have sudden and encompassing insights right in the seminar room. Sometimes such insights come when we have withdrawn into ourselves. (I recall a sophomore who �25 saw the One walking along College Creek.) We waste no study time on piffling books, since we have chosen to read only works that repay our efforts. We try to do it in the right order, keeping abreast of our authors. We try to have read some of the same books that have gone into the making of each book we come to. Hugo would probably have been surprised at the capture of his monastic studium legendi, which might be translated as "book learning," by the modes of participatory democracy in our seminar: by the relegation of the teachers to questioners-in- chief and by the encouragement of tentative offerings and trial balloons from all participants. I think he was the sort of man who, having seen us at work, might have been tempted to turn the monastery school at St. Victor in Paris into an early st. John's. Of course, he might then have ended up in the monastery scullery, for our questioning is almost routinely more radical than his community could have countenanced. Our seminar, I am implying, is devoted to philosophy, and the tutorials, including the laboratory, are the preparation that should make the seminar conversation progressively at once more allusive and more coherent. than technique. In the seminar we follow wisdom more Some books are in fact quite directly concerned with the wisdom which Hugo calls vivax mens et sola rerum primaeva ratio: things." "living mind and the only primal principle of Proceeding through direct argument, these books are the ones usually called philosophical or theological. Others present their wisdom in more oblique ways, clothed in the many-colored �26 coat of fiction. They have a relation to the philosophical books something like that of the open palm to the clenched fist. Recall that Cassiodorus had used that figure to distinguish rhetoric from dialectic. Those books, usually referred to as literature, are easier to read but often more demanding. One of the beauties of our order of reading is that we do not preordain which is which, what books must be called philosophy and what books must be called fiction. For all our seminar list knows, Homer's Iliad is a work of philosophical theology and Newton's Principia a word of cosmological myth. All the distinction we ever make is to assign some readings to the tutorials and others to the seminar. In the tutorials we use manuals, compendia, textbooks for guiding our demonstrations, and the prose selections and poems we read are chosen to be worked over -- translated and analyzed. Euclid's Elements, for example, is a textbook, meant specifically to introduce students into the sciences of space and number in the most succinct and systematic way. And when we do a logical and rhetorical analysis we might use a question from Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologicae. I would sum up the work of tutorials and laboratories as dealing with the seven liberal arts. Here we use the best examples available and apply to them the terms and techniques of the basic skills for learning about words and things. And these terms and techniques are in turn taken from the best teaching texts we can find. Some know-how may even be best acquired in a form abstracted from all context and then compressed and �27 reconstructed, like processed food. Sometimes manuals are just the thing. In the seminar, on the other hand, we read books, whole books as much as possible, or carefully -- and reluctantly -selected parts. Here it is not arts and textbooks but authors and texts that we attend to. Here we do not engage in exercises for acquiring the skills of learning, but we engage in liberal learning itself. We reflect on everything that we are and that the world holds, including the arts of learning themselves. The reason that the seminar is the place for integral texts by named authors is this. That since we use the seminar books above all to help our own thought, it is of the essence that we should be addressed by an original human voice and that we should hear it out. I said earlier that whereas the liberal arts were quite definable, liberal education could mean practically anything. There is a book that tries to organize the chaos. books as it is with children: It is with We tend to have a special affection for other people's offspring if we have gotten to diaper them as babies, and we have a special esteem for books that we have been asked to read in manuscript. The book I am thinking of is by Bruce A. Kimball, and it is called Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education. It offers a typology, that is to say, a conceptual coordinate system, of the kinds of liberal education that the author has discerned. You will see by looking at the axes on your sheets �Two Axes } of Liberal Ed~tion Four Types Classical Authors ~o<? o~ ~~ ~~ %~~· (' & ~':>~ co N The Liberal Arts Elements of Learning Preparation for Truth-Seeking Education of Leaders Pursuit of Virtue <Qo/- "J-!Y ~ ~~" ~ o(f . ~Q· ~Oc; ~~ ~~Q' ...(>~& ~ ~~ <Q~~ ·O~ c,':>~ ~~ .q,.~o Modern Science Derived from Bruce A. Kimball, Orators and Pbflosopbers, p. 228 "Liberal Arts'' Curricula Elective Courses Epistemological Skepticism Tolerance of Individual Views l~elativism �29 what the most telling characteristic of the types are. The right-hand horizontal or major axis shows the spirit of liberal education prevalent in the best of secular American schools: "epistemological skepticism," that is to say, comprehensive questioning and tolerance of all views. The left side shows a diametrically opposed idea, that good citizens must be trained in a common set of virtues, which are often set out in great texts. You will find this spirit alive especially in the great Catholic schools. The minor axis opposes mathematics and sciences, the hard disciplines, at the bottom, to classical texts, the soft readings, at the top. I do think with a little patting and pushing, most colleges in this country fit into this coordinate system. And now comes your own college, St. John's. go on the grid? Where does it Well, we study classical texts, many of them, and the best we can find, of all periods. Do we confine ourselves to one of the so-called "Two Cultures," the sciences or the humanities, at opposite ends of the vertical axis? No, everyone studies mathematics for four years and science for three, simple but real science, elementary but real mathematics. Yet, looking to the left of the horizontal axis, we certainly also think that our studies should make us better human beings, and we are deeply concerned with the civic effect of our education. Moreover we choose the texts we read because we think they contain worthy truths about moral and civic matters. looking to the opposite right, we are inveterate askers of And �30 questions. Tolerating others' opinion isn't quite a sufficient description of the spirit of our classrooms: We try truly to hear what others say and, if we can, to appreciate their opinion rather than just to tolerate it. To us the verb "to question" does not mean "to attack" but "to elicit." At this school we read classical texts but think that these include works of mathematics and science. We assume that moral civic and intellectual virtue may be acquired through attending to the teaching of our authors, but we think that there is no authority other than each thinking student. In short, we use classics to teach us science, and great books to help us reflect on large questions. The founders and sustainers of this school, the generations of tutors and the fifty classes of students that have devised and confirmed this program since 1937, seem to have done a remarkable thing. Without much conscious reference to the historically discernible types of liberal education, they seem to have brought about a school that encompasses and reconciles all the major good purposes that the grand tradition of liberal education has over time included. how have we done that? The St. John's program is materially exclusive and intellectually inclusive. By "materially exclusive" I mean that there are many subjects well worth knowing and many objects well worth accomplishing that we have excluded so as to able to require ourselves to study what we think is best and so as to study it together. By "intellectually �31 inclusive" I mean that there is no mode of learning, knowing, and believing that we fail to acknowledge as worthy of serious attention. By "serious attention" I mean that in studying a book or listening to a person we hold open, somewhere in our thought, the possibility that what they say might be true and that we might want to live by it . And what are we consequently? We are a college where learning is well-defined and question-asking unlimited, where study is selective and thought receptive, where opinions may be definite and minds yet open. That is what our seal of seven book betokens. At the center of St. John's are the liberal arts and the books and instruments through which we study them. These arts are encompassed by an understanding of liberal education that the seal articulates in the surrounding work: "By books and a balance I make humanly free adults of legally free children." the seal the college speaks to us and promises: the bonds of freedom." On "I forge for you �32 BIBLIOGRAPHY Boethius, Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus, De institutione arithmetica libri duo, edited by G. Friedlein: Leipzig (1869). Cassiodorus, M. Aurelius, De Artibus ac Disciplinis Liberalium Litterarum, Opera Omnia, II (1848). Fletcher, Charlotte, "St. John's 'For Ever': Five Essays on the History of King William's School and st. John's College," The St. John's Review, XL, 2 (1990-91). Hugo of St. Victor Didascalicon de Studio Legendi, Geschichte und Dokumente der abendlaendischen Paedagogik, Vol. I, edited by Eugene Garin, Hamburg: Rowohlt (1964). John Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist: Homilies 1-47, translated by Sister Thomas Aquinas Goggin, New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc. (1959). Joseph, Flavius, History of the Jewish War, translated by H. St. J. Thackeray, Vol. II, Appendix, 644, Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library (1976). John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon: A Twelth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, translated by Daniel D. McGarry, Berkeley: University of California Press (1962). Kimball, Bruce A., Orators and Philosophers, New York: College Press (1986). Teachers Lutz, Cora E., "Remigius' Ideas on the Classification of the Seven Liberal Arts," Traditio, XII (1956), 65-86. Marrou, H. I., A History of Education in Antiquity, New York: Mentor Books (1956). Merlan, Philip, "The Origin of the Quadrivium," From Platonism to Neoplatonism, Ch. 4, The Hague: Nijhoff (1975). Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introduction to Arithmetic, Annapolis: The St. John's College Press (1955). �33 Paetow, John L., The Arts Course at Medieval Universities with Special Reference to Grammar and Rhetoric, Dubuque: Reprint Library (from 1910). Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, translated by H. E. Butler, Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library (1963). Stahl, William H., Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, New York: Columbia University Press (1971). �34 THE SEVEN LIBERAL ARTS The Trivium Grammar Logic Rhetoric The Quadrivium Arithmetic Geometry Astronomy Music �35 Masonic Apron. Jacques Chailley, The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera Seal of St. John's College 1793 Seal of st. John's College, 1937 Bruce A. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers THE BOOK OF SEVEN SEALS � 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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Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 35 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 The seal with seven books Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992-08-25 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 25, 1992 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1992-08-25 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b3ea3e06e0d6c778606befa155573b23.pdf 2a7c82008ccd2f962088495bf800c3f8 PDF Text Text 1993 St. John's College Opening Lecture Telling Lies Eva T .H. Brann, Dean St. John's College, Annapolis �Telling Lies EvaT.H.Brann,Dean St. John's College, Annapolis The first lecture of the school year is, by ari old tradition, dedieated to that portion of the college new to this Friday night ritual, the freshmen among us. Yesterday, Thursday night, you participated in the first of many seminars where you yourselves do all the talking. Tonight you are present at the only weekly event where someone else gets to speak to you, a dean or a tutor or a visitor. One thing stays the same. Whether you are speaking or listening, you are intended to hear and to judge. Although you may have allowed the talk of the world to persuade you that "being judgmental" is a social sin, judgments are what you are intended to render - on the words of others, though above all on your own. For example, this lecture is entitled "Telling Lies." What, you are intended to ask yourselves, "ts she up to?" Is she gotng to start us off here by giving lessons in lying? Or, what is worse, by preaching honesty to us, good people all? If she is so preoccupied with telling lies, that's perhaps what she does. And in fact I have already engaged in false speech: That "old" tradition of dedicating this opening lecture to you, the freshmen - I made it up myself and it is only three years old. To recognize this and similar lies you have to know some facts, and to judge their seriousness you have to have some appreciation of rhetoric. For the bravado of rhetorical overstatement seems to be a species of the so-called white lie. Perhaps such a colorless lie is better than a blazingly scarlet one, perhaps it is not. You will spend time in the language tutorial distinguishing and analyzing the rhetorical deceptions of language and forming judgments about them. To top it off, for your last seminar, not only of your freshman year but again of your senior year, you will read a dialogue by Plato, the Phaedrus, in which questions of love, rhetoric, and truth are intertwined. Unfortunately, the knowledge that initiates you into judging speech cannily can also be construed as lessons in lying - an uneasy fact to which I shall return. 1 �But I have put the cart before the horse. Before you can judge whether an utterance is a lie, you have to be .able to discern what it means: meaning first. then judgment. For example, what does "telling lies" mean? Does it mean "uttering untruths," as in "She stands up there and keeps telling lies"? Or does it mean "revealing." as in "Achilles' lles are always telling lies, since they tell us a lot about him"? In order to establish possible meanings you have to know some grammar. You have to know that "telling" can be a participle, a verbal form. and then "telling lies" is something a speaker does. Or "telling" can be an adjective modifying "lies," and then "telling lies" are lies that tell you something. "Telling lies" is in fact a pun, and puns exploit the squtrmtness of language. while grammar nails down the choices. You will be studying a great deal of grammar in your language tutorial. (If that prospect does not delight you. do but consider that grammar is etymologically connected to glamour, a most telling relation.) There is one more study that completes the traditional trio making up the art of language. Besides grammatical regularity and rhetorical effect you will also be studying logical validity. I shall return to the relation of logic to lying later. All three studies are intended to make you canny and witting hearers and speakers, able to discern meaning and judge truth, to have your wits about you. You will need these skills here, because you have joined a community that engages in a very peculiar activity. We ask after truth. We ask whether the books we read contain something true, and we ask on occasion not only what truth herself might be, but also what the truth is, independently of books. I will say something later about the reasons why it ts unusual for a college to admit these questions after truth and what the conditions are that make them possible. Whatever the conditions. let me point out one consequence of trying to live in a truth-seeking community. Members of such a community should probably try not to tell lies. It ls conceivable that there might be one who earnestly seeks the truth for himself while determinedly telling lies to others. But such a person ls probably a loner, not a friend among friends. ·Let me give you two reasons that may be new to you why members in any intimate community, such as ours, should be truthful with each other. We are able to tell lies because we who speak are encased in a cocoon, in our opaque body. Some people think that they can see through others and that others are transparent to them, 2 �but where they think they see through our exterior as through a pane of glass they are in truth apt to be looking into a mirror. There are no certain somatic signs of lying. The nervous reaction to being suspected 1s not discernibly different from that of being guilty. Consequently even lie detectors are known to be unreliable. The human carapace is really impenetrable. Now when people live as closely together as you will on this campus, a certain decent distance 1s essential to comfort. You will not want to observe each other too penetratingly. But a bodily presence that hides a lie draws attention, and a face suspected of being a facade invites searching curiosity. Telling lies in close quarters 1s a temptation to breached privacy and to sorry involvements. Under these circumstances there is no harm that is not compounded by lies. The same mortal sheath that hides thoughts can be used to express them. I say "can be used" because every adult expression is part performance. A small, close, lively community acts at its best like those revolving stone polishing cylinders that take off the rough edges and bring out the natural markings of a piece of rock. Those markings represent the personal rhetoric, the gestures and the diction, that a community of learning brings out in people. It 1s a curious fact that adult nature has to be brought out by polishing. Consequently there is nothing straightfoiward about uttering - which literally means "outering" -your meaning. Some of you may think that spontaneity and sincerity are natural and therefore easy and that controlled expression is hypocrisy, an elderly vice. I think intended spontaneity is a self-contradiction, and sincerity is a sappy virtue, the virtue of insisting on being always one's - possibly reprehensible - self. And isn't it a strange fact that people indulging in natural expression tend to look dramatic and self-dramatizing to their neighbors? So I think I need to say something in favor of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy derives from the Greek work for actor, hypocrites. It is a necessary part of adult conduct because it prevents something worse. Hamlet urges his adulterous mother to Assume a virtue, if you have it not (III, iv, 158). She is to make a pretense of purity so that it might turn into truth. There is a stage of badness beyond being bad, and it is not caring how one looks. Hypocrisy, they say, is the compliment vice pays to virtue. There is another similar word that brings out my point. The word "person" comes from the Latin persona, an actor's mask. A person is a being behind a mask, a self-made facade through 3 �which come utterances. The lower anJmals at least do not seem to have such masks, because they have no conduct, only behavior. Perhaps one should say that they are masks, masks through which nature ex.presses herself. But we have masks, and we conduct ourselves. I mean that there can always be at least a brief check between our impulse and our expression. Homer uses a wonderfully apt figure: "What a word has escaped the barrier of your teeth?" one person will say to another, implying that the words should have been held back. We can maintain silence, and we can shape our speech and its expressive accompanJments. In fact we cannot do otherwise, for all human conduct is a kind of self-presentation, and being natural is a great feat. (A sociological classic on this subject is Erving Goffi:nan's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959.) Suppose I am right in intimating that learning to be oneself, to be a person in a community, is an arduous work ofmaskmaking, requiring much biting back of words, some white lying, and continual attempts to find expression that will do justice to one's meaning. Then to derail these efforts at sculpting one's own expressive persona by the strong jolt of a crude lle would be a criI:ne agatnstyour own developing personality, particularly when you have looked someone in the eye and sworn that what is about to come out of your mouth is the truth. In Robert Bolt's play about Thomas More, A Man for aU Seasons, Thomas says: When a man takes an oath, Meg, he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. (He cups his hands) And ts he opens his fingers then- he needn't hope to find himself again. (Act Two) So these are my two arguments - I don't think they are preachments - against outright intended lying. Telling such lies prevents intimacy and wrecks self-formation. There are plenty of authors who disagree with me in both directions. Kant, whom you will read in your junior year, will condemn every kind of lie from the whitest social lle to the heroic lie told to protect an innocent life. For lying, he says, is "the obliteration of one's dignity as a human being" (The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue 429). He thinks so because he thinks that the will to communicate our thought is part of what it means to be a person, and thus to misuse speech is to abrogate our personality, to undo the intention of our own rational will, which must be to utter truth. There are, on the other hand, authors who advocate lying like hell. Machiavelli advises his prince to be like a fox and to 4 �deceive when it is to his interest (The Prince, Ch. XVIII). Rousseau blithely confesses that he often lied from embarrassment just to keep the conversation going. In fact, he does talk a suspicious lot about lying. in his Reveries of a SoUtary Walker (Fourth Walk), a book we.don't read. Nietzsche inveighs against veracity as the impossibly naive wish to come clean, to expose oneself, and he praises the bracing tonic of a falseness perpetrated without guilt (The Wal toPower377-78). For my part, I am not entirely persuaded by Kant's absolutism and more than a little repelled by the others' equivocations. There is, happily an author who seems to me to speak sweet reason, and that is Thomas Aquinas, who treats of lying in a book of which you will read parts next year, the Swnma Theologica (II. 2, ques. 110, art. 4 ff.). He gives various useful classifications of lies and concludes that not all lies are mortal sins, sins that entail damnation. Lies that injure God and your neighbor are mortal, but lies told with no intention contrary to charity, are not. This judgment leaves room for wh!te lies and seems to me pretty good for practical purposes. (Practical lying is treated by Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Ufe, 1978.) But it was not really my purpose to talk about the practice of lying. either whether to do it or how to go about it. What I want us to consider is the theocy of lying: What are the conditions of human nature and the world that make lying possible? It seems to me that the inquicy into telling lies is particularly appropriate to a school devoted to the truth. You will discover in the next four years that the most convenient access to the house of truth is often through the back door. The assumption in the back-door approach is that truth precedes falsity, that it is the original positive. Our language seems to imply the priority of truth, since we speak of untruths but not of unlies or unerrors. Your reading will often take the back-to-front way: In Homer and Tolstoy, War precedes Peace. In Dante and Milton, Hell comes before Heaven and' Satan, the lord of lies. comes before God, the fountain of truth. In Plato, error explicates knowledge. And in Aristotle, art elucidates nature. Before I proceed to lies, I want to pause a moment to reinforce the claim that in this school we seek truth. Of course that is not the only, or even the first, interest we have. We also acquire skills and learn arguments and even gather some facts. But we do have a remarkable hypothesis. We ask ourselves and each other: "Is what I am reading true? Should I let it enter my life or must I fend it off?" Here are two special conditions that 5 �support our search for truth. One is that we are not ashamed to be discovered in error. When I say "we," I mean we- tutors along with students. We go so far as to regard the recognition of ignorance in ourselves as a high achievement. The other condition is that we admit.no institutional truth, no authoritative dogma. If we had the truth, we would not need to inquire about it. This hypothesis of ours is peculiar and hard to defend. At most academic institutions the professors deny it and take precautions against it; they bracket the question of truth and set it aside. They have good reasons: They think many old books by now have historical interest only, treating by-gone problems and providing "irrelevant" answers. They think it is a sort of intellectual tactlessness to get too close to students' lives in the classroom, and they distrust the authority such inquiries might give the professor who directs them. They think there is no fixed public meaning in texts, that the meaning is construed anew by each reader, and often they also think that a question after the truth is in principle nonsense, because truth is a private or senseless notion. All of you will be coming to grips with some of these notions right in the seminar. For example, you will be tempted to say that a proposition is "true for me," if not for you, and then you will have to consider whether the word "true" can be used in that way. Meanwhile we will ask you to act provisionally on our hypothesis that truth may be pursued, to be shamelessly open to the pursuit, to trust your tutors as fellow learners, to work at discovering the meaning of a book, and to treat authors as fellow human beings who raise questions you can care about. In short, we will ask you to engage in what Francis Bacon calls the inquiry of truth, which ts the love-making and wooing of it. ("Of Truth") By way of beginning the inquiry into telling lies as a prelude to searching for truth, I want to add a classification of lies to those gtven by Thomas Aquinas: Some lies are subjective, others are objective. The subjective lie is the one Kant defines and proscribes so absolutely: wilful, intentional falsehood. Your straight basic liars intend to tell lies and know they are doing it. But there is also the objective lie, an unintentional falsehood, a failed willingness to tell the truth. Being willing to tell the truth but failing at it is usually called being in error. At this point I might be accused of the rhetorical trick of metonymy, a figure of speech in which the speaker confuses species and genus. For 6 �here the genus seems to be the False and the species seem to be the Lie and the Error. An error is not really a kind of lie, but one of two parallel species of the False, the Unwitting and the Witting Falsehood. Errors are all the unintended misses of targeted truth: mistakes, misspeakings, misjudgments, misperceptions. Now there will be a man, the guardian angel or perhaps the goblin ofyour first year, Socrates, who will claim that ignorance, and therefore error, is the genuine or "true lie" in the soul (RepubUc 382 b). He is helped in saying so by the fact that in Greek the word for error and lie is the same. It is pseudos, which you know, for instance, in the word pseud-onym, a false name. But he also really does mean to identify lie and error, and his thinking .ts roughly like this: He will iiy to persuade you that effective virtue is a kind of knowledge. If he is right, then it is at least likely that ignorance is a kind of vice, and that the particular ignorance manifested in error is not far from the vice of lying. After having studied some logic in the sophomore year you will be able to show diagrammatically that these consequences are not logical entailments but just thought-possibilities. If you find reason to accept them, then there is no truly unwilling falsehood; our errors become our responsibilities, and we are charged with exorcising the unwitting lie in the soul. This ignorant lie is what I call the objective lie. Socrates has something to say not only about the untold lie hidden in the soul but also about the outward telling of lies. There ts a dialogue we don't read, called the Lesser Htppias, so called because it ts the shorter of two dialogues featuring a sophist called Hippias. Sophists figure in many of the Platonic dialogues, above all in the dialogues called Theaetetus and Sophist, in which Plato deals respectively with error and the possibility of lying. I can tell you that no book has affected me more than the Sophist A sophist is the most fascinating creature in the world, and Plato is never through with him. The sophist has a name that begins with the word for "wise," sop1ws, and ends in -ist, a suffix that denotes an imitator and an operator. For Plato ordinary sophists are wise guys, smart and dumb at once, by profession evasive, tricky, and deceitful, though somettmes in person endearingly naive. The sophist extraordinatre ts Socrates himself, a canny wise man, whose mode is irony, a wily sort of self-deprecation that Aristotle does not hesitate to classify among the lying deviations from truth (Ntcomachean Ethics II, vii, 12). 7 �Now in the dialogue Socrates carries on with Hippias, two characters that will soon be very familiar to you come on the scene: Achilles and Odysseus. Hippias, who can quote Homer, cites passages to show that Achilles is a true and simple fellow, who tells Odysseus that he hates lies worse than hell (Iliad IX, 312). Odysseus, on the other hand, is a habitual teller of lies. The two men differ as truth-teller differs from liar. Now comes Socrates to prove that Achilles sometimes tells lies. For example, he informs Odysseus that he will leave Troy so that "on the third day he would come to fertile Phthia," his home - and yet he makes no move at all to go. Hippias objects that Achilles tells untruths unwittingly while Odysseus lies by design. Socrates then tricks Hippias into admittlng that it is the person with the more capable soul, the one who knows exactly what he is doing, who is best, and that therefore the voluntary liar is better than the unwitting teller of falsehoods. The claim that the true lie is a kind of guilty ignorance is here complemented by the not altogether playful assertion that the truer and more genuine person is the liar who knows the truth and determines not to utter it. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, agrees with Socrates· estimation of Odysseus, for she declares her love and loyalty to him as a cunning knave and a witting liar (Odyssey XIII, 287 ff.). Not only, I conclude, is the silent lie in the soul to be held against us as a weakness because it betokens a culpable ignorance, but the utterance of a lie confirms our strength, because it presupposes knowledge of truth. As Nietzsche puts it: "The recognition of reality ... has been greatest exactly among liars" ·(Will to Power 378). More generally, anyone who grants the possibility of lying reveals a commitment to the existence of truth. With subjective and objective lies established, let me now list the rubrics of conditions that make the telling of a lie possible. I will read them off before explaining them: I. Will II. Knowledge III. Negation IV . Necessity V. Freedom I. First, then, for a lie to be told there has to be the wUL This is the main condition for the pure subjective lie. Perhaps will is too strong a word, since much lie-telling results not so much from strong choice as from a weak willingness. In the lingo of this decade: We give ourselves permission. Sometimes lying is even a mere default position of the will. But one way or another 8 �the capacity for choice, for letting the words escape from the barrler of our teeth, is involved. What the human will is, and how the will comes not to will, are a long story for another night. Of course, as I have said, the exterior has to cooperate: The body has to be opaque and the world obtuse. If every lie caused our noses to grow proportionately, or if a spade when falsely called a shovel protested loudly, we would in time lose the will to lie. II. Second, for a lie to be told there has to be, as I have intimated, knowledge. As Socrates shows, a liar has to know the truth, all sorts of truth, but particularly the truth about words. Otherwise the uttered lie may be a false lie, an unwitting truth. Uttering unw.Ittlng truth is just what happens to Ach1lles, when he says that on the third day he will come to Phthia but stays in Troy. He does not know the truth of the name of his all-too-attainable home. The knowledge of such truth is called "etymology," and etynws is a Greek term for word-truth. Socrates has such knowledge. For in prison two nights before his execution he dreams that a beautiful woman quotes Achilles' words to hnn (CriiD 44 b}, and he clearly knows what "coming to Phthia" must mean. It means death, for Phthia means "Land of the Dead," from the verb phthlnein. to destroy (H. Frisk, Grtechisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch II, 1O15). You have to know both what is the case and what you are saying to tell a proper lie. They say there are no atheists in the foxholes of w:ar. and there are surely few relativists among the true tellers of lies. Consequently, as I have said, this condition for lying is an odd cause for cheer: Every telling of a lie is a reaftlrmatlon of the possibility of truth. m. The third and central of my five conditions for tell1ng lies is a human capacity, which is an incapacity as well. I will call it the power of blind negatton. In the dialogue the Sophist that I mentioned before, the main speaker (not Socrates) says: To believe or to say the things that are not - that ls, it seems, the lie arising in the mind and in words. (260 c) More than two millennia later Captain Gulliver is, in the course of his travels, set ashore by his crew of mutineers in a land governed by noble horses who call themselves Houyhnhnms. The land also harbors some savage, repulsive two-legged ape-like creatures, the Yahoos, with whom the horses identify Gull1ver, calling him their "gentle Yahoo." Gulliver tries to give his equine master an account of the mores of the European Yahoos, but the noble horse is hard put to it 9 �to comprehend the Yahoo custom of telling lies, which ts. Gulliver notes, "so perfectly understood, and so universally practiced among human creatures." The noble horse calls it "saying the thing which ts not," to him a most self-defeating use of speech. · By this testimony, we may begin to definer lying as saying the thing which ts not. So, of course, ts sp~aking in error, as Socrates had already intimated in the di~ogue on error that precedes the Sophist, the Theaetetus ( 199 4, see also Aristotle, Metaphysics 1011b27.) In fact, tn logic the two falsehoods are indistinguishable. For logic abstracts from what ts called the pragmatic aspect of speech, the internal intention and the social use. I might put it this way. In the full human context, lies have something infernal about them; they are under Satan, the prince of li~s and of dental. In the bright and weightless realm of logtc, dental ts a mere squiggle or "curl" ("') - just an operator. It ts defined by a table of so-called truth-values. ("Value" 1n logic as in life denotes an arbitrary as opposed to an intrinsic worth.) If a proposition. little p, ts assigned the truth value T, then squtggle-p ("'P) ts F, false. and conversely. T and Fare mere symbols; T has no primacy over F and imparts no particular significance to a proposition. (While it is the case that logicians think about what truth is, they do not feel equally obligated to think about what is true, though it may be finally impossible to separate the two questions.) Now in real life people do not talk "propositionally" very often. except in courts of law. under cross-examination: "Is it or is it not the case that your mother told you something signJficant? Just answer yes or no, please." In ordinary speech the negative does not stand outside an impregnable proposition but invades it and is deeply implicated in it. Traditional logtc does in fact recognize two additional possibilities for the position of the negation. Textbooks on logic seem quite unamazed by these possibilities, which they blithely declare to· be equivalent (e.g. I. M. Copi, Introduction to Logic, p. 223), though thoughtful logicians have had their preferences. In what follows S stands for the subject, capital P for the predicate of a proposition. We can say: _ 1. S (is not) P. Here the proposition itself, internally, ts said to have the "quality" of being negative or positive: Achilles ts-not a liar. Some authors maintain that this form alone ts correct because logical quality belongs strictly to the copula connecting the subject and the predicate (Maritain, Formal Logic, p. 110). I think that view is too restrictive. 10 �2. Sis (not P). Whether the speaker is telling the truth or a Ue, this form posits a "thing that is not": Achilles is a non-liar. It therefore supports the doctrine of lies adopted by the Sophist and the Houyhnhnms. 3. Not (Sis P), i.e. Np. The negative is outside the proposition: It is not the case that Achilles is a liar. This is how the modem logic called propositional places the negative, though the thought goes back to the Stoics and to Abelard (W. and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic, p. 210). Here the whole proposition is externally negated. The real life differences among the three forms are remarkable when the logical bones are fleshed out with meaning. For while the negative that has got inside the sentence wrecks havoc there with meaning, the denial of the whole proposition leaves it intact, as putting a negative sign before a number leaves it its absolute value. Look at the example of the truthful Achilles, the unwitting liar. Early on, in the first book of the Iliad (352), we see him withdrawn from his friends, weeping on the shore and calling his mother. "Mother" he says, addressing her plainly and intimately, "Mother, you bore me to be short-lived"; the Greek word is mtnunthiados - minute-lived. The son states it, and the mother confirms it: Achilles will die soon. Now listen to a later episode. In the ninth book (410) Achilles tells Odysseus, who has come to talk him into returning to the battle, that his mother- she is now grandly "the goddess, silver-footed Thetls" - has said that he has a choice of two fates. He can go home and forego fame or stay and die soon gloriously. Unless mother arid son have been talking behind our backs, Achilles is engaging in sheer hopeful invention, attributing it to his divine mother. And finally, in a still later passage in the sixteenth book (51) he answers the concerned and suspecting question of his friend Patroclos, whether his mother had told him something from Zeus: "Neither do I care about any oracle that I know nor has my mistress mother [as he now calls her formally and coolly) told me anything from Zeus." This answer betokens what we like to call "going into full denial." Note the progressive negation of the truth. At first Achilles admits the hard fact: I and my mother both know I shall die young. The second version is: My mother has told me that I have a choice of fates. Here Achill.e s begins to say "the thing that is not": Sis not-P. For he does not deny that his mother has been in communication with him, but he undoes and denies her message. And third he says: It is not the case that my mother has told me a thing. Now he is denying the whole proposition: not (Sis P). This is not altering 11 �the message and saying the thing that is not. This is a more radical lie, that of denying blindly that anything whatever has been said. Such is the progress and the pathos of Achilles' peculiarly telling lies. lies that reveal the young warrior's fear of facing death. Let me step back for a moment. It seems to me that we can think more than we can say. The papers you write this year will probably demonstrate that fact. We can also say more than we think. Some of your colleagues in seminar will seem to you to gtve examples of that fact. Moreover, while the world contains more things than we can enumerate. it is also true that we can say what corresponds to no thought and no thing. We can speak without meaning. The word can become footloose. One good example of a word rattling around by itself is the pseudo-name by which Odysseus introduces himself to the Cyclops, No-One (Outis, IX, 364-412). The poor monster literally does not know what he is saying when, having been brutally blinded by Odysseus, he calls on his neighbors for help. Who has hurt you, they ask, and he answers "No One." Nor do they know what they are saying when they go off shouting something to the effect: "Well, if no one has hurt you, you must be sick. Go see a doctor." For in conditional contexts the form 01ltis turns into me tis, which means again "No one," but it also sounds like metis, which means "cunning, craftiness": "Cunning has done you in, go see a doctor" - that is what the Cyclopean neighbors truly but unwittingly say. But particularly to my point are the words no and not and the prefixes wiand non: The first philosopher, Parmenides, said that ".neither could you know that which is not (for it is impossible). nor·could you say it" (Diels Fragment 2). I think he holds too nobly simple a view of speech. I agree that it is not possible to think what is not. The intellect is incapable of the pure negative. When it tries to think not or non or un it always finds itself attending to something different or other rather than to nothing. For example, Un-rest is not No Rest but Motton, and Non-being is not Nothing but something Different or Other. I think that in perception too there is never nothing but only difference. Even the imagination cannot practice negation effectively. For an image of the imagination may be nullified, as a stamp is cancelled so that its value is gone - yet its face, though smudged, is not obliterated. In the imagination and in visual thinking - which is what we mostly do - negated being nearly always has a positive look. Denial produces a murky or perhaps a monstrous shape, but never a nonentity. 12 �In speech alone can we say the negative and for a moment really mean nothing. It Is, I think, this potent Incapacity that makes lying possible. So let me sketch out for you how telling lies seems to me to come about as a product of negating speech and defective will. There ts a crucial moment - for Achilles tt comes last, but often it Is first - whe~ we say a blind and ignoble no to the truth, when we will to tell the lie. The proposition that we know to be true remains untouched but we determine in our hearts to reject ft, Ignorantly and uncircumstantlally: "Not (S Is P)." The hero decides to maintain: "It is not the case, Patroclos, that my mother conflnned my pending death" - without thought for the consequence to the interior of the sentence. We say no and think nothing constructive, only "I shall not tell the truth whatever follows." Our two strange negative capacities for exercising an infirm will and for uttering an unmeaning word come briefly but momentously together. In the second and third moment the negation invades the sentence and begins to generate meaning. Perhaps ft first attaches Itself to the copula so as to disjoin subject from predicate: Achtlles and his death are not to be conjoined in speech. But eventually the negation ends up attacldng the predicate itself; S Is not-P: My mother told me not what you all think, Odysseus, but something else, that my death is still my choice. That "not" when stuck to the predicate no longer betokens pure blinding negative non-truth, but signals an alternative to the truth, a positive invention; the lie goes out of control and become baroque. Here cross the activities of telling lies and telling tales. Both tell the thing that ts not. Let me conclude this section on lies and negating language by reminding us that except for the willing, all I said holds also for error: Lies differ from errors only in beginning wilfully and then sliding out of control, while errors begin inadvertently and then settle in. I cannot resist adding that telling lies is also close in form to asldng questions. A lie is in fact a kind of inverse question. For a question Is a directed receptivity, a shaped expectation of a truth as yet unknown. And a lie ts a directed rejection, a determined negation, of a truth already known. Since we are a school for questioning, lies, the diametric opposite of questions, would seem to be. on occasion, a proper preoccupation for us. IV. I would phrase the fourth condition oflytng. necessity, in this way: We can lie because we must lie. I am thinking not ·of the subjective pseudo-necessity of lying from fear or need, but of unavoidable objective lying. If human speech is to be efflca- 13 �cious it must accommodate itself to a world about which it is, as I have already intimated, simply not possible to speak with total truth. Let me quote an author of the junior year with whom I maintain a - necessarily one-sided but cordial - friendship, Jane Austen. She says: Seldom, v~iy seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken. (Enuna, Ch. 49) It is an ever-rewarded effort to try to tell the truth, but to tell the whole truth is beyond our cognitive abilities and to .tell nothing but the truth is outside of our linguistic equipment. Anyone made to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is being asked to stretch it. We cannot utter exactly what it is we think because the qualifying internal history behind every thought is enormous. It cannot be put in finite words. Similarly we cannot tell all that we perceive, because the world's space is indefinitely extended and infinitesimally detailed, and in addition every spatial point has behind it an infinite history in time. The case is not entirely hopeless and offers no excuse for not trying. Our cognitive constitution, our capacity for speech, and the external world all do seem to be to some degree geared to each other. Our attention highlights parts of the world that seem to be meaningful wholes. The parts of speech seem to fit the behavior of the world, and the words of language seem to be able to collect items scattered widely in space. Sometimes many things can be said "in a word." The constitutional limitation on our truth-telling, our necessary objective lying, is therefore also an incitement to subjective truthfulness, to the effort to do what we can with such telling speech as we have. V. There is, finally, a fifth condition, .freedom, the condition for telling true lies of a marvelous sort. Here is an activity in which the reckless will, the footloose word, and the feckless world intersect. This activity produces the freely willed lie called fiction, feigning wonderful worlds in words; or poetry, making splendid fabrics out of words. The notion that fiction and poetry are a kind of lie is attributed to Socrates, and you will hear him say so when you read the dialogue called the Republic (Bk. II). Yet it was not a philosopher who first published this slander, but a poet, Hesiod, Homer's younger rival, for whom we have no time. He takes seriously what Homer takes lightly: the aboriginal birth of the gods and the daily work of men. This peasants' Homer 14 �tells how the Muses spoke to him, a shepherd of the wilderness, and said: We know how to tell many lies that are stmllar to true words, and again, when we wish, we can utter true things. (Theogany 27-28) These are wonderful lines because they introduce a distinction into the truths that are opposed to lies. There are what I will call world-truths, alethea. and there are word-truths, etyma. the term I mentioned before, the one that goes into the word etymology. Hesiod's Muses tell lies that are sim1lar to true words. These are the free lies I am talking about: words freely chosen to tell lies that are true in the world of words. How is it possible that such :11berated lies should acquire the force of a peculiar and special truth? The answer is in a strange capacity we share with the world, the power of entertaf.ning certain half-existences called images. But like the will, the imagination is a mystery for another night. I am nearing the end, and your turn ~o express your judgments of my lecture in your questions for me is about to come. Let me, on the way out,. return once more to the second hero of this lecture, Odysseus. When he is about to become the teller and poet of his own travels, he introduces and reveals himself in this fashion to the Phaeacians, who will be the first folk to hear his odyssey: I am Odysseus Laertldes: I am the preoccupation of mankind · for all my deceits... But I dwell in lucid (eudeielos) Ithaca (IX 19-21). ·Telling false lies and telling true lies, telling lies from necessity and for pleasure, Odysseus attains the sunlit clarity of the home he loves. Not, I think, the worst way to home in on truth! But there is a better way still, Socrates' way: the unwillingness to tolerate the unwitting, untold lie in the soul, and the wit and wisdom to transmute the unavoidable lying of any utterance into the telling lies that reveal truth. 15 � 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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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. 16 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 Telling lies Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993-08-27 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 27, 1993 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1993 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/264">Audio recording</a> Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b22f741ad51b26f15b12ec7351aec94f.pdf 657fd7399e663887dc35151c45a98a70 PDF Text Text THE PAST-PRESENT Dean's Lecture Friday, September 2, 1994 Eva T. H. Brann I. Tonight I want to state, and even to overstate, what I believe to be a truth about the Program of St. John's College. What makes the truth worth 'considering is that it goes against the plain appearances and against what people, quite understandably, say about us. I want to state this truth especially for the freshmen, the newest members of the college, who might be surprised to hear it. And I want to overstate it, because a sharp finite pronouncement is probably the most productive prelude to the chief part of any Friday evening, which is the question period. It is then that I can modify, qualify, perhaps even retract what I am about to say. But before I state my truth, let me say something to the freshmen about all such opinions. Many of you have probably already guessed that this Program of learning is like an iceberg, which has a visible tip that swims along on a subaquatic mass nine times the size of the visible part. It is perfectly fine and profitable to attend entirely to the brilli'ant tip, to study the superlative books and acquire the liberal skills set out in the Program. But some of you will wish to dive from time to time into the murky depths to inspect the contestable theory that supports the Program. The statement I am about to propose belongs to this netherworld. I say that as students of the St. John's Program we have no interest in the Past. None. What I mean is that care for the past is not one of the features that makes this curriculum what it is meant to be. This school has no institutional interest in what has gone by and passed away. You might say that we let bygones be bygones. I assert this in the face of the obvious fact that almost all our books, scores, theorems, and experiments have authors that are, as human beings, long dead and gone. When I say that we do not care about the past I am not particularly thinking of the fact that we do not study history as a field. After all, we do not study any of the other normal university disciplines either - sociology, geology, psychqlogy. We do read the two authors who 1 �are generally agreed to be the founders of history. However it is not . clear just how much interest these writers had in the past. Herodotus introduced the word history, historia, for his composition concerning , the Persian War, but the Greek word means primarily an inquiry. It has . the same origin as the verb for knowing; .a histor is someone who knows, not necessarily things remote in time. Even when it i~ taken in the current sense, history has a relation to the past which is anything but straightforward. After all, History with a capital H, -that is, the public memory of events in the past, comes into being after history with a small h, the work of reconstructing the past, has been done . . Some people go so far as to claim that historians in telling their plausible and timely tales do not reconstruct so much as construct the past, so that the past is an invention of the present. I might say that I cannot quite believe so extreme a claim, because I know of some historians who are less truthful than others and therefore of others who are more truthful in trying to determine the deeds done (these are called facts) and the times assigned to them (these are called dates). Facts and dates form, of course, the skeleton of history. I do believe that something definite in fact happened at a certain date, but I doubt that it is in principle or in practice possible to find out what that was, and I am pretty sure that it ought not 'to be our business here to learn what others thought happened or to try to find out for ourselves. The reason is that the recovery of the past from its fragments is a practically infinite and intellectually tricky task that requires a completed liberal education. In short, you learn to do it in graduate school. Yet, as I said, the fact that we have no department of history, or that some of us have misgivings about the relation of history to the past that was (meaning the past that really was and is really gone), is not what makes me say that we have no interest in the past. Nor could I possibly say that as private persons many of us lack interest in the past. Many of us are ardent time-travelers. We like to go sight-seeing in temporally distant places. For example, in my free time I like to read about the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru. Part of that interest is, to be sure, intellectual and is closely connected to the fact that I function in a program that deals exclusively with the · Euro-American West, so that any light that is thrown on this tradition immediately draws my attention. In the case of the Aztecs and the Incas it is the evidently irresistible potency of the West, the power to conquer, to coopt and to corrupt that is sometimes luridly and sometimes tragically illuminated. I have in mind the awful fates of those two great kings, Montezuma of the Aztecs and Atahualpa the Inca. Both of them - canny, sophisticated potentates - gave themselves, like rabbits frozen in a trembling panic, into the treacherous hands of those two conquistadores Cortez and Pizarro, whose scruffy, diminutive bands had only a few horses, a few guns, limitless greed, and 2 �impregnable faith in the Cross, to oppose to the two huge magnificent royal armies. Naturally I would like to know, if history can tell me, why the West always conquers and conquers so completely that all resistance assumes the means and terms of its enemy. But learning lessons, if there are any, is not my best reason for reading books of history. Mostly I want to see new worlds. No city, except perhaps Athens, has a more beautiful past behind its ugly present than Mexico City. Bernal Diaz, the soldier-chronicler of the Conquest, who rode with Cortez, says this of ancient Mexico City, Tenochtitlan, set in a great lake covered with floating gardens: When we saw so many cities and villages built in the waters of the lake and other large towns on dry land, and that straight, level causeway leading into Mexico City, we were amazed and we said that it was like the enchanted things related in the book of A ma dis because of the huge towers, temples, and buildings rising from the water, and all of masonry. And some of the soldiers even asked whether the things we saw were not a dream. The book of Amadis, Juniors will know, is the romance that inspired Don Quixote. The hanging city of Machu Picchu, a fortified outpost of the Inca empire, rediscovered accidentally in 1911, also has a weird and wonderful beauty, which I simply have in my mental picture book of ancient marvels. And that seems to me to be the main attraction of the past - that it adds worlds to my world, and bygone beauties to a present diminishing in beauty. It does so much as does fiction, only with the strangely moving modifier of real past existence. I read history dutifully for information, I consult historians somewhat skeptically for illumination, but I am in the past uncritically as in a romance, like Bernal Diaz when he saw Tenochtitlan. For the past is primarily a place (we will see that all talk of time is infected by spatial metaphor), a romantic place, as the present is prosaic and the future uncanny. Perhaps we can talk about this claim, that the past is the place of romance, in the question period. II This might be a proper spot to collect the reasons I can think of why anyone should, and why many of us do, care about the past, if not as students and tutors in the Program, then as human beings. For the two are not entirely coincident. 1. Well, then, I have just mentioned the romance of time travel. I am persuaded that all devoted archaeologists and historians begin as temporal romantics, though it is their professional obligation not 3 �2. 3. 4. 5. to let on. When, some thirty-six years ago, I was a practicing archaeologist - which means someone who gives an account of very old things - I was not too young and naive to get pleasure from watching each of my revered elders in the excavation at Athens talking in carefully damped scholarly prose about the particular period for which I well knew each cherished a hopeless passion. It was like listening to a lover giving a disingenuously objective account of the one face about which that is really impossible. A second reason why people do care about the past is, as I have already mentioned, that they hope to learn its lessons. Sometimes they mean to use the past to lay the past to rest, for it is said that those who are ignorant of the past are doomed to repeat it. One book of essays we study, the Federalist Papers, is full of such a use of the past. The eighteenth paper, for example, written by James Madison, is a study of failed Greek confederations, intended by horrible counterexamples to point the way to a successful federal structure. In other words, the past can be used like our personal memory, as the depository of accumulated experience. For some, the past is treasure trove and the way to it a treasure hunt. The origin of archaeology was largely in grave robbing and gold digging. Eventually the passion for lost beauty and lost treasure turned into a sober science of carefully recorded digging below ground and meticulous mapping above ground. The passion of discovery and acquisition yielded to the more temperate but equally tenacious passion for detective-like induction, and for accuracy, cataloging, and tabulation. As the past below the·earth is carefully brought up and recorded, so the past about ground is carefully preserved and restored. Time-reservations, such as Williamsburg, are established somewhat in the same spirit as that in which in Victorian times the woman of the house would maintain a "good" parlor - a place protected from the wear and tear of daily life. Thus nostalgia is legitimized by academic discipline, and the past is preserved in a form more pristine than it had as a present. A peculiarly contemporary way of dealing with the past is to put . energy not into digging out the roots of the present but into .inventing them. Such inventions are plain lies, told by people, usually professors, who should and do know better, to people who have no way to be critical - told for dubiously therapeutic reasons. The people who participate in these self-deceptions tend to understand that the passage of time confers honor and that the past plays a role in establishing what is nowadays called "identity." 4 �6. On the opposite end with respect to motive and honesty 'is an academic way of occupying oneself with the past that is exemplary in its rigor. It is represented by the university discipline called "history of ideas." Here past and bygone notions evoke a meticulous reconstructive interest, and are objectively reported as beliefs that used to be believed. I have always been puzzled by the strong attraction of so bloodless an activity. 7. A last, and to my mind best, way of having close relations to the past that I have observed is the way of revival, rebirth, recovery, renascence. It is an act of pure imaginative vitality, of which the greatest historical example is the period called the Renaissance. Its mode, which can be reactivated anytime, and certainly right here and now, is to attempt to revivify a golden antiquity while succeeding in bringing to life a resonant modernity. Each of these ways of being involved with the past has its dangerous and debilitating aspects. The romantic attachment to the past, which is called nostalgia, is a form of sentimentalism. The lessons of history teach everything and nothing. The earth's treasures are no longer for the taking, and robbing graves is in most countries plain illegal. The exact recording and reconstruction of the relics of lost worlds imposes an abstracted rigidity on the messy life that was. Self-invention with respect to the past is also self-delusion. The meticulous study of superseded opinions is even drearier than the trendy courting of current ones. There are two ways of mummifying the past: by not letting it die and by not letting it live. On the other hand, to be disconnected from the past is also a pathology. A human being that lives merely in the present is less than Euclid's point that has no parts- it is a dimensionless being that lacks even a location. For such a memoryless being has no path behind, no human lineage. It seems to me part of our human location in the world to feel sometimes some sorrow at all the worlds that are lost arid gone and some elation at all the civilizations to which we are heir. This function of pity and love for the sheer goneness and absence of previous worlds and people, a sense not so much of personal as of generic loss, seems to me a necessary part of one's humanity . Therefore I do think we ought to be sometimes somewhat in love with what I shall call the past-perfect, the past that is finished, has passed away. III. I think the time has come to analyze more soberly what is implied in caring about that past-perfect; that finished past. In all such caring, this seems to me to be the essential element: The past is the temporally absent. As students are not usually marked absent from a class in which they have not been previously present, so absence in time 5 �implies an earlier presence. The future is not, to my mind, temporally absent, because it hasn't yet been present. Therefore the essence of caring about the past-perfect is a relation, be it of love, hate, or fascinated indifference, to what was. "Was" is the past tense of "is." "Was" is an "is" that is no more. (Let me interject here the thought that "no more" need not mean _ "nevermore," for I am not at all sure that the adage about not turnmg the clock back is true. I think we can tum , the clock back at a blink of the will. It is only a question of cost.) "Temporal" as in "temporal absence" is the adjective formed from time. To think about the past it is thus necessary to think about time. I have read an estimate of the number of publications concerning time: Since 1900, there have been 95,000 books, and since 1990 well over 90,000 articles. Of these writings I've read perhaps forty-five, among them the eight or nine that seem to matter most. They do all, apparently, agree about this - that time has two major aspects: Now and Then. They also agree that Then in tum has two aspects: Before and After Now or Past and Future. Beyond these three aspects or phases of time, Present, Past, and Future, everything is debatable. The Now presents a set of puzzles first set out by Plato in the dialogue Pannenides. The order of importance of the phases, the direction in which they advance, the substantiality of time itself, the relation of . time to soul - these and many more issues are treated by Aristotle, Augustine, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. Most of these you will in fact read in the next four years. What I will say tonight will be almost culpably sketchy. And first I have to observe once more, without stopping to dweH on the reason, that it is practically impossible to speak of time and its phases without using spatial metaphors. The past particularly is in its very name metaphorical, for "past" is related to "pace" or step, and to "passage" or a going by; past means, as I have said, by-gone. Let me now give you the feature that I think of when I reflect on the meaning of the word "past." 1. It is one of three times or phases of time "in" which an event can be. Notice the space-like location of events implied by the prepo- · sition "in." 2. It is what was. Notice the apparently unavoidable contradiction of the tenses used in this description. 3. It is present for us in two ways, externally and internally. Notice • that the past is present for us as memory (an insight I have borrowed from Augustine's Confessions), and that memory has two storage spaces, so to speak. One is in our souls. It is described beautifully by Augustine as a "spacious and infinite inner sanctum" (X, 8). A being without such an inner room is one for whom . nothing has significant connotations or imaginative penumbras. 6 �The other memory space is outside. It consists of all the testimonials, be they writings or objects, that have survived into our present as evidence of past life. As I have already said, it seems to me that a person who has no knowledge of these reminders of our human antecedents is an unanchored and untethered being. 4. My fourth and final feature of the past is the one I have just mentioned: the gravity of our attitude toward it, whether it is to be deliberate denial, laborious reconstruction, shameless invention, nostalgic luxuriating, or free appropriation. Notice the implication that our position with respect to the past is at some point a most deliberate choice with wide consequences to our life. IV. I now feel entitled, and perhaps even obligated, to say outright how I think we should bear ourselves toward the past and how we should live with it. There are past-related pathologies that seem to me particularly sick. One is the condition of those people, describable as galvanized zombies, who live in a frantic present, without a moment's collected contemplation. This mode is practically definitive of contemporary life. The other is the luxuriating nostalgia of Poe's Raven, who croaks "Nevermore." This mode is practically definitive of romanticism. For my part I think the past is indeed a place in which to take refuge when it is necessary to pull back, to contemplate life and mull things over. The present is the phase for brisk deliberation, decision, and action, for being in that sleepwalking state in which we do, more or less surefootedly, the one thing needful just now. In visiting the past, whether in books or places, we get longer, more serene views. In the past too the open-ended passage of moments turns into completed tales, from anecdotes to myths. In it, moreover, are to be found the models for our actions and the patterns for our demeanor, without which it is impossible to shape a distinctive self. And finally the past is to be appreciated as a double source of dimensionality, a source of solidity and ghostliness at once. For, as I have already intimated, it is the past that adds a dimension to the here and now, which would otherwise be a mere momentary facade, a painted curtain stretched over nothingness, floating into a shapeless future. It is the past that gives this moving front of present appearances some sense of solidity, of having endured and being here to stay. The ghostliness I have mentioned is really the same effect in _a different mood. When I was in Japan I saw in the enclosures of Buddhist temples trees with prayer strips affixed to the branches, fluttering in the wind. So also memories of the past attach themselves to places and flutter about them, giving them an attendant ghostly life. 7 �To be sure, not all locations are equally good ghost-catchers - for example, to my mind, this auditorium is not as good at it as our Great Hall over in McDowell. v. Now I want to recall to you the claim that set me off, paradoxically, on this praise of the past. The claim is that whatever attachment we do and ought to have to the past privately, as students in the St. John's Program we have none whatsoever. It is a claim I mean to argue even in the face of the fact that we study hardly any contemporary book or subject, and that almost everything we pay attention to is rather old - or as Francis Bacon says, very young, since the older a production is, the closer it is to the childhood of humanity. To develop my opinion, I want to put before you, and to disti~­ guish, three terms. They are History, Tradition, and Past. I don't feel much obligation to define them here. When people say "Define your terms," they usually mean to turn a conversation into a debate. But although I am putting forth my claim with a certain panache, I would like it to be the beginning of a conversation rather than an argument. So I shall offer a mere collection of the connotations that I personally intend, first putting some preliminary effort into distinguishing these terms. I have already said something of the past. The past, I say, is what is absent in time, bygone. It is a kind of folk wisdom that the past was, meaning that it is a bygone present, and that it is therefore in a way · that neither the moving now nor the unhappened future is. History, of which I have also spoken before, is the deliberate account given of selected past events or conditions by historians, whom we may call public memory-experts. History depends on the fact that human affairs assume distinct shapes, either as discrete notable events like revolutions or as continuous but noticeable conditions like social · movements. History with a capital His reconstructed in histories with a lower-case h by means of written and tangible testimonials. The writing of history is therefore, as I said, a research activity, and its study from books requires the experience necessary for a critical review of the use to which the testimony is put. All writing of histories that I know of rests on the faith I have already mentioned, that human time . on this earth organizes itself into discernible entities that have some relation of cause and effect. This fundamental axiom of all History is no stronger than a hypothesis because, since events are always demonstrably unique, no one is in a position to show for sure that a given outcome was lawfully caused by a given antecedent. You might call this histori3:n's faith a post hoc, ergo propter hoc disposition. This Latin tag means: "After the event and therefore because of it," and we all tend to believe it. I'll give you two personal examples: I ardently 8 �believe that I could be born in Europe only because Leonidas and his three-hundred Spartan held Thermopylae for a while against the Persians, and I ardently believe that I could flourish in America only because Abraham Lincoln was president when the Union was threatened. But who could prove that? The deeds that make up History are alive insofar as we feel their effects reaching into the present and dead insofar as the sheer increasing weight of intervening human moments push them into the ineffective distance. Since the fall of Troy in 1183 B.C., 100,189,872,000 seconds have gone by - and anyone who has ever had a sharp pain or keen sorrow knows what a second is, each an eternal moment. Most of History is truly gone by, only dimly and diffusely related to our lives. The historical past is prologue but not present. VI. So we are left with the third term, Tradition. The word literally means a "handing down" of the past to the present. Often it means ritual that has been taken over and respected because it has long been established; thus Shakespeare speaks of "respect, tradition, form and ceremonious duty" (Richard II, III, ii. 173). There is however, another strong and significant usage. Theword is often used of the literary and textual tradition, the set of books that have survived because people have respected and protected them and have handed them down, mostly in those book-reservations called libraries. This tradition includes only a small part of the writings of the past. We can hope that it is an advantageously sifted past, and that the best books are the ones that survived, but we cannot be sure. For example, of Sophocles's 123 dramas only seven are extant, one eighteenth of the output of Athens's central tragedian. From the vicissitudes of war, like the -allegedlyaccidental burning of the huge library at Alexandria during Caesar's siege of the city in 48 B.C., to the deliberate torching of books conducted by the Nazis in Berlin in 1933, from the mildew of forgotten trunks to the acid bum that is eating up old books in contemporary libraries, circumstance has played a large role in the selection of the written tradition, since it is handed down physically. That we are lucky both in the losses and in the survivals, that what survives is both the best and somehow coherent, is a faith, a reasonable faith we have in the discrimination and care of our predecessors. In sum, we believe that the past has preserved for us plenty of great books, and they seem to speak to each other. ·How does this tradition of texts, be it texts of words, or mathematical symbols, or musical notes, differ from the other remains of the past? ·Let me use as an example our own McDowell Hall, the pride of the Annapolis campus. Our Director of Admissions, John Christensen, 9 �probably the faculty member best known to the freshmen, has pu. together a handsome and informative volume about this "historical" building. McDowell was begun in the 1740s and by 1799 it housed all th~ functions of St. John's College, which had been chartered in 1784. Iri 1909 it was burned down to just above the first story. The then-princi~: pal, Dr. Fell, wrote that the students "ruined their suits of clothing tci save the building and its contents." This dreadful catastrophe inspirec some dreadful student poetry about old McDowell, who, it was written in the yearbook, "has perished in the flame ... and she's nought now but a name." Which was as wrong as the poem was bad, because she rose, like a phoenix from the ashes, to be continually used as our main building. In 1989 McDowell was again gutted, this time for a deliberate and beautiful renovation and modernization. Here is the contrast between our building and our books, the contrast that is relevant to my point: We can modernize old buildings, · install new operational systems, modify unsafe or inconvenient features. We cannot do that to our books. Modem paraphrases or bowdlerized versions will not give us new improved up-to-standard texts, · but travesties. Secondly, we can live comfortably and purposefully in our building without understanding it, or with only a dim sense of esthetic satisfaction, yet without knowing the underlying construction: ·: or even seeing the elegantly rational hierarchy of her elevation. But we •· can't live with our books unconsciously. Everything depends on max- · imum awareness of detail, structure, purpose. A dim sense of a great text is almost a contradiction in terms. Therefore, the books of the past differ from the buildings of the past in the manner of their renovation - their renewal excludes comfort· able remodeling and trouble-free use. We have to do it their way. The: would seem to impose their past on us. VII. But actually the case is just the opposite. Because we have to engage the books of the tradition as they are and with all our available awareness, they are not in the past, but in the present. There are not, except in incidentals, bygone. What they say to us is what they have always said, and they say it now and always now. There is the simple past, the once-and-for-all past, which is absent except in memory or in monuments. But there is also a past which may be named after the grammatical tense from which I took my title: past-present. It is a nice fact that there are certain verbs in English as well as in Greek that display this past-presence dramatically. The English can" as in "I can" is actually a past from a verb meaning to know, as in "cunning," or German, kennen. Past knowing is present power; to have learned is to be now able. Similarly, the Greek verb for /1 10 �"I know," oida, is a past form of the verb for seeing; to have seen is now to know. That is what the grammarians call the past-present. It brings a past form into the present tense. The tradition, as I understand it, does the same. It presents a past that is not absent but present - if we let it be. I can think of a powerful . image for what I mean. When Odysseus goes into the underworld the diaphanous shades flutter about him and cannot attain to living presence until he lets then drink from the pit of sacrificial blood (Book XI). The books are, with our encouragement, capable of taking life. VITI. To understand the tradition of books consciously as I have delineated it, you have to be willing to entertain a very powerful- and very controversial- set of beliefs. There is, I hasten to add once again, also the possibility of just reading the books receptively. It is perfectly profitable, and even sound, for students to read thoughtfully without reflecting very often on the conditions for reading. But you might want to consider them sometimes, so here are the beliefs that I think support the idea of the tradition as a past-present. First: I think that, in order to believe that there is a past that is present, you have to believe in the unity of literate humanity. You have to imagine the thinking and writing human species as living below the threshold of natural evolution and also as standing in some part outside the vicissitudes of history. For example, I believe that a certain young man called Glaucon, one of Plato's older brothers, if he were present tonight, might be puzzled and disgusted to see a female in unbecoming dress address the public and utter decided opinions. But although he might not get over the indecency of it in one lifetime, I believe this time-immigrant would undergo the same naturalization as does a contemporary space-immigrant. He would pick up our customs and prejudices and begin to be involved with us. He might even enroll in the Graduate Institute. His intellect would be engaged even if his sensibilities continued to be outraged. My guess is, he would imperceptibly become acclimatized until he loved this place better than that time and could bear to return to Athens only in the manner of a loquaciously superior tourist, as happens to most of us immigrants when we try to go ''home." So much the more readily would his quicker and deeper younger brother be naturalized, especially since he would already have understood, and as I think, respected, democratic life. For he had observed that the kind of free discussion concerning the choice of a way of life and of a political constitution that his Socrates carries on, happens naturally in democracies (Republic VIII, 557). So conversely, since we can readily imagine him thinking with us, we can pick up his writings and think with him. For these writings are meant to be ahistorical in 11 �the sense that we can, in imagination, discount historical circumstance. Of course old books will refer to past prejudices and preoccu- ' pations, but we, by trying to understand what it means to be prejudiced and preoccupied, will soon learn to read around what is simply past in old books. Second. A closely related belief maintains that we have not only been the same rational species throughout recorded time, but that we do, in fact, have the same preoccupations, the same questions as even our remotest ancestors, provided only the level of formulation is deep enough. We must feel a little queasy at the sanctimonious superiority with which people who think they preeminently inhabit the present , condemn the opinions of people who lived in the past. But let me choose items on which positive contemporary opinion probably really is on safer moral ground, say, the position of women, the exposure of children, the owning of human chattel. We do, whatever our local conclusions may be, at the least share the questions (perennial questions, as they are rightly called) concerning human equality, the right to life of the very young, the inalienable freedom of individuals. These problems you will recognize as not dated at all. But the argument that we are, at least in our questions, alike through time, could be turned against the tradition. If at a level properly established nothing changes, neither human nature nor human preoccupations, why bother with older, less accessible versions? If concerns are perennial, why not seize hold of them in the present from? Third. Yet two additional beliefs address this reasonable point. One · is the belief born of experience, which I for one hold with equal amazement and fervor, that there is a palpable distinction between good and great. Good books are written all the time and they lean in · friendly fellowship on their great relatives. But those great ones are few and far between. There seem to be times, to be sure, when they are bunched together. It is probably that inexplicable fact, that miracle of history, that makes us think of centuries as if they were breeding grounds: the fifth century B.C. for Parmenides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Plato; the sixteenth century for Luther, Bacon, • Shakespeare, Galileo. But however they seem to be bunched or strung out on the tablets of time, these writers are rare and - I will say this ·· most controversial thing-absolutely great. As you know, this faculty, your tutors, claims for itself - some might say arrogates to itself the judgment and the choice of books. We have many gross and subtle criteria, which we might wish to discuss in the question period. The first one for me was formulated by the teacher who introduced me to Homer and won me for Classics, back in Brooklyn College in 1950. I recall a student asking her in a bright and impertinent tone-we were a bright and impertinent lot -what made her know a great book, and 12 �she said in the throwaway voice of utter conviction: "It makes my hair stand on end." One answer, therefore, to the desirability of taking up books ostensibly written in the past is that the tradition is a very slowly filling treasury. We are too poor in the present to be able to afford the loss of this inheritance. Fourth. But one more belief, complementary and even antithetical, is needed. When the past is regarded as presenting unique and irreplaceable treasures to the present, one dimension of human thinking and imagining is disregarded. We live, as I said before, at the front of a facade of time, a facade propped up and given solidity by the past behind it. It is not that we need to think of the past as determining our thinking. Thought is by its nature capable of thinking anything at any time. Yet it is a· fact, perhaps a paradoxical fact, that we live with inherited opinions. It is a paradoxical fact beca4se most opinions are held thoughtlessly; they are unthought thoughts. It is a very different thing to inherit a book and to inherit an opinion, not only because the books reach much farther back than the opinions, but because the · books become ours only by an effort of appropriation, while the opinions are what we effortlessly just have. They are part of that ever-advancing, ever-changing facade called the present. There is no denying that the facade progresses, not necessarily in the optimist's sense of getting better but in the neutral sense of going on. For while the questions may stay recognizably similar, the answers change drastically, by creeping evolution or abrupt revolution. Yet it seems that the more radical a new departure in thought is intended to be, the more it is shaped by its origin, be it through the precise contradiction involved in a sharp rejection, through the careful reconstruction required by a conscious recovery, or through the conversational continuity encouraged by a receptive response. It follows that the tradition, as I understand it, is for us not only a treasure house for any time but also a key to our specific present condition, to our understanding of private and public humanity, of nature and of divinity. One way or the other - as suppressed antithesis, as deliberate reacquisition, or as conversational partner - it props up our present, and on our knowledge of it depends our critical · appreciation of our time. I speak of time, but, really, time, datable time, has little to do with it. I can think of several ancient authors who are nearly two millennia away from us in time, but two seconds away from us in thought two seconds being what it takes to conceive a tremendously new idea. The order in which these authors appear probably matters but not the date of their birth, just as in our thinking the sequence of conception, the genesis of understanding, is significant, but very rarely the exact time. 13 �This notion of mine, that order matters but not dates, is, I must tell you, pagan; in fact it seems to me to be the gist of Paganism. It is therefore highly debatable, and I hope we will talk about it in the question period. In any case, the point I want this notion to reinforce is that absorbing the tradition is not the same as studying history or caring about the past. For we study these books not insofar as they tell us hf bygone times but because they tell us of the present. They are not absent in time, as is the past, but present (and perhaps even out of time altogether). They are the past insofar as it is present; they are effectively present; they are in the terms of the title of my lecture, the PAST-PRESENT. But that is not quite the last word. The books of the tradition, our books, become present, as I have said, only when we let them. We revivify them and make then vital. Therefore they stand by us and speak as does that shade in Hades whom Odysseus calls "the prince of those with gift of speech." It is the seer Teiresias, and he pleads: Let me but taste of blood, I shall speak true. (Odyssey XI, 96, Fitzgerald) 14 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. 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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. 14 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 The past-present Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994-09-02 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 02, 1994 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1994-09-02 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/265">Audio recording</a> Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f2db2f6e0cd3bed5846287b6c4d2d820.pdf 6ea7591eada1e7693d8fcac9b305c60b PDF Text Text FOR THE FIRST TIME Eva T. H. Brann Opening Lecture by the Dean August29. 1995 �FOR THE FIRST TIME Dean's Lecture August 29, 1995 Eva T. H. Brann This will be the first time that you, the freshmen among us, you to whom this opening occasion is traditionally dedicated, have attended a Friday night lecture- the first time, the first of many times, we hope. I imagine that there have been many things this past week which you did and experienced for the first time: the first time you have been really and truly gone from under your parents' roof, the first time you cast eyes on people who will be your life long friends or perhaps something even more intimate, the first time you've taken part in seminar (with two hundred fifty-five to come), the first time you've read words in the beautiful new Greek alphabet and the first time you have said the words psyche and pl1ilosophia in Greek (because they are in the first lesson of your Greek manual). All these "firsts" make a discontinuity in your lives, and give a sort of shock to your familiar ways. St. John's does not differ from any other live-in college you might have chosen, in intending to tear you from old contexts and habits. I hasten to say that all of us are at one in ardently hoping that you will hang on to some habits with which you all undoubtedly came imbued, such as keeping your room in impeccable order, or going to bed punctually and alone at 10:30 PM and rising promptly at 6:30 AM to brush your teeth and study your Euclid. But all schools expect you to undergo some culture shock, as the anthropologists say, or defamiliarization, in intellectual lingo. You are ex­ pected to come apart in some benign sense and for a while at least. But now arises a difference. You all know the nursery rhyme: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the King's horses and all the King's men Couldn't put Humpty together again. Well, if Humpty stands for a freshman who is suddenly dropped into a new environment, and the royal horses and troops for the school's courses and professors, then most colleges do succeed in putting the egghead some­ how together again. You should come out reshaped as a scientist, or a historian, or a philosopher, with the methods and habits of thought that give you, as they say, an "identity" as a prospective member of a profession. And in all the colleges I know about, the professors are seriously concerned with �the bearing this reintegration in professional terms has on the personal life and the character of their students. As you knew when you chose to come here, we do not promise or wish to put you together again as solidly trained specialists with tried-and-true categories and methods of approach to each subject. We hope -with trepi­ dation - for something far more risky: that you should find a new integrity of person and togetherness of character while becoming permanently uneasy with routines of thinking. To put it another way: We would love it - or perhaps it is safer to say, I would love it - if you eventually appeared, and really did live, in the outer world as solid people of dependable habits, but if you had in your inner being only one habit - that of having no habits, of seeing as many things as often as possible for the first time. For example: The title and theme of this opening lecture is "For the First Time." I came on that theme by two approaches. (By the way, for me, and, it might possibly be, for you, tfrat is the test of a good theme - one that turns up along different routes.) One approach arises from the fact that I am incurably interested in time-language, such as "the first time" or "two times two" or "The New York (or Washington or London) Times." Similarly I am fascinated by all the firsts which I expect to talk about in a minute. So the conjunction of "first" and "time" is irresistible to me. A second approach came from using my imagination about the freshman condition. This is the first week of my thirty-eighth year at this school; what's it feel like for you who are in your first week? Which of us is more acutely and really here? What is the difference between beginning absolutely and beginning once again? Is there such a thing as a truly first time? Such thoughts and musings made suddenly strange to me-strange and wonderful -this matter of "the fi'rst time." That sort of estrangement, in which the familiar turns unfamiliar and thereby becomes acutely noticeable, will be called wonder by several authors you will be reading this year. It differs from doubt, curiosity and round-eyed amazement. I understand round-eyed amazement as the naive surprise at something that appears as marvelous, curiosity as the pursuit of the variety and novelty of the world, and doubt as the uneasy sense that what you are told is not so. Amazement belongs to the perceptive child of any age, curiosity to the insatiable onlooker, and doubt to the wary initiate. It is a pity not to have in one's makeup the propensity for some degree of both of these. But wonder belongs to a kind of lover who wishes to place things at just that distance and in exactly that light in which they will become visible to thought. Now the wish to place things in the right way also has a name. It is called asking questions -of a certain kind. There are many sorts of questions, and most of these are not what I mean, particularly questions that are part of a self-canceling two-step mechanism. Someone asks, someone answers: the end. " Are you crazy?" -"Get lost." "What time is it?"- "8:30 PM." (Though I can't resist interjecting here, quite gratuitously, my favorite counterquestion, which suddenly raises a dead-end answer to a wonderfully loopy significance: That genius of inspired inadvertence, Yogi Berra, was asked "What time is it?" and answered "You mean now?") 2 �The kind of question I am speaking of, the kind that does not lapse with its answer, does not in fact request an answer so much as it initiates a search. This question stays active throughout and guides an inquiry- which means that asking good questions is, or rather requires, art and skill. It is only a beginning to frame the question; then you have to know how to go on; you have to find passages into the thing asked about. Otherwise you remain without passage at an impasse. The Greek word for an impasse, which will become very familiar to you, is a-poria. Poros is a means of passage, and a is called an "alpha privative," a negating prefix. Thus aporia means exactly that: "impasse." Aporia is an important stage in any inquiry, when the ordinary means and the ready answers are exhausted and mere willingness is not enough, so that your own ingenuity or a teacher's know-how have to come into play. It would not be too much to say that what we hope you will become here above all is an inspired framer of questions and an artful discoverer of passages through them. Among the best questions are often those in which we tum back on ourselves. Not for nothing is the thought that stops action for a moment called reflection. We leave off dealing with affairs to bend back on ourselves, -for that is what reflection means literally - to consider our own thinking and speaking and doing. It is said of scorpions that, if caught in a circle of fire, they bend their venom-tipped tail back on themselves and sting themselves to death. The story is false as both fact and as simile. In fact, the scorpions' arch is a mere thermal reflex, not a mortal reflection on their own poisonousness. The simile for a reflective question should be the opposite of fatal self-canceling circular­ ity, perhaps something more like a rising circle, a spiral. To return to the example at hand. You, the freshmen, have uttered the phrase "for the first time," very conservatively speaking, perhaps 360 times in your life, say twice a month since you learned to talk. Now suddenly you are to hear yourself speak, to ask yourselves what you mean, what we mean, what it means, when you say those words. So let's see. First let me frame spontaneously and randomly some ques­ tions of the sort I am talking about. Many of us are doing this week for the first time what others among us are doing for the umptieth time. Is there a special significance in such a first time? Is it begging to be gotten over with quickly or to be recorded in deep memory? What is the significance of the fact that we are beings who begin life in time, to whom things happen for the first - and it seems, by the same token -for the last time? Is the first time the best, or the least, or just like the others? Is the first day of your birth or the second day or the eighteenth year or the eightieth of most significance, or do any anniversaries matter? Does the first day of your life somehow have in it the rest of all your days as its outcome, or can a new, a second birth, occur if you will it? Could it be that some things have to happen twice to happen at all? But then, is there in fact ever a true and discernible first or, for that matter, a second time of anything?- One of the two founding fathers of philosophy, Heracleitus, said that you can't step into the same river twice, but another witty wise man topped him, saying that you can't step into the same river even once. What that one meant, I think, is that there are no first times, nor, in fact, 3 �any discernible events, bunches of time that you can count, at all, but that everything flows continuously and smoothly, continually new and evenly undifferentiated. Think, that wit meant (he was Cratylus and according to Aristotle he was Plato's first teacher), of your life not as a sequence of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, decades, but as an undifferentiated flow which has no countable times at all, first, second or last! I want to supply examples of how books help you to think about questions of this kind. For while asking questions is the beginning and end, the arclre and the telos, of your unsettling life here, in between comes a very solid and settling activity. It is the activity of study and reading -the study and practice of the skills that I mentioned before as useful for approaching problems, as well as the reading and interpretation of the stories and theories, the fictions and truths contained in books of stature. While you are here, you will divide your time between arts and authors, between studying some of the skills necessary for thinking well and reading some of the books that contain examples of such thought. I want to use three such books as examples of help in thinking about first and second and numerically indiscernible times. One of these books, an epic, Homer's Odyssey, is on the program; a second, a novel, Gabriel Garcia Mar­ quez's Love in the Time oftire Clrolera, might well be so some time in the future; and the third, a long short story, Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," used to be on the seminar list. These are the books, and the area of application is love, where times of inchoateness, of incipience, and of incisive recognition, that is, of vague potentiality, triggered growth, and unmistakable flowering are most poignantly in evidence. Put to these books the question of first times, now in the form of love at first sight, or second sight, or without a clear epoch, that is, without a clearly marked time of beginning. They will answer with a treasury of human possibilities. Let me begin with "Death in Venice." It is the story of an old and famous writer, one who has become a classic author, and of the love he conceives for a beautiful boy in the city of Venice in the dissolute time of the cholera. This love, the voyage that leads to it, and the author 's death from heart disease or cholera which brings the episode to an end, is fraught with all sorts of time-bound significance. The purpose here is to attend to the genesis of this eventually fatal passion. It is not love at first sight. The first time the writer casts eyes on the boy in the elegant lobby of an international luxury hotel, he observes him with the objective, almost cool attention of a man of mature esthetic judgment facing perfect beauty. He is roused to an abstract meditation on that mysterious union of the generic and the individual that produces the humanly beautiful. Soon after, he makes an attempt, under a mundane pretext, to escape from Venice, an attempt which is fated to fail. All is atmosphere, intimation, resonance, while first in restrained steps and then through mountingly catastrophic episodes the lover begins to enter and understand his true state. From the falsely serene beginning to the deadly end, there is no word or touch exchanged between the two, no first word or first closing of physical distance. This is an unpunctuated, unrealized, unbounded affair - no first time, no consummation, no last time. 4 �Let me go next to Love in the Time of Cholera, a book I came to read because our student Nick Colton, whom some of the juniors and seniors will remem­ ber, gave it to me as a parting present, and because whatever a fellow-reader wishes me to read, that I do eventually read. It is one of those responsive courtesies that carries its own manifold reward. Love- the love that arises, once more, in the time of cholera -begins on page 55 of my book, when Florentino Ariza, who is delivering a telegram to the house of Fermina Daza, catches a glimpse of her as she is sitting in the sewing room teaching her old aunt to read. She is thirteen. She raises her eyes to see who is passing. And for Florentino Ariza "that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later." Of course, one must think of that Florentine Dante and his Beatrice. Fermina Daza marries another man and has a not-unsatisfactory marriage. Florentino Ariza spends a life somewhat lovelessly hunting women, mechanically repli­ cating his young years of lying in wait for Fermina Daza. When the book ends some three hundred pages later, Florentino Ariza and the widowed Fermina Daza are sailing up and down the Magdalena River on the boat of the line that Florentino Ariza now owns. He has ordered the captain to hoist the cholera flag - though no one is sick on the boat. In cozy quarantine the two make love, and when the captain asks how long they think they can keep up "this goddam coming and going," Florentino Ariza, "who had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights," says, "Forever." Florentino Ariza's love has a first time- and then no others, except forever. Those two stories are one in the temporal modes of intellectualized roman­ ticism and the other in the magicised realism of novelistic prose. Now comes poetry, straight, plain and in accordance with nature, and with it love at second sight. It is the girl who loves, and it takes a second apparition, a second time in the man's presence, for love to happen. The Odyssey is the second book you will read together here. This episode happens near the end of Odysseus' voyage. He has been shipwrecked on the shore of Phaeacia, having escaped on a raft from seven years of increasingly savorless love-service to a voluptuous goddess. Nausicaa, the young princess of Phaeacia, and her attendants have come to wash clothes (particularly her trousseau, in accordance with a dream she has had), and to picnic and play ball on the sea shore. Odysseus, washed ashore, worn out, briny, and naked, has crawled into a lair of leaves. When he is awakened by the girls' voices he emerges like a lion, covering himself with a branch. The handmaidens run from him, but the young princess stands her ground and plays courteous hostess to the castaway; he responds with gallantry. She calls for oil and clothing, and Odysseus, having washed, shaved and dressed himself, under­ goes one of those transformations from bandy-legged uncouth roughneck to smooth, beautiful lord that characterize him. This look he sometimes has is not so much a matter of grooming, as of being seen in one of the modes proper to him - a sort of splendid lovableness. Here is what Homer says in Fitzgerald's poignant translation (V I, 238-261): 5 �And now Odysseus, dousing in the river, scrubbed the coat of brine from back and shoulders and rinsed the clot of sea-spume from his hair; got himself all rubbed down, from head to foot, then he put on the clothes the princess gave him. Athena lent a hand, making him seem taller, and massive too, with crisping hair in curls like petals of wild hyacinth, but all red-golden. Think of gold infused on silver by a craftsman, whose fine art Hephaistos taught him, or Athena: one whose work moves to delight: just so she lavished beauty over Odysseus' head and shoulders. Then he went down to sit on the sea beach in his new splendor. There the girl regarded him, and after a time she said to the maids beside her: "My gentlewomen, I have a thing to tell you. The Olympian gods cannot be all averse to this man's coming here among our islanders. Uncouth he seemed, I thought so, too, before; but now he looks like one of heaven's people. I wish my husband could be fine as he and glad to stay forever on Skheria! But have you given refreshment to our guest?" Now that is all a way of saying that Nausikaa sees him, at second sight, with love- that she has fallen in love with him. And here Homer plays one of his many lovely tricks. Where Fitzgerald has Nausikaa ask: "But have you given refreshment to our guest?," she actually says: "Do give, my attendants, food and drink to the stranger" (209) In Greek -and now it helps to have the linguistic skill of knowing Greek - she actually says: Alia dot', amp1tipoloi, xeinoi brosin te posin te. Brosis is the same word as our "bread;" and it is contrasted to ambrosia, "un-bread," the ethereal solid food of the immortals. But posis means plain drink and it happens to be a homonym- a word with the same sound but different sense- of posis, the word for husband Nausikaa had just used. To Odysseus, who has for seven years unwillingly drunk heavenly nectar and eaten immortal ambrosia in divine Calypso's cave, posis names the first mortal, real food and drink he has had for seven years. But to Nausikaa it carries the sound and thought of marriage and husband. As it happens, Odysseus is on his way to his wife-not a girl but a woman and a mother -and cannot stay. But we know that the young princess is not to Odysseus simply one more 6 �among the powerful and voluptuous women who gladly become his lovers. We can tell because when he and his wife Penelope finally go to bed together, for the first time in twenty years, he talks to her of all the witches and nymphs who have captivated him, but of the maiden Nausikaa he says not a word. He maintains the respectful discretion due to a virgin, a human being distin­ guished by not yet having had a certain experience for the first time. We may imagine that Nausikaa, in cut-off "Skheria" (the name means the "Split-off Land"), will get a satisfactory husband from the many elegant sailor boys that frequent her parents' court, but we cannot think that she will ever forget this exciting stranger. For her this was real love, arrived in the real way: sudden but not immediate, a proof of the power of the second time. This then is an example of thinking about first -and second -times in human life and of using books, in this case fiction, to guide the inquiry by means of the imagination. But we can go beyond our individual lives to the life of our species, mankind. For example, we might ask, was there a first time a human being stood erect, clothed in dignity, and asked questions like these? Or was the develop­ ment, the evolution as we call it, so smoothly continuous that no first could have been discernible? Is the question of a first-time human a problem for science or a speculation for philosophy? What, if there was a first moment of human consciousness, did it feel like? Was it like breaking through the cracking solid surface of familiar things and falling all alone into a black icy lake, or was it like rising from the dark fog of every preceding day into a new, fiery, illuminating presence? Or was it like floating peacefully to a light surface from a misty sleep? Did this ancestor of ours, this first Johnny, run to find someone to tell about it, inventing the required language on the spot, or did this ancestor devote all the rest of life to remembering and trying to tell how it was? These are dreamily speculative questions, in which any human being with a sense of ancestry will sometimes get lost. Books on human evolution will not help much, because while they have more to say every decade about the times and places where upright posture was achieved and where signs of sapient behavior are first to be found, they can only guess at the inner life that accompanied it - in particular they can only speculate whether there were discernible first times at all, and if there were, whether thought or behavior came first. So let us leave, for the rest of this lecture, first times that have to do with one particular time, with what came first as measured by the revolutions of the earth or the pulsations of the universe. Let me set aside "times " and attend only to "first." In Lesson XV of your Greek manual you will, for the first time, come on a word of great ancient dignity, arche, alpha, rho, chi, eta, a feminine noun of the first declension. You will, perhaps unknowingly, be quite familiar with the word. It occurs in archangel, archetype, architect, archipelago, archfiend. In this school, the tutor in charge of the meeting in which your teachers talk over the week's work in your classes is traditionally called an archon, the person responsible for starting the meeting off and conducting it. Arche, you may be able to guess, is what comes first, at the beginning, though not merely first in time, but first in responsibility. An arche might 7 �indeed be a beginning in time. Thus Herodotus, who as a historian traces each event, in particular the Persian War, to its beginning in time, speaks near the beginning of his work of the arche tes ecllthres, "the beginning of the enmity" of the Persians towards the Greeks, which, at least in the opinion of the Persians, was the seizure of Troy (I 5). Some such beginnings continue to be at work and to have effects when their time is passed. For example, what has happened to you here this first week may well influence you when the week is over. How it does is one of that slew of questions I threw out at the beginning: whether there are ever beginnings that do not rule the rest of days? I happen to think there are such. For example, the first day of any mere routine, of any mindless repetition, has no more force than any other because nothing is coming into being or to fruition; each day is the lifeless replica of any other. Such a first is a beginning as mere lower limit, not as a governing principle. "Principle," in Latin principium, is a good word to introduce here. It is Cicero's translation for arche. It is made up of the two words primus, "first," and capere, "to take." A principle, like a prince - a word that has the same origin -is what (or who) takes first place. The German word for prince is Fuerst, which is the same as our word "first." "Principal" belongs here, too; it has the same origin and meaning as principle and prince, but perhaps a more vivid meaning to you, since your high school probably had one of them, an awesome personage who took the first place and had the last word. (I can't resist interrupting myself with a totally incidental but highly charming reference. My favorite dictionary, the American Heritage, has a lovely little disquisition on the long history of confusion in the spelling of principle as in arche, and of principal as in "go to the principal's office," which ends as follows: A key point to remember ... is that in middle English spelling was not nearly as fixed as it usually is today, a development that was much furthered by the invention of printing. When we interchange spellings for principle and principal we are doing something that would have been less of a fault in the days before the conformity imposed on us by this marvelous invention.) This little collection of '�first" words shows that people appreciate in their speech the fact that to be first does not always mean to come before or earlier in time. An arclte may be first out of time. It may go before in a different sense. It may be the beginning, fountain, origin or rule. About such a first, about a timeless arche, clusters a whole new set of questions. One subset has to do with the beginning of the world, or rather the transition to the beginning. Is such a transition thinkable? Was there a moment- could it be called a moment?-before time or its materialization began? Was there a time before time began, a beginning of beginnings, as is intimated in the most famous of sentences containing the word arche: En archei ein ho logos; in Latin: In principio erat verbum - "In the beginning was the word," the first sentence of the Gospel according to St. John? Is the beginning cf time thinkable? Is the non-beginning of time thinkable? Such questions are , 8 �considered alike by those who think about God, by theologians like Augustine whose book on time, the Confessions, you will read as sophomores, and by those who think about nature, the physicists from Aristotle to Stephen Hawkins - but oh, how differently! The transition from eternity to time is not, however, always to be thought of in the analogy of a sequence: first a "standing" now and then a passage of nows. It can also be thought of as a simultaneity: a double world of timeless and changeless being and of passing and variable becoming. Should we accept such a duality? In what sense is the stable world the beginning, the arche, of changing appearances, as Plato, above all the philosophers you will be reading this year, will claim? And how does such an arche, such a "founding ruler," as Plato calls what always and primarily is (archegos, Sopltist 243 d) -how does this arche govern? Is it an apex, a divinity to which all that lives is drawn, or one from which all increase flows? Or is it a foundation, a fundament, on which all that appears is grounded? Or are the laws and rules that govern the physical world throughout everywhere equally in force, so that no one and nothing has special privileges, and the most beautifully painted porcelain vase falls to earth under exactly the same dispensation as an ugly old clay pot? This is the new claim that the scientific writers of your junior year will make. These questions and others will arise for you as you think your way through the next four years. And they will always arise in two tiers, as it were. For you will always be asking about "firsts" -as about everything else what are the terms, problems and arguments presented by the books, and also whether the authors are right in the formulation of the question and the contriving of the answer. There will continually be this double task for you: first to make out the meaning and then to judge its truth. Let me turn a second and last time from the framing of questions to an example of an attempted development. For this second set of questions, help comes primarily not from those authors who improve on the visible world by increasing its stock of particular characters and events -I mean the poets and novelists- but from those who clarify it by lifting from it universal descrip­ tions- I mean the philosophers. The question whose treatment I want to exemplify belongs to that tricky type which concerns beginnings in time and out time as they come together, not at the origin or in the perpetuation of the external world, but in us human beings. This question arose for me, as -remember -good questions tend to do, coincidentally in several ways. (I have often noticed that there seems to be a sort of benign arsonist of the mind abroad who lights fires in several mental districts at once.) This time the question had one beginning when I had occasion to reread Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, a work the freshmen among us will reach in February. I noticed for the first time the full force of a powerfully abrupt phrase. Aristotle speaks of the human being as a beginning. "The human being," he says, "is that kind of beginning" - toiaute arche anthropos (1139 b 7). What kind of beginning? A beginning called choice. Not so long after, a colleague stopped me in the hall to ask what I thought might be the connotations of the word Aristotle uses for human choice, 9 �prohairesis. There is a perfectly good Greek word for choice, hairesis. You actually know it from the English word "heretic," used for people who insist on making choices of their own rather than following the established doctrine, the orthodoxy. Why, my colleague wanted to figure out, does Aristotle insist on pro-hairesis? Pro is a prefix meaning before, as in pro-gnosis, that is, pre-diction. What on earth is fore-choice? Could it mean pre-ference, choos­ ing something over or before something else? That seemed insipid. Could it mean choice before choice? That seemed mysterious. We went off to attend to the lesser matters that take most of our time. Not long after, Mr. John White, another colleague, gave a lecture in which he dwelled on this pro of prohairesis (St. John's Review XLII, 3, 1994). Let me give my interpretation of his interpretation of Aristotle's understanding of the human beginning, not in the sense of how human beings first began to be human but how they are in themselves beginnings. This interpretational episode is intended to be an example of our way. Our way is by listening to each other talk about books to get closer to the things themselves, and by becoming more and more familiar with them to make them stranger and more wonderful to ourselves. Pro-llaeris, then, has to do with human originality, with our ability to be origins or beginnings. Let me read you my version of Aristotle's whole sentence: Therefore fore-choice is either thought reaching out in desire or desire informed by thought, and the human being is that kind of beginning. "Therefore" refers to what Aristotle had just said, that mere thought by itself moves no practical action, but only when it is for the sake of something. Productive work, too, he says, begins like that - with a purpose in mind. Therefore it is choice that makes human beings beginnings or origins. The way it works is that every originating choice implies a "before" which decides an "after," or as Mr. White puts it: a present choice is "the past of a future." Mere desirous preference in the now is mere choice, hairesis simply. Little children and animals live in that now, that present-choice; they do seem to exercise choice but not fore-choice, for example, when they want to be picked up and then they want to get down. Simple hairesis is, Aristotle implies, the word to be used for a choice driven by desire without thought. Prohairesis then is choiee made not on the cusp of desire. In fact Aristotle had already said quite a while earlier (1112 a 17) about fore-choice: Isn't it something pre-planned? For choice involves reason and thinking. It seems that the name signifies something chosen before other things. He appears to be saying that to choose something above other things is to choose it beforehand. To make a proper choice, all the possibilities have to be calculated beforehand, and then you can place one above the others. 10 �Calculation is an aspect of beforehandedness that intelligence and thinking make possible. But there is another aspect that is not, Aristotle holds, to be gotten from the mere intelligence of one's calculations and certainly not from the truth of one's principles. That aspect has to do with being set in the right direction to make good choices, and we call it habit. Mr. W hite points out that the Greek word for habit, l1exis, comes from the future of the verb ecl1ein, to have or hold. So people who have good habits will hold themselves well when the moment comes. They have gotten into the habit from way back, and it is with them, always waiting and about to go to work. They're all set before­ hand, and that condition too goes into the pro of prohairesis. Let me now lay out an understanding of that pertinent but startling claim that a human being is a kind of arcl1e, namely the kind in whom desire and thought have become inextricably entangled, so that it is impossible to say which modifies which. On the one hand, as immature human beings still close to our animal nature, we may exhibit mere choice, hairesis, reaching for the desire of the moment, imprisoned in the present by each passing preference. On the other hand, there is an incomplete mode of thinking, a mere thinking that possesses some of us, a kind of ratiocination running on dry, that gets nowhere and does 'nothing, and is disconnected from any human hunger. This kind of thinking is not, like appetite or desire, in the now, but rather in the never. How does hungry reaching become tamed and mere figuring get aimed? This fusion of thought and passion is attained way back, by having made, or better, by having been made to make many choices. Such choices were first rather thoughtless, perhaps mere thwartings of appetite under the constraints of parental guidance, but then, in time, desire and thought became all but fused, and choice turned into fore-choice. For that is how we acquire a habit. A habit grows by what we now call boot-strapping. It pulls itself up by its own handle, that is, it becomes what it is by just beginning with an instance of itself, but in time it grows deliberate and thoughtful. So that is Aristotle's broadest understanding of what it means to be good, or, in an older language, virtuous: "Virtue," he says, is the "fore-choice habit" (he arete hexis proairetike, 1106 b 36); virtue is the habit of making choices from thought-di­ rected desire. Human beings project themselves into time in a peculiarly human way, by being shaped in the past to be ready for the future. That is what habit helps us do and be. At the present moment we make choices that arise from that past shaping, which amounts to an integration of our hungers and our thoughts. Much past goes into that kind of choice, and so it is called, at least by Aristotle, fore-choice. Mr. White says, finally, that the pro of the prohairesis also looks backward on the deed that will follow the choice, even before it is done. We reflect on the consequences at the moment of narrowing our options and specifying our principles; we leap into the future before us and, while still in the present preceding action, look back on the implications of our principles. Tl1at is what Aristotle means when he says that a human being is an origin called choice: a being who at every present moment uses the past to shape the future. We might say: a being who is a matrix of controlled beginnings and hence a source of intended consequences. 11 �If I stopped here I would have given an exposition but not an interpreta­ tion. Interpretations get personal. We have to figure out what a text means and then what we think. Moreover we have to try not to contradict ourselves in what we say to each other in public. If I were simply to say "yes, indeed," and "surely so," to Aristotle, like some little boy in a Platonicdialogue, it would be because I omitted to ask him if this human arclre who makes a difference in time is itself altogether in time and why, if thought itself moves nothing, it turns out at the climax of his thought in the majestic Book Lambda of his Metaphysics to move everything. And then all my questions about arche as a timeless beginning, and whether it is source or foundation, would be left dangling. And again, if I were simply to say yea and amen to Aristotle, who has such faith in good habits, I would have to rely on your having forgotten how I began tonight. I began by saying that we hope you will acquire here the habit of having no habits. Of course, what I meant was that we hope you will break down quite a few of your own petrified opinions and derail your scheduled trains of thought. But when thinking cuts loose, conduct becomes more original. With thinking people you will never know what· interesting thing they'll say in seminar or what imaginative thing they'll do outside of class. All you can bet on is that it will be worth listening to and that they will be worth being with. So I'll express my personal reservations to Aristotle thus, knowing very well that he has more to say in other places: You seem to me to be very right in your emphasis on the human originating activity as rooted in time, in present choices being conditioned both by past practices and by forethought. What you say is sheer soundmindedness and sanity. Thus students are beings who rejoice in a habitual obedience to seminar lists, class schedules, daily assignments, and paper deadlines. But students, really good students, seem to live double lives. They are also learners. Learn­ ers are beings who are subject to the sudden irruptions of unscheduled insights, to the habit-disrupting exhilaration of glimpsing sources, origins, beginnings out of time and beyond themselves, to those abrupt, kaleidoscopic shifts in which the familiar world rearranges itself to appear again and again for the first time. How, I ask, do such first times come about? I end with a question because at this school a lecture is merely the incite­ ment to a question period. And I will tell you one more thing: If the first question is asked by one of you freshmen attending question period for the first time, I have a neat little present in my office for you, which I will give you on Monday as a token of valor-this one first time. 12 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 13 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 For the first time Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995-08-29 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 29, 1995 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1995-08-29 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/266">Audio recording</a> Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8ced069597ebbf92956268e3779da410.pdf 9c19c913516fe795adf078aed85368af PDF Text Text WHY READ BOOKS? DEAN'S LECTURE, AUGUST EVA T. 30, 1996 H. BRANN As always, this opening lecture is dedicated to our freshmen. There is a Greek saying: Arche de toi hemisu pant6s: "The beginning is, in truth, half of the whole." I recall the saying because it sat above the first lesson of my Greek book in college, and it meant: You'd better learn these case endings thoroughly or else. But I want to take the saying on a nobler plane - as a reminder that what we, your teachers and fellow students, say to you in this first week is likely to have a special influence and to mark your four years here to some degree. So it seems to me important to alert you right away to one of the ways of your new community: a lecture, a prepared, uninterrupted pronouncement of some length, is in this college mainly the occasion for a conversation, either in the question period immediately afterwards, or later on, when you are very welcome -and this is no merely polite invitation -to visit me to talk more at less distance. The topic, or rather the question of this lecture "Why read books?" fits with this approach. All of you, as I know from reading your applications, do in fact read books, and you came here to read more of them and to do it better. It is the one thing you all have in common, this love of books. But what we do here is to question the facts and attachments of our lives, and that is the world of which you have now become a part. It has always seemed absurd to me, and a sign of how little experience the world in general has in asking real questions, that "questioning" should be felt as something hostile, as an interrogation intended to destroy self-confidence and faith, as if a call to question your own life and its assumptions were an invitation to undermine the ground you stand on. That may happen, to be sure, and cause you some difficult times, but it can never be the first, good-faith intention of question-raising. Questions are raised so that the mental ground you occupy will not be as a hard-trodden asphalt-covered barren parking lot for your thoughts but the tilled and turned-over soil of a growing garden of ideas. When I ask myself and you "Why read books?," I don't mean "What's the point?" but rather "There's more to this than I thought." Before I pursue my question for the evening, I want to add a dedication. This, my seventh and last opening lecture, is dedicated 1 �Brann to the seniors as well. We have something very particular in common, because for all of us, you and me, it will be the last year · of an epoch in our lives. You, however, will turn into alumni and will take ~p a new life, while I will return to my old occupations, reading books and teaching. And this mirror image of our fates makes me want to tell you something I have learned in the dean's office. Some of you will recall how fiercely - and ineffectually - I resisted being called "the administration." Why? Because the deans are in their proper being students and teachers in the program who have taken time out to fulfill a particular duty in this community that needs to be done, and by our polity, must be done by tutors. This constitution of ours embodies a rule that governs this institution oflearning as a whole. This rule is: First think, then act. If this rule is a good one, it justifies the four years you have taken out of your normal life as active participants in the world of action . . First you were given time and occasion to think, and now you are ready to seize the opportunity to do deeds. The strange fact is that few people in institutions of learning believe in this rule anymore. Some think that you learn to live by living and others think that it's enough to learn to make a living. Pragmatism and vocationalism are the short-hand terms for these beliefs. I am here to tell you that these notions have got to be wrong. I cannot tell you why it is so, but we human beings are so constituted that we cannot do these two things at once: think and act. I believe this fact of life has to do with the ever-enigmatic nature of time: the time of receptive contemplation is radically different from the time of decisive action. That is not to say that there is not much thought-like activity in action: prospective . imagining, provident figuring, careful calculating, summary intuiting. But in action all these mental activities are exercised as by a sleepwalker whose safety rests on the habits of another life and who had better not try to wake up. Deans know that; some even like it. Aristotle, it seems to me, has it absolutely right in the third book of the Nicomachean Ethics: the life of deliberation, which is the mental side of the active life, needs a capital of prior truths, theories and, above all, ends, a capital that is accumulated in contemplation. When you go into action you must already know what working hypotheses you will adopt, what you think about human nature in general, and most importantly what you love and want to bring about or save. It was in order to build up this fund of 2 �Why Read Books theories, insights and attachments that you came to this place of leisure - and it is never out of place to remind us all that the word "school" comes from the Greek word for leisure, schole. But something not unexpected will happen. As you draw down even a mental capital, you deplete it, you wear down the detailing that gives particularity to your thought, you compact and pare it into usable phrases; in short it undergoes what thought tolerates even less than fruit: canning. It is to prevent this normal canning of thought in active life that our alumni all over the country regularly hold seminars and read books together. · Have I gotten away from "Why read books?," my opening question? I think not. In this school books are the means of choice · for occasioning thought. There is a lovely archaic usage for a common word. In Psalm 119 (v. 147) of the King James version we read: "I prevented the dawning of the morning," meaning "My rising preceded that of the sun." The reading of books properly prevents the thinking of thoughts, in the sense of preceding it. Might it also sometimes prevent it in the sense of presenting an obstacle to thinking? Are reading and contemplation in league or at odds? That is a qu.e stion that has always puzzled me, but does so especially now that I am not far from returning to study. It may well interest you also, who are about to begin and who are about to conclude your studies, at least at the college. I want to ask the question in parts, first "What is reading?," then "What is a book?," and finally "Why read books'?" I am following here Socrates' teaching, which seems true to me, that to answer a "why'' or "how" question well we must inquire "what" sort of thing the object of our interest is. I. Reading Reading has a wide sense. The word itself is related both to reasoning and to riddling. To read is both to think and to puzzle something out. We are said to read faces and character, the lie of the land and maps, the book of nature and evidence. Here reading means attending carefully both by scanning and fixing in detail on whatever is before the eyes or other senses - and making something of it. In the largest sense reading is interpretation. The primary Latin meaning of "interpreter" is go-between or broker, and that fits the activity of reader in the largest sense very well. This kind of interpreting reader knows how to go from a sign to 3 �Brann what it signifies; a reader knows how to negotiate the way between a sign and meaning. Theories of signification are a huge and deep subject. We do not study them explicitly in this program any more than we pick out other philosophical or linguistic subject matter, but the study you do here should set you up particularly well for more detailed inquiry into signification. For the moment, let me provide a word for the object that reading, broadly understood, deals with: symbols. A symbol, in one frequent and well-warranted use of the word, is a sign that, whether intentionally or naturally, catches the attention on its own and at least in part reveals its significance through inspection. The word is Greek and means something joined or fitted together. When two parties were about to enter into a contract, say that one would act as broker to the other's money, they would take a strip of clay, make ajagged cut through it and bake the halves. When the lender came for his deposit, he had the fitting half as proof of ownership. A symbol is therefore a token meaningful through its sensory attributes. For example, if someone were to receive a bouquet of skunk cabbage from a neighbor as a token of esteem, the recipient would know what to think through exercising the sense of smell. Reading in the.wide sense is therefore the skill of interpreting symbols, which presupposes the ability to discern which among the multitude of objects we perceive are in fact symbolic; this ability is · anticipated by a far more fundamental disposition: the disposition to see everything whatsoever on occasion as pointing beyond itself. This inclination to regard nothing that appears as a dead end seems to me to be as human a characteristic as anything can be. I would go so far as to say that if any creature displays it, it has honorary membership in the human race and is entitled to all the privileges and immunities thereunto appertaining. Dolphins and chimpanzees may well turn out to be candidates. The human being may then be defined as the reading animal. But besides symbols, which are to be looked at, there are also signs, usually, though not always, of a conventional sort, signs that are meant to be looked not at but through. I say "usually" rather than "always" because there may be certain physical signs which are to be observed as, say, symbols of some disease, but are to be seen through and overlooked as signs of human nature, such as a bodily deficiency. But the class I am speaking of is mostly conventional, that is, it functions by a convention, an agreement which is usually published in a dictionary-like list somewhere. The 4 �Why Read Books signs that I am particularly thinking of are letters .. The letters themselves as well as their order are largely conventional, which means they do not signify on their own - else why would one need agreement and dictionary? "Conventional" is often and sensibly opposed to "natural," and in this context the difference is that what is natural reveals itself for what it is or does and what is conventional needs the aid of instruction, as an image of a dolphin reveals what it is an image of by being looked at, while the capital letter Q is not a sperm fertilizing an egg; which is what it looks like, nor could anyone guess that in English words it needs to be followed by a U. To be sure, some of the letters of the Western alphabet started as pictograms, and others were interpreted as pictures. For example the capital letter Delta, shaped like a triangle, gave its name to the spreading alluvial mouth of a river, and the capital letter Lamda, originally an inverted chevron one of whose legs was shorter than the other, gave its name to the mother of the great Corinthian house of the Cypselids, because she had the same characteristic. Herodotus tells her remarkable story in his fifth book (92). So also a meaning was sometimes found in the conventional ordei: of the alphabet or ABC. Some Romans evidently read in the sequence that sits in the middle of the ABC, L-M-N, the word elementum, making an analogy between the order of letters and the elements of nature. Since wherever convention is strongly involved, history becomes the primary source of explanation, knowing the history of our alphabet is the necessary way into the reasons for its present state, and a wonderful story it is. But to my mind, its most wonderful aspect, one with deep causes and great consequences, is how soon and completely the letters become mere signs with none but assigned functions. And that brings me to reading in the narrow sense, the kind of reading peculiarly appropriate to books. Here is what I mean. Recall the painful days - they were for me at six - of learning to read. Recall how your eye stopped at the letter, how you laboriously and haltingly spelled out each word. Letters stood between you and the sounded words, and every desire was to return to the companionable ease of being read to. Then one day, perhaps rather suddenly, everything clicked. The letters disappeared, often even the sound, and you were in the book. I remember my first silently read book with a kind ofreinforced vividness because it was exactly the one title that Rousseau recommends in his Emile, the text on the upbringing of children that obscurely influenced European 5 �Brann parents for generations down to my own. This "marvelous book" was Robinson Crusoe (Book Ill), and reading it by myself had an effect not unlike the one Rousseau imagined: a tremendous sense of withdrawal from the social world, of being on my own, of' imagining myself capable of being self-subsisting. (I should say, parenthetically, that it was a child's version I read, and I discovered only later that this aboriginal self-help book is actually also a chronicle of the blackest depression and god-foresakenness.) The wonder then of reading in the narrowest sense, of alphabetical reading, is that the letters disappear. Or perhaps it is possible to say that they are transparent, as Aristotle understands transparency in On the Soul (II, 7). He says that the transparent is not visible in itself but takes its visibility, its color, from something elSe. So the letters are no longer seen in their own shape, but as they convey the story told. It is a good way of saying that letters are the medium par excellence. You all know that there are quite a few other ways of noting down what is in the mind: particularly pictographs, ideograms, hieroglyphics. What characterizes these notations in their pure form (they are usually mixed with conventional signs) is that the eye notes them and should not immediately read past them. They are not mere media but mean something in themselves. For example, it isinsufficient but possible to decipher a ChiJ).ese poem just by looking at its characters: here is a stylized but recognizable mountain; here is a person, the ideograms looking very much like the lambda above. They occur in the first line of Wang Wei's poem "Dear Park," which is in fact about an empty mountain and unseen people (Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei). In the West too we have partly symbolic scripts, for instance musical notations, in which rising notes climb up the staff. Even mathematical notation is partly symbolic - the equal sign of an equation is as the fulcrum of a balance. So by and large it is alphabetical writing alone that is a pure medium. Most of the so called media- recall that "medium" means a middle-thing, a go-between - are impure as hell. They crop and take an angle and omit, and so convey a cooked version of some far-off original speech or deed. The purity of the letter medium seems to me to be of the very deepest significance. It means that we can be absorbed into a book in a most immediate way, and then again we can, at will, surface and attend to the literal level, the letter of the text. There are, 6 �Why Read Books consequently, different kinds of reading. In classical antiquity scrolls were, it seems, read aloud by servants who did not, perhaps, quite understand what they were reading. Our tutor, Ms. Judy Seeger tells a great story which takes the point to its extreme. When she and her husband Tony, who is an anthropologist, lived with a preliterate tribe of the Amazon called the Suya, it once happened that the men, who were amused by Tony's portable memory, had him transcribe a bunch oflewdjokes that he himself did not understand. The notebook was carried to the women's side of the village and Ms. Seeger, who was equally innocent of the meaning, was made to read the writing aloud to the ladies of the tribe. Pandemonium ensued. Here letters are nothing but sound notations. Of course, reading aloud can also be a very companionable activity, and it,is probably the most important educating that parents can do for little children. The next stage in reading is recounted by Augustine in his Confessions. He tells with wonder of St. Ambrose, his teacher, that "when he was reading he drew his eyes along over the leaves, and his heart searched into the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent" (VI, 3). He did this, Augustine conjectures, because his time for leisure was short and he did not wish to have it intruded upon by the requests for clarifications of those who might be listening. The beginning of our prevalent way of reading is thus the shortness of leisure and withdrawal - time-deprivation and a need for privacy. At a subsequent stage, I have no idea when attained, even the internally sounded letters were bypassed. I think that this is how most of us read; we hardly ever feel impelled even to move our lips. It is the kind of reading that makes correctness of spelling and punctuation so important, because unorthodox forms act as eye-catchers (sometimes, of course, that might be intended) and distract the reader from the matter. We all know how hurt we feel when we submit the thoughts of our mind to a reader who seems to see only the typo on the page. So when your tutor does that sort of subeditorial reading for you, it is to save your work from that distraction in the future. There are, finally, all sorts of readings that new time constraints have made necessary and new techniques possible: skimming, speed-reading, listening to book tapes in the car, and reading off the teleprompter, which is a high-tech crib for public speakers. Let me then suppose that the kind of reading most characteristic of this community is the extended silent reading which is largely, though not altogether, accomplished by the sort of visual scanning 7 �Brann that provides the most recessive sort of stimulation to sensation set moreover in an environment as secluded and, one might say, as homeostatic, as little intrusive, as you can manage. What bodily positions and perceptual backdrop help you concentrate on this essentially non-physical activity is very much a matter of taste and as such probably not worth disputing - there is for instance the matter of background music, of auditory atmospherics. It seems to me that silent reading and the seminar are two activities in search of each other. Casual, informal conversations should be a large part of your life out of class here, but the scheduled conversation that we call the seminar is in need of a guiding text, or, experience shows, it will end up producing the product after which the bull session is so felicitously named. But though it is true that the world round people P1Ogram get-togethers about nothing · f and then wonder why it all seems so unprofitable, the more interesting question for us is why silent reading should require the complement of regular conversation. For in my opinion it is only half the story that you are required to prepare for seminar by doing your reading; the other half is that your reading requires the seminar. The reason is to be found in the way we are made: We have an inside and an outside, a private interior and a public exterior, and our internal activities -feelings and opinions - seek to become external; they long for expression, resonance and refutation. And silent reading, more than any other steady activity I know of, is capable of producing large stores of inner responses that are badly in need of untangling and testing or just of shining in the light of public conversation. I might go so far as to say that to sit apart and read and to come together and talk- that is the natural rhythm of the life oflearning. So much for reading and its return to living speech. II. Books ."To read" is a · transitive verb, which means it normally takes an object. We read something, and there was a time when the most obvious object of reading in the narrow sense was a book. But that is no longer so - many things can now be read besides books. There are, it seems to me, two main sets of alternatives to book-reading. The differences are in what might be called "format" and "delivery." Format distinguishes reading matter such as articles in periodicals or collections, course packs, photocopied lectures and the like, from 8 �Why Read Books bound books by single authors. Delivery refers to the physical substrate, the underlying bearer of the text, particularly the electronic alternative to the printed book. There is no denying that some of the most epoch-making ideas have been announced in so-called "papers," short works published in periodicals. One great example among many is Einstein's 1905 paper on Special Relativity, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," which the seniors will be studying next semester. Now it may seem like a very superficial way oflooking at a text to ask whether it has the format of a flyer, of an article in a periodical (be it printed on mat, glossy, or pulp paper), of an off-print - or of a book. But facts are sometimes significant, and the fact is that the papers we take up are mostly read for the laboratory and are often known by their date, such as Einstein's "nineteen-o-five paper," while in~ the seminar we read almost exclusively wholes or parts of books, and only a few of us pay much attention to their dates of publication. Speaking very roughly, but not without some truth, I can say that differences in the format of writings often betoken deep distinctions in the things written about. It belongs to the character of science that it is carried forward by succinctly presentable discoveries. Both the fact that science is progressive, so that later work is presumed to present an advance, and the fact that each newly uncovered truth is in our tradition credited to its first discoverer, means that quick publication and clear chronology are crucial to the enterprise. Not so with literature and philosophy. In neither is there a reasonable presumption - or so it seems to us at this school -that the latest is the most creditable. Nor is there a premium on elegant succinctness or quick publication. We want books of literature to spread themselves pleasingly over our lives; we want books of philosophy to amplify their theses sufficiently; and we couldn't care less whose system or whose tale got out first - at least most of us here don't. I might say, parenthetically, that the generation of a good deal of non-scientific periodical literature is due to the attempt to bring the format of natural science to other human inquiries. If you are interested in the origin of this format and the philosophy behind it, look at the postscript of Bacon's New Organon, where you will find the aboriginal directions for modern research scholarship, albeit with many cautions that have been blatantly neglected, such as: 9 �Brann Never cite an author except in a matter of doubtful credit; never introduce a controversy except in a matter of great moment. And for all that concerns ornaments of speech, similitudes, treasury of eloquence, and such like emptinesses, let it be utterly dismissed. (Aphorism Ill.) Anyhow, it is books that we read here, writings that are expansive in the physical space they occupy and independent of the time in which they were published - and that have yet one more feature: They have weight, physical gravity. The text is delivered in a material form, the writing has a tangible substrate. Less than a decade ago this feature would not have been worth noting. Almost all texts were written or printed onto an underlying, usually natural, material such as paper, parchment, or wood. The very name of a book and its paper tells as much. "Book" apparently comes from "beech," referring to the source of the wooden tablets on which runes, the ancient Scandinavian letters, were inscribed, and "paper" comes from Rapyrus, the plant from which the ancient Egyptians made their writing material. Now has arisen something truly new in the world - the immaterial electronic book. The electronic tablet itselfis, to be sure, a material object, made of plastic and perhaps glass. But the writing is not on a material medium. And this fact has all sorts of thought-provoking consequences for reading. It is generally agreed that people who value the sight of their eyes and the alignment of their vertebrae would not think of reading a long book off a computer screen. Moreover, readers who like to carry the books they are involved with on their daily rounds will not find a computer monitor sufficiently portable. But comfort and portability will indeed be features of the not-so-far future when electronic tablets of handy size and with eye-saving screens will be readily available. Just think of what is in the offing: one slim tablet on which will appear, on demand, every text on our seminar list and every writing found worth scanning into its memory. The one tablet will be the repository of a large virtual library. ''Virtuality" is a word and a meaning that will, it is my guess, play a huge role in your lives after you leave us. To my mind, virtuality presents the next great human issue that our intellectual tradition has to digest. Virtuality is, I think, quite properly contrasted to reality. The particular meaning of the word "virtue" that "virtuality'' turns into an issue is an old one. Virtue here means 10 �Why Read Books the effect some thing or substance has, as the virtue of a drug. For example, a candidate for doctor of medicine, in Moliere's Malade Jmaginaire or The Hypochondriac, who is being examined upon the cause and reason why opium makes one sleep, answers in hilarious pidgin-Latin thus: Quia est in eo Virtus dormitiva, Cujus ef;lt natura Sensus assoupire. (Third Intermezzo.) Because there is in it A sleepy-making virtue, Whose nature it is To lull the senses. The virtus or virtue here is the cause which is identical with the effect. Virtuality then describes the, condition in which virtue, or effect, has cast loose from the substance or thing, that is to say, from the reality, that underlies it. A virtual world is a world of apparitions that is effectively perceived but has no real, weighty, inertial, material world of things behind it. Its space is nowadays said to be cyberspace, which means control-space (from the Greek verb kybernaein to steer, guide or control). To my mind, the fasCinating question of the early next century will concern the relation of virtuality to imagination, of cyberspace to , maginative i space and of the virtual world to the world of the imagination. For it seems to me that they are in some respects happily coincident and in others bitterly at odds. But I've brought this preoccupation of mine in only to talk about libraries of books, virtual and real. For it is the case that we've just built ourselves a beautiful new library, and moved our nearly hundred thousand volumes into it. I wish the freshmen had been here in spring on May 6th to see the whole community turn out for the Great Book Move. All day long lines of book-bag carrying students, tutors, and staff members wended their way across the front campus from the old library, now about to be the Barr-Buchanan Center, to the new Greenfield Library. Connie and Stewart Greenfield themselves worked most of the day carrying and shelving books, and there was a lovely spirit abroad. The word "real" is Latin and means "thing-like." Our new library was designed not only to house the books that we have accumulated since 1697, the date of our earliest acquisitions, but 11 �Brann also to have empty shelves for again as many books to come -real, thing-like books occupying real, thing-accommodating space. Our new library is, among other things, an announcement to the world that we mean to keep acquiring and reading real beech-and-paper books, housed in real cubic space, for quite a while. III. Why Read Real Books? So now the time has come to conclude by attempting an answer to the question of my title "Why read books?," but in a new version: "Why read real books?" In the beginning I insisted on the truly wondrous minimalism of reading in the narrow sense - how unobtrusive this Phoenician-Greco-Roman alphabet of ours is, a true medium, a recessive go-between. But I've noticed, as have all of us who have learned at this school to pay large attention to apparently trivial matters, that the less blatant .i s the appeal to the senses in an activity, the more opportunity there is for the noticing sensibility, for subtlety. And so it is with this activity: Just because there is so little for eye, ear and touch, the subtle circumstances mattera great deal. Let me therefore finish by setting out just a very few of those subtle, almost evanescent marks of reading real books and end by merely intimating how massively important they are to sublimating reading in the narrow technical sense into reading in the widest and grandest sense. As I am composing this lecture, I am sitting within my personal library. The house holds maybe five thousand books, collected over five decades. What is moving, now that I'm paying attention, is how familiar the aspect of almost every book is. These are not mere book-volumes occupying mere space-volumes. Each is a place, a local concentration of eventful memory. I ask myself which volume out of these weighs the most with me and immediately find the Oxford Plato, two maroon-and-gold volumes of onion skin paper, crisp and compact, containing all the dialogues in Greek. And when I open one, a glimpse of Ionic columns carved from ivory-hued marble and an aroma of thyme-scented Aegean island paths emerges, as if from a magic chest. I bought these books probably in 1957, the year I came to this college, and one reason they have such strong sensory associations is that the Greek printed in them is still Greek to me. I bought them with the youthfully megalomaniac intention ofreading, more and more fluently, all thirty-six genuine 12 �Why Read Books dialogues in Greek and then the six spurious ones. That never happened and therefore the Greek text within these volumes retains after all these years the evocatory enchantment of a true spell. Books, then, serve as depositories of memory, but one would have to be a very distractable bibliophile to consider this their essential attribute. So that's not it. Some books are simply beautiful and being elaborately beautiful is their end-all. If any of you have ever seen old books with fore-edge painting you will know that books can be magical while yet half-closed. Fore-edging, now a lost art, makes a hidden picture come to view when the pages, gilded on their outer rims, are fanned. It is indeed pure magic, but it is the point of the book only for a collecting connoisseur. So that's not it either. Anyhow I don't own one of these wonders. Some books in my library are full of strange signs and symbols, like nothing to be found on any keyboard, and intelligible only to me. These book-objects belong to me, and I can annotate them as I please - never, never, let me interject here, write in a library book - and I can make them the repository of my encoded comments . over all the years and all the different readings. But I imagine that the virtual-text-tablets will eventually have a free-hand annotation capability by means of a stylus, so that's not it either. Since it is a well-researched fact that human place memory has a stupendous capacity, it is not surprising that I can find my way to certain passages in many books almost as I find my way to my friends' houses. Well-read books are full of idea-addresses; in them thoughts have definite places in space. And now we're getting close. For what I've been in search of is the subtle influence that the peculiar material character of real books exercises on reading. I can think, as I said, of quite a few, but I will mention only the two that seem crucially important to me. I call them "simultaneity'' and "intractability." By simultaneity I mean that, since books are stacks of leaves, all the text that tells the tale is there simultaneously, at once, in real space. You can stick in up to five fingers or any number of slips and by flipping back and forth read the linearly progressive text as a simultaneous architectural structure. At this finger-reading, usually the second time around, the conventional signs of the text allow a new level to emerge: symbolic reading. The letters are still suppressed, but the structure of the visible writing begins to work symbolically. Recall that a symbol is a sign that speaks by itself, 13 �Brann and the layout of the book, spatially perceived, does tell things on its own. For example, it is a fact that if you open your copy of Plato's Republic at the nearly exact center of its pages -originally you would have unrolled a scroll - you will have before you the claim that Socrates' beautiful city will never come into being "until either philosophers become kings or those now called kings and regents become genuine philosophers" (473 d) - and that is the most startling and most contentious assertion in this radical book. Here "center of the book" symbolizes "central to the book," and you discover this by treating the text symbolically, that is, by letting its signs in their extension speak to you. One reason why great books are so often long books is that the elaboration of a textual architecture cannot help but need room, just as its discovery is meant to take time. I am not saying that this kind of reading can't also be done by scrolling a text on a monitor, but that the suggestive physical substrate," which gives the spatial sense of shape, will be missing. Now to my second mark of a book, an even weightier one. By intractability I mean that a printed book resists revision, emendation, editing and any other sort of ex post facto interference. The text in the book once published is intractably persistent and recalcitrantly non-interactive. By contrast, there is evidently no perfect protection against alterations to an electronic text. In fact, commentators on literature in cyberspace extol the fluidity of electronic texts and the obliteration of a single responsible author. They welcome the disappearance of the definitive text and the advent of the continuously changing joint product. This instability will not only characterize the new texts specifically composed for the electronic medium, but also older ones, for we all know that there is no reasonable precaution or real protection against a determined cyberspace revisionist. No text is safe from a brilliant but conscienceless hacker. And since great works are nearly always finely calibrated, even a little change can have large consequences. That is why, although it is very necessary for the likes of you and me to take advice from those who are kind enough to correct our papers, really accomplished writers cannot condone even a small interference. For example, Lincoln, to my mind the greatest writer of American English, tells an editor about his editing: 14 �Why Read Books So far it is intended merely to improve in grammar, and elegance of composition, I am quite agreed; but I do not wish the sense changed, or modified, to a hair's breadth. And you, not having studied the particular points so closely as I have, can not be quite sure that you do not change the sense when you do not intend it. (To Charles C. Nott, May 31, 1860.) Texts printed in books, then, have stability; they are the unalterable formulation of a definite, responsible author - some one particular person, who has thought it out and put it down. Of course, the author is usually not literally ."responsible," that is, answerable, as someone who can be made to appear, respond, and answer in person. One excuse for authorial unresponsiveness is being dead, as most of our authors are. Another is the one given by Bishop Ambrose, Augustine's teacher, when he said that he read silently so that pupils wouldn't interrupt with questions addressed to him in the author's place. Yet another, the most formidable excuse, is that authors write books just in order to distance themselves from what they have worked out; the book may go abroad and make its rounds in public, but the author stays at home and is entitled to privacy. At the very end of this year the freshmen will read and the seniors will reread the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus. In it Socrates blames written works for just this intractable stability I mean to praise tonight. He says: Writing, you know, Phaedrus, has this strange quality about it, which makes it really like painting: the painter's products stand before us quite as though they were alive; but if you question them, they maintain a solemn silence. So, too, with written words: you might think they spoke as though they made sense, but if you ask them anything about what they are saying, if you wish an explanation, they go on telling you the same thing, over and over forever. (275d.) It's impossible to forget, though, that this dialogue itself was written by Plato, and that for all its lively conversation, the characters keep saying the same thing to each other up to its enthusiastic end. Here we can hear Socrates and Plato coming apart, and we see a new era of inquiry beginning-inquiry by reading. 15 �Brann For the written word, and above all, the printed book incite thought just because they are unbudgeably and solidly fixed. The printed book says what it says, and it is up to us to read it in the large sense, to puzzle it out and reason about it. It confronts us as a real thing in the world, which happens to contain as if by magic the fully realized thought of another human being. It incites our attention and our opposition by its sturdy and stolid independent existence. It demands our concentrated attention because it allows no clicking onto informational distractions. Its author is entitled to no agreement and no gratitude beyond what the book itself evokes. Thus it symbolizes whatever in life we come up against that will not give, and this reading of books in the widest sense, which is also called interpretation, is a skill eminently transferable to what is often called "the real world." Now is the moment to finish by returning nearly full circle to an early question: Does reading books help or hinder thinking? I think the sober answer is, it does both. It helps thought because it draws us into the fully accomplished product of another's thought, and we in turn begin to think, to reason and puzzle, by sympathetic attraction or repulsion. It hinders thought for the very same reason: because in reading books we are partly outside of ourselves, and thinking goes on within. Then, to close the circle completely, why should we read books - read not this or that particular book but read as a lifelong activity? The answer, or rather my answer for tonight, is now ready to be formulated - and therefore ready as well to be taken apart in the question period. Here it is: Reading in the narrow sense accustoms us to look right past the conventional sign to the intended meaning; reading in the wide sense teaches us to dwell on the words to find the larger meanings; reading good books develops in us the ability to apprehend intricate structures wrought by an intending intellect; and reading printed volumes keeps us mindful of the miraculous hard fact that thought can be an obstinate real presence in the world. In sum, this answer to the question "Why read books?," which is pretty nearly the same as an answer to the question "Why become educated?," is: so that the world outside and your life within may gather well-defined significance. 16 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 16 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 Why read books? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996-08-30 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 30, 1996 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1996-08-30 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/267">Audio recording</a> Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d94bc934a9090ca74d759c2a5b0eae2b.pdf 0045ff34baf8851f7755749e7d778407 PDF Text Text ON TRANSLATING PLATO For "Retracing the Platonic Text": Conference held on March 20-22, 1997 at Penn State Eva T. H. Brann Dean St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland I imagine that Professor Sallis asked me to speak on translating in the first instance because of some work I had done in turning German into English. First was the translation of Jacob Klein's book Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, which was originally published by the M.I.T. Press in 1968, and, having become a sort of classic not only in the history of mathematics but also in the study of modernity, was picked up for republication by the Dover Press in 1991. I had also done an annotated version of Heidegger's essay ''What is that -- Philosophy?'' for the use of our seniors at st. John's College. It remains unpublished because Professor Sallis was unable to obtain reasonable terms from the Heidegger estate. Furthermore I did an essay written by Nietzsche when he was twenty "On the Relation of the Speech of Alcibades to the Other Speeches of the Platonic Symposium," which our student journal Energeia published to serve not only a model but also as an encouragement for our students who choose similar topics for their annual essay. I aiso did a short vignette by Hermann Hesse, called "An Evening at Home with Doctor Faustus" for the same journal; in this story Mephistopheles invents a future-phonograph and plays for Doctor Faustus the music of our century -- pretty nearly the same that sometimes wafts across our campus. The Doctor concludes that the world has gone to the devil, as he himself soon will. In 1995 I was asked by the series adviser, Keith Whitaker to do a first translation for the nascent Focus Philosophical Library; Plato was suggested as a possibility. The Focus Press publishes fresh translations, intended to be very reasonably priced and to be used by American students. The project was appealing to me both as a teacher in a school dependent on good and accessible translations and as a dean in need of intellectual recreation. I had what turned out to be an inspired idea, that of seeking collaborators among my colleagues, figuring that the pleasure of becoming so really intimate with a dialogue as only a translator is would be enhanced by the close partnership of common work, and that three heads could better solve the problems and detect the mistakes that would surely dog a lone translator. Peter Kalkavage and Eric Salem agreed to becoming a trio. We chose the Sophist because we had all three begun to recognize the dialogue as the most ontologically future-fraught of them all, �2 and we welcomed the challenge of preserving its originary freshness. What follows is a report, under various headings, of the things we think we learned, and the advice we might venture to give our fellow translators. Collaboration One feature of the Sophist is that wherever you are, there he is not; he is forever trying to escape into trackless impassible thickets, ("Impasse," incidentally, is one of our translations, very nearly literal, of aporia -- waylessness.) But those who deal in knowing also display an opposite fault in the dialogues. That is the fault of position-taking. They occupy positions in defense of which they throw up outworks (problema is the Greek word for such a defensive outwork) and employ various apotropaic stratagems. Evidently Socrates and Plato consider that either to have a universal escape route in all arguments or to occupy entrenched positions is unworthy of the philosopher's mission. And so it is of the translator's task. Those who work together on transferring Greek meanings into English words have to be focussed on what the Greeks call the praqma and what Hegel calls die Sache. They have to eschew both escape and entrenchment, and they must be objective -- intent on the object at hand. Yet while ego is out, there is a strong human element in a collaboration put in the service of a dialogue. It demands and develops friendship. The three of us all bring slightly different strengths: One is perhaps more alert to Greek grammar, another to the philosophical resonances of terms. All three of us, having undergone the most effective part of our education at St. John's College, are relatively fearless in the face of ignorance and fresh in our deliberate amateurism. The way we work is that each of us presents a translation of one Stephanus page in turn every third week, which all of us together then rake over as with a fine-tooth comb, the original translator explaining but not particularly defending a choice. Often we let somewhat daring or awkwardly accurate readings stand, waiting for that reading, close to the final one, in which we attend particularly to idiom and flow while erasing false inspirations. I think we have become persuaded that in putting a rich Greek text into English there are so many facets to be attended to, that three heads are indeed better than one. We do in fact �3 have grand predecessors to look to: You will recall the legend about the seventy-two scribes, six from each of Israel's twelve tribes, who produced the Septuagint, the earliest extant Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, in the third century B.C. They worked in separate cells and came up with identical translations, presumably inspired by the text itself. We might say that the Platonic text acted on us in a more modest ex post facto mode in a similar way -- one version would suddenly, after some trial and error, click for all three of us. Our advice to collaborators: Cotranslating is a form of intimacy, best done by those who have the same object firmly in their sights while viewing each other with affectionate respect. Readership We thought it essential to keep in mind for whom we meant this translation. We meant it for the people that we imagine standing around in this as in so many other dialogues as spectators and auditors. They are presumably tacitly engaged, like the silently present young Socrates, Theaetetus's friend, who shares our Socrates' name, as Theaetetus shares his looks. Another way to put it is that we thought of our students as they prepare for a seminar by silent reading. Some are quite innocent of the issues, some have, or think they have, insider knowledge, some read casually and disengagedly, and some are intensely serious. That brought up the delicate question of colloquialism. One device that would keep the conversation casually speech-like was contraction, and we used it a lot, but not in places that we thought were meant to be stuffy, highflown, or solemn. We looked for idiomatic equivalents but avoided slang (though we had a great time devising some raucous interim translations, such as "wise guy" or "weisenheimer" for the sophist himself) . While we were well aware that every idiomatic translation will in time betray its date, nothing dates more quickly than slang, and even in its day it fails, like all truckling-under to fashion, to have real appeal for students. In the course of thinking about drawing readers into the dialogue we often had occasion to consider what is probably a real difference between the ear of a young contemporary Greek and one of our students. The well-brought up Greek (and not only an Athenian) , being nourished on Homer and the tragedians whose language was no one's spoken Greek, could savor artificialities and archaisms that our students would find simply off-putting. A couple of generations ago some English-speaking students would have absorbed enough of Shakespeare and Milton to be appreciative of such echoes, but we couldn't count on that. So we put �4 everything into plain current English, sometimes allowing ourselves the merest whiff of high poetry or archaism. Above all, we tried, in our students' behalf, to put ourselves into the interlocutors' sandals: What is being said, what is being heard, what is being felt, what is being thought? We called on our experience as teachers to guess at the dialogic backdrop of anxious agreement, triumphant dissent, and shamed realization - that young Theaetetus contributes. But above all we clung to our main hypothesis as trusting readers of the dialogues: that each speech uttered has a discernible meaning contributing to the drift of the conversation, and that the translation should preserve that motion. our advice here is: In translating fill out imaginatively not only the conversation within the text but draw in the external participant, the reading student. Predecessors Of course, we took all the help we could get from earlier translations. We used Robin for his intelligently chosen readings, Campbell for his linguistic annotations, Cornford for informational help. The two translations we had always at our side were the Loeb Fowler and Benardete. Fowler, though old-fashioned in diction and uninspired in terminology, was almost unfailing in making sense of puzzling passages and turns of phrase. We consulted Benardete whenever we ran into trouble, because of his meticulous attention to every word and because of his linguistic ingenuity. His version is a crib for the better sort of folk; it becomes intelligible if you read it as essentially in Greek and accidentally in English. Since, however, we were determined to translate not only from Greek but also into English, we only rarely borrowed phrases from him though we took many hints as to meaning. Heidegger translates numerous passages of the Sophist in the lecture notes published in 1992 under the title Platen: Sophistes. These versions are a reminder that in certain respects the translator into German is to be envied. Some of the forms that have to do with Being go more directly into German than into English. For example, to einai becomes "das Sein," while in English the infinitive cannot normally be nominalized; also to on readily goes into "Seiendes," and ta onta is rendered as "das Seiende," which functions, like the Greek neuter plural, as a collective noun. Probably most provocative and least helpful to translators who intend to be as naively true to the �5 text and as agendaless as possible, are Heidegger's terms for ousia, which he renders in an uninterpreted and an interpreted version, as it were. In the former, ousia is plain "Sein." In the interpreted version ousia is rendered as if it were parousia: "das Anwesende" or "das Vorhandene," i.e., "the present" or "the at-hand," in accord with his idea that Greek thought suffers from the aboriginal flaw of thinking of Being as if it were a thing. We puzzled a good deal over the proper translation of ousia, being loath on principle, namely the principle that translation should be as far as feasible into an existent language, to invent non-current abstract substantives. But we finally decided on "beinghood. 11 We chose it over "beingness" not only because it sounded better to us but because it had more concreteness, as in neighborhood or manhood; we were mindful that ousia means something like ''real estate" in ordinary Greek. And we decided to make up a word to begin with because we had an unresolved sense that ousia, which in the Sophist is usually contrasted with genesis, had a peculiar weight, and we wanted the reader to be in a position to attend to that interpretational problem. I was relieved to see that even German could not deal with the crucial little adverb ontos, which for our private amusement only we translated as "beingly" but more soberly, for public consumption, as "in its very being;" thus the phrase that concludes the ultimate collection of differentiating terms reveals ton ontos sophisten: "the Sophist in his very being." To return to the advantages of translating into German with two examples. 1. We had long discussions about the translation of stasis, the specific other of motion. We settled on rest, knowing full well that rest is wrong insofar as it means lack of, or cessation from, motion. "Stand-still" or "stationariness," a condition coequal with motion, seemed too strained, and we consigned them to the glossary. German is lucky in being able to form "Standigkeit" quite naturally, as Heidegger does (p. 579). 2. In 244 c 4, when the stranger begins his critique of Parmenides' hypothesis of the One, we were pretty much forced to use the English word "hypothesis" with all it scientific baggage. Schleiermacher uses the Germanized version of "presupposition," that is "Voraussetzung," but Heidegger eschews both and brilliantly writes "Ansatz," with the observation that Parmenides's One is not a supposition to be consequently confirmed but a beginning, an arche, an "onset" -- which is exactly what "Ansatz" may mean. Nonetheless, with all the felicities to be gotten especially from the German propensity for easy prepositional compounding, I kept being grateful that it was our lot to be putting Plato into �6 English, particularly American English. In our idiom we could achieve a plainness and a playfulness that must be, when all is said and done, more pleasing to Socrates as he listens in than a lot of linguistic incense. I think our general advice to fellow translators would be unabashedly to cannibalize and unabashedly to set aside previous translations. Apparatus Since we were left very free by our press to decide on supplementary materials, we thought long and hard about our obligation to the text and to the reader. We come from a school meaning both a way of thinking and an institution -- that has the greatest misgivings about standing between a reader and the book. The extra-textual stuff in a volume is of course meant to facilitate the approach to the translated text, but really, how can it? Take an introduction. If it says the same thing as the work, it will, assuming that the work is of the highest quality, say it worse. If it says something else, it will keep the reader from the work by that much time. We have a strong faith, based on our common teaching experience, that good books don't need approaching; they need facing, immediately and directly, at least at the first reading. We compromised that faith, partly because by the end of our labor we were simply so full of thoughts that we couldn't contain ourselves, partly because we know perfectly well that wellinstructed students skip introductions and come back to them much later, if at all. So we decided to keep it short, simple, and straightforward. We avoided historical backgrounding on the principle that Plato would have felt about our doing it much as a landscape painter might if we took his painting and provided it with a broad frame extending the scenery so as to give the viewer an enlarged setting. We didn't want to deface the dialogue or distract or prejudice our student readers in this way; I should say that at st. John's evidence of familiarity with introductions is a suspect virtue. But we did set the dialogue briefly in its sequence -- Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman and the mysteriously missing Philosopher. We gave a succinct plot outline of the hunt for the sophist, geared to a new and, we think, quite spiffy diagram of the infamous divisions that play so large a role in the Sophist. We pointed out some aspects of the dialogue that had become particularly pregnant for us, such as the generic nature of the Sophist here pursued (as opposed to the named individual sophists Socrates politely persecutes in dialogues �7 like the Gorgias and the Protagoras). We had a little section on Father Parrnenides and the strange and wonderful fact that he, the Stranger's own teacher, attracts the main attack of the dialogue. Then we told briefly what we understood about the such deep matters as the relation of Image to Non-being and of Non-being to Otherness. And we left it at that. Since we made use of the printer's full typographical menu, we had a little note on that. We were very sparing with footnotes, using them mostly to supply what we thought an ancient contemporary reader might have known, or where we thought we detected a joke or an allusion obscure to a current reader. Our energy went into the glossary, which we put in back, to be used or not. We arranged the Greek terms and our reasoned translations in meaning-clusters. (You will find something similar in the Hope translation of Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics, except that we transliterated all our Greek in the hope that students might learn to accent and pronounce words like phr6nesis and poiesis and mimesis correctly.) We avoided the alphabetic order so as to prevent the impression that we -- or the partners of a dialogue -- are ever looking for dictionarylike definitions. We also hoped to provide students with what we thought of as the proto-terrninology of a corning ontology -- or perhaps better a me-ontology, an account of Non-being; the Sophist is a spawning ground of metaphysical terms-to-be. Our advice to translators is to go easy on the paraphernalia of translation. Editing The translator's final reading of course tries for absolute correctness. But we have to warn the trustful that having a perfect disk is no protection. Something will get screwed up, there will be unexpected glitches and, as we learned to our sorrow, it will be in the most carefully construed first sentence. No matter how good and accommodating the editor -- and we have good reason to thank Ron Pullins, the editor-publisher of Focus Press -- there will be howlers. Our advice: final proofs. Trust no one but yourselves and demand to see �8 Replies Theaetetus plays to the Stranger by regularly uttering a budget of stock replies signifying slight hesitation, passive assent, positive agreement or requests for clarification. After a while we began to suspect that the rotating litany of responses might not be entirely mechanical. This apprehension made it incumbent upon us to keep a list of our considered renditions of nai, pos, pos d'ou, pos gar ou, ti de, houtos, anangke, pan, panu ge, pantapasi men oun and a dozen others, so that in one of our later readings we could make all the replies consistent. In that way we would give readers of the translation a chance to discover patterns we only suspected. For example, pantapasi men oun, for which we borrowed Benardete's "That's altogether so," occurs in the dialogue as a strong assent to a summary claim and concludes the dialogue as Theaetetus's last response to the final collection of divisions that catch the true and ultimate sophist as the expert of the non-genuine. Theaetetus is clearly assenting not only to the definitive but also to the global character of this final determination of a human type and profession. Particles We were similarly anxious to render particles fairly consistently. The dialogic life is in them -- they indicate inflections of the voice, gestures of the body, and even motions of the soul. The dictionary, or even Denniston's Greek Particles, though they must be consulted to give the limits of usage, cannot do it all. The translators must savor the speech in its context and judge whether it is marked as an inference or a new departure, whether eagerness is being displayed, smiles are suppressed, eyebrows raised or hands thrown up. We were mindful of typographic and punctuational devices not available to a Greek composer of living speech and used italics, dashes, colons, semicolons and exclamation points liberally to render the force of particles or emphases indicated by sentential order. I might mention here that capitalization helped us a great deal in translating a dialogue full of terms for f orrns and kinds designated in Greek by the definite article and a verbal or adjectival substantive such as to on (Being), to me on (Nonbeing), tauton (the Sarne), thateron (the Other). Our advice to translators is to be -- within the limits of natural English -- consistent, careful and ingenious in rendering apparently little and apparently automatic elements of the �9 dialogues; they may be more revealing than one realizes at the time. Techno-humor At the end of Bacon's New Oraanon there is to be found a prescient catalogue of one hundred and thirty "histories" of special investigations that are one day to constitute the sphere of human expertise. It is a strange and wonderful fact that the first such comprehensive ordering of extant technical know-how · (that I know of) is found in the Sophist -- and that it is a send-up. The stranger, who is not an overtly funny person, engages in what might be called techno-humor at the expense of experts. Of course, as readers of the dialogue, we thought a good deal about the reason why a comprehensive classification of human know-how or technique -- we translated techne as "expertise" and sometimes "art," as in "arts and crafts" -- should be the approach of choice to the delineation of the Sophist. We were, of course, alert to the startling conjunction of apparently disjunct themes that governs a number of the great dialogues, as the Phaedrus, for instance, seems to yoke the unlikely pair of love and rhetoric. Moreover, it does not take much reflection to see that the Sophist, whose nature is presented here as that of a faker and a know-it-all, should be tracked into the branches of human activity, and that in that great decision-tree he should reappear in seven places, and sometimes among the lowly but genuine crafts and sometimes among the high-sounding but dubious ones. It also made sense that the hunt for this elusive creature should be the occasion for presenting to the world the new dialectic art of division and collection and all its problems -- chief among them what might be called the problem of heuristic direction: at what moment in this dialectic enterprise, at the beginning, end or inbetween, does new insight arise? But as translators it was not so much our business to have theories about the inevitable implication of expertise and shamming or about the problems of classification as to render the divisions faithfully into English. And there we were in a pretty good position. As I have said, all three of us come from a college that has distanced itself from specialization, and we were alive to the tragicomedy of defining human beings as the professors of a profession. (Our English version of sophistes was, incidentally, "professor of wisdom.") Not that all of us aren't ourselves certified members of the world of expertise. I myself, for instance, began my working life in a profession that the Stranger might have ranged, looking to the three great �10 branches of human expertise called "getting," "separating," and "making," under getting, specifying it as a hunt beneath the soil for fragmented old artifacts carried on by means of pick-axes. We call it archaeology. Recall that the Sophist is first found in the right hand branch of animal hunting on land, specified as the sham-teaching hunt of wealthy youths. We tried to preserve the neologic high-jinks of some of the divisions. Thus the sophist is found a second, third, and fourth time in the getting part of expertise as a psycho-trading virtueseller, and in the manipulating part both as a seller of selfmade learnables and a peddler of other-made learnables: "psychotrading" renders pychemporike and "learnable-selling" mathematopolikon. We had not long worked on our new current project for the Focus Philosophical Library, a translation of the Phaedo, before we became aware of the varieties of Platonic humor. In fact one of us, Peter Kalkavage, who, as it happens, got his doctorate at Penn State, began retrospectively to refer to the Sophist as a one-joke dialogue, dominated by the techno-humor of the otherwise ponderous Stranger that I've just described. The Phaedo, because in it Socrates not only speaks but even makes speeches, is, we discovered, infused with a very different, far more subtle humor, which we are doing our best to preserve. It is the sort of hilarity or jocundity in the original Latin sense, the subdued joyousness and even merriment of the ultimate moment, that belongs to a man going blithely to his death without having lost his firm, even hard grip on the earthly condition. We have come to think of it as the tone of the . lightness of Being. It keeps his companions in an ambivalent state of sorrowful exhilaration, suspended between tears and laughter. Of course the secondary partners too, are very different in the two dialogues. Theaetetus is, at least vis-a-vis the Stranger, a somewhat stuffy boy, while that comradely pair, Simmias and Cebes, are each in their way pretty lively. Does bringing out the humor of the dialogues in translations need a justification? I should not imagine so, but I might mention once more that all three of us are receiving our real education in a place to which a way of reading Plato was introduced by Jacob Klein, who in his interpretations was especially alert to the mimetic character of the dialogues. As imitations of Socrates and the conversations he conducted or attended, they were bound to be playful, as Socrates was playful, with a playfulness that is the kindly counterpart of his notorious dissembling, his irony. But not all humor is comedic in Aristotle's understanding of comedy as the imitation of what is laughable, that is, low or ugly but relatively harmless (Else, Aristotle's Poetics, pp. 39 ff, 183 ff). The techno-humor of the Sophist comes far closer to comedy than does that of the other �11 dialogues, with the proviso that the laughableness of the sophistic craft is not so harmless. In any case, our advice to colleagues who plan to translate Platonic dialogues is to be prepared not only to laugh themselves but also to be the cause of laughter in others. Faithfulness It was clear to us from the beginning that looseness, paraphrase, and interpretative adumbration were intolerable in the translation of any Platonic writing, but especially in a dialogue like the Sophist, which is so close to the brink of technical metaphysics and yet so carefully refrains from letting philosophy become a techne, an expertise. It does so by going at what Aristotle will later codify as "problems" of Being in an oblique and human way. It is oblique in concentrating, as was said, less on ontology than on me-ontology, the account of Nonbeing as the ground of imitation or pretense, and it is human in pursuing the Sophist as a human type as much as it does sophistry as a profession. In this morning-twilight of philosophy meticulous accuracy is especially necessary. So we spent, as I have said, much time on words, determining for ourselves whether they were terms of a trade or not -- yet. Aporia and methodos are examples. Both come to be fixed as terms of philosophy: "perplexity" and "method." But we aimed to preserve at least in some places the unfixed original meaning: "impasse," i.e. lack of passage, and "way," both at which preserve the playful spatial analogy that is so prominent in the Stranger's reflections on the motion of thought. We aimed at faithfulness, however, not only in words and terms but also in sentences. The obvious problem is always subliteralness -- producing a contortedly accurate pony. We thought that it was a part of faithfulness to render the various levels of elegance, clarity and emphasis of the speeches -- and the Stranger surely has his obscure and klunky moments, at least as we heard them. The faith of translators who mean to be faithful must be that, meaning-element for meaning-element, it is possible to turn Greek into English, and that this must imply that usually -- it never pays to be too rigid -- one Greek word goes into one English word or typographical symbol, one phrase into one phrase, one clause into one clause, and one sentence into one sentence -in other words that it is possible to get equivalence without sublinearity. It also implies that one can find an English word order that renders the emphasis of the Greek sentence, and English connectives that maintain the Greek flow. One of our last readings was addressed, as I have mentioned, to the attempted eradication of all signs of translaterese. Our trust �12 was that if we stuck faithfully to the Greek, barring simple mistakes and omissions, we would get English that said exactly what the Greek said and with something like the original naturalness and deviations from naturalness. In other words, we had the faith that we might overcome the charge expressed in the Italian pairing traduttore: traditore; we hoped that a translator need not be a traitor to the text. our best advice to others is not to give in to current hermeneutic theories concerning the essential untranslatability of one language into another, but to suppose, as a starting hypothesis, that even if not all human speech can say the same thing, then at least we can think and say practically the same thing as our ancient intellectual progenitors -- from which it is evident that the translator's hypothesis is no negligible commentary on contemporary philosophy. Requirements The last item on my list of observations concerns the crucial question what translators need to know and be good at. The three of us did not think that we were required to have a full-fledged interpretation to have a go at a translation. What we needed instead was a lively sense of intimations, a sense born of a belief in the unfailing significance of the text. In other words, we came to Plato's philosophic plays with the trust that every word (or nearly every word) was deliberately placed, but that some terms and turns were special sign-posts to implied meanings. We tried to be alert to oddities of language and emphasis as well as to hapax legomena (linguistic singularities which we treated as occasions for literalness even if it proved awkward). On another level, we listened for high points and crucial junctures, which Plato's most responsible speakers, and of course Socrates himself, often signal by a throwaway reference to that one more "little" addition. None of us are, this is the moment to say, great believers in esoteric readings. We are much too possessed by a sense of the pedagogic generosity of the dialogues, a sense that here a discreetly fierce energy is devoted to carrying interlocutors, bystanders, and readers beyond themselves, into realms reachable only by circuitous and indirect means. To put it another way: In the dialogues we are told as much, but no more, than we need to make us want to think onward. That is why the dialogues are fairly easy to read the first time and get harder to understand as, with each reading, more signals are picked up. There certainly exist occasionally esoteric writers like Newton who, "to avoid being baited by little smatterers in �13 mathematics ... designedly made his Princioia abstruse" (Portsmouth Collection), and authors who touch guardedly on theological or political issues in intolerant times (though they never do seem to escape persecution). Socrates' dissembling and Plato's subtlety, however, are not of this self-protective sort but are pedagogical devices for drawing the learner in -- at least that is our experience. The dialogues work on the principle that "a cat may look at a king," or rather, "a boy may look at Being." And in any case, they display hardly any attempt to mask the fact that not everything that goes on in these conversations will be of comfort to respectable parents. So the first translator's requirement is a belief in the many-layered accessibility of the text and an alertness to those signs and signals which the English version should preserve for readers to puzzle over. A second requirement we put on ourselves was to attempt consistency but to shun method. An intelligent consistency is, we thought, the guardian spirit of open minds. So as far as possible we· tried, as I said, to choose the right word and to stick with it even in fairly routine phrases. Thus phainetai is almost always "it appears" and dokei "it seems." At the same time we tried to remain open to significant nuances and strange turns within each dialogue, though our avoidance of methodical translating bound to a particular interpretation of Platonic philosophy applied mainly across the dialogues: In taking up the · Phaedo we saw once again the truth of the teaching that each dialogue is a fresh world of discourse and is to be faced without preconceptions regarding "Platonic thought." That observation is particularly true as between dialogues in which Socrates guides the conversation and those in which he only listens in or is, finally, even absent. As far as preparation is concerned, since none of us can really read Greek as a living language, we were glad to see that we could do pretty well on a lot of Greek reading experience to give us a feel for the intention and on enough grammatical expertise to tell us when we needed to do careful parsing. We found that besides Liddell-Scott we needed to have at hand Roget's Thesaurus to help us to the word we were looking for. But we think that all in all, the main requirement for translators of Plato, and our advice to them, is to believe in the semantic plenitude of the Platonic texts, and to produce an English version that, like the Greek, says more than the translators know. � 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures 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. 13 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 On translating Plato Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997-03 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered in March 1997 by Eva Brann at the "Retracing the Platonic Text" conference held at Penn State. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1997-03 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Pennsylvania 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Deans Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ea14c33aa80252ba796f917c643bce96.pdf a7defdefa7114cd33acc482cfc216759 PDF Text Text Friday Night Lecture St. John's College, Annapolis September4, 1998 What, then, is Time? Eva Brann When our dean asked me to lecture this September it was because he had heard that I'd just completed a book on time, and he thought I might like to talk about it. He was right, and here are three possible kinds of profit that, on thinking it over, I figured might come to you and to me if I gave what I guess one might call a book report. First, even if the writing of books is a few decades off for most of you here tonight, it turns out that writing papers and annual essays is not so different from writing books, and I thought I might be able to tell you something useful. In fact I'll do it right now. \Vhen the time comes to write, whether it's a small paper or a long annual essay, never think: "I've got to write this thing! Help! I need a paper!" Instead search your soul for a question you have nursed for quite a while, whether articulately or inarticulately, somethingj:hat bothered and puzzled you, something that might be very intimate but is capable of public expression. Then flip mentally through the books you've studied, or the music you've sung, or the theorems you've proved, or the experiments you've re-enacted, and ask yourself which have a bearing, taken in the largest sense, on your issue. What will happen next is the result of a mixture of concentration and luck: some paradox or analogy or some other significant array will jump out at you. Seize that and slowly pummel, stroke, and shape it into an articulate order. Of course, none of that can happen at 1 �the last minute. For looking into yourself, for calling on your studies, for finding a crystallizing moment, for working all of it into a well-shaped' whole, time is of the essence. My second thought was that time is one subject concerning which it does not matter whether one is a freshman finishing the second week at the college or a senior beginning the fourth year, or even a tutor who has taught most of the program. Stormy love is not a pressing issue to all ages, nor is looming death, but there is, I think, no one, at any time of life, for whom time does not become a problem in some way or other. I know this from experience. Of the things that have urgently interested me from time to time, the mention of Being and Non-being, for example, provokes mostly stupefied non-interest, the mention of the Imagination elicits an account of people's favorite fantasy series, but the mention of Time gives rise to intelligently companionable puzzlement. People have a different relation to the question concerning time than to other deep matters, which they are either willing to bypass as too obscure for their taste or to treat with the most unreflective but familiar particularity. The title of this lecture -- and of my book -- is "What, then, is Time?" It is a quotation from the most famous sentence ever written on time by the man who was most deeply immersed in its elusive familiarity, Augustine. It comes from the eleventh book of his Confessions, which we read in the sophomore year. Here is the \vhole sentence: What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to the questioner, I do not know. My own concern with time started from two ends at once, intellectual puzzlement and deepfelt irritation, and it developed, as really good questions do, from annoyed fascination to serious interest. The intellectual puzzlement was just that expressed by Augustine: What sort of a being, if it was a being, could be so handily familiar in daily usage and so fugitive to the grasp of thought? Here I did as all my fellow humans do: I make time, kill time, manage my time, waste time. To be sure, I've never "done" time, though but for the grace of God I might have. I know that time heals all wounds and ravages all the beauties of the world. 2 But if I ask myself what it is that does this, I �see and touch nothing and think of less. That is at first just a puzzling and then an engaging state of affairs. The irritation I experienced had a superficially different source. In all the departments of life people talk of time as a force or a power, not just in the sort of dead metaphor that makes up the unconscious poetry of popular usage, as in all the phrases cited above. No, they mean it literally, especially when they are talking of the so-called "phases" of time. "Phase" will be the most important word in this lecture. It is my word -- different authors use different words -- for the three parts of time, past, present, future. Perhaps I should have said the three parts of human time, for I will argue that only human, or human-like, beings have pasts and presents and futures. It is the future with which these people mostly play infuriating havoc. They say and they inean that there is a future coming and our business is to form a reception committee for it. Some see this Future with a capital Fas a doom, as in Yeats's great poem, "The Second Coming": And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Far more of our contemporaries see it cheerfully as a benefactor, though a totally manipulative one: It is the Information Age or the Global Age or the Age of Megacorporations, you name it, and our duty is to be ready or to be run over by time. They engage in what I call to myself proactive passivity. This time-mode -- the adjective, incidentally, is "temporal," so I will say, this temporal mode -- strikes me as paralyzing the human will, and that is one form of immorality. So besides the intellectual desire to understand the nature of time and whether it is a being or a nothing, I also began to think about time in its human effects. Almost everyone who has lived for some time has neat observations about these effects. For example, I have been at this college forty-one years or almost fifteen thousand days. Sometimes it seems like forever and sometimes it seems like a day. What accounts for this mad elasticity of time? But besides these timernminations there is also that sense I have of the important moral consequences of not thinking about the nature of time, about accepting what seem to be abuses of our phase-nature. In fact, a new hero of mine, Octavio Paz (whom I did not in fact discover for myself but through one of our 3 �Mexican alumni, Juan Villasenor) put my thought much more expansively than I would have had the courage to do. He says in his book on India: I believe that the reformation of our civilization must begin with a reflection on time. Recall that I am still laying out the possible profit of telling you about my book, and here is the last one, chiefly to myself. Imagine what a pleasure it will be to come on campus and to be able to fall easily into a conversation about this magical subject with some proportion of the people that live and learn here -- with the more virtuous part, I might add, those who come to Friday night lectures. Now let me tell you of two discoveries or devices -- it's always hard to tell whether it's one or the other -- about which the book crystallized. One was the discovery -- and I became persuaded that it was a discovery, was really there to be found-- that writers on time who lived millennia apart in time and who were worlds apart in thought were at crucial moments driven into the same understanding, or at least the same problem. Once I had discovered one such pair of time-twins I came on three others. And finally I came to believe that amongst them they pretty well established the perennial possibilities and the pertinent problems concerning time. In a moment I will tell who these writers are and what deep notion each pair shares. But let me say here that it ' was a blessing to find such a principle of selection. For it is hard for most of us to think about these enigmas without help. The trouble is, there is too much help on offer. I own a bibliography of time which tells of nearly two hundred thousand books and articles written between 1900 and now. Of course, much of it is piffling, but much of it is, I am sure, though!1'ul. I chose four great writers, and they paired quite naturally with four more, and by good luck these are the eight among the ancient and modern writers generally agreed to have the deepest theories. The pairs, then, are Plato and Einstein, Aristotle and Kant, Plotinus and Heidegger, Augustine and Husserl. Since many of you will not have read them, though all but Husserl are on the Program (and he ought to be), I'll present their time-theories as simply and as unencumbered by terminology as possible. But I'll omit completely telling you about one pair, Plotinus and Heidegger, because it is too tricky 4 �to do, although their similarity on the point of time is most spectacular in view of their diametric opposition on everything else that matters. The other discovery was that a human effect which never ceases to enchant me, namely the images that arise before the mind's eye in our imagination, had a certain remarkable similarity with our sense of time, a formal sort of similarity. Images are absent presences or present absences; they are not what they are, they are made of Being and Non-being. What I mean is that any image, but particularly a mental image, presents someone or something not actually present. To imagine an absent friend is to have him there, but not really. Time as well, it turns out, has this curious character of being and not-being, of being there but not really, of being present only in its absence. My all-time favorite time-saying is by the priceless Yogi Berra. When someone asked him: "What time is it?" he replied: "You mean now?" It is the wisest of answers, because you can't tell time, and yet we do. It is always and never Now. So the book began to have two parts. One part was a study of these eight philosophers for the purpose of seeing what kinds of answers could be given to the question "What is time?" and what problems were inherent in the answers. But studying, while a help to thinking, and for most of us an indispensable help, is not thinking, since to understand what others think is simply a different activity from the thinking that goes directly, without intermediary, to the question. So in a second part I tried to go directly to the question, having absorbed all the help I could. Therefore in this lecture, too, after telling what some of the best writers I could find have thought about time, I will try to tell what I think. I should say right now, lest you be disappointed, that what I conclude first and last is that it is a true mystery. I mean a potent effect whose characteristics are poignantly clear but whose nature is finally unfathomable. You can specify a mystery but you can't resolve it. If you have a huge field of apparently possible answers to a question, it clears the decks somewhat to begin by removing the answers that are simply unacceptable. In thinking about the ways time is spoken of, it seemed to me that whatever else is said, time is spoken of either as 5 �occurring in nature or as being within the human being. Time is either external or internal, or perhaps both. External time has attracted by far the greater interest. Time is written of in religion, where it is a great question how an eternal God acts in created time. Time is treated in history, where it is a great question whether the times make history or people do. But above all time is a great subject in physics, where the best-grounded and most remarkable theories of time are developed. Without question, the physicist who has done most to make other physicists and people in general think about time is Einstein. The work I chose to examine is his 1905 paper on what came to be known as the Special Theory of Relativity. \Vhat struck me first was that every mention of time was in quotation marks. This habit conveyed to me that I was dealing with the most careful and thoughtful of writers, one who knew that time in physics is a most problematic notion. Einstein says right away: It might appear possible to overcome all the difficulties attending the definition of "time" by substituting "the position of the small hand of my watch" for "time." And in fact such a definition is satisfactory .... At least it is satisfactory when we are talking only of time here and now. Before Einstein, physicists had believed what everyone believes: that it is the same time throughout the world, that every other Here simply has the same Now as my Here. This situation was called simultaneity and was regarded as a chief feature of external, I mean natural, time. Einstein goes on to show that for any stationary Here far away from my own, it takes some calculating to synchronize our watches. And when we are moving relative to each other one of our most entrenched senses about time is overthrown, namely that what time it is is independent of our state of rest or motion. Einstein's theory turns out to have to do entirely with the measurement of time -- what my local clock and your local clock tell under different physical conditions. That is why Einstein puts "time" in quotations: He is warning us that not the nature of time but its measurement is at issue. Now I'll jump back two and a half millennia and quote to you what is the most famous, . most often cited definition of time. It comes from Plato's dialogue called Timaeus. Timaeus is a 6 �made-up character, a visiting physicist. He and some of Socrates' friends have planned an amusement for him. On the day before Socrates had produced for them a picture in words of the ideal political community -- some people think it is the one set out in the dialogue called The Republic. Now Timaeus will reciprocate by painting for Socrates' entertainment the cosmos, the ordered world within which such an ideal city might fit. In the course of giving a mathematical account of such a cosmos, Timaeus says this about the way the maker of the world introduced time into it: He planned to make a movable image of eternity, and as he ordered heaven into a cosmos, he made an image of that eternity which stays one and the same, an eternal image moving according to number. And that is what we call time. What Timaeus is saying is that the heavens move like a great cosmic dial and that this motion allows us to tell time. So the mythical early physicist and the greatest of modem physicists are saying the same thing: Time is what the clock tells, in one case the cosmic clock, in the other a local watch. And so say all working physicists in between. It is a working, a so-called operational definition of time, and it works just fine -- until you begin to think about it. That time is what the clock tells is what one might call a dispositive definition. It disposes of time as an issue. But if you turn it around and try to say that the clock tells time you're in trouble. Time never appears on the face of a clock. Nor does it appear anywhere else in nature, ever. All other natural phenomena appear somehow to sight or hearing or touch. Of time not a trace. What does appear is motion. An analog clock is a standard cyclical motion. A digital clock " is a standard progressive motion. Clocks are calibrated motions. There is no time actually used in physics and none that actually appears in nature. There is much more to be said about this shocking claim, and I'm sure you'll want to argue it out in the question period. Among other points then to be made, the seniors, who have read Newton, might want to point out that Newton, at least, does stipulate true natural time, an equable flux that comes before motion. And I would answer that it is not only as physicist but also as theologian that Newton 7 �puts time into nature. For this so-called absolute time, which has no <:>bservable features, is probably not so much in nature as in God's mind, in that part of God's mind, called his "sensorium," with which he is receptive to all of nature, its infinite spaces, its primary forces, its ultimate bodies. My point at the moment is, however, only to reinforce a conclusion I came to: Wherever time is seriously considered, mind, soul, consciousness and sensibility come on the scene. Time can only be internal, meaning within a mind, possibly God's mind. So I disposed to my own satisfaction of the vast majority of theories of time. Intricate and interesting as they are, they are really theories of motion, not of time, and they don't tell what time is. But time is the sort of subject for which every settling of the mind in one respect is punished by a complementary problem popping up in another. You can, and I think you have to, take time out of nature, b·ut I am not so perverse as to claim that the outside world isn't full of variations: locomotions, processes, alterations. The mystery that has now popped up is that we have no idea what is really going on in this time-deprived world. Let me show you what I mean. Human time, internal time, will be distinguished by its phases, past, present, future. But nothing in nature, except perhaps the near-human mammals, apes and dolphins, has a past or a present or a future. Edwin Muir says in a poem called "The Animals": But these have never trod Twice the familiar track, Never turned back Into the memoried day. All is new and near In the unchanging Here .... Animals and sticks and stones do not have a past, though they might be scµd to be their past. But I, for one, just cannot imagine what it is like to live in the unchanging Here and not the have memory, how such a being gets itself into and out of existence, in short how anything can change without having phases of time. But then again the effort is love's labor lost: Hmv could I have empathy with, feel my way into, that which has no inside? So the outer world becomes in this 'fespect opaque, and this is the price to be paid for making a philosophical choice. In corning to conclusions in philosophical inquiries, I want to say as an aside, it is always a matter of what we 8 �can best live with for the time being -- which is why all philosophy as carried on by human beings is ultimately moral philosophy. There is perhaps a solution to the timelessness of nature. It is a commonplace for writers o. time that there are two kinds of time. They might be called succession-time and phase-time. n Phase-time is dynamic in the sense that the human present, about which time breaks into past and . future, continually shifts -- as Yogi Berra's counter-question, "You mean now?" makes clear in its unavoidable absurdity. Succession-time, on the other hand, is static. It is merely the endless chain of before-and-after, established once and for all. It' is time all by itself, no one's time, the time of all events taken only with relation to their succession and to nothing and nobody else. Perhaps nature does have its time, succession-time. But even the successions of nature tum out to be more intelligible as causal than as temporal sequences. This is the moment to introduce Aristotle, who produced the first extensive treatment of time ever, in Book Four of his Physics. Here is what he says time is: Time, then, is not motion but that by which motion has number. Aristotle seems to be making spectacularly short shrift of that mysterious power, time. It is nothing but an attribute of motion . Then he says what sort of attribute: Time ... is the number of motion with resnect to before and after. L 'What th~ deep meaning of all this is can't come out unless we follow up what Aristotle means by motion, number, before-and-after. But we might guess at two problematic elements of this understanding of time. . The first, which is by far the less deep of the two but is endlessly dis~ussed, is this. If time is the number of motion as a progression in which the parts come before and after, if it is in fact the succession-time I just introduced, it must somehow share in a chief feature of motion, namely continuity. Physical motion borrows this feature from the fact that it takes place over distance. Distances are representable as mathematical lines, and these lines, as the freshmen have just begun to see, must be continuous -- no elements can be missing. So time, as Aristotle himself 9 �emphasizes, is continuous, like a line. Wherever you cut the line you get a point that belongs to both parts of the cut. This point is the Now. Time is in every way like a line of geometry: It lies upon its points, each of which is a Now. The only difference is that the geometric points are static, whereas the Now moves forward, ever the same in its features, ever different in temporal location. But as you know by now, a point is that which has no parts, so the Now has no parts . .Therefore it has no extent, no bulk, no force, no presence. Therefore the point-Now of the mathematical model of time is as far removed as anything can be from the humanly experienced present, which is vivid, full, and altogether the most impressive phase of time. Insofar as time is continuous it is not very human. But then Aristotle has also said that which will make time totally discontinuous. For time is a number by which motion is counted, and a number is a collection of completely discontinuous units -- there is no way one unit can be tangent to another. Motion, locomotion at least, is bound to distance and borrows from that fact its continuity. But number is bound to something else which reinforces its discontinuity. Many things in the world are collections of items. Aristotle mentions herds of horses and flocks of sheep. Other things, such as distances of all sorts, can be marked off into artificial units. All these things have a number that belongs to them. But nothing in nature gets its number unless someone is counting. Aristotle says that it is the soul that counts. So time, in order to be the number of motion, requires a wide-awake counting soul. Now I shall say a sentence, or rather a question, which is underlined in my typescript: When the soul is countin2. does it take time to do it? Does it get its numbering from some motion? What distance does that psychic motion cover? Aristotle is in big - and I must say unacknowledged - trouble. Time in nature is only the number of motion, but what is the counting that announces that number? I don't think he knew, but perhaps in the question period someone will make his case. Now let me leap two thousand plus years ahead. For Aristotle time originates with the counting soul. To my mind, Aristotle's true modem successor, the one who takes Aristotle's 10 �thought and turns it thoroughly and precisely upside down, is Kant. Here is an aside: This kind of inversion of thought, so that it is the same in name but utterly different in significance, is the chief moving force of the philosophical tradition we study at this college. By "force" I don't mean some magical attribute of the passage of time, but the way of proceeding that is congenial to those immersed in this tradition. At any rate, whatever time is, if it has power it has it only as an aspect of human consciousness. Back to Kant. You will be relieved to hear that I do not plan to tell you what is in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant's founding book, although everything in there. is sooner or later related to time. In any case, the Juniors will be studying it in spring, and it is that which makes February a month of delights. Instead I will focus on a few sentences which show what it is that brings Kant so very close to Aristotle in the letter, though he is worlds apart in meaning. Kant regards time as a constitutional part of our receptive capacity, our ability to take in what is given to us. Such a capacity is called "sensibility," and we are so made that whatever comes to us, the world of nature especially, comes in the form of temporal sensibility. The Critique is a great work of philosophical art, and I omit the many factors that feed beautifully into rounding this notion out, in order to concentrate on just one thing: When we ask what it means that nature comes to us in the form of time, the answer is that whenever we think about nature we begin by noticing quantities, and we do that first of all by numbering-- not top-of-the-head counting, but a deeply interior kind of beating out of units that add up into a number. Here is Kant's word on what is happening in this counting: "I generate time itself .... " So Aristotle and Kant agree that time is a kind of psychic beating or counting. It does not save Kant from the question I asked of Aristotle that he calls time a form of the sensibility. Is this form, I now ask, itself static or is it fluid? If it is static, how does it produce the psychic flow of pulses? If it is fluid, is there yet another time behind Kant's deep constitutional time? Let me say right now that all the authors who put time within the soul run into this trouble. And those who put the origin or ground of time outside of the soul run into other and worse troubles. 11 �Both Aristotle and Kant have been primarily interested in what I have called successiontime, the steady chain of before-and-afters found in nature, though apprehended by our counting. Now is the time to speak of human time, phase-time. To my mind, Augustine is the greatest writer on time -- and the most beautiful one. Here's another aside: Very broadly speaking, philosophers come in two kinds, those who inquire serenely and hopefully into a subject they long to know and believe they can approach and those who question severely and disenchantedly a matter they think is ultimately hopeless. Augustine certainly has travails of the soul, and I would not be unfair to call Husserl, who takes up two millennia later exactly where Augustine had left off, a fusspot. But both are not so much driven as led by faith in their subject, and I want to say that these are the philosophers I trust and prefer to be with. Augustine wants to know what time is because it is the human counterpart of God's eternity, the eternity of the God he has just found and acknowledged. But there is nothing exalted about his questioning -- it is very down-to-earth. He loves to sing hymns, and the question is: How do I measure times, the long and short syllables, the lengths of the stanzas? Distances are easy to measure. They stay put while you lay a measuring stick alongside them. But the moment slips away, the past is no longer, the future not yet, and there is no way to lay a time-stick along an elapsed time. Lengths measure lengths, motions measure motions -- what measures time? Here is his answer, as I said, to my mind the most illuminating thing ever uttered about time, a new discovery, as he himself says: Time is nothing else but a stretching out, though of what I do not know. Yet I marvel if it be not of the mind itself. Our mind or soul is distended and that makes it capable of holding time, so to speak. How distended, how stretched? Here is Augustine again: This then is clear and plain, that neither things to come nor things past are, nor should we properly say: "There are three times, past, present, and future." But probably we should say: "There are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future" .... The present of things past is memory, 12 �the present of things present is sight [or perception], the present of things future is expectation. So we can measure times gone by and times to come because they are now present to us. But the solution of the measuring problem is the least of it. What Augustine has done is to tell what makes a human being temporal, how time is in us. To be human is to be present and to have things present before or within. Yet another aside: Certain so-called postmodern writers, ta19ng their departure from Heidegger, think that this is a very derivative way of approaching human Being and that to think of human beings as containing presences within and confronting things present without demeans the originality of existence. But Augustine does think that to exist is both to be in the present and to be in the presence of things. Augustine's book on time in the Confessions is preceded by a book on memory, and this book is the indispensable preparation for his understanding of time. For there he shows how we can also be in the presence of absent things: We have the whole spacious world, its fields and palaces, within us, not, however, the things themselves but their images. Here you can see how the imagination, as a power for making the absent present, is essential to our inner sense of time. For with it we can have memory of past times and also expectation of future things, since expectation is a forward-directed imagination. And since much of what has happened to us is now present to us or is now recoverable, we can not only measure time somewhat as we do space, which is all there simultaneously. We can also see how our mind is a temporal image of God's mind, who holds all creation toget~er there at once, in the eternal Now. a To be human, then, is to have mind so stretched that it encompasses in its present both memory and foresight. One way to depict that condition is in a diagram like a coordinate system. The horizontal axis is the time of the world, of Creation; it is succession-time. God knows how it works; we don't. Astride of this horizontal coordinate sits a vertical stretch of line, our mind. ·Where the two intersect is the moment of sight, of perception, our point of intake for the world. The segment below 'represents remembered events, dropped out of sight but not out of mind. The 13 �part above represents the dreams and plans we now have for the future -- and that is all the future that actually exists. As the world passes by, our memory line grows longer and our expectation line shortens. Then one day it ends. Husserl, who actually draws diagrams of this sort, in fact marks one of his lines as the "tug towards death." It is not, however, one of the axes he is marking in this way, but one of the oblique lines with which he connects the horizontal axis of succession-time and the vertical axis of phase-time. These oblique lines show how each perception offered by the horizontal successionline sinks away into vertical memory in an orderly and continuous manner, without any scrambling or dislocation. Husserl's time-diagrams are clever and complex, and I had a lot of fun -- fun bordering on agony, that is -- working them out. But I didn't give you any handouts, because then you'd be trying to figure them out now instead of listening; I should know. Many of you will not have heard of Husserl, and I'll say just enough for my purpose. He is the founder of a way of inquiry called Phenomenology. Its chief feature is that is excludes all questions of existence and reality, such as whether time is real. Instead a Phenomenologist pays attention to the appearances within consciousness, articulating and ordering them. Our sense of time is a perfect subject for Phenomenology and Husserl's lecture-series known as The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is the great first-fruit of his method. Husserl makes hundreds of acute observations, but his main advance on Augustine is to puzzle seriously over the extent of the present. Recall that the point-Now of mathematics is too skimpy to live in, but consider also that an extended present is going to be part past, part future. Husser! finds a way, fairly technical, to show that there is a discernible immediate past and an immediate future that are so bound in with the present as to give room, so to speak, for perception, so that there is time for a time-sequence, say a melody, to be taken in. He shows how the present has time for the world to impress itself on us. One last word about Husserl. The horizontal axis, which represented the world's time for Augustine, represents an internal time-flux, a continuous sort of subjective succession-time, for 14 �Husserl. For he is withholding all claims about the reality of the world and its time, and attending only to our inner experience, to our internal time-consciousness. In trying to understand this internal flow Husserl is drawn into questions beyond Phenomenology. The question that finally preoccupies him is the familiar one: How can this flux, which is one aspect of our sense of time and for him the deepest, be spoken of? Are we fluid through and through, or is this flux grounded in a stable form? But how can a fixed form be the source of a flow? Husserl, a man who is willing to admit ultimate perplexity without losing faith in the worth of his problem, says: For these things we have no names. · Now is the time for me to say what I think time is -- maybe it would be more sensible to say "how time works." I thiiik that phase-time is the fountain and origin of all time. Every phenomenon of time is derivative from the fact that we have past, present and future. To me the most astounding circumstance of our temporal life, surpassingly strange but apparently unavoidable, is the crux and center of the three phases: the present. All that is ever real for us, all that is really there, really present; occurs in these point-by-point moments of presence. This is the instant of perception when we see and hear and touch the world. The rest, the long stretches behind and before, is absence -- what has gone by and what is yet to come. Human life would therefore be very pointillistic and poor if present existence were all we had. Happily there are ways of being that are even more potent than present reality and momentary existence. There is the actuality of imaginative memory and of imaginative expectation. The present of perception is the point of intake for the novelties that the world offers to our senses, but the past and the future are also present to us as images, as memories of things past and plans for things to come. These are the present actualities, the powerfully present absences that give coherence and resonance and significance to the moment They also make it possible for us to measure time directly, not by observing external motions as of the hands of the clock which never displays time at all, but by the thickness of the image-pictures we flip through or leap over to get to 15 �moment from which we want to estimate a stretch of time. Our memory is like a laminate of transparencies or a carousel of slides, and my claim is that this accumulation we call the past and this projection we call the future is what produces our inner sense of time. And this thickening of the present by past and future is what Augustine calls "the stretching of the mind." Now note that I have described the present as punctual, instantaneous, momentary. And this description seems to be supported by the observations of all kinds of people, perhaps poets above all. The Nows that matter are somewhat isolated - instants of recognition, moments of meaning. In his book The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz calls the Now "explosive and orgiastic" and wonders how it fits into ordinary historical passage. But much of the time of our lives passes in seeming continuity, and this sort of time, the time that seems like a continuous passage, usually called duration, has to be accounted for as well. I think it works as follows. Our present appears punctuated by the ever-varying world and our perception of it. Now . we see our friends, now they've disappeared around the. corner; now we hear one note, now another. But there is another time experience that we become conscious of when we are deprived of most external sensation or when our inner images are pushed out of sight by fear and anxiety. Or we can deliberately close off our senses and empty our minds to concentrate simply on our inner duration. What then comes to the fore is a sort of inner pulsing, the very beat of our mere consciousness, empty life itself. I am trying to describe the soul's aboriginal counting that both Aristotle and Kant discovered. This inner beat then is the origin of that succession-time that is mirrored in the before-and-after of physical motion and that plays so large a role in our practicaL life. Now most of the time we are not taking note of this pulse, or paying much attention to our inner life at all. The beats recede and merge as in a long perspective; time's passage appears continuous and acquires all the characteristics and problems of a line in space. Then, 16 �retrospedively, time is thought of -- not felt -- as a continuum that is continuously cut by a pointlike Now, the kind of Now in which nothing can happen. So my description of time, which leaves time as what I call "a well-specified mystery," ends with the point-Now. And that is where a review of the various pathologies people attach to the phases of time begins. I'll give the sketchiest summary of our time-troubles, partly because time is short, partly because every one of us has a lot of personal experience with this aspect of time, and it will make a good subject for the question period. One way, then, to think of the way people wreak havoc with the perceptual present is that they treat it as a mere, point-like Now, monotonously empty and featureless, while racing unrestrainably forward. To try to live in this Now is to long to fill it with strong stimulation and increasing novelty. Now-life is the pathological counterpart of present-life. Similarly some people deprive themselves of the image-filled memory that gives the present its anchor of significance by rushing to keep up with novelty and trashing not only their own past but that past which their communities have in common, their external memories. And finally, some people are so dominated by a future that is supposedly coming at them that they give up what they really care about to make themselves into ready servants of this oncoming power. But according to my understanding the future is nothing but the dreams and plans we currently have, and as far as the humanly-made world is concerned, nothing is coming but what we actively or passively agree to. It is that passivity which is, to my mind, the greatest time-pathology. Arid now time's up. 17 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. 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Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 17 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 What, then, is time? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998-09-14 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 14, 1998 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1998-09-04 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/268">Audio recording</a> Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d074ca2720d678c69ea6edcfb9b1027e.pdf fae7eb4ec5c8d2f182676ad1d12c01d6 PDF Text Text Friday Night lecture Parents' Weekend November 2, 2001 Eva Brann WAYS OF NA YSA YING No, Not, Nonexistence, Nonbeing, Negativity, Nothing-these \vords, the guideposts of my lecture, may seem like a dismal parade for Parents' Weekend. There's an old post-World War II song that goes: "You gotta accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative," and accordingly the more pessimistic particles, adjectives, nouns, have a bad name in our assertively optimistic country. But that aversion is a misapprehension. Almost nothing in our mental capacity is more life-affirming than our power of naysaying, and you might almost say that where there's No there's Hope. So when our dean, Mr. Flaumenhaft, asked me to give a sort of higher book report on a 'fht. volume I've completed fairly recently, called/Vays of Naysaying: I c.heerfully assented, thinking that it needn't spoil your evening. For the human capacity for negation does turn out to be a large territory-full of fascinatingly knotty intellectual problems but also of plain familiar human charm. Now the book contains about sixty thousand words, while I won't keep you here even sixty minutes, so I'll have to pick and choose my negations. It will be hard, because all of naysaying has come to seem to me close to \vhat I think of as the human center. • Rowman and Littlefield, 2001 . �To explain what I mean by the human center I have to use a very unfashionable word, unfashionable at least among those who now write academic books about human beings. The word is "soul." Oddly enough the word is more acceptable in its Greek version "psyche." With the word "soul" comes, very naturally, the notion of a lay-out, a spatial topography. We speak of surface emotions and deep feelings, for example. A number of the authors we read at this college-Plato, Augustine, Freud-speak of the soul as a sort of territory with its O\Vn geography. And so I will feel entitled to use a similar figure and give our inner being a spatial expression. In my image, the soul has an outer margin, a front, where it is open to the outside world and its facts of sense, be they human or natural. And it has a background, deep behind, whence arise truths of thought. As we must not only deliberately keep our eyes open to see (though it is not the eyes that see but we ourselves) so we must go deep into these inner places to learn things the outside can't teach us. On reason why the Platonic dialogue Meno is so central to our program is that it tells a story and gives a demonstration about the way to that deep inner region where live not only mathematical but also moral truths. Now I sketch for myself a middle territory where whatever comes through the senses up front and whatever thought we can dredge up from the depths behind meet, and where, incidentally, our feelings live most familiarly; it is where we come in those "sessions of sweet silent thought" Shakespeare sings of. This middle territory is a strange non-spatial space, a quasispace. You .c an't measure its extent, but you can pace or fly through it. You won't find solid weighty objects there, but nothing is more lasting than its contents. In it is whatever you've seen or heard, except that it is not really there; and it contains besides much that you've never seen or heard, except that it is as if you had; and it contains above all the many scenes and people that are now far a\vay or gone altogether, except that they are present in there. I've never read a more 2 �accurate description of this middle-soul than Augustine gives in his Confessions. He tells how he "comes into the fields and spacious palaces of memory" where he finds everything he's ever sensed and much more. "There," he says, "I have in readiness the heaven, the earth, the sea," though "not the things themselves but their images." We are speaking of course of the imagination and that part of it which is time-affected, memory. In fact I thought I could show that the memory is the origin of our sense of time (and incidentally that there is no objective natural time beyond that inner time). It is when we flip through the files of our memory, so to speak, that time arises-the thicker the file, the longer the time. Now in_ meditating on the nature of the imagination and time, those inhabitants of our soul's center, I kept coming on "not" and "non-," on negative particles and prefLxes. The imagination is full of presences of absent things; things that are there but not there themselves. These images are beings and also non beings, because when we say of a picture, "Tpat's him all right," we also know that it really isn't. Images and imagining have their satisfactions, but who doesn't fly to embrace the friend in the flesh? So too with time. What is a memory a memory of but what was once but is not no\v or not here? What is that forward-directed memory called expectation but dreams and fears of the "not yet"? Time consists altogether of what is no longer and is not yet, and these surround a vanishing now, the elusive present. Nothing in thinking about time hit me with a greater shock than the realization that time, which consisted of what was no more and is not yet, really didn't leave much time for anything to be present, to stand out of that stream of no longer and not yet. For this "standing-out," translated into Latin, is "existence," and so we seemed to exist on the cusp of tv,:o converging negations. 3 �So having done a lot of scribbling first about imagination and then time, I seemed to be driven into tonight's subject. Imagination and time began and ended as enigmas and mysteries and here appeared a third, which seemed to emerge in thinking about both. Let me take a little detour here to talk about enigmas and emergences, something particularly relevant to an audience ofstudents and teachers devoted to tackling mysteries and making questions emerge, and to the parents who underwrite this strange enterprise. \\'hat is an inquiry of the sort we are most committed to? Does it begin with a problem, which is a brisk formulation of a topic to be attacked, and end in a resolution so that the problem goes away and the topic becomes untopical, no longer interesting? No such thing. It begins with some muddled thoughts and some talk that leads to an increasing unease, a sense of being at once stuck and at loose ends. Students quite often ask to have a conversation about something, but when we sit down together the topic isn't quite clear to them, neither the place they're at nor where we're intended to go. So first we figure out what we want to be talking about. Then people who are serious read up on the subject, and in this study they find different approaches and a whole slew of prepared problems and solutions. And then comes the real thinking, the kind that makes the question emerge, and new topics, new places to be. Now mere problems tum into true emergences and mysteries-I ' ll have something more to say about these at the end. One question that can really only be answered late in the inquiry arose pretty soon: Is there something negation everywhere and always, and so to speak, essentially, is? Is there fundamental naysaying? It is a question to be answered, if at all, only through collecting the kinds, the ways of naysaying, though there is one linguistic fact that did encourage the expectation that all naysaying is at bottom one. This is the fact that no, not, non, nothing, negation, denial, denigration, and dozens of other refusing words all have the same root, ne. :t\c 4 �one knows what that root signifies, but there is a plausible if unprovable conjecture that goes back to Darwin, who was much interested in the signifying origins of human gesture. He thought that negation was expressed by putting up or wrinkling your nose at something in refusal or disgust, as infants do when they don't \Vant their bottle, saying "nenenenenene" through . clenched gums-and also as modern Greeks do when they want to express "no." To the confusion of the tourist they give a slight upward jerk of the head, as if raising their nose at the idea. A related question was whether negation was essentially linguistic: Was language the locus of naysaying, as it seemed on the face of it? Could there be negation only for thinking and speaking beings?-for I accepted it as given that speech expresses thought. To be sure, there is mindless jabber and rote opinion, and conversely there is thought yet seeking expression. But when things are working right, we have a sense of the word neatly clicking L·nto the thought. So if naysaying is primarily a verbal phenomenon, perhaps everything in the natural \vorld is positive-as some people have certainly thought-and we humans (plus whatever spirits have speech besides us) alone say "no." And of course, I asked myself how negation got into our inner life, our imagining and our remembering, and our living through time by means of memory. Did it come from the nether parts of our soul's topography as an expression of our capacity to think negatingly, or was that middle part itself somehow receptive to nonexistent objects? And there was the same question only asked from within about the world without: Are there ghost presences, like our Liberty Tree, that half-millennium-old tulip poplar on our front campus, which fell victim to a hurricane in 1999 and which is still somehow visible in its absence, like Robert Frost's memory house ... that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm 5 �And in a to\\'n that is no more a town. Are there nonexistences that walk the earth alongside or even in the same place as all the assertively solid, weightily positive beings that inhabit nature? Physicists talk a lot about negative forces and particles. It is said that when in 1747 Benjamin Franklin assigned the adjective "negative" to electricity gotten by rubbing a rubber rod with fur, while when a glass rod was rubbed with silk the electricity was called positive, he was being arbitrary. But is that true of all the oppositions of physics? Are they all arbitrarily positive and negative? Are there, furthermore, in that vivid, feeling-filled field of the imagination half-beings without physical weight but with all the gravity that belongs to human matters? And finally, does the region of thought contain non beings, objects of thought whose nature it is not to be? These may seem to you weird-if perhaps wonderful--questions to ask. I have a certain justification for asking them in the fact that they are frequently answered without even being asked. For example, the tribe of logicians is frequently positive-minded; it comes to them naturally to think that the world is full of positive facts and objects, and that negation is a formal operation, which flips a positive proposition into its opposite. Then there are philosophers who define negation as opposition, a word that pits position against counter-position, this posited thing against that. The notion of opposition too is a kind of positivism. In fact, about five years ago my friends and fellow tutors, Eric Salem and Peter Kalkavage and I studied and translated the Platonic dialogue that deals with these matters more deeply than any work I.know (except for the Hegelian Logic, some of which our seniors used to read-and should again). It is the Sophist. A sophist then and now is a professor, someone who professes to have teachable, usually trendy, wisdom but who has never gone deeply into 6 �anything. In Plato's dialogue, it is a f}pe whose nature the participants pursue, not a particular person. The chief speaker is a stranger from the town where Parmenides taught. Parmenides was the first of those who wanted to think about Being, about that one nature displayed by everything whatsoever that comes to our attention. For whatever else it might be, everything is, when it might so easily (we sometimes think) be otherwise, when it might not be. Or if it seems · unthinkable that certain beings could not be, these people who attended to Being wanted know why not. This inquiry, which Parmenides initiated, is called ontology, Greek for "the story of Being," and I will now boldly claim that there can't be many human beings who haven't come up against the question of Being in some way. They might just soberly have noticed that almost every sentence either has "is" or "are" or "am" in it or can be made to have it: "What is she talking about?", "Why are we sitting here?", "I am feeling sleepy." Or they might have felt that the things of this world are fleeting and deceptive and wondered what, if anything, is behind them. Now this Parmenides, when he was the age of a college freshman, took a number of blazingly wild rides right into the heart of truth where a goddess spoke to him. She told him that there are two ways to thin\<. And she said One way says: "Is" and that "Is not" is impossible. This is the road of conviction, for it follows truth. The other says: "Is not" and that it is fated that "Is" not be. · This path I show you as altogether unlearnable. For neither could you knov,: Nonbeing, since it is unattainable, Nor could you show it to anyone 7 �For Is-not cannot possibly be said or thought. So this is the message the youth was to bring to all human beings: Speak only Being, and, moreover, know that Being has no divisions, no limits, no time, no discernible distinctions at all . But you can hear and discern right away that the goddess is asking the impossible: to speak without making attributions and distinctions, and above all without saying "not" or "non-." For thinking and speaking is altogether articulating and bringing together differences. In every sentence this is said to be that or not that. If I say, as I must, that "Being is a mystery," you can and should puzzle from now till doomsday whether I am separating the mysteriousness out from Being or putting it together with Being. In fact the goddess herself uses these particles and prefixes all the time. She does worse: She puts into the human vocabulary a brand-new word, "Nonbeing." So she manages to accomplish what earnest prohibitions so often do, to name a proscribed thing and so to make it infinitely fascinating. This effect falls in the class of unintended consequences. Unintended consequences are best known in the realms of economic and social policy. They occur when you intend a very good thing and get a very sorry side-effect, such as trying to prevent inflation by hiking interest rates and causing a slow-down, or closing a number of all-black schools in the interests of integration and losing a large percentage of black principals. So here we have it in the realm of thought: This goddess wants to drive out all negation from thought and speech but incidentally lets -loose among us the thought called Nonbeing. So Parmenides and his pupils spend the rest of his life puzzling out what one could say without disobeying the goddess. At the time the dialogue takes place Parrrienides is dead and one of these pupils, a stranger, arrives in Athens, and Socrates draws him into a conversation about 8 �sophists as a type, and then he says no more. I think he knows perfectly well what mischief he is stirring up. The Sophist, a false or pretended or negatively wise man, who is himself a mere image of wisdom and a maker of mere images, can't be caught in speech without reference to Nonbeing. Nonbeing is, one might say, the ideal cause in thought of an incarnate negation like the Sophist; it is, taken in itself, the very thought of Non and Not, the thought we get hold of as an object to wrap our mind around when we think of the opposite of Being. Now this stranger rises to the occasion by doing something wonderful and terrible that he himself gives a name to. He commits parricide; he kills Father Parmenides in spirit by sho\l,.ing that his goddess was wrong: Nonbeing is after all. He does this deed by thinking the thought I've already mentioned: The opposite of Being is indeed Nonbeing, but that Nonbeing is not an unthinkable and unspeakable nullity but just other being. ¥/hen I say the real Sophist is not a genuine lover of wisdom, or to put it into Greek, is not a philosopher, I am not saying he is n·owhere to be found and a nothing, not to be grasped.-That is exactly what the clever Sophist would like me to think, because then I can't catch him in my understanding. I am saying he is other than, diverse from}he philosopher. (In fact, he's in some ways pretty close.) This is the stranger's tremendous thought: Nonbeing is Otherness, and coversely, Otherness is Nonbeing. If ,,.... . you 're tempted to think that this is mere wordage, ask yourself what is the most potent political sentiment in our country at this moment. I say it is what we all call "diversity," the idea that who and what we are not has as much proper Being as we do; what is other is only other, not less. And this powerful thought is first articulated in Plato's Sophist. But here's the rub. This parricidal Stranger doesn't quite succeed with his reinterpretation of Nonbeing. For though the Sophist is now unable to escape capture by going to ground in utter nothingness, he's still not the genuine article, still a faker, still the mere image of the honest 9 �thinker. So ifNonbeing is just Otherbeing, how will we account for true inferiority, truly mere images, a true decline and fall from what we usually call reality? For an image isn't just other than its original-it really is not quite up to that particular original, though in a way it is, namely insofar as it has its looks. An image is usually hopelessly less than its original; few people prefer a photograph to its sitter or a fake to the genuine article. Do notice that all I've just reported is really a very deep treatment of the question I posed before, asking whether negation is just something we think and say or whether there is real, genuine, true negation in things themselves, be they thinkable or visible. Thus for me Parmenides' goddess with her rejected Nonbeing was at the center of the \i,·hole inquiry, and that is where she appears in the book I'm telling you about. Notice too how important the practical consequences of the answer are. Those theologians who make most sense to me all think that evil, in the world and in the soul, is the effect of an infirmity of Being, of an inferior or lesser existence. When we meet badness incarnate, face to face, it may appear as positive, even vital evil, but when we try to think our way as best we can into the badness of a soul we ahvays find something missing, a lack, a poverty, a kind ofNonbeing. But if we deny this analysis then evil is either perspectival or positive.-It is either the effect of our subjective v.:ays of naysaying rejection or a powerful and therefore possibly respectable and often fascinating way of positive being. You can see that to me it is important that the external and internal world should not just be a tissue of positive facts-as the school called positivism in fact claims. But I'm not one hundred percent convinced I can have it my way, though as I will shortly show, I've got another good reason, even closer to my heart, for wishing to acknowledge non-existent objects. Let me now return to one of my many questions, the first one, which was to be answered only toward the end, after having gone some way into the inquiry. The question was: Is all 10 �negation fundamentally one? The mere etymology of all the no and neg- words in terms of turned-up noses doesn't get us very far, so the next thing is to try to discern the kinds of naysaying and nayspeaking there are, and then to see what they might have in common. I'll hurtle through them, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if in the question period you will add some I left out. I began where our life as persons begins, with toddlers, those two-year-old terrors of negativity. This propensity of the terrible twos for naysaying will ring a bell with parents. It's No! to everything, often for the sheer compulsion to negate. I once minded (in both senses of the . word) a little fellow who actually said to me: "I want not to want .... "Or ask a kid in the throes of negativity: "Do you want some of my baloney sandwich?" ''No!" he says, and he gets on your lap and takes it away from you. Now at least in our Western world there are three great crises of individual development: One is the mid-life crisis, which ought to seem very remote to students; the second is adolescence, of which they come as accredited experts; and the earliset is the "terrible twos," which they have probably totally blanked out. But this was when they first grew from lovable animals into respect-demanding persons. In its rebellious assertiveness it is very similar to the second transition into independent humanity, the one that occurs in adolescence . The momentous happening for babies is the discovery of their will, the negative will that repels the outside and defines the child as a separate human being. The briefest, most independent kind of naysaying, just ''No!'', is here willful, and it is an open question for me whether human negativity doesn't always preserve a trace of self-assertion. I might add that from naysaying babies I go in the first chapter by a natural and easy transition to negating devils and demons \Vho are in permanent rebellion against their divinity. 11 �Whatever the case of personal naysaying may be, there is an opposite kind of denial, expressed by the particle "not," which can be as impersonal and objective as human rationality is capable of being. This is the negation of the logicians, the negation that is tied to sentences, statements, and propositions. There are many deeply interesting questions to be asked oflogical negation, for example, how what is known as the Law of Excluded Middle got built into the · fundamental standard logic-the law that says that there is no third possibility between affirmation and denial. Or whether positive and negative are logically coequal, or the positive is always the original position. But let me propose to you a preliminary question not quite so deep but just as interesting: Where in a sentence does the "not" properly come? Let me give you the possibilities. You might say (I hope): 1. "This lecture is-not boring." Here the not is attached to the copula "is." The thoughtcoupling or connection between my lecture and boredom is broken by the operation of negation. Or 2. "This lecture is not-boring." Here the "not" goes with the boredom, and puts the lecture into the infinitely large class of non-boring speeches. This is not so much a negative operation as a positive classification into a negative class, a class that is itself a negative object. Or 3. "It is not the case that this lecture kboring." Here the negation is to the who le proposition. The curious possibility of denying a proposition lock, stock, and barrel led to a new logic early in the last century. This is symbolic logic, for which the sentence itself shrinks into the symbol p or q, one whose relations of implication can be studied quite apart from any sentential meaning. Here negation is nothing more than a flipping function. If p is true, then notp is false and the reverse, if p is false then not-p is true. It is the most colorless negation there is. Its definition is nothing more than the rule just stated; no one really \Vants to say what true and 12 �false, T and F, means in this formal context, though in ordinary speech negation and falsity seem to be closer than negation and truth. Thus those Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels, which the Juniors read about, call "saying the thing which is not" a lie, though it might \.vell be the trutlr--if the thing really is not. There is a fourth possibility: 4. "This non-lecture is boring." This sentence suddenly has an altogether different quality. ("Quality" is the term used of the positivity or negativity of a proposition). It is not a negation at all, but the affirmation that a predicate belongs positively to a subject, though the subject is itself negative. So here we are back to the question raised before. Are there non-subjects, non-beings that can be subjects of assertions, at least in thought? Here is a way to think ofthis puzzle. Almost everyone agrees that when you think you are thinking about something. I say "almost everyone" because there are alternatives: There might not be separable objects for thought and speech to be about, but thinking and speaking might just be about themselves. But let that be, and let me here suppose that the question "\\'hat are you thinking about?" makes sense. Then one might argue that the sentence "This non-lecture is boring" is nonsense, but it isn't straightforward nonsense. Or one might e;ven argue that it is straightforwardly false. There are, that argument would go, all sorts of non-existent objects that make a sentence false when you try to make them the subject, since you can't talk of non-beings and shouldn't try. There are golden mountains that happen not to exist, though they might; there are round squares that can't exist because they are selfcontradictory in concept; there are unicorns that are imaginable but not as an existing part of nature. All these are nonexistent objects; add-to them the legion of human beings who live in epics and novels, for example, Odysseus who lives in Homer's Odyssey. 13 �Now, however, let me introduce to you Mrs. Pringle, an acquaintance of one philosophically inclined logician. Mrs. Pringle teaches high school; it is a good school because they read the Odyssey. She wants to test if you've read carefully, so she asks: "What is the color of Odysseus' hair?" If you have in fact read carefully you know Odysseus has auburn, reddishgold hair, and that when he comes home to Ithaca it's a little silvery and a little thin. That's all in the poem. So ifyou say "auburn" on the test she marks it T and if"brov.11" it's F for falssand your grade is Fas well. So it's clearly not the case that all sentences about the fictional, imagined, nonexistent Odysseus are false-not to Mrs. Pringle, who's not to be fooled. The Englishman Bertrand Russell, one of those who think that the world is composed of positive particulars and also the man who was the co-discoverer of symbolic logic, made the claim, clearly connected to these opinions and discoveries, that propositions about nonbeings are just false. He had an opponent, whom he respected highly and who wrote at about the same time, the beginning of the last century, the Austrian Alexius Meinong. He squarely faced the fact so clear to Mrs. Pringle, that sentences about nonexistences and nonbeings can be both true and false, and moreover he took it as a basic feature of thought that it always is about something, that without fail we intend something when we think. So he made the follov.:ing paradoxical but unavoidable claim. He said: "There are objects of which it is true that there are no such objects." It was a way of saying that there must be objects, objects that we think of or imagine, that are indifferent to existence, that are outside of existence. Meinong says that such objects have "Beyond-being." Among them are the mathematical objects, the theories \Ve have in mind, and also beings like Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus, Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa and even unicorns. So the standing of the creatures of the imagination seems to be saved and we can talk 14 �about them. They can be subjects of sentences. They don't exist but they have a kind of Being, Beyond-being. But here's the trouble: Recent logicians have blamed Meinong for making a "slum" of nonexistents, a ''breeding ground of disorderly elements"-though that's their problem, not mine. My trouble is that Meinong's Beyond-being is more the acknowledgement of a need than the solution of a problem. Beyond-being is a courtesy title for objects that it is very easy and natural to be acquainted with and very mystifying to get to the bottom of The beings that arise in our imagination, or that transmigrate from someone else's imagination into ours by way of a work of fiction, don't exist, to be sure, at least not in their full specificity. They are not flesh and blood and yet they are more vital and more vivid than much that has respectable existence in the ) real world. Fictions coinhabit our lives as models and companions and they have more staying · power than human beings-Odysseus is, after all, well over three thousand years old. Their power seems to derive from the mysterious way in which an airy nothing has assumed a . habitation and a name. The term Being both does and doesn't apply to them, and Meinong's Beyond-being is a brave acknowledgement of that fact, but no more. Now I have given examples of willful No, logical Not, the Nonbeing that arises unwittingly with the inquiry into Being, and the Nonexistence that concerns philosophically inclined logicians. There are two more ways of naysaying that I'll dispose of quickly. One is Negativity itself, considered not, as is negation, in terms of a fixed positive judgment pitted against a negative judgment \.vhere one says: "I say this lecture is not boring;'' and the other, whose understanding is the opposite, says: "Yes, it is." This more fluid negativity was discovered by Hegel; it is known to the seniors as it appears at work in the Phenomenology of the Spirit. This late in the lecture is no time to talk seriously about that kind of negativity, but let me 15 �describe it briefly and give an example-perhaps it would be better to say, let me try to induce a taste of it. Summarizing once-more, I've spoken of the negation that is the expression of an act of repelling will, and the negation that is an operation of logical thought and the negative object that thought is about. Hegelian negativity is neither an operation of the mind nor a mental object that holds still for thought. It is instead the life of thought in which the activity of thinking and the stable object that thinking is about meld and fuse together. Thus the object is, as it were, animated, while the thinking is not yours or mine but emanates from the thing itself. Assuming that the word Being has some meaning for you, hold it in your mind and receptively watch it; immerse yourself in it. Being will reveal itself, just as Parmenides's goddess says it must. But what it will reveal about itself is that it has no shape, no weight, no limit. It has no features, and the thought of Being is altogether negative, a tissue of no's and not's. So in being thought and in animating ·· thought, Being turns out to be Nothing or Naught. The story of Hegelian negativity begins here, for Nothing under this scrutiny of thought, or thought under the influence of Nothing, turns into yet another, a third thought-object, namely Becoming. Hegel calls these animate thoughts "concepts" and the whole universe of subjectively active thought and stable thought-substance develops as an organic whole. Hegel's name for this development is dialectic. It became more and more a problem to me why it begins with Being rather than Nothing, for Nothing seems even more rudimentary than Being, and, when watched thoughtfully, it too turns into its opposite, namely Being. But leaving that problem aside, I was next confronted with what seemed to me the most final and absolute kind of negation, the thought of Nothing. Nonbeing was always relative to Being, the negation of and alternative to Being. But Nothing is independent and absolute. Indeed 16 �the Nihilists, the "nothingists," as they call themselves, do deny reality and being, do seem to negate all that is and say that everything is nothing, comes to nothing, is worth nothing. But that is only because they find themselves in an illusory world, and so they begin by opposing the naive and deluded believers in this world. Thus it turns out that they do acknowledge something, even if it is something illusory. What they really maintain is the absolute primacy of Nothing. So the great question becomes why there is anything at all and not only nothing, ~w that small stain of illusion appears upon the vast pure plain of Nothingness. Nihilist passion can be powerfully political and nihilist metaphysics deeply subtle, but, to tell the truth, I don't know what to make of it: The fly in the nihilist ointment seems to be the nihilist himself thrashing about in a very positive way. The object of this hurtling race through the various negations that I discerned was to ask what they might have in common. What, if anything, do willful No, logical Not, fictional Nonexistence, ontological Nonbeing, dialectical Negativity, and absolute Nothing have in common? Well, the first thing that came to mind is also the last. What they all have in common is that they start from a position, a place maintained, and develop from that an op-position, a denial of that place. Willful No opposes what I want to what I repel, sometimes just because it's not my idea. Logical Not rises above my subjective position to see a field of propositions that are affirmed and couples itself with these as their denial, their negation. Nonexistence is a ghostly doppelganger that opposes its own related Existence, where that term is used of what is posited as here in place and now in time. Nonbeing is what opposes Being, where Being means all that is, in or even out of place, in and even out of time. Negativity is the movement of thought as it 'Natches its object develop into its opposite. And finally, Nihilism is the claim that the natural human position, which is in the positive, in Reality, Existence, Being, and in Yeasaying, must be · 17 �reversed and that Nothing is the original affirmative position to which Something is negatively opposed. That negation is fundamentally opposition is not news: many books on the subject say so quite incidentally and smoothly. But when this understanding arises not as an obvious and easy assumption but as a haltingly thought-out conclusion it comes as a revelation. Mine and thine, this and that, here and there, now and then are discernible, discriminable, distinguishable not as mere diversities and differences but as related position and counterposition, as bonded opposites. Each kind of naysaying is a specific response to what first comes to sight or to mind; all naysaying is parasitic on and shows up the configuration of a positive object, the sense of an affirmative thought which it cancels and yet somehow keeps. It is slightly less obvious that there might be things that are in themselves negative which are inferior by reason of their nonexistence or nonbeing. And it is a very unobv_ous reflection that some nonexistences and nonbeings are i more potent and more important to us than the most positive reality. It's, as I say, no great news, and yet it is a revealing insight with which to live, this ability of ours to keep and cherish what absence, passage oftime, inherent nature, circumstantial impossibility or opposing thought has canceled. And so I want to end with a little disquisition on the results and uses of inquiries ofthis sort, the kind we encourage at this college. The chief question, the one that drove me into the investigation, led me only to mystery upon mystery, as I will show in a minute. By hard-nosed standards I got no results to which a well-informed reader of philosophical and logical books couldn't say either: "Well, we knew that to begin with" or "That's against common sense ." And the only use these results seem to have is to make everyday occurrences strange and confusing. 18 �But you might as truthfully say that they make dully ordinary mundane things remarkable and wonderful. Indeed, the discovery of a mystery is least of anything the sowing of confusion. A mystery is not an unsolved problem awaiting expert resolution in the course of progress. But neither is it a swampy indeterminacy that sucks in all attempts at clarification. Nor is it one of those notorious unanswerable questions from that deep pit about which we think we know, by some magical insight, that it has no bottom. A mystery in my meaning is a beckoning question to which one can discover very precise approaches and very definite answers, only to find that there are ever new routes of inquiry and that each solution contains new questions. In the course of this enterprise the mystery develops specificity, and we develop the conviction that there is really something stupendously wonderful there for .us to pursue-something to which all serious attempts at inquiry do bring us closer, but that we can never simply undo and discard as a question in the way we resolve and leave behind a problem. Moreover, we acquire the faith that our inability to finish the question off for good does not lie in the murky bottomlessness of the mystery but in the insuperable finitude of our thinking. In sum, here is what I think: The pursuit of a mystery is the prescription for a pretty interesting life. And now to the real end of this lecture. My main question was: How do we account for our strange and wonderful ability to live by and with things that are no longer and things that never were, these being the formulas for our temporal and imaginative life? Well, the truth is that I've come on a number of ways to ask the question, and a number of ways to ans\.ver it, but no one way or one answer. Instead I have developed a powerful conviction that there is an articulabl~ mystery at our human center. Out of the background of our soul come discerning thought and its distinction-making language, which is always explicitly or implicitly a kind of naysaying; they inject themselves into the broad fields and beautiful palaces of our strangely 19 �spatial middle soul. There thought and speech meet the deliverances of our physical fa9ade which come by way of our frontal senses, especially sight and hearing, by which we face and confront the external world. And between these two, sense and thought, on the field of our imagination, there arise presences that are also absences: existences that are nonexistences too, beings that are nonbeings as well. Among these are the memories of what once was in time but no longer is, the remembrances from which our past, our histories are made. Among these are as well the present images of what is absent in space, the imagined completion of our sensually limited world. And among them are, finally, the enchanting visions of what never yet was but might yet be in the real world, the hopeful images that spur and guide our actions. I commend this middle mystery to you as a good companion for life, both to cultivate as an experience and to pursue as an inquiry. 20 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. 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Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 20 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 Ways of Naysaying Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001-11-02 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 02, 2001 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series (during Parents Weekend). Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 2001-11-02 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/269">Audio recording</a> Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1d3f88b4251f118f815e78f707981e97.pdf 04ccd899a25071e8771e3a15c3549cfd PDF Text Text Friday Night Lecture Homecoming, October 4, 2002 Annapolis, MD THE ElvfPIRES OF THE SUN AND THE WEST Eva Brann, Tutor This lecture is dedicated to my friend and fellow tutor William Darkey, who first introduced me to the book behind this.lecture, William Prescott's History of the Conquest ofMexico. I shall begin with two sets of facts and dates. On or about August 8of1519 Heman Cortes, a hidalgo, a knight, from Medellin in the Estremadura region of Spain, having sailed his expeditionary fleet from Cuba to win "vast and wealthy lands," set out from a city he called Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico to march inland, west toward the capital of Anahuac, the empire of the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs. The city was called Tenochtitlan and its lord, the emperor, was Montezuma II. Cortes knew of the place from the emperor's coastal vassals and from delegations Montezuma had sent loaded with presents to welcome-and to forestall-the invaders. The presents included many works of well-crafted gold. Cortes had with him about 300 Spaniards, including about forty crossbowmen and twenty arquebusiers, that is, men carrying heavy matchlock rifles. He probably had three front-loading cannons. His officers wore metal armor. There were fifteen horses for the captains and a pack of hunting dogs. (I might mention here that the Aztec dogs were a hairless type bred for food.) The band was accompanied by Indian porters and allies, a group that grew to about I 000 as they marched inland. Early in November they passed at 13000 feet between the two volcanoes that guard the high Valley of Mexico. Some Spanish captains astounded the Indians by venturing to climb to the crater rim of the ominously smoking Popocatepetl. On November 8, Cortes was on �the causeway to Tenochtitlan. On November 14, Montezuma, the ruler of a realm of 125,000 square miles, capable of putting in the field an army of200,000 men with a highly trained officer corps, quietly surrendered his person to the custody of Cortes, declared himself a vassal of Emperor Charles V, and transferred his administration to the palace assigned to the Spaniards. He soon made them a present of the state treasure which they had discovered behind a plasteredover door in the_ palace aviary. Cortes's suimise that just to enter Tenoc.htitlan was to take Anahuac captive seemed to be justified. On June 30, 1520, Cortes being absent, Montezuma was either murdered by the Spaniards or stoned to death by his own people as he appeared on the palace wall attempting to contain a rebellion. The latter account seems more plausible, since he appears to have been shielded by Spaniards to whom he was a valuable pawn and since some of his nobles were growing disgusted with his submissiveness. The uprising had been induced by the young captain whom Cortes had left in charge, who had massacred unarmed celebrants of the feast of Huitzilop6chtli, the city's chief god; this god both was and stood for the Sun. The Mexican uprising culminated in the noche triste, the Sad Night, when the Spaniards were driven from the city with enormous loss of life. In June 1521 the Spanish situation looked desperate to them, as a vigorous, indomitable, eighteen-year-old emperor, Cuauhtemoc, Montezuma' s second successor (the first having died of smallpox), assumed the leadership of an Aztec army now better acquainted with these once apparently invincible invaders. On August 15, 1521, just two years after his landing, Cortes's band, augmented by some new arrivals and an allied Indian army from Tenochtitlan's old enemy, Tlaxca.Ia, fought its way, foot by foot, back into the city, with frightful losses on both sides. The Spaniards were supported by a flotilla of forty brigantines, light square-rigged sailing vessels that Cortes had ordered built 2 �and dragged overland to Lake Texcoco, the complex shallow water on which Tenochtitlan stood.-It was the first fleet of sailing ships to float on the lake. I am still in the realm of fact when I say that within a few days this city, surpassing all cities then on earth in the beauty of its situation and the magic of its aspect, was completely razed . Within four years it was overlaid, under Cortes's supervision, by a complete Spanish city, whose cathedral, the Cathedral of Mexico City, was eventually built h4[d by the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. In this total catastrophe the Spaniards had lost fewer than 100 men, the Aztecs or Mexica about 100,000. I have, of course, omitted myriads of gripping details, such as a novelist might hesitate to invent. But I shall now abbreviate an abbreviation: In August 1519 there was a large, powerful, highly civilized empire called Anahuac. By August 1521 it was gone; instead there was a new realm, a colony called New Spain; Spanish was replacing the native Nahuatl. Now the second set of facts, even more curtailed. On May 13, 1532, Francisco Pizarro (like Cortes from the Estremadura and his distant relation) arrived at Tumbez, a port at the northern end of the Inca empire and of modern Peru. This empire was called by its people Tahuantinsuyu, meaning the Realm of the Four Quarters. Pizarro had 130 troopers, 40 cavalry and one small cannon. The Inca Atahualpa-Inca means Lord-had an anny of 50,000 men. On November 16, 1533, the Inca came, at Pizarro's invitation, to meet him in the town plaza of Cajamara. There he was unintelligibly harangued by the chaplain of the expedition and given a breviary: the Inca scornfully threw the scribbles to the ground. Within 33 minutes, he having been seized, 4000 of his men had been massacred. Resistance and the empire itself fell apart with his capture. Atahualpa offered to fill his prison, a cell 22 x 10 feet, with gold to the height of his reach in exchange for his freedom. While the temples which were encrusted with gold were 3 �being denuded and the condition was being fulfilled, the Inca was condemned to death by burning. This sentence was commuted to strangulation when he agreed to be baptized. Pizarro soon took Cuzco, the capital, and installed a puppet Inca, Manco Capac, who mounted a rebellion; it was put down with great loss of life on the Inca's side in 1534. There followed a period of civil war among the conquerors. Again to summarize the summary: A tiny band of Spanish ruffians brought down, within two· years, the most efficiently aqministered polity of its time. Quechua, the native language, was replaced by Spanish as the chief language. It is thought that this second scenario was, on Pizarro's part, a reprise of Cortes's conquest. If so, it is a demonstration of the inferiority of imitations. The kind of facts I have listed here are spectacular yet uncontested discontinuities in the stream of life. The dates, which tell us both the temporal order of these facts and their distance from us, serve to dramatize the discontinuity: About half a millennium ago there occurred, not very far south of us and close to each other in space and time, two mind-boggling events-the destruction by a very few Spaniards of two great civilizations. We at this college have read or will read in Herodotus's Persian Wars how in July of 480 B.C. a band of 299 Spartans, the same in number as Cortes's original companions, died in holding the pass of Thermopylae against an Asian anny of who knows how many hundreds of thousands, led by Xerxes, king of Persia. Their object was to give the Greeks time and courage to repel the invader. But the Spartans were defending their own land from a self-debilitating behemoth. The Spaniards' situation in Mesoamerica is just the inverse, except that in each case the few were the free . What, we may wonder, would our world be like if the Asians had prevailed in 480 B.C. or the Nahua in 1519 AD.? 4 �How could it happen? How did these American empires fall? Just as Herodotus drew conclusions about the nature of the Greeks from the Persian defeat, so one might wonder if illumination about the nature of our West might not be found in these catastrophes that mark the beginning of modem life. To put it straightforwardly: In reading about Mexico and Peru I began to wonder if there might be a clue in these events to the apparently irresistible potency of the West when it touches, be it insidiously or catastrophically, other worlds, be they receptive or resistant. Let me explain the not altogether appropriate use of the term "the West" in my title, "The Empires of the Sun and the West." Our tradition-I mean the one whose works we study at this college-is usually called the Western tradition. It is thereby revealed as defining itself against the East, Near and Far, the Orient, the place where the sun rises. Our North American republic is in this sense the West's very West and its currently culminating expression. But, of course, the Aztecs-let me interrupt myself to say that the people of the imperial city ofMexicoTenochtitlan did not call themselves Aztecs but Mexica and that they called those who spoke their language the Nahua and that the term Aztec was introduced to the English-speaking world by the aforementioned Prescott-these Mexica, then, of course thought of the invaders as being from the quarter of the rising sun, from the east. This turns out to be a significant fact. Columbus thought that he was "sailing not the usual way" but west-sailing west to reach the East, Japan, China, India. It was for quite a while a very unwelcome discovery that the people whom the adventurers so hopefully called Indians (as I will continue to do here) inhabited a long continent which, although it contracted into a narrow isthmus in the middle, blocked the ocean route to the fabulous Orient. Thus Prescott calls Tenochtitlan "the great capital of the western world." So "West" is, strictly speaking, nonsense as used in this context, but I cling to it because it is the 5 �available shorthand for ourselves, for those living in the tradition that has its roots in Jerusalem and Athens, achieves its modernity in Europe, has come to its current culmination on this continent, and is spreading its effects all over the globe. What can be more necessary at this moment than to grapple with the being of this West? As I read on it seemed to me often that the reasons given by historians for Anahuac' s sudden collapse before the Spaniards might well be cumulatively necess¥J' but could not be sufficient conditions. I mean that without their operation the Empires could not have fallen so quickly, but that altogether they did not so completely account for the fall as to make it seem unavoidable. It is true that the Spaniards brought horses into a land without draft animals, and so the cavaliers could run down the pedestrian Aztec warriors and frighten the Indians into seeing the Europeans as centaurs, four-footed monstrous men-horses. But these Indians soon learned that man and horse were separable and mortal; during their desperate and bloody defense of Tenochtitlan there appeared on the skull rack of a local temple, beneath 53 heads of Spaniards, the heads of a number of horses, of "Spanish deer," as they were now called. The crossbows and cannons may have delivered more swift and terrifying destruction than the Aztec javelinthrowers, the metal armor deflected the cuts of obsidian-studded wooden swords; the driving greed for gold, which, as Cortes ironically represented to an Indian official, was the specific remedy for a disease that troubled the Spaniards, may have disoriented the people; the 'physical disease brought by the Spaniards, the smallpox, did more than decimate the uninoculated natives; Spanish luck at crucial junctures may have demoralized the caciques, the Indian chieftains; the harsh exactions and suppression ofMontezuma's empire did indeed provide Cortes with Indian allies (though the 150,000 Indians that came with the now 900 Spaniards to retake Tenochtitlan were by their very numbers an encumbrance on the heavily defended causeways into the island 6 �city and by their excited hatred for their Mexica oppressors a danger to Cortes's prudent intentions}; the crucifix may well, in Carlos Fuentes's words, "have made their minds collapse," as they saw how their own numerous gods demanded numerous sacrifices of them, while this one Christian god sacrificed one man, himself. Such factors or forces are called, in the categories in which history is conceptualized, technological, demographic, epidemiological, political, psychological, or what have you. Perhaps they were necessary to Spani?h success. But a number of contemporaries thought that at various junctures it might well have gone otherwise. For example, the strong-minded king ofTexcoco, Cacima, said that all the Spaniards within Tenochtitlan could be killed in an hour; Cortes himself thought so. To me historical inevitability seems an ex post facto cause. It is the way afait accompli presents itself, when passage has turned into past. I cannot quite tell whether my rejection of historical determinism should be reinforced or thrown into doubt by the fact that the Mexica themselves had given themselves over to fate, as I will tell. Perhaps that very self-surrender was a sufficient condition, the factor that makes the outcome practically certain. But that would only be half the explanation; for the other half one would have to look in the nature of the Europeans as well. Before doing that, let me complete the apology for my title. In it I mention the two empires, though I will speak of one only, Anahuac. I mean no reflection on the Inca realm, that marvel of social administration and public works built with the most astounding masonry I've ever seen. But both of the Peruvian protagonists were like deteriorated copies of their Aztec templates. Pizarro was an intrepid thug, by all accounts, and Atahualpa a culpably and carelessly arrogant man with a violent history. Since it seemed to me that the pairs of chief actors in this drama not only were the main factors because both empires were autocracies, but were also in 7 �their very distinctive ways personally emblematic of their worlds, I chose the more humanly accessible, the more expressive duo. Finally, I refer to the Sun because the solar domination under which both these Precolumbian empires labored seemed to me more and more significant. The Incas called themselves the Children of the Sun; their great Sun Temple at Cuzco, the Coricancha, was studded with gold, "the tears wept by the sun." So too the Mexicans, who called their generals "the Lords of the Sun," had come into the marshes of Lake Texcoco, their place of destiny, led by priests who bore on their backs a twittering medicine bundle. It was Huitzilopochtli, who was reborn on the way at Teotihuac<in, the birthplace of the gods, and later installed in Tenochtitlan in the Great Temple. There he was incessantly nourished with human blood. Of course, when I use the indicative mood in speaking of the Aztec gods, I am not reporting fact-I am telling what the Aztecs said and are thought to have believed. The most difficult thing, I have discovered, is for historians to find the right voice in speaking of alien gods, especially when they are many in number, fluid in function, and visible in many forms. The Indians' relation to the sun I have come to think of as symbolic of the whole debacle and even its proximate cause. To anticipate my version of a common idea: The daily, annual and epochal returns of the heavenly body were to the Aztecs so fearsomely antic, so uncertain, that they burdened themselves, as their traditions taught them, with rituals and sacrifices. These were so demanding that they enfeebled both the Nahua empire and the Nahua's souls. The West's relation to the Sun was just the opposite. In 1506, just about the time young Cortes came to the Indies, Copernicus was beginning to write On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. It is one of Western modernity's seminal works, which our sophomores study. In it he shows that the mathematical rationalization of the 8 �heavens is more economically accomplished and the celestial phenomena are better "saved" if the sun stands stably at the center of the world. But his motive is not only mathematical economy. "For who," he says, "would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple in another place than this, wherefrom it can illuminate everything at the same time?" Cortes was surely not a premature Copernican, but he acted out of a tradition in which one God controls the cosmos through the laws of nature. Since the deity' is not capricious, celestial n1j.ture is ever-reliable, well-illuminated and confidence-inspiring. Nature's sun does not, in any case, respond to human · propitiation and Nature's god prefers prayers to ritual sacrifices. Let me append here a poignant incident told by Cortes. In the final days of the investment of Tenochtitlan, a delegation of parched and starvmg Mexica came to the banicades. They said that they held Cortes to be a child of the Sun, who could perform a circuit of the earth in a day and a night. Why would he not slay them in that time to end their suffering? Let me hold off yet one more minute from my main task to tell you what motives drew me into a study so far from our Program. To begin with, there was the sheer enchantment of what proved to be a fragile civilization and the unburdened romance of comfortably un-current drama. All that romance I got from reading William Hickling Prescott's Conquest ofMexico of 1843, and his Conquest of Peru of 1847. Of the first book he himself wrote that it was conceived "not as a philosophical theme but as an epic in prose, a romance of chivalry." For this approach later historians, for whom demythification, deromanticization, and the dispersal of human deeds into forces and patterns is a professional requirement, despise him somewhat, and it took me a while to see what valuable lesson could be drawn from his telling. Prescott has it right; first the great tale, then the critical theory. 9 �From the first I knew I was reading the American Gibbon. We at St. John' s used to read parts, particularly notorious :fifteenth chapter, of that English historian's monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, completed in 1788. To my taste the American is the finer of the two. Gibbon conceals in the magnificantly Latinate periods of his style the universal irony of the ultimately enlightened man. I do not fault him for sitting in judgment, for a non-judgmental historian is an incarnate contradiction and produces only an armature o( facts without the musculature that gives it human shape. But I am put off by his judging as an Olympian enthroned on Olympus. In that fifteenth chapter, which treats the question "by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of this earth?" (a question of the kind I am asking) he reflects with raised eyebrows in tum on the mortification of the flesh, pious chastity and divine providence, so as to come to a pretty secular answer, just as if Christianity were not first and last a faith. Surely when a faith conquers, its substance must be given some credit. Prescott, on the other hand, who had in his youth privately critiqued Gibbon's style for its "tumid grandeur," writes with deliberate American plainness,though to this twenty-first-century ear, with a dignified elegance. What matters more to me is that he does his level best to enter into the feelings and thoughts of his alien world, finding much to admire in the Aztecs and much to blame in the Spaniards; for example he calls the massacre of the Indians in fateful Cholula a "dark stain" on Cortes' s record . But for all his romantic pleasure in new marvels he never condescends to accept the horrifying elements of Aztec civilization. He recognizes that these are not individual crimes but systemic evils that his Western liberal conscience cannot condone. One might say that he dignifies his subjects with his condemnation. For this candor he is, as you can 10 �imagine, belittled these days as naive, culture-bound, and ethnocentric. I shall have a word to say on the sophisticated reverse bigotry of his belittlers. His style, to add one more feature, is extraordinarily vivid; it compares to Gibbon's as a classical statue in all its original bright encaustic colors to one that has been dug up, now only bare white marble. This visual aliveness may be a "blind Homer" effect. When Prescott was a young student dining at the Harvard Commons, he was hit in the eye by a hard piece of bread during a food fight and was half-blind for the rest of his life. It is characteristic of this man that, although he knew whose missile had hit him, he never told the name. His enormous collection of sources was read to him and evidently richly illustrated in his imagination. I might mention the other chief sources I read. (A longer bibliography, merging books read and those merely consulted, is attached.) First for anyone interested in the actual course of the Conquest is Bernal Diaz del Castillo's True History of New Spain of 1555 . This simply told, incident-rich account of the march on Tenochtitlan and what happened afterwards gains credence from the fact that the old trooper was disgruntled with his captain's assignment of rewards-the common condition of the Conquistador ranks; the poor devils got little for their endless exertions and wounds. In spite of his grievances, Diaz's love and admiration for Cortes unsuppressably dominates his story. The Conquistadores are sometimes represented as having had eyes for nothing not made of gold. Here is the old soldier's recall of Tenochtitlan as he first glimpsed it, thirty-six years before, on a causeway leading toward the island city: We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues (temples) rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things we saw were not a dream. It is not to be wondered that I here write it down in this manner, for there is so much to think over that I do not know how to describe 11 �it, seeing things, as we did, that have never been heard of or seen or even dreamed. These men; some of them ruffians, but with medieval romances behind their eyes to help them see alien beauty, were evidently not altogether sick with gold greed. But those later writers who don't blame them for the one, accuse them of the other: they're either merely medieval knighterrants or merely mercantile expeditionaries. In fact, they seem to have been poignantly aware that they were seeing sights no European had ever seen before or could ever see after. Here is what they saw: A city edged by flowering "floating gardens," the mud-anchored chinampas, lying on the shining flat waters of a shallow, irregular lake collected in a high valley guarded by the snowy peaks-even in August---ofthe two volcanoes; straight broad causeways connecting the city to the shore giving into straight broad avenues leading from the four directions of the winds to its sacred center, the center of the world, with its great, gleaming, colorfully decorated temple pyramid; a grid of smaller streets edged with bridged canals; a myriad of lesser temple pyramids, some smoking with sacrifices; palaces with stuccoed walls and patios polished to gleam like silver; sparkling pools; crowds of clean, orderly people going about their business, especially in the great market of Tlatelolco; gardens everywhere; and the white houses of the city's quarter million inhabitants with their flat roofs, the azoteas from which two years hence such a deadly shower of missiles would rain down on the returning Spaniards that the dwellings were demolished one by one.-All these features of the vision have been, incidentally, described with a poet's relish by William Carlos Williams: [T]he city spread its dark life upon the earth of a new world, sensitive to its richest beauty, but so completely removed from those foreign contacts that harden and protect, that at the very breath of conquest it vanished. 12 �The mutual admiration of Indians and Spaniards was great-in the beginning. True, the Spaniards, whom Cortes's vigilance kept sleeping in their armor, stank in the nostrils of the much-bathing Indians, and the priests with their long, blood-matted hair in their gore-bespattered sanctuaries nauseated the Spaniards. (I omit here, for the moment, the Spaniards' response to the sacrifices themselves, which marked, on the Christians' side, the beginning of the end of amity.) The Spaniards were astonished by Indian craftsmanship. Diaz describes.after decades a necklace made of golden crabs (others say crayfish) that Montezuma placed around Cortes's neck. Of course, Diaz described the golden gifts more often in terms of the pesos they weighed when melted down into bullion. I note here that the Aztecs did not, evidently, have scales and did not reduce objects to their universal stuff, ponderable mass (thus the Mexicans used natural items, quils of gold dust and cocoa beans, for currency, while the Spanish had the peso d' oro, the "gold weight," calibrated in fact to silver, to 42.29 grams of the pure substance)~ this intellectual device of universal quantification even those critics of the West who deplore it can hardly forego in the business oflife. The Spaniards were astounded by, and perhaps a little envious of, the stately splendor of the cacique' s accoutrements. The Indians, on their part, were amazed by the invaders' daring, tenaicty, and endurance. They called them, as the Spanish heard it, teules, teat/ being the Nahuatl word for god. The term seems to have been used somewhat as Homer uses dios, indicating sometimes just excellence and sometimes divinity. As we shall see, the Aztecs had a serious reason to call Cortes and his people gods. The Spanish, on their side, in their very horror of the frightful-looking Aztec god-images, paid them a certain respect in regarding them not as mere idols, deaf and dumb objects of stupid worship, but much as the Mexica themselves did: Sahaglin, of whom I will shortly tell, records an Aztec ruler's admonitory speech in which he says: "For our lord seeth, heareth within wood, within stone." The god-representations were 13 �not of masks of nothing to the Christians, but they were images of demons, of the Devil in various shapes. Thus in looking at the Nahuatl side in Sahagun's dual language text, I noticed that diablo, Devil, had become a Spanish loan word in Nahuatl--one new name for all the old divinities, to be abominated but also acknowledged. The second eyewitness source is Cortes himself, who wrote to his sovereign, Charles V, five letters reporting on his activities. Of these cartas de relacion, lettex:s ofreport, all but one are extant in copies. They are not notes but voluminous, detailed accounts beginning with the first, pre-Cortes exploration of the Gulf Coast and ending with Cortes's own post-Conquest explorations; the second and third letter contain the material for this lecture. The English version conveys a flavor of studiedly plain elegance. These clearly literary works are charged by historians with being both subtly self-aggrandizing and consciously myth-making. To me it would seem strange if Cortes, in writing to his sovereign, on whom depended acknowledgements and rewards, did not portray his exertions most favorably. It might be said-I don't know whether in mitigation or exacerbation-that he was also willing to suppress a brave but irrepressible compaiiero's guilt : Nowhere have I found even a mention of Alvarado's culpability in the events leading to the noche triste. It is also said that Cortes invented the myth of an Aztec empire which rivaled Charles's own, to whet the Spanish emperor's interest in his new dominion. To me, the account itself, telling of tributes owed by the subject cities and of their chiefs obliged to be in attendance in Tenochtitlan, sounds more like information he was in fact given by proud Mexica officials or disaffected dependents. Above all, Cortes fills his letters with myriads of meticulously noted detail-too thick and too vivid to be attributed to mere mendacious fantasizing . He would have had to have been a veritable Gabriel Garcia Marquez to invent so magical a reality. For, he says, "we saw things so 14 �remarkable as not to be believed. We who saw them with our own eyes could not grasp them with our understanding." Cortes himself will appear in a moment. The third source, the most exhaustive in scope and remarkable in method, is The History of the Things of New Spain by the before-mentioned Friar Bernadine de Sahagun. He had arrived as the forty-third of the religious that Cortes had requested in one of his letters to the emperor. The Conquistador needed them to cany on the task of conversion, bec~use, as he said, the ·,_,. . . Indians had a great natural attraction to Christianity; indeed in the early post-Conquest years, Indians were baptized by the thousands a day. (The reasons that Cortes's observation is not implausible will be mentioned below.) The name New Spain in Sahagun's title is, incidentally, Cortes's own for conquered Anahuac: ''New Spain of the Ocean Sea." For the Conquistador it betokens a great colonial accession to old peninsular Spain and the emphasis is on "Spain." But later the accent shifts to "New," as the criollos, the Mexican-born Spaniards, rebel against the old country's domination. Eventually a nativist revival and a growing sense of nationhood leads to a rejection by the nativeborn Spaniards themselves of their Conquistador heritage, and when in 1821 the country achieves independence, it will be called by the old Nahua name for Tenochtitlan, Mtxico (now pronounced in the Spanish way, Mehico) . Nativist Mexico's tutelary deity will be Quetzalc6atl, the dominating god of this lecture, of whom more in a moment. Back to Sahagun. He learned Nahuatl himself and spent the rest of his life, with much untoward clerical interference, compiling the world's first inside ethnographic account. In his college he trained his own informants, Indian boys, often of noble descent, who could interview their living elders and obtain the information that Sahagun compiled in parallel columns, Spanish and Nahuatl. The work, in twelve volumes, is known as the Florentine Corpus. Lisa Richmond, 15 �our librarian, fulfilled my·unexpectant hopes by buying the very expensive English edition for our library, and if one reader a decade finds the delight and illumination in it that I did, the investment will be well justified. Sahagun begins with the gods and their births-for like Greek gods, these gods were born, at Teotihuacan, 33 miles northeast of Tenochtitlan. This sacred city was well over a millennium old when Anahuac was established, and in ruins. But there the Mexica came to worship, particularly at the great temple pyramid dedicated to Quetzalcoatl. What bound new Anahuac to old Teotihuacan-the name means City of the Gods-was their common era, that of the Fifth Sun, upon whose destruction the world would end. Sahagun then records everything from the sacred rituals and binding omens to the set . . moral speeches (much more charming without failing to be scary than similar speeches made by our elders) down to the riddles people asked, such as "What drags its entrails through a gorge?" Answer: "A needle." The next to last book is an inventory of the "Earthly Things" of New Spain, its flora, fauna and minerals; the chapter on herbs begins with the plants "that perturb one, madden one," the hallucinogens. The twelfth book is Sahagun's own history of the Conquest. Some say that the first bishop of New Spain, Zumarraga, conducted a huge auto-da-je, a book burning of Aztec codices, those screenfold books composed in glyphs (stylized figures with fixed meanings) combined with lively pictures. Others say that those codices that weren't destroyed by the hostile Tlaxcalans or in the great conflagration of Tenochtitlan were spirited away by Indians. In any case, the art of illustration was still alive, and Sahagun used the talents of Indian painters to supplement his records in this visually delightful pre-alphabetic way. Finally I want to mention the History of the Indians of New Spain by another Franciscan, affectionately named by his Indian parishioners Motolinia, Nahuatl for "Little Poor One," since 16 �he took his vow of poverty seriously. He reports the terrible post-Conquest sufferings undergone by the Indian population; worse than their cruel exploitation by the disappointed Conquistadores and colonists was the succession of European plagues (smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, for which the Indians reciprocated only with syphilis). I am impressed, over and over, with this pattern: that the inoculated West does most of its harm to other civilizations unintentionally, and I mean not only through their physical susceptibility but even more, through their spiritual and intellectual vulnerability. The reason we can cope with our dangerously developed, potent tradition is that we know how to fight back, how to subject our powers to constraining criticism and how to correct our aberrations by returns to sounder beginnings. Critique and Renaissance are the continual evidence of our self-inoculation, and we see right now the dangerous consequences of the Western invasion of souls not so protected. But Motolinia also reports successes, not only in conversions, which were too stupendous in number and abrupt in spiritual terms to be always quite real. What is lovely to read about is not only his affection for the gentleness and dignified reticence of his boys but their quick intelligence and general talentedness; some learned enough Latin in a few years to correct the grammar-a tense but triumphant moment for their teacher--of a visiting dignitary. They sang liturgies like angels and easily learned to play European instruments. No wonder Mexico City was to become, in the eighteenth century, this hemisphere's greatest center of baroque music; its chief composer, Manuel de Zumaya, Chapel Master at the very Cathedral of Mexico City which replaced Huitzilopochtli's temple, was part-Indian. I should also mention two more works written with great sympathy for the Indians: Bishop las Casas's Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies of 1542, a book of passionate accusation against the Spanish conquerors and colonists, and Cabesa de Vaca's Relacion, the 17 �story of the tribulations of a discoverer of Florida, who was himself for a while enslaved by Indians. By contemporary historians the Aztecs are treated in almost comically opposite ways. Jacques Soustelle paints their daily life as an idyll of gentle, flower-loving, orderly culture, made poignant on occasion by the necessities of the ritual care and feeding of the gods. It is the myth of harmony and happiness the Mexica themselves encouraged in the revisionist accounts that succeeded the "book burning" by Itzc6atl, their first emperor. Inga Clendinnen, on the other hand, depicts a somberly severe, fear-ridden, God-encumbered society, whose sacrificial rituals, coruscating with whirling sights and penetrating musical noise, were, she says, "infused with the transcendent reality of the aesthetic." Hugh Thomas, the moSt recent historian of the Conquest, a sensible and thorough marshaller of thousands of facts, speaks similarly ofuthe astounding, often splendid, and sometimes beautiful barbarities" of Aztec ritual practice. What astounds me is not the antithetical views of Aztec life, for these polarities seem to have been of the Aztec essence. What takes me aback is that my contemporaries seem to wish to appear as knowing what is beautiful but not what is wrong. There are of course exceptions, writers who feel insuperable moral unease over these alien customs they are by their professional bias bound to honor. The imaginary experiment that I, as an outsider and amateur, have devised for myself to put the profession in general to the test is this: When the Spaniards first came on the remains of ritual killings-later they saw the rituals themselves and eventually found the body parts of their own comrades---they broke into the holding pens where prisoners were being fattened and stormed the temples. Would the professors have done the same or would they have regarded the practice as protected by the mantra of "otherness"? I am assuming here that they do disapprove of human sacrifice in their own culture. For my part, I cannot tell what I would have �had the courage to do, but I would have been forever ashamed if I had not shared in the revulsion, the reversal of an original appreciation that, for all their rapaciousness, the Christians had for the Indians-and I might add, for certain remarkable Indian women. I have thus evolved for myself two categories of historians: non-condoners and condoners. The older writers tend to be non-condoners; they are not careful to cloak themselves in moral opacity; what they abhor at borne they will not condone abroad, be it ever so indigenous and ever so splendid. One remarkable exception is the before-mentioned Bartolome de Las Casas, who lays out the case for human sacrifice as being both natural-since men offer their god what they hold most excellent, their own kind-and also as being within our traditionsince Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's bidding, and God himself sacrificed his son. The difficulty with this latter argument would seem to be that Abraham's sacrifice was called off, and God's sacri£ce was unique, while Indian sacrifices were multitudinous. Las Casas is the preceptor ofTzetan Todorov, a European intellectual who, in his book Conquest, tries hard to come to grips with "the Other," with the Aztec non-West. He finally elevates the Other over his own: The Aztecs made sacrifices, the Spaniards committed massacres. And here the rational difficulty is that Aztec religion commanded these deaths and Christian religion forbade them, so that Todorov is comparing customs with crimes. This enterprise of restricting universal morality in the interests of empathy with otherness puzzles me a lot. For if we are really and radically each other's Other, then those who leave their own side to enter into the Other will thereby also lose their footing as open-eyed contemplators. In any case, it seems to me that the non-condoning Prescott's grand narrative has done more for the memory of this bygone civilization than have the condoning contemporaries. For he induces 19 �what Virgil calls lacrimae rerum, tears for lost things-while they invite, in me at least, contrariness, resistance to their sanctimonious self-denial. You can see that as I read on I developed an interest in historiography, the reflective study of historical accounting itself For it seems to me of great current importance to consider a propensity of Western intellectuals, particularly pronounced in the social studies and expressive of a strength and its complementary weaknesses native to this tradition: knowledgeable selfcriticism flipping into unthinking self-abasement before the non-West. I say this mindful of the moral quandary of pitting the humanly unacceptable, but, so to speak, innocent evils, the traditional practices of a whole civilization, against the crimes of individuals transgressing the laws of their own, crimes magnified by its superior power. And now a final motive for this, my aberrant interest: We here on the Annapolis campus are only 200 miles further from Mexico City than from our other halfin New Mexico; Incan Cuzco is nearly on our longitude of76° W. Yet these pre-Columbian empires are hardly ever in our common consciousness, even less now than in the decades after Prescott's very popular book appeared. True, some of the skyscrapers of the twenties and thirties intentionally recalled Mesoamerican pyramids. True, the Nahuatl words chocoldtl and tamal!i are in our daily vocabulary, as is Nahua cooking, that is, Mexican food, in our diets. The Aztecs had in fact a high cuisine; the description of the emperor's daily service with its hundreds of dishes--among which (lest we be tempted too much) there may have been, as Diaz reports, the meat of little children-is staggering in its variety; indeed there cannot ever have been a potentate more luxuriously or elaborately served. Of all this we've adopted, through modern Mexico, the low end, but where else do the Empires of the Sun figure in our lives? This surprised sense of their missing influence made me engage in another one of those imagination-experiments by which 20 �we see the world anew: \Vhat if, as King Cacama ofTexcoco and some later historians thought possible, the Mex.ica had just killed Cortes and his band, so that the Westernization of Anahuac had been held off for some centuries?-for it is not within my imagination that the West was forever to be resisted . Suppose the unwitting extermination of the Indians by disease had thus been prevented. (I might say here that this huge demographic disaster, possibly among the worst in history, is numerically unfixed . Some say Anahuac had thirty million, some say it had four before Cortes. Some say by the mid-fifteenth century this population had been reduced to 2.6 or 1.2 million, to be fully restored only much later.) Suppose, then, that the ravaged generation of the Conquest and post-Conquest era had instead been preserved, and Nahua civilization with it. Suppose eventually North American jeans and technology had drifted down and Aztec gorgeousness and craftsmanship up the latitudes.- ! might inject here that the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who has grappled seriously with such dreams, comes to the sad but realistic conclusion that the loss of native culture is worth the benefit to ordinary people that these imports bring.-Suppose moreover that our American English had absorbed some of the suavely dignified classical Nahuatl, its urbane address, its poetic rephrasings, its expressive wordagglutinations; suppose as well that the speech of the N ahua had accepted some of our flamboyant informality. Suppose our clothing had been restyled by Aztec orchidaciousness and our manners had been a little improved by Aztec ceremoniousness. Suppose our political discourse had been informed by a neighboring monarchy against which we had never had to rebel. We can learn in our imagination whether such fine acquisitions could have come into our way of life without losing their hieratic heart. Would not one of the parties in this cultural exchange eventually tum out to contribute the core and the other the decoration? My provisional 21 �answer is that the West would assert itself as the substructure and the Empire of the Sun would become part of its recreation--they would be the pilgrims and we the tourists. The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes tells of a similar imagined reversal of history in the semi-historical story "The Two Shores." Here Aguilar, Cortes' s first interpreter who had long lived with the Maya, speaks from the grave. He tells how even while in Cortes's employ he held with the Indians and, by always translating.not what Cortes said but what he thought, caused trouble. He confesses that he was jealous of Malinche, the Nahuatl- and Mayan-speaking woman, whose Mayan Aguilar translated into Spanish. She soon became Cortes's mistress and learned Spanish; she was one of the central figures of the conquest, present and mediating on every great occasion; Aguilar was made redundant But revenge is not his final passion. It is rather a plan to mount with his Mayans a reverse conquest, a successful invasion of Spain, and there to recall the defeated Moors and the expelled Jews, to inaugurate a darker-skinned, better melded Europe, "a universe simultaneously new and recovered, permeable, complex, fertile,,., where "Sweet Mayan songs joined those of the Provencal troubadours . .. ."But Aguilar, as he dreams his impossible dream, is dead of the bubonic plague that did not attack only Indians. So these imagination-experiments endorse the question raised by the facts with which I began: How can we understand what happened here, on this American continent, between 1519 and 1534? Can we compel the fortunes of war and the forces of history to show their human motive power? To get at some sort of answer, I shall take up the four factors in the conquest of Mexico that seem to me most revealing: One is a god, Quetzalcoatl; one is a practice, human sacrifice; two are men, Montezuma and Cortes. 22 �Quetzalcoatl, the most appealing of the Mesoamerican gods, is also most deeply implicated in the Mexican debacle. This is a complex figure, a god of human interiority and of the works of civilization, a searcher into the depth of hell and the guardian of terrestrial idylls, a priest king of Tula and the deus absconditus of Anahuac, an Indian Prometheus. He was not the tribal god of the Mexica, having been in the country long before they arrived. Their god was Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and of the sun, or rather the Sun itself, who shared the great temple pyramid of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the scene of so much of the drama in this tale, with Tlaloc, the god of rain-the god who floods the heavens with the god who drenches the earth. When the Mexica were still Chichimeca (as the Nahua called the wandering semi-savages of the north), coming down from their mythical city of origin Aztlan (whence the name Aztec) in search of their appointed home, their priests carried on their backs, as I mentioned before, a twittering medicine bundle. This was Huitzilopochtli, reborn at Teotihuacan, the birthplace of the gods, as the Fifth Sun. His name means "Hummingbird On the Left" or "On the South," perhaps because he and his people went southwest to find their marshland home on Lake Texcoco, perhaps because the god-figure was half-bird, having a thin, feathered left leg. In effect their god was crippled. Cripples, dwarves, hunchbacks, albinos play a great role in Nahua history, partly because the valley people had an inexhaustible interest in the sports and varieties of nature: Montezuma's palace complex included besides an aviary, a zoo, an arboretum, a gallery of anomalous humans; but there may be something deeper to it, some sense of awe before the exceptional-I don't know. The war god was a hummingbird because Aztec warriors who died in battle went not to the murky Hades of Mictlan but to a sunny Elysium where they flitted about feeding on flowery 23 �nectar-perfect examples of a dominant Aztec characteristic, the abrupt juxtaposing of or transiting from the brutal to the delicate. Most of the Aztec gods seem to have had frightful aspects. There is a statue of Huitzilopochtli' s mother Coatlicue, a chunky monster with a necklace of human parts and a head like an oblong package made up from two compressed snakes springing from her neck. The tribal god himself must have looked inhumanly terrifying. Not so Quetzalcoatl. The Aztecs were very sensitive to human beauty-the ugliness of the gods is clearly deliberate-and this god was represented as beautiful, though in a way which, although not unique to him, is yet most remarkable. Quetzalcoatl's name combines the word quetzal, a Mesoamerican bird that has precious green tailfeathers (the green of quetzal feathers and of jade was the color of the Mexica nobility), with coat!, meaning snake. So he is the bird-snake, or the Plumed Serpent, belonging both to the sky and the earth. And thus he is shown in some sculptures, with coils whose scales are lengthened into feathers neatly piled into a spiral. The fanged jaws are wide open and frame a handsome, spare young male face, with high-bridged nose, well-shaped eyes, thin-lipped mouth-the face, I imagine, of a young Aztec noble. Is this face that of the god within a serpentine integument, or is the creature as a whole the god, or is it the god's priest in his ritual costume? It is not clear that it is even a permissible question. The Aztecs appear to have had the most flexible notions of their divinities. The gods amalgamate competences, share names, identify with their victims, and merge with their priests. As far as I can tell, this mode is neither confusion nor indeterminacy. It is rather a kind of conceptual fluidity which does become fixed in the very precisely promulgated rituals. The graphic art of the Aztecs expresses this multifarious melding by its complexly intertwined 24 �figures with their attributes all drawn indistinguishably on one plane and discriminable only to an expert in Aztec divinity. But of Quetzalcoatl we know that he was indeed both god and man. As man he was then lord of Tula, and as the Toltec lord he became fateful to the Mexica. To me the most appealing characteristic of these newcomers, these recent Chichimeca, was their longing deference to a city of the. past, Tula, a city forty miles.north of their lake and overthrown more than 300 years before Montezuma' s day. Tula was to Tenochtitlan what Athens has been to Europe and still is to us in Maryland and New Mexico: the source of wisdom, art, and ideals oflife. The Toltecs were to the Mexica like gods, walking swiftly everywhere on blue sandals, wrapped in flowery fragrance. For them corn sprouted in enormous ears, precious cocoa beans--one of the Mexican currencies-were found in plenty, and cotton grew already dyed in rich colors. They made works of art so exemplary that the Aztecs gave their own craftsmen the generic name of tolteca, Tulans. Over this earthly idyll Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin, Our Dear Lord Quetzalcoatl, ruled as priest and king, godlike but also all too human. I cannot tell you what then happened in all its tragicomic detail. But in brief, Huitzilopochtli and other gods arrived in the guise of mischiefmaking wizards. Never mind the disparity in dates. This is the story of a newer god of war undoing an older god of civilization, and, I suspect, the story of how Huitzilopochtli' s people betrayed their assumed Toltec heritage. These wizards assaulted the Toltec lord, who had grown in some way neglectful, with portents and temptations. They tempted him with pulque, the wine made from the maguey cactus, the American aloe, whose consumption was fiercely regulated in Tenochtitlan. They raised indecent passions in princesses and induced civil wars that Quetzalcoatl had to win with his army of dwarves and cripples. They caused the T olteca to sing 25 �and dance themselves to death. To these temptations the lord of Tula succumbed as a participant. Finally, however, they tried to force him to make human sacrifices. Here he balked and refused and was for that steadfastness driven from Tula. All this is told by Sahagun and other Indian sources. This is the moment to say once more what needs saying just because it seems too naive for words: To report that Huitzilopochtli did this and Quetzalcoatl that is not to confer the status of existence on these divine figures . Indeed they became fateful to thei~ people precisely because they were so vulnerable to non-existence proofs. There is a stone head that shows the Dear Lord weeping, long clublike tears issuing straight from the god's eyes, probably those he wept as he went into exile. The same head shows him heavily bearded, an unusual feature in a young god, and among the Indians in general . He is also supposed to have been light-skinned. Quetzalcoatl flees toward the east. He crosses, in space not time, the path of the Mexica' s god going southwest, and he makes his way toward the east coast, there to embark with his loyal band on a raft of serpents and to drift into the rising sun-the very way Cortes, a white bearded man, took in reverse going west and inland. Cortes comes this way in 1519, just as the year that in the Aztec calendrical cycle is Quetzalcoatl's birth and death year, ce acatl, One Reed, had come round again. In this year the Dear Lord was destined to return by boat from his transoceanic exile. You can see the tragedy taking shape. The biggest pyramid in America rose at Cholula to mark one of the god-man's stations of flight. There the old god failed his people when, on his way to Tenochtitlan, Cortes massacred more than a hundred unarmed Cholulan nobles in his temple precinct. Cortes thought he had uncovered a plot to betray his band to the Mexica. Perhaps he had, and perhaps the planned ambush would have been the end for him if he had not prevented it with his characteristic 26 �merciless decisiveness. That we shall never know, but we do know this: The Cholulans remembered an old prophecy that the god who had rested from his flight in their city would protect them, and that if they pulled a stone out of his pyramid, a flood of water would sweep the enemy away. With panicky energy they succeeded in wrenching out a stone-and got a cloud of dust. The Plumed Serpent, briefly to finish his tale, was not permanently discredited, nor did he cease to occupy imaginations. He became the savior god of a resurrected Mexico. The friars who came at Cortes's request wanted a warrant for treating the Indians as aboriginal Christians; they saw in the wandering god St. Thomas, one of Jesus's twelve disciples who was his missionary to India. Quetzalcoatl was also the guardian god of the nativist movement in New Spain and Mexico, celebrated in murals and hymns by Mexican painters and intellectuals and even by that wandering Englishman D. H. Lawrence. His novel of 1926, The Plumed Serpent, is a repulsively fascinating, garishly proto-Nazi fantasy of the god's return in provincial Mexico, complete with the paraphernalia of Nuremberg: a charismatic god-representing leader, choreographed soldiery, Nazi-like salutes, and finally human sacrifice-all this so that the heroine, a manless ageing Irishwoman, might find a man who is a man, that is, who hardly ever talks. It is a travesty of the sorrowful Toltec divinity of civilization. Human sacrifice was, I have learned to think, not really just a Mexican custom ascribable to "otherness." The Mexica knew the story just told of Quetzalcoatl. I cannot believe that some of them, especially their last emperor, did not reflect that they were co-opting the god into a practice he abhorred and over which he went into exile. Perhaps those priests ofHuitzilopochtli, with their skull-decorated black gowns and blood-matted hair, were fanatics totally absorbed in their cultic task, but the educated nobles, admirers of Tula, so refined in their intimate habits and 27 �their social life, must have had qualms and doubts--unless there is no way to infer from ourselves to others. The numbers are staggering. It is reported that at the inauguration of Huitzilopochtli' s Great Temple in 1487, 20,000-by some readings 80,000--victims were lined up four abreast in queues stretching from the temple onto the city's causeways. (Is it altogether an ironical coincidence that these were about the numbers of Indians said to have px:esented themselves for conversion on certain days after the conquest?) And this killing went on, in smaller numbers, in the numerous minor temples of the city. Every twenty days, by the ritual calendar, there was a god's feast, requiring sometimes quite a few children, sometimes a woman, sometimes a specially prepared youth. The operation itself is often shown in the codices. The victims march, mostly unassisted, to the top of the pyramid; there they are laid on a convex sacrificial stone, their limbs are held by four priests while a fifth chokes off his screams with a wooden yoke, the obsidian knife rips into the chest, the heart, still beating, is held up to the Sun and put in a wooden bowl, the "eagle dish." The victim is rolled down the steps to be dismembered and distributed for feasting according to a strict protocol. The victims are children bought from the poor, the pick of slaves for sale in the market (who are ritually bathed), beautiful young nobles prepared in a year of splendid living for their role as ixiptlas, god-impersonators. Evidently certain divinities, like the ever-present Tezcatlip6ca, Lord of the Near and Nigh, who shared functions with the city god, were not only recipients of victims but were themselves sacrificed, albeit through their human incarnations-Dne noteworthy parallel to Christianity. It seems to be true that these ritual killings were not sadistic in intention or demeaning to the victims. While there are reports of weeping family and frightened victims, the sacrificial 28 �human was evidently well co-opted into the performance. Moreover, the cactus button peyotl and the mushroom teonanacatl, "Flesh of the Gods," both hallucinogens, and the alcoholic pulque seem to have been administered to the sacrifices, who were, in any case, intoxicated with the ritual swirl and the musical strider around them. For the prepared chosen at least this passage into a flowery next world was perhaps a high point of this life-though who knows how many victims, particularly the children, died experiencing extreme fear. These frightful, somber, and splendid festivals were evidently thought to be truly necessary to the survival of the city and the continuing existence of its world. Yet, as I said, the Aztec nobility, who were so finely attuned to right and wrong conduct (as their stock homilies, preserved by Sahagun, show), must have felt themselves to be living over a moral abyss, doing a balancing act in a threatening and fragile sacred world, which doomed them in their hearts for what they did and through their sacred duties for what they might omit to do. I have neglected to mention the largest and most steady supply of victims, the prisoners. The highest calling ofHuitzilopochtli's people, the soldiers of the Sun, was war, and the object of war was to take captives, an even higher object than the subjugation of Anahuac's cities. Promotion in the army was strictly according to the number of prisoners taken. The warriors needed to take prisoners to rise in rank; the city needed prisoners for their flesh and blood, the sacrifices that would feed and maintain the good will of the gods. It was a tight circle of necessities. This religious trap-I will call it that-had three devastating secular consequences. First, the Mexican army never learned, until it was too late, to fight to kill, to fight a war for survival in realest earnest. Second, Tenochtitlan trained up a deadly enemy for itself, the city ofTlaxcala, seated between itself and the eastern coast. There was a bizarre but logical institution in 29 �Anahuac, the so-called "flowery war," xochiya6yotl. The Triple Alliance of Anahuac, eventually dominated by Tenochtitlan and including Texcoco, had a mutual arrangement with three cities across the mountains, of which the aristocratic republic of Tlaxcala was the most independent. The agreement was to stage battles regularly for the sole purpose of obtaining from each other prisoners for sacrifice. This was a strange kind of ceremonious warfare, which required the highborn warriors skillfully to take their enemies alive, only to bring them back home to their delayed warriors' death. Meanwhile the Tlaxcalans remained free, in training, and full of hatred, and they became Cortes's most effective allies. And third, the evidence and actual sight of human sacrifice turned the Spaniards' stomachs-as powerful a revulsion as the moral one, I imagine. So when, as I said, they saw the remains of their own people, an ineradicable repugnance seems to have turned their hearts, a disgust which became the pretext for much savagery of their own. Montezuma was installed as tlatoani of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1502. 17atoani means "He Who Speaks," who has authority. Since Tenochtitlan was the secular and sacred center of the Aztec world, he was the speaker over the universe, the uei-tlatoani-usually rendered as "emperor." When he was killed in 1520 he was 52. His lineage was even shorter than the city's existence, whose founding date is 1345. The Anahuac empire was put together during the next century; Axayacatl, Montezuma's father, who died in 1481, was only the third emperor. As was the custom, the council that chose the new lord did not go to the son but first to Axayacatl's two brothers. When Montezuma became the sixth emperor, Anahuac was less than seventy years old. Historians disagree whether objectively the empire was in a state of youthful vigor or in the course of rigidified decline when Cortes came. But there can be no doubt that Montezuma was a monarch who personally felt doom corning. Motolinia says (probably incorrectly) that his very 30 �name--nomen omen--meant one who is sad and serious, as well as one who inspires fear and respect . As was necessary for the tlatoani, he had proved himself as warrior and officer, but he was also a highly educated man . The Mexica, like most high civilizations, were committed to a well-defined and diversified plan of education for their young. The set speeches, the traditional admonitions, that the ruling nobles made to their boys and girls upon thyir having reached the age of discretion are loving, somber, straitlaced, meticulous-and full of Nahua charm. The one from which I will read a sampling goes on for six of Sahagun's columns. It begins thus: Here art thou, thou who art my child, thou who art my precious necklace, thou who art my precious feather, thou who art my creation, my offspring, my blood, my image. And then the child is inducted into Aztec pessimism: Hear well, 0 my daughter, 0 my child. The earth is not a good place. It is not a place of joy; it is not a place of contentment. Then the little girl is given rules of conduct, for example: At night hold vigil, arise promptly. Extend thy arms promptly, quickly leave thy soft bed, wash thy face, wash thy hands, wash thy mouth, seize the broom; be diligent with the sweeping; be not tepid, be not lukewarm. What wilt thou seize upon as thy womanly labors? ... Look well to the drink, the food; how it is prepared, how it is made Then the speech touches deep moral matters: May thou not covet carnal things. May t}1ou not wish for experience, as is said, in the excrement, in the refuse. And if thou truly art to change thyself, would thou become a goddess? But there was also public education, a dual system. The Young Men's (and Women's) House, the telpochcalli, was open to the lower nobility and even to commoners. The boys' house had features of our prep school. The emphasis was on physical hardening and the performance of 31 �rough public service. A lot of rowdy fun was overlooked; some of the older boys even took mistresses, and, Sahagun reports, "they presumed to utter light and ironic words and spoke with pride and temerity." The second institution, the famous calmecac, was part seminary, part cadet corps. Here went the high nobility and commoners destined by talent to be priests. The daily routine was punishing; for example, sleep was often interrupted when the boys wen: called to draw blood from their earlobes and ankles with maguey spines. This self-sacrifice was said to have been instituted by Quetzalcoatl, who was in fact the tutelary divinity, the super-tutor, of the calmecac. Discipline was fierce. There were constant humiliations, and if a noble' s son was found even a little drunk on pulque he was secretly strangled; a commoner was beaten to death. The curriculum was rigid and rigorous. The boys learned the revisionist Mexica version of Nahua history from painted books that were expounded to them. They learned to speak ceremoniously and to perform ritual songs and dances accurately. They learned, besides the sign and number count of the 360-day solar calendar with its five unfortunate "hollow" intercalary days, the divinatory calendar. This was the "Sacred Book of Days" by which the priest told the feast days of the gods, the personal destiny of a baby and the epochs of the world. This study was evidently the most effective initiation into the Aztec way of seeing the world . That is the reason why the friars, trying to extirpate Aztec worship, denounced this sacred calendar with particular vehemence as having cast loose from the natural heavenly revol_utions and being an evil convention-as they said: "the fruit of a compact with the Devil." The two calendars came together every 52 years, an era called the Bundling of the Years. Ominously, such an epoch evidently occurred in 1506, "One Rabbit," when just as many yearbundles had gone by as would make the setting of the fifth Sun imminent, and with it the final 32 �destruction by earthquakes of Huitzilopochtli, his city, and the world whose center was Tenochtitlan. The year of 1519, moreover, was, as I said, ce acat!, "One Reed," the name of the year of Quetzalcoatl's birth, exile and prophesied return. A student of the calendar presumably knew himself to be living at once near doomsday and near delivery. From this schooling and his experience in the field, Montezuma emerged as high priest, warrior and tlatoani: spiritually austere for all his palatial luxury, a severe father to his Mexica, rigidly religious, ·and, for all the self-abasement his set accession speech required, an autocratic and aristocratic ruler, the first to restrict high office to the nobility. He was inaccessible to the populace, stately and ceremonious with his nobles, reserved as to his person: When Cortes, as he himself tells, tried to hug him "in Spanish fashion," Montezuma's attendants stopped him; this was court etiquette but presumably also personal preference. But above all he was a burdened man, doom-ridden, half hopeful, self-doubtful. "What shall I do, where shall I hide? If only I could tum into stone, wood or some other earthly matter rather than suffer that which I dread!" he cried out, this victor of nine pitched battles, to his magicians who could not turn to good the omens of evil to come (and got severely punished for it). This was no coward's funk but a pious man's terror of a probably inevitable future. There was a city across the lake, Texcoco, a member of Tenochtitlan's Triple Alliance. It paralleled the Italian cities of the Renaissance in high culture; it was a Tula revived. In the fifteenth century it had a poet-king, Nezahualc6yotl, whose poetry has the fragrance that arises when the melancholy of existence melds with soundness of heart. Like a Nahua Lucretius he offers his bitter cup with the rim sweetened by honey. He speaks: . I, Nezahualcoyotl, ask this : Is it true one really lives on the earth? Not forever on earth, only a little while here. 33 �Though it be jade it falls apart, though it be gold it wears away, though it be quetzal plumage it is tom asunder. Not forever on earth, only a little while here. This is beauty to console for the brevity of being, but in the Texcocan Renaissance prince it is without the panicky gloom of the Mexican Emperor of the late Fifth Sun. Nezahualcoyotl's underlying sense of life's inconstancy is the same, but Montezuma's w~ infected by the consciousness of a more starkly immediate doom. I think that Montezuma was probably an overwrought exemplar of a Mexica noble: devout witness of constant bloody brutality; refined connoisseur of jade and feather work; watcher for imminent death and destruction; avid collector of fleeting things like birds and flowers; cruel lord and ever-courteous prince; liar of great ability and treacherous too, as the Tlaxcalans believed; high noble of candid and simple bearing: witness the poignant speech of submission he appears to have made to Cortes when he was still in his own palace, when he still believed in the Spanish savior. He said with a smile: You too have been told perhaps that I am a god, and dwell in palaces of gold and silver. But you see it is false. My houses, though large, are of stone and wood like those of others. And as to my body [here he threw open his cloak]-you see it is flesh and blood like yours. Some see delicate irony in his words, particularly in the reference to the absence of gold. But to me his speech sounds heartfelt, and he was in fact submitting to men he thought might be teules, gods; Cortes's band, the santa compafzia, the Holy Company, might indeed be bringing back Quetzalcoatl-Cortes, "the white hero of the break of day." He had had some cause to be thus receptive, for in the decade before Cortes's arrival the omens had multiplied: the spontaneous combustion of Huitzilopochtli's temple, tongues of 34 �celestial fire, finally a bird found in Lake Texcoco bearing a black mirror in its head in which the emperor briefly glimpsed the strangers landing-Sahagun catalogues eight serious omens. I think Montezuma became heartsick and started vacillating, now welcoming the Spaniard from afar with golden gifts, now holding him off or even arranging his ambush. In the end he was transfixed like a rabbit by a snake, truly a snake since Cortes played the role of the Plumed Serpent. So he sent the Spaniard Quetzalcoatl's regalia, since it was the year ce acatl, One Reed . Not all his nobles were pleased at the emperor's submissiveness; they wept when not much later they attended his litter to his place of custody, his father's palace. Some historians think the omens were an ex post facto invention to make the catastrophe more palatable to simple people. But they sound very plausible; ominous events do occur in clusters before disasters (as Machiavelli observes in his Discourses), at least for those who have prophetic souls. The omens help explain Montezuma's fragility before the crisis. It was, I want to say, a type of fragility almost designed to highlight Cortes's robustness, as if Montezuma had found his fated match, the better to reveal the West to itself Once he had made his submission to the Spanish emperor and been taken into Spanish custody, another side of his character came out : He became receptive to new experiences, learned to shoot the crossbow, sailed Lake Texcoco on a brigantine, the first wind-driven vessel on those waters.-It is always the West's inventions, especially those that shoot far and go fast, that first beguile the non-West. He retained his exquisite courtesy and generosity; he became sociable and even affectionate with the Spaniards. It has been suggested that he was displaying the pathological bonding of a victim to his kidnappers. But by a concord with Cortes Montezuma was running his empire from Axayacatl's palace where he and the Spaniards were quartered, and 35 �he was free to indulge in his old pleasures like hunting. It is reported that if there was fun afoot he could dissolve in giggles. But this priest-emperor never converted or gave up human sacrifice, although frequently subjected to Cortes's passionate theological harangues against the ritual on the grounds of human brotherhood. As Fuentes says, it was simply a more urgent question to him whether the sun would rise and the world go on than what the Spaniards did to him or his empire. Nevertheless, I wonder if it ever came to him that his religious practices were, in the nature of things, futile, that the Christians had a sun that moved reliably and stably (and would soon even stand still) precisely because it was not a god and therefore not amenable to human exertion and sacrifice. Octavio Paz says in his Labyrinth of Solitude that the Aztecs committed suicide because they were betrayed by their gods. I th.ink they were, speaking more precisely, betrayed by their trust in their visible and palpable gods, who (as I th.ink in contrast to the early invaders, who acknowledged them as devils) did nothing and were nothing and absconded more crassly than could an invisible deity or one less abjectly served-a truth I have, strangely enough, never found enunciated by the historians I have read. Cortes, finally, the Conquistador, seems to me a man as emblematic of the conquering West as Montezuma was of the empire of the doomed Sun. Cortes was a hidalgo from an old, turbulent, moderately situated family. Having gotten into various scrapes he chose to come to the Indies in 1504 when he was nineteen-an age more often given over to wanderlust than to acquisitiveness. In 1519 he began to subdue Anahuac, whose chiefs became, as he put it to his sovereign, "Your Majesty's vassals, and obey my commands." No sooner had he conquered Mexico for Spain than he was beset by endless audiencias and residencias, tribunals and inquiries, conducted by officials whose rectitude was apparently not much greater than his own 36 �and whose daring was considerably less. Nevertheless, by 1529 he was Marquess of the Oaxaca Valley and Captain-General of New Spain, empowered to discover further lands and to colonize them. (In fact following Mexico he discovered and named California after a queen in one of those medieval romances.) He died in 1547, and his bones have undergone grotesque removals paralleling his downward course in Mexican history, during which Quetzalcoatl was raised to a national hero while his unwitting impersonator was suppressed by the descendants of the Conquest. The story of his and his Holy Company's march toward Tenochtitlan in 1519, his first peaceful entrance into the sacred and magical city, his expulsion, near-annihilation and devastating re-entry have lately been retold in all its fiction-defying detail by Hugh Thomas in Conquest. He lands on Anahuac's eastern shore with his little fleet of "water houses," as the natives described his three-masted square-riggers, of the type called naos. When they first saw them, they reported on them as "mountain ranges floating on water." His boldest first stroke is to dismantle his ships before he marches inland. Now the thirty-four-year-old sailor emerges as a man of many devices and deceits, a bold man of faith-and greed-inspired audacity-albeit somewhat more devoted to the salvation of his soul than to the amassing of gold; a resilient man well acquainted with suffering and depression; a man of self- and other-punishing endurance and scary tenacity, who seems to live on little sleep; cruel and charming, careful of his companions and demanding their utmost; prudent and daring; circumspect and lightning-quick; generous and grasping; kind and manipulative; and always an adventurer and a wanderer-as complex a man in his way as Montezuma. Prescott says in his personal memoranda, in which he details for himself the oppositions of Cortes' s character: The great feature of his character was constancy of purpose ... . He was inexhaustible in resources, and when all outward means 37 �were withdrawn, seemed to find sufficient to sustain him, in his own bosom. Now listen to the beginning of Homer's Odyssey: Tell me, 0 Muse, of the many of many twists who wandered so much when he had sacked the sacred city of Troy. He saw the towns of many men and knew their mind, and suffered much on the sea, seeking to save his soul and the return of his companions. No two men could be more alike; if I were to inventory the characters of the two adventurers nearly every feature in one list would tum up quite recognizably in the other, including the bouts of depression. And this happy circumstance tells me that Cortes was not primarily a man of his time: not just a medieval knight-errant or a mercantile-minded gold prospector, or a hard-tocontrol vassal of the Spanish crown, or a fierce competitor for the rights of first conquest-He was certainly all these, and it was because he returned to the Gulf Coast to intercept his Spanish pursuers that he first lost Tenochtitlan. But before these and more fundamentally he was a man who in his intense individuality expressed an ancient type of the West, Odysseus the selfsufficient, who talks to his own heart, who has many twists and devices, who is blunt and tactful, who can be driven to extreme cruelty and engage in gratuitous acts of kindness, who lies but not ignobly, and above all, who can, in a pinch, rely on his virgin goddess, Athena, because he relies on himself. In Cortes that ancient pagan character type seems to have comfortably accommodated, or better, absorbed the God from the other root of the Western tradition, though Cortes was particularly devoted to the Virgin. Hugh Thomas says that he became more God-fearing as the expedition went on-who wouldn't? His flagship sailed under a banner he had inscribed with the saying: "Friends, let us follow the Cross and if we only have faith in this sign we shall conquer." He was citing the legend under which the Emperor Constantine fought the battle that in 3 12 38 �turned the Roman Empire Christian. Cortes's Christianity is a debated subject, but to me it seems unquestionable. One kind of evidence is that this prudent commander several times put his expedition at risk because of his religious impetuousness and had to be restrained by Bartolome de Olmeda, the wise and patient friar with the expedition, a man who while practicing prudence also thought of the Indians' feelings-so .unlike Pizarro's fatal chaplain. On one memorable occasion, the emperor, at Cortes's request, invited him with some of his ·captains to come up the Great Pyramid ofHuitzilopochtli. Montezuma himself was, as usual, carried to the top, but Cortes insisted on marching up all 113 steep narrow steps and declared to the solicitous emperor waiting for him that "Spaniards are never weary;" indeed, as I mentioned, Cortes slept little when on campaign. Montezuma then obtained pemiission from the priests for Cortes, who was clearly already in the Christian conqueror mode, to enter the sanctuary. This reeking place so disgusted him that he asked Montezuma with a smile---not a charming one, I imagine---how so wise a prince could put his faith in a representation of the Devil. He offered to install in this temple, as he had on other pyramids, a cross and an image of the Virgin, before which the false gods would shrink into oblivion. Montezuma was deeply shocked and said-here is irony-that these were the gods that had ever led the Mexica to victory. Cortes, perhaps nudged by Friar Olmeda, apologized. But it was a dangerous moment. Montezuma stayed behind to expiate the sacrilege. This action, which could have meant the ·early end of Montezuma's policy of submission, was certainly impolitic and clearly inspired by pure if untimely Christian fervor. In his own account Cortes naturally suppresses this incident in favor of what must have been a later occasion, when he did actually topple the idol down the pyramid steps, and, as he claims, stop the sacrifices. 39 �Cortes became de facto emperor of Anahuac close to the time, namely 1513, that Machiavelli's Prince appeared. So I looked Cortes up, as it were. I have often wondered for whom this manual on rulership is meant, since natural princes already know it all and untalented rulers will simply use it as permission for misconduct. Cortes, it turns out, knows most of Machiavelli' s lessons: how to fight both like a fox and a lion, for he was proud of his "cunning stratagems" and fierce even when wounded and unarmed; how not to b'e good on occasion, for he could be brutal; how to get credit for every exploit, for his letters take care that he should; how to rule more by love than fear, as his trooper Diaz attests; how, finally, to be lucky, and-a Machiavellian or Odyssean trait of his own-how to lie royally without being commonly dishonest. But there were many more things that he did not do by this book but did rather against its explicit advice: he relied heavily on auxiliaries, fought with an amateur's improvisation, and did not study eminent predecessors-for there were none. But above all, Machiavelli doesn't seem to know, or at least to enunciate, the one thing most needful to an imperial conquistador: faith-in Cortes's case, Christian faith, but faith also in a more expansive sense, as I will try to show. Both rulers made mistakes. Montezuma should not have sent gold to greet the ''Holy Company," though how was he to know? He should not have quartered the Spaniards in Axayacatl's palace where the state treasure was hidden-and so on. But the chief mistake was to believe the prophecies and to submit to the omens, and so to the bearded white men coming over the water. Some of his nobles seem to have realized this, but they were themselves used to submitting to their lord, and so they wept silently. Cortes' s errors were those of a nervous yet decisive aggressor. At Cholula he stained his name with a possibly preventable massacre. At Tenochtitlan, when he hastened to the coast to 40 �repel his pursuers, he left in charge a valorous young brute, Pedro d' Alvarado, whom the Indians called Tonatiuh, the Sun, because he was blond and beautiful. He proved worse to them than their own doomed Fifth Sun, for as he was edgy, eager and without judgment, he unleashed a massacre on the unarmed celebrants ofHuitzilopochtli's festival which ended every chance of peaceful dominion and brought on that Sad Night. This was the night when the Spaniards, their Indian allies, and the Spanish women fighting desperately alongside their men, were driven from the city and nearly exterminated. Above all, he razed Tenochtitlan, the finest city in the world. Was it a mistake, a crime? Here is what he himself says in his account of the recapture of the city from the Mexica, who under the young Emperor Cuauhtemoc, Montezuma's nephew, had learned the Spanish skills: to fight to kill, to fight at night, to fight from the water. The passage is from the third letter to Emperor Charles V: All I had seen forced me to two conclusions, the one that we should regain little of the treasure the Mexicans had taken from us; the other that they would force us to destroy and kill them all and this last weighed on my soul. I began to wonder how I. could terrify them and bring them to a sense of their error. It could only be done by burning and destroying their houses and towers of the idols . . . . Of course, the letter explains first things first : why the Emperor isn't getting his customary fifth of treasure. Of course, it assumes that the Mexica are legally in rebellion. But it also reveals a certain travail of spirit, a conscience, a care for a people whose intelligence Cortes admired and whose fate he pitied, albeit he was its cause. On Cortes's premise the destruction was a necessity, but was the premise itself necessary? For my part, I simply cannot judge. It is true, however, that once he was master of Anahuac he looked carefully after his realm and probably did it more good in the long run than it ever was in Montezuma's power to do : He spent his own resources in rebuilding the country, introduced new plants and draught animals, condemned the enslavement 41 �of the Indians and recorded in his will his deep misgivings of conscience about the institution itself, and tried to mitigate the treatment of the natives by the colonists. And, of course, he abolished human sacrifice. All in all, his dubious deeds had the effect of relegating Anahuac to the past; his good deeds gave Mexico a future. And, pressed to think in these terms about the Conquest itself, I suppose with the Peruvian writer Mario Llosa that it belongs in the long run to the credit side of something, call it human welfare. But the question I proposed was how and why it could happen. So let me try to come to some sort of conclusion. Two worlds clashed (here the cliche tells the simple truth), and the leaders happened to be emblematic of their worlds. Let me first compare the divinities that led the leaders. We have an alumnus, Peter Nabokov, the stepson of the man to whom this lecture is dedicated, William Darkey. He is an expert on Indian sacred life and its sacred space. When he heard that I was reading on this subject he sent me a large box of books from his private library. In one of these books I found an article containing an antithetical listing of Aztec and Christian religiosity. On the left, the Nahua side, is listed (I select for brevity's sake) Symmetry, Autonomy, Interchangeability, and Cyclicality. On the right, the Spanish side, is listed Hierarchy, Centralization, Fixity, and Linearity. This right side is in fact recognizable as a checklist of features condemned in the West as evils of the West, a compendium of the self-critique of the West such as was current in the later part of the last century. I also recognize the left side of the list, and it does appear to me to be descriptive of Aztec religion. But notice this strange effect : how each characteristic of that religion induced an opposite effect on the Aztec polity. The complexly related Symmetries of divine functions make 42 �for a draining tangle of rituals; the Autonomy of the deities-as many as 1600-leads to a burdensome multiplicity of services; the Interchangeability of identities leads to dependence on priestly interpreters; and the Cyclicality leads to a sense of inescapable doom. In fact it was Anahuac that most tended toward social Hierarchy, administrative Centralization and rigid Fixity of protocol. The Spanish side, on the other hand, gave its real-life practitioners one supreme god, reliable in his operations, author of a stable creation, progressing hopefully into a new day. And so it was the Spaniards who could afford to be free, flexible, energetic, and self-reliant: When God permits them to be defeated it is, Cortes says, on account of their own sins, a deserved punishment, not a divine antic. But, a student of Aztec religion might argue, the similarities to Christianity are remarkably exact and numerous, so why would religion make the difference? To give a sampling of the parallelisms: The Indians had the symbol of the cross, a Maltese type, that turns up frequently in their visual art. They had absolution by confession, though it could be undergone only once in a lifetime. They had a form of baptism, ritual fasting, even an invisible god. Above all, they had the ritual ingestion of their god's blood: the victim's or their own blood was kneaded into loaves of amaranth seeds that were god-images and were then eaten. This last practice, the analogue of Christian communion, is most interesting to me, because some scholars represent this Christian sacrament as a form of cannibalism that brings Christianity closer to the Aztec feasting on flesh . But, of course, the blood partaken of during the Christian Eucharist is precisely not the blood of a living human being. Even a very untheoretical Christian knows that it is a mystery which is accompanied by a complex rational theology. Communicants know, if vaguely, that the wafer and wine are neither merely symbolic nor brutely real-the nature of their transformation is open to rational questioning: For example, have they undergone 43 �transubstantiation, so that the substance itself, the bread and the wine, are to be regarded as now the body and blood of Christ, or have they achieved consubstantiation, such that they present a duality of visible properties and invisible essence? I may be allowed to dismiss the beguiling but bizarre notion of the friars that the Indians were lapsed Christians, baptized a millennium and a half ago by Quetzalcoatl-St. Thomas; at any rate, they themselves were always afraid that the willing conversions of the Indians were perhaps rather shallow and masked the survival of the old similar-seeming worship. It remains a problem, requiring really deep investigation by people who know not only the methods of comparative ethnography but the ways of faith, whether such similarities betoken pure coincidence, or are features belonging to some general human religiosity, and whether such all-human phenomena have a deep or shallow common root. To me it seems, judging only at first glance, that a religion supported by many disparate narratives, whose meaning, being a matter of memory, is uncircumventably in the hands of trained priests, is simply incommensurable with a religion that has one master story whose ever new interpretations, carried on by priests, theologians, and laymen alike, strive for coherence. Let me make my point brusquely and minimally: Such a religion, Christianity in the present case, seems to me simply more energizing. To wit : Cortes liked to read, as he said, when he had time, and he knew some theology which, in turn, gave him the self-confidence to harangue an emperor. He went to mass in the morning without fail and was ready for the day. In defense, Montezuma could only tell divine stories-myths to us-and insist on his gods' past services, which he had to keep securing by spending every day much time and many resources on arduous cultic performances. Moreover, Cortes's Holy Company could rely on their God who, being invisible-though having one and only one human incarnation-was therefore impervious to sudden toppling. This 44 �God, a god mysterious but not capricious, made nature according to laws and left it largely alone. Thus God's created nature was open to the self-reliant inventiveness of human beings. This natural realm, being amenable to human rationality, invited initiative, for its God had himself engaged in radical innovation when he created the world and when he irrupted into history in human form . I have been engaged by this puzzle: We know that the Indians had wheeled toys; why did Anahuac wait for Cortes to introduce wagons? It seems to me that it is not generally true that necessity is the mother of invention, but rather than inventions develop necessities: We see a convenience and we need it. Anahuac, to be sure, had enough slaves and commoners with tumplines to drag its building stones anywhere. But why didn't someone think of the splendor of rolling in stately carriages over the waiting causeways of Tenochtitlan? By my premise it was not lack of need but something else, at which I am guessing: the Aztecs were close and loving onlookers and clever users of nature, but they were not on the lookout to go her one better, to whirl rather than to walk over her terrain. Perhaps the wheel isn' t the most convincing general example, since it seems to have come to the Western world not as an original invention but by diffusion, probably from Mesopotamia, but to me its absence in Anahuac does seem telling for Aztec invention-inertia. Theology, the laws of nature, interpretative accessibility, and inventiveness-these are great but they are not the only advantages that these Westerners who came out of the East carried with them. Others have been intimated : the fraternal equality of human beings insofar as they are ensouled creatures that Cortes preached to the Aztec nobles, whereas Anahuac was caste-ridden; the ensuing closeness of the leader to his men that made Cortes listen to the complaints and sometimes-never at crucial moments-heed the advice of his companions, whereas Montezuma 45 �was deliberately remote-his subjects had to avert their eyes when he passed-and autocratic; the project of propagating to all the world a truth felt to be universal that unquestionably drove Cortes if not the "Holy Company"-the name was first given ironically-whereas the Mexica rather collected the gods of other cities, ever more of them, for whom Montezuma even established a sort of all-Anahuac pantheon; and, for our times, above all, the tenacity of the Christians in holding on to life, whereas the Aztecs seemed somehow-Tm far from understanding it-to surrender themselves more readily to the thought of death and to death itself. Of course, the Conquistadores' Christianity was intertwined with that other root of our West, pagan Greco-Roman antiquity, of which I mention now only the intellectual taproot, the Greek one. From this dual root stems, it seems to me, that faith in a more comprehensive sense I mentioned before, the faith that underlies a daily life free for confident projects: the trust in the stable motions of nature combined with a contemplative care for transcendence, the faith in "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," to cite our founding charter AH of us here know--or will learn in the next four years-how much the Christian and post-Christian West owes to the Greek science of celestial nature and the rational account of divinity. But I want to recur to the human model that is exemplified with such spectacular accuracy by Cortes, the Homeric Odysseus, the first mature Western man (for Achilles, though in years the same age in the Iliad as was Cortes in 1519, is constitutionally a youth) . This man, a soldier and sailor too, is free, self-reliant, inventive, a discoverer of new lands, be it of the world or the soul, and, I nearly omitted to say, the lover of women of stature: Like Odysseus, who had his semi-goddesses abroad and his Penelope at home, Cortes had in his life two royal daughters of Montezuma and two Spanish wives, but above all his comrade, his advisor and interpreter, 46 �Malinali or Malinche, the Mexican princess christened Dona Marina. It was his partnership with her that gave him his Nahua nickname-the Indians addressed him as "Malinche;" if it was meant in derision, it was a misplaced scorn. She and Cortes were, like Odysseus and Penelope, one in their wily works, and they had a son, the Conquistador's heir Don Martin Cortes (named after the Conquistador's father), a son to whom he was as attached as Odysseus was to his Telemachus. I cannot pretend to understand how this distinctive species of Odyssean individualists is propagated down the ages, nor can I quite figure out whether the type produces the tradition or the tradition generates the type. In other words, to me this question seems askable and therefore pursuable: Whatever may be the case for the rest of the human world, is our West ultimately more a civilization or a kind of human being? I tend toward the latter, but for the moment I will take the safe though weasly way and say that together, type and tradition in tangled reciprocity, they are responsible for the West's apparently irresistible expansiveness. The Empires of the Sun, on the other hand, fell so fast into ruin because they and their leaders displayed characteristics that were, so to speak, the fateful complement, the matched antithesis, of the men and machines of the West. The lessons learned in thinking about a problem amount more often to collateral insights than direct solutions. So I want to end with two such lessons I believe I learned: First, that we really must come to grips with this expansiveness of the West and if, on thoughtful consideration, it proves necessary, acknowledge candidly its superiority-superiority, that is, in the scope it gives to individual human nature by the universality of its conceptions. And two, that we, as conscious representatives of that tradition, owe those overrun and extinguished 47 �civilizations, with alLtheir irreplaceable strange beauty, a remembrance-not merely as projects for research but as objects of human regard. 48 �Books Read and Books Consulted Baldwin, Neil. 1998. Legends of the Plumed Serpent: Biography of a Mexican God. New York: PublicAffairs. Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 1994. The Aztec World. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books. Broda, Johanna, David Carrasco, and Eduardo Moctezuma. 1987. The Great Temple of Tenochtitlan: Center and Periphery of the Aztec World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nunez. 1542. The Account: A/var Ni111ez Cabeza de Vaca 's Relacion. Translated by Martin A Favata and Jose B. Fernandez. Houston: Arte PUblico Press (1993). Carmack, Robert M ., Janine Gasco, and Gary H. Gossen. 1996. The Legacy of Mesoamerica: History and Culture of Native American Civilization. Upper Saddle River, N.J. : Prentice Hall. Carrasco, David. 1982. Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press. Clendinnen, Inga. 1991. Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Columbus, Christopher. 1492-1504. The Four Voyages of Christopher Colwnbus. Edited and translated by J.M. Cohen. Baltimore: Penguin Books (1969). Conrad, Geoffrey, and Arthur A Demarest. 1988. Religion and Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism . Cambridge: Cambridge University. Copernicus, Nicolaus. 1543 . On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Translated by Charles Glenn-Wallace. Great Books of the Western World, no. 16: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler. Chicago : Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. (1952). Cortes, Heman. 1520's. Heman Cortes, LettersjromMexico. Translated by Anthony Pagden. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1986). Diamond, Jared . 1999. Guns, Genns, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton. Diaz del Castillo, Bernal. 1555. The Discovery and Conquest ofMexico. Translated by A P. Maudslay. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1956) . Diaz, Gisele and Alan Rodgers . c. 1500. The Codex Borgia: A Full-Color Restauration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript. New York: Dover Publications (1993) . 49 �Florescano, Enrique. 1999. The Myth of Quetzalcoatl. Translated by Lysa Hochroth. Baltimore: The Johns Hoplcins University Press. Fuentes, Carlos. 1998. "The Two Shores." In Clashes of Culture. Chicago: The Great Books Foundation. Galeano, Eduardo. 1985. Memory of Fire: 1. Genesis: Part One of a Trilogy. Translated by Cedric Belfrage. New York: Pantheon Books. Gibbon, Edward. 1788. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I. New York: The Modem Library. Jennings, Gary. 1980. Aztec. New York: A Tom Doherty Associates Book (1997). Kadir, Djelal. 1992. Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Klor de Alva, J. Jorge. 1999. "Religious Rationalization and the Conversion of the Nahuas: Social Organization and Colonial Epistemology." In Aztec Ceremonial Landscapes. Edited by David Carrasco. Niwot, CO : University Press of Colorado. Lafaye, Jacques. 1976. Quetzalc6atl and Guadalupe: the Formation ofMexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813. Translated by Benjamin Keen. Foreword by Octavio Paz. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press. Las Casas, Bartolome de. 1542. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Translated by Nigel Griffin. London: Penguin Books (1992). Lawrence, D. H. 1926. The Plumed Serpent [Quetzalcoatl}. New York: Vintage Books (1992). Le Clezio, J.M. G. 1993 . The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press. Leon-Portilla, Miguel, editor. 1969. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon Press. - - - , editor. 1980. Native Mesoamerican Spirituality: Ancient Myths, Discourses, Stories, Doctrines, Hymns, Poems from the Aztec, Yucatec, Quiche-Maya and Other Sacred Traditions. Mahwah, N .J.: Paulist Press. Llosa, Mario Vargas. 1990. "Questions of Conquest," Harper'sMagazine (December):45-53 . 50 �- - - . 1989. The Storyteller. Translated by Helen Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1513. The Prince and The Discourses. Translated by Luigi Ricci. New York: Modem Library (1950). "Motolinia" (Fray Toribio de Benavente). c. 1541. History of the Indians of New Spain. Translated by Francis Borgia Steck, O.F.M. Richmond, VA: William Byrd Press (1951). Naipaul, V. S. 1969. The Loss of El Dorado: A History. New York: Penguin Books (1981). Paz, Octavio. 1985. The Labyrinth of Solitude and The Other Mexico; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude; Mexico and the United States; The Philanthropic Ogre. Translated by Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash. New York: Grove Press. Pearce, Colin D. 1997. "Prescott's Conquests: Anthropophagy, Auto-da-Fe and Eternal Return." Interpretation, Vol. 24, 3 (Spring):339-361. Peck, Harry Thurston. 1905. William Hickling Prescott. Port Washington, N .Y.: Kennikat Press (1968). Prescott, William Hickling. 1843, 1847. History of the Conquest ofMexico and History of the Conquest of Peru . New York: The Modem Library. - - -. History of the Conquest ofMexico. Introduction by James Lockhart. New York: Modem Library (2001). - - - . 1823-1858. The Literary Memoranda of William Hickling Prescott, Vols. I, II. Edited by C. Harvey Gardiner. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press (1961). Ricard, Robert. 1933. The Spiritual Conquest ofMexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain: 1523-1572. Berkeley: University of California Press (1982). Sahaglin, Fray Bernadine de. 1547-1579. General History of the Things of New Spain (Florentine Codex, 12 Books). Translated by Arthur J. 0 . Anderson and Charles Dibble. Published in thirteen parts: Santa Fe, N.M.: The School of American Research and The University of Utah (1953-82). - - -. 1585. Conquest of New Spain: 1585 Revision. Translated by Howard F. Cline. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press (1989). 51 �Sejourne, Laurette. 1976. Burning Water: Thought and Religion in Ancient Mexico . Berkeley: Shambala. Soustelle, Jacques. 1955. The Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest. Translated by Patrick O'Brian. Stanford: Stanford University Press (1970). Thomas, Hugh. 1993 . Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico. New York: Simon and Schuster. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest ofAmerica: The Question of the Other. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: HarperPerennial (1992). Townsend, Richard F., editor. 1992. The Ancient Americas: Art.from Sacred Landscapes. Chicago : The Art Institute of Chicago. Von Hagen, Victor W. 1957. Realm of the Incas. New York: Mentor Books. Walker, Ronald G. 1978. Infernal Paradise: Mexico and the Modem English Novel. Berkeley: The University of California Press. Williams, William Carlos. 1925 . "The Destruction of Tenochtitlan: Cortez and Montezuma." In In the American Grain: Essays by William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions Books (1956). Wolf, Eric. 1959. Sons of the Shaking Earth. Chicago : University of Chicago Press. 52 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. 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Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/270">Audio recording</a> Deans Friday night lecture Homecoming Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c1abd1a23a771c5f35bc772bfc3c64f2.pdf 67babadb41116f14bec9dd3e5b9d3f31 PDF Text Text 1 Talking, Reacting, Writing, Listening Eva Brann I imagine that on Parents' Weekend there might be some parents attending this once weekly occasion when the college assembles to hear a lecture. By its very name, a lecture is read-but read out loud, delivered in the writer's voice. Thus, the sequence goes: I thought, I wrote, I read, I speak. Although this is the principal way of teaching at institutions of higher education, it is a curious one. Here at St. John's, we show our respect for the possible profit we might derive from it by requiring our students to come to a lecture every Friday night-just when, elsewhere, it is prelude-time to party night. And we express our suspicion of lecture-hearing by asking students to listen to a lecture-but only once a week. So this one weekly hour of just sitting and listening is mandatory, and about as enforceable as a mandatory evacuation before a storm. (This simile appears here because this lecture was ·written in the dark during Hurricane Irene.) The attendance that we do take utterly seriously is presence in class-seminar above all. In seminar, no speeches are delivered. Instead we talk, in turn, to one another. So rather .than call my lecture "Speaking, Writing, Reading, Listening," I have substituted "Talking" for "Speaking." Talk seems to denote a more conversational, almost social mode of speech, less formal, more spontaneous, more participatory. And yet our seminar is a mandatory, scheduled class, with prescribed texts. Is that a setting for talk? So I would like to think in public about our modes of being together, about the how and what of this college as a community of learning. Since we, the tutors, collude This lecture was delivered at St. John's College in Annapolis on the Friday of Parents' Weekend, November 4, 2011. Eva Brann is a tutor and former Dean of the College. �2 with our students in making them a little impatient with being talked at, I'll sneak around that resistance, which I share. I'll snaffle their good will (old books on rhetoric called this formal beginning of a speech the captatio benevolentiae, "the capture of benevolence") by speaking about talking itself and what it entails. _ Your children, our students, will probably have told you now and then that parents don't know anything. Freshmen, on the other hand, know everything. They are fresh, unimpaired in spirit-and also, perhaps, somewhat fresh in a now obsolete meaning of the term: cheeky. Sophomores know a little less; their class name means "wise fools," as their knowledge of Greek will tell them; it is a combination of Greek sophon, "wise" and moron, "foolish." Juniors and the college elders, the seniors, have reapproached their parents and become almost perfect in ignorance. I am, in fact, being serious. The members of this community of learning are not ashamed to own up to their own ignorance; indeed we think better of this thoughtful confession than of a profession of expertise. It's why the teachers here call themselves "tutors," guardians of learning, rather than "professors," authorities of knowledge, and it is why our students are to some degree our fellow-learners. Thus we are apt to think of even the most positive, content-replete learning as a specification of our ignorance. It's a fancy way of saying that all our learning starts and ends in questions- a point to which I will return as we go along. So this acknowledged ignorance is not false humility, but a confident, even competent, way to conduct a college. Yet, of course, sub aeternitatis, "under the aspect of eternity," specie as the philosophers say, we are, as limited beings, all equal--equally diminutive before the infinitely distant ultimacies we long for. This is cause enough for some personal modesty and even occasional dejection. �3 I've been saying "we," meaning the college of students and tutors. Now I'll mean mainly the tutors when I say that, although there's probably nothing we all agree must be true, there is something we �1 agree must be done. Some of us, perhaps even most, think that the Appearances before our senses bespeak a Being behind them; some of us suppose there is a Ground in which all nature is rooted; and some of us believe there is a realm of Divinity above us. Others see no reason to agree to any of these. But we all agree that, in regard to our ignorance about matters of most persistent importance to human beings, we are close to our students, and that we are therefore guardians of learning rather than transmitters of doctrine. We have a model for this unteacherly mode of teaching, presented to us in the writings of Plato: Socrates. Not all of us, particularly freshmen, take to him. He describes himself now as a gadfly, stinging a sluggish horse into wakefulness, now mediating between earth and heaven (Apology 30e, Symposium 202d, as a demon ff.). So he is both irritating and elusive. One moment he argues like a sophist, that is to say, a trickster of the intellect; another moment he intimates his most genuine relation to truth. He is both bully and benefactor. So when he declares, often and insistently, that he is ignorant, we must suspect irony. "Irony," eironeia, is the Greek word for dissembling, pretending to be what one is not. What then is this Socratic ignorance, which in some of us engenders trust precisely by causing dis-ease? We' ve all come across genuine inarticulate cluelessness, truly dumb ignorance­ though I think it is fairly rare in human beings. Socratic ignorance, on the other hand, is anything but dumb; it talks, and that makes all the difference. For example, in the first philosophical work our students read together, Plato's dialogueMeno, Socrates blames �4 himself for knowing "nothing at all" about human excellence (71b) That is why he can . genuinely ask: What is it? But look what this question involves. First of all it is an admission, actually an assertion, of self-knowledge. People who ask, know what they lack. They know what they don't know. Acknowledged ignorance is important . knowledge about ourselves. And second, it is a very precise negative knowledge of what we are asking after. The word "comprehend" comes to mind; it means "to get, to enclose, in one's grasp '' Human thinking is wonderfully prehensile. It can get at, wrap itself around, something it does not yet really "get' ' in the sense of "understand." In this dialogue, Meno is Socrates' "interlocutor," which is learned Latin for "conversational partner." I use the term here because Meno--who, as we know from other sources, was as bad a man as you'll never want to meet-can't really be a partner, and certainly not a participant, in the sort of searching conversation Socrates cares about. In fact he tries to forestall such talk by producing a clever argument. He has the clever ignorance that defines human badness for Socrates. This obstructionist argument turns that very wonder of question-asking, which I' ve described as our ability to wrap our thought around what we haven' t yet got, into an obstacle: If you know something why would you ask about it? If you're ignorant of it, how would you recognize it if you did get it? Socrates has a reply that has resonated down through the ages; it bears on the essential character of talking, and I'll come to it soon. Meanwhile, there's a third aspect to questions, shown in their very asking. We ask ourselves in inner speech, but in the world, and in that little world, the seminar, we ask each other. This asking presupposes a sort of trust: the trust that we will be �5 comprehended and met halfway by our fellow learners. For a question is a sort of appeal: " Share my perplexity; help me." A fourth trait of asking is one that Socrates, who claims to know so little, claims to know for sure: To inquire, to seek by questions, to search for what one does not know-that makes us better, braver, less lazy than giving in to Meno's clever sophism (86b-c). And finally a fifth feature, which sounds odd but is central. I know of only one subject in which Socrates claims outright to be an expert: He says of himself that he "knows nothing else than matters of love" (Symposium 177d). There are in the dialogues several examples of a wonderfully illuminating word-play: love, eros, and questioning, erotesis, sound very much alike (Symposium 199d, Phaedrus 234c); they are almost homonyms. The love in which Socrates is an expert is the longing for knowledge, the "love of wisdom" which is the English translation of the Greek wordphilosophia. But this longing, this pressure of desire is exactly what you might call the question-feeling. It transfigures apparently insoluble problems into beckoning mysteries, where by a mystery I mean an ultimate problem that attracts energizing reverence rather than dispirited resignation. Our students' much misused word "awesome" applies here, for once. Thus genuine asking is the expression of a desire. For Socrates-and for all of us-such question-desire is always close to real human love. In fact Socratic love has a great penumbra of intermingling loves, among them the affectionate delight that elders feel for the young, the fond respect that colleagues-at their best-feel for one another, and, best of all, that lifelong care which develops between students who have spent many a night talking together. It's a tutor's delight to hear the selfless admiration in the voice of �6 a student who tells of having found such a partner-admiration together with a very proper and surely life-long pride in having accomplished such a friendship. Here is half a line from Schiller's "Ode to Joy," which, in Beethoven's setting, our Freshman Chorus often sings: Wem der grosse Wuifgelungen Eines Freundes Freund zu sein... One who's managed the great fortune To become a true friend's friend. .. such a one is entitled to join in this ode to joy. Schiller has it just right: Friendship is an effortful accomplishment resting on great good luck. This school is its propitious setting: In the talk that is a questioning, friends are found. Aristotle, Plato's true-that is to say resistant-pupil says brusquely: "[Socrates] asked, but didn't answer, for he claimed not to know'' (On Sophistic Refutations, 183b7). Now ironic Socrates is surely unsettling, but no-nonsense Aristotle is often more so. Does he mean it? If I take him at face value, then he is certainly wrong. Socrates does answer, probably always, though often not in explicit words. His questioning doesn't lead to the levity of easy skepticism. He does often begin by "questioning." Light-minded talk about higher education tends to fall into two camps. One camp thinks that this education happens when authorities pour expertise into mostly recalcitrant pupils. The other camp thinks this �7 education occurs when academics incite all too willing students to "question," that is to test, with the implicit intention of refuting, received wisdoms. Socrates often does begin by showing that people's opinions are wrong-headed or incoherent, and, above all, not their own thought but some received doctrine confidently proclaimed to the world but negligently adopted within the soul. That is questioning in the somewhat hostile sense; it is "interrogation." But it is only done in order to clear the decks for a second, more gracious question-asking, by which what ordinary people are really after is confirmed. Socrates is a horsefly to the lazy, to wake them up, but a winged love-god to those ready to be impassioned. I said Socrates gives answers. About present human life he proposes himself as a model that says to us, "Live to learn, and learn to leave life, to be dead" (Phaedo 61 c ff. ). What he means, I think, is this: Devote some of your time every day to reaching for what is behind, beneath, above the world we live in. Here many thoughtful people part company with him-and our students often do, understandably. About ultimate things he offers only working conjectures and hypotheses, which he leaves to his companions to take up. And indeed that is what happened; the thinking generations took him up. Alfred North Whitehead-it figures here that an emigrant to America is speaking to you-says that "the European philosophical tradition ... consists of a series of footnotes to Plato" �d . (Process and Reality, Ch.l, Sec.l }-and that means largely Socrates as Plato pic him speaking. I am about to leap into that two and a half millennia-long footnote for help in thinking more precisely about our ki.nd of talking. Each seminar starts with a question, asked by a tutor. Framing seminar questions is the one ��pertise a tutor might be said to develop. Such a question might well have �8 much thought behind it, but it shouldn't be an invitation to guess the tutor's pet theory. It could be a wide-open admission of puzzlement, but it shouldn't be mushily vague. It might take off from an inconspicuous but significant detail of the text but it shouldn't run the conversation up the creek of a side issue. Why start with a question rather than, say, a tutorial interpretation? A question is,· of course, the very embodiment of a teaching mode devoted to eliciting thought rather than delivering thought-products. The reason lies in the five features of question asking I've mentioned, the most pertinent of these being that questions solicit responses by evincing trust in the willingness and ability to respond in those addressed in the question mode. What then is responsive talk? Here I'll go into the footnote mode. In the Middle Ages, certain thinkers developed the notion of"intentionality." In fact it had come to Europe through the Arabic philosopher Avicenna (c. 1000 C.E.). Most good ideas have their comeback time, and intentionality has been brought back in modem times. It's probably not wrong to say that its beginning is in Socrates' passion for this question: What is it that is knowable in our ever-changing, illusion-rife world, and how is it that words can convey what things are? Intention is both a characteristic of thinking and a capability of speaking (where it is called"imposition'')-one that we can ascribe to nothing else in the world or out of it. ' Its meaning is the action of"stretching towards," of reaching for something. Its descriptive name is "aboutness," the action and the result.of something laying itself ?-bout, of"comprehending" something. Perhaps words show more of the stretching, reaching-toward motion, while thoughts are more like embracing, enclosing structures. �9 Take an example of what intentional aboutness isn 't: a wrapped gift. The gift paper is distinguishable from the box of nougats-and so.you can unwrap the candy-but it's also of the same kind, material stuff. What you can't do is put the gift-wrap about your affectionate wishes, as you can't wrap your sentiments around the nougat-except poetically. Now think a thought. Let's not be particular about its exact nature-whatever we mean when we say that we have something in mind-an object, a relation, an idea, an Th(i..Y\ interpretation-any thought-thing. NGW ask yourself, Can I unwrap my thinking from the thought? When I say that I am thinking a thought, is my thinking separable from the thought? Or it is rather that thinking (that is, a form of the verb for which thought is the noun), is the same as the thought, so that when I think of something, intend it, attend to it, my mind becomes that thing? Do thinking and thought become one? If that's what happens, then which element wins out-the mine-ness of my thinking or the object-ness of the content? Do I taint it with my prejudices, do I rectify it to my standards, or do I let it be what it is? When I think, it is often about a material object in a worldly environment. What aspect of things comes to or into my mind-a mental, quasi-visual image, some ideal essence, or just their use? In what way, as I attend to the world of objects, do they tend toward me? When my talk is for real-that is, when it is about something-how do I begin? How do I get my thoughts to collect themselves in words? Or does my acquired language in fact produce the mental state that feels like thinking, and by its very grammar give me the sense that there are mental objects? How are my words about objects? Do these offer labels that present themselves for me to read off insofar as I know the vocabulary of the world, or do my words tend out from me to the objects, throwing from �10 my mind an ideal sort of lasso, a thinking-noose, that will cast itself about them and snaffle them in a mental shape suitable for my mind? This long litany touches the Socratic mysteries, which, I have said, he started on their way along with some conjectured elucidations. Not that, after all, it matters much who began. These questions, at least, are now ours. Questions about thinking and speaking must surely be central to the education of human beings, who, as even animal ethnologists are willing to admit, are the only animal that can ask questions rather than solicit reactions. But my main point here was to establish one sure thing about talking-that it has the capacity of aboutness, which turns out to make a piece of life like the seminar possible to begin with. Now in the world at large there is much talk that has the aspect of serious, even sophisticated, meaning but that, like many a hard-to-crack nut, has no kernel. So too, in the seminar, there is twaddle-quite a lot of it. Twaddle has in fact a sort of squatter's right in the seminar. Concern for spontaneity and respect for potential make us leery of suppressing it too soon. I can think of three kinds of seminar twaddle. Some among us are so eager to capture attention that they utter words before they have collected a thought. Others are so abashed by the insufficiency of their speaking that they go on for quite a while after they have finished; in the hope of amending their fault they make it worse. This happens to us all and is easily fixed. We just have to become aware of it, as we do of any minor habit. The third kind of twaddle goes much deeper. All worthwhile activities have their specific nullifications, and twaddle is the negation of intentional talk. It is the consequence of a curious negative ability that human beings have: the ability to fashion �11 well-formed sentences that express none of their own thinking, but that sound comfortably explanatory. Here is an inevitable example from the first freshman seminar: Why is Achilles so unassuagably angry when Agamemnon takes his woman away? Student answer: Because he feels dishonored, and"iri the culture of that time honor was important." Tutor's overt follow-up question: What do you know more about, the culture of the time ofHomer's epics (this time happen to be a fictional composite of times) or about Achilles? Tutor's suppressed internal question: How did this most murky of notions-culture-come to seem like a handy explanatory principle to generations of students? Equally silent answer: Because Socrates' notion of opinion is so right. We all share in the remarkable inclination to find satisfaction in surrendering our minds to enticing terms of thought without reaching for the intended thought itself. "Culture" is the most perfect cover-all, the universal wet-blanket for glimmers of penetrating thought. A somewhat impatient tutorial response to twaddle is thus, What are you talking about? And generally, what are we talking about in seminar? Books. We prepare for seminar by reading assignments, and then we bring our readings to class. For my part, I don't care how the readings are delivered. If students find graven stone tablets their medium of choice, let them bring those, or if e-books, let them bring those, provided they don't get diverted and distracted by appended applications, and provided they can find their place. After all, one reason we center seminar on books is so that we may all be on the same page. Let me interrupt myself here for an observation. Our faculty recently had a long discussion about the question: Should e-books be permitted in seminar? We sensibly decided to leave it up to the tutors. In last year's freshman seminar I was expecting an �12 invasion of electronic tablets. Not a one of them appeared. Word was that upperclass members were discouraging them as not in our spirit. The world's opinion is that the young thrive on novelty; the truth as I've experienced it is that; having found a place to cherish, they become its radical conservatives. I have much sympathy. The material book-be it of papyrus, parchment, paper-has, besides its sensory pleasures, one great advantage: it's all there at once in real space. This is a handy representation of one important characteristic of a text: it's an all-present whole; it exists simultaneously with itself. And now that I've used the word "text" let me explain this slightly pretentious term. I use it, first, because it is broader than "book," which is usually composed of words. But we read, in a broad sense, also compositions of notes (musical scores) and books containing more diagrams and symbols than words (mathematical texts). Moreover, "text" reminds us of two etymologically related words: "textile," a woven fabric, and Greek techne, "skill, craft." Books are artfully crafted, carefully coherent artifacts. Well, not all books. The tutors of this college are pretty much at one in thinking themselves not so much entitled as obligated to discriminate between great books and lesser books. St. John's College is, unpopular though that term may be with terminally egalitarian souls, a great books school. Let me say right away that the not-so-great but good books, as well as the mediocre ones, and even the outright shoddy stuff-all these have their saving graces. The'best policy is to read some of everything. (When I was a little girl I developed for a while a passion for reading product labels, especially the fractured instructions written by people for whom English was a second language.) �13 But together we read great books, because, to use a gross metaphor, these are the ones you can sink your teeth into, the ones that stick to your ribs. There are statable criteria for them, of which I'll mention the ones most pertinent to the life of the seminar: Great books are usually self-sufficient, so that no background information or annotation is absolutely necessary to getting absorbed in the text; the best context for them is another great book-perhaps, but not necessarily, its chronological predecessor. Second, a great book, approachable as it is on one level the first time around, is inexhaustibly new, so that on opening it a fifth time you ask yourself, "Could I have read this before? Where was I, to miss so much?" Third, such books are endlessly artful-sometimes beautiful from shapely depth and something ugly with significant contrivance. And fourth, great truth-seeking texts of reflection are full of imagination and great imaginative works of fiction are full of reflection. The former present universals corroborated by particular instances, the latter represent particulars coruscating with liniversal application. Thus philosophy and fiction go hand in hand. Take, for example that famous first sentence of Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." What is it but an applied version of Aristotle's dictum in the Nicomacheari Ethics: "There are many ways of going wrong but only one way which is right" (1106b28)? So such texts are what seminar talk appears to be about. To prepare for seminar we all read the same book-students for the first, tutors for the umptieth time. Reading is, for us, a silent, solitary activity. I say "for us"; Augustine in his Confessions (c.400 C.E.) tells with amazement how his beloved bishop, Ambrose, read. As his eyes moved down �14 the page, "his heart sought out the meaning but his tongue remained silent" (VI, 3). It was an inestimably great revolution, this inward relocation of the written word, which, among other things, made possible summary reading both divorced from and unconcerned about precise wording. We are the heirs of this revolution. This preparatory reading we do is a curious business, then. New readers actually mouth the words; more mature ones read silently but subvocalize the text laryngeally; others let the writing glide directly into the mind. They get the thought, but see rather than hear the words. They register whole sentences through the eyes and tum language, the business of the tongue, into sight-seeing, the work of the eyes. However they do it, they now have in their minds and hearts the words and thoughts of someone else. Our texts, then, are writings, for the most part. And surprise, surprise! Books are written before they are read. How does writing come about? Here is how I do it myself and imagine it for others: Writing comes after talking, in two ways. First, in my own personal history I learned to speak way back, effortlessly, but to write later, with difficulty. I also know that in the larger history of human beings, writing, especially the kind that records the sound of speech, alphabetical writing, did not, in fact, come to Greece until the late eighth century B.C.E. (where in my early years as an archaeologist I had a chance to publish some of the earliest graffiti-that is, scratched letter-words). Second, before and as I write, I talk to myself, because speech is the concretion of thought; it collects its misty pressure into concise sentences and utters them in sensory shape. It's often said that the primary purpose of speech is "communication." The evidence seems to me otherwise. I imagine that most of us say to ourselves in the course of our day hundreds of words for every word we say to others. Speech certainly begins �15 that way. Listen to what students of child development call "jargoning," that sweetest, most melodious gibberish of late infancy, which issues from a lonely crib. Whether it is the antecedent of adult twaddle or carries mental meaning no one knows. This internal speech is what we write down. In "paper conferences" with students tutors can't do better than to persuade them that it is this talk with themselves that they ought to record, without dulling rectification in the interest of a risklessly pompous formality. An author-the word means an originating "augmentor"-is a recorder of an inner speech that improves upon the banal ordinariness of a relaxed inner life by saying something original, either in the sense of "never-said-before" or in the sense of going to the origin of things-or both. This is practically a definition of what the authors of our great books accomplish. They are the masters of pouring thought into the mold of inner speech and of turning that mold out onto the expectant paper. . I must add here that, although you'd scarcely believe it, both claims-that books have authors and that speaking comes before writing-have been disputed in the later part of the last century. The former claim, that there is no originating authorship, is disputed because whatever is said has been pre-shaped by predecessors and will be reshaped by readers. The latter claim, that writing precedes speaking, is disputed on the ground (too sophisticated for presentation here) that writing has a character more original than speech and in fact subsumes it. 1 Reading presupposes writing, and writing poses at least two dangers. The one I've just touched on is that in the interest of liberating our students from being possessed by the opinion of others we in fact subject them to four years of others' very powerful Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967), Chapter 2. Derrida, the author of both claims, at one point instituted a suit for plagiarism. Imagine!) 1 �16 opinions. Another way to put this is that even--or especially-the devoted study of books is not direct thinking, immediate aboutness. It runs the danger of producing a commentator's soul. I mean that to study books is not quite the same as to think about things; it is to be attending to a secondary sort of aboutness. By thinking in a primary way I mean appropriating the cry of early modem scientists: "To the things themselves!"-· without mediating texts. The other danger, really the complement of the first, is set down in Plato's dialogue Phaedrus. Socrates tells approvingly of an Egyptian king who refused the gift of writing because, he said, those who put trust in writing will learn to forget how to go into themselves to recollect the truths within. Writing will then tum out to be no medicine for memory, but merely a reminder (272c ff.). Writing is external memory; we call on it to remind us now and then of baggage we do not care to keep always with us. Whatever is readily accessible as a filed record becomes storable stuff, a bit of fractured fact, related to living thought as a cellophane-wrapped fish filet is to a frisky live fish. It becomes information, which is as apt to wreck as to rectify judgment. I think this is an up-to-date version of Socrates' misgivings about writing. However-you might call this Platonic irony-this condemnation of writing is delivered to us in the most ravishing piece of philosophical writing I know of, the work that drew me into philosophy as a graduate student. Evidently Plato thought of a way to overcome the rigidification of writing-by incorporating conversation into the text. We extend this trick by incorporating books into a living dialogue, the seminar. How do we then mitigate these drawbacks? Well, we get together, come out of studious privacy, to talk with each other. In universities, "seminar" means an advanced �17 study group under the leadership of a professor. Papers are written, read, and discussed. It is a place of earnest, highly disciplined speech. Our seminars are serious, but perhaps not earnest, or at least not dead earnest, but live earnest-lively. Walk through our corridors on seminar nights, and if you don't hear hilarity issuing from behind this or that door, you may conclude that we've turned into the sitting dead, like the ancestral mummies the Incas brought out to sit at their feasts. For laughter is the explosive expulsion of breath that follows from having one's equanimity pleasantly pinpricked by an acute incongruity-the result, in other words, of a startling insight. Laughter is the grace note of our seriousness. To be sure, the books lie before us, well used, even marked up (which is why we should buy, not borrow, seminar books), and they are the first focus of our attention. But that is also a misapprehension. Books, texts, are occasions, not ends. We don't live in but through books. That formulation would be mere verbiage, were there not a way of study that stays strictly with the text and in it. For instance, in graduate study, say, in English or philosophy, all the student's effort is really invested in the text. The goal is to know the text accurately, to be acquainted with scholarly opinions about it, to work out its arguments in detail, all the while setting aside questions of truth-telling and personal illumination. We encourage a different kind of reading-more direct, and if you like, somewhat naive. Because the author wrote about or expressed something, we feel entitled to pass through the text to that something. We find it plausible sometimes to ask "What did the author have in mind?" and sometimes "Does this representation agree with our experience of life?" and sometimes "Can I corroborate this claim in my own thinking?" �18 Not that we ignore the literal words in their artfulness-not at all-but we regard them as a sort of come-on to catch and hold us to the text until it gives up its meaning. Let me give an example from the freshman seminar that was going on while I was writing this lecture -a wonderfully lively seminar. We asked: "Do the Homeric gods, in all their irresponsible levity, look the same to Homer as to his heroes, does he have access to a view of Olympus, transmitted to him by the Muses, that none of his humans have?" We asked: "Is it in accord with our experience that gentle, thoughtful Patroclus is transformed into a wildly impetuous warrior just by wearing Achilles' armor?" We asked: "Can we follow Socrates in his claim that truth already lies in us and can be retrieved, 'recollected,' as he says, by the right questions?" So to sum up our sort of reading: We pay careful attention to details for the sake of the text's-the author's-intentions, and we pay attention to these for the sake of world and life. That effort requires skills, namely, the arts of reading in the broad sense, the liberal arts. We have the corresponding tutorials, where we practice dealing with thought-laden words in the language class and with thought-structured symbols in the mathematics class. We add to these the latest of the liberal arts to appear on the scene, the art of making nature speak in numbers; for that we have the laboratory class. I've now talked in tum about talking, reading, writing. Now comes the high point: listening. Among the boons of living within a study program like ours-one that is stable and changes, though steadily, yet slowly-is that truly new experiences can come to us tutors. For our students, it's all new anyhow. By contrast, when so-called innovation, that is, deliberate variation, is the universal background, we may indeed be stimulated by novelty-the ever-diminishing frisson accompanying continual variety-but we can �19 scarcely experience newness, which is the poignant sensation of a substantial accession­ a real expansion of our psychic holdings. Under the influence of continua! novelty our mind, as Shakespeare so tellingly puts it, "Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream, I Goes to, and back, lackeying the varying tide, I To rot itself with motion" (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.4.45-47). Thus it was that through our way of acquiring truly new insights, I belatedly discovered a philosopher-as it happens the very first one whose writings we have. He was born around 540 B.C.E. I had often glanced over, but had never made my way into, his sayings. He thinks in aphorisms, that is, terse revelations. The most enticing one of these begins in this way: Listen not to me but to the logos . . . (Heraclitus, D50). Logos is one Greek work all our students are apt to have something to say about. It had dozens of uses and more than one central meaning: word, speech, saying, thinking, reason, ratio. Heraclitus's saying goes on to tell us what we must, in tum, say when we listen to the Logos, the Logos with a capital L. This Logos is the principle that governs everything, and it has something to say to us. I won't go into the entirety of the world­ informing thought that the Logos utters to Heraclitus, but I'll attend� to the first part of it. I think it has, and is meant to have, several meanings-a fact that governs many of Heraclitus's sayings and makes reading him so pleasurably difficult. One of these sayings, the one just quoted, is, as it were, made to be the principle of our seminar. I'll retranslate it: Listen not to me but to my intention. �20 The civility of the seminar, expressed in our addressing one another by last names together with the honorific Ms. or Mr., goes much deeper than a mere form of address. It makes for respectful distance. It means listening past personalities to the thought-gist of our speaking. It enjoins us to try to hear what our fellow speakers intend us to hear, even if we have to hear past the words they are actually, and perhaps ineptly, saying. Of course, we take in each other's looks, mannerisms, gestures. It is, after all, through these that the human being to whose intention we are to listen appears to us. Of course, the "me" Heraclitus wants us to listen past is unavoidably up front. We all, particularly tutors, whose business it is to form impressions of the candor, seriousness, and preparation of speakers, observe the physical fayade. Any student who imagines that tutors don't know, by such observations, whether they've done their seminar reading or are improvising-be it brilliantly, be it twaddingly-is living in cloud-cuckoo-land. The tutors' version of Heraclitus's injunction is the prospective principle of hopeful pretense: Listen for the intention, for what the speech is about, listen to all the speeches extendedly and intently, until they are about something; help students frame what they mean or find out what they intended to say by evincing a staunch faith (even against all evidence) that they did mean or intend something. What is for Heraclitus a call to hear the speech of Thought-capital T-itself, is for us a pedagogic principle: Give respect even before it is due, so that it may become due. Advise students with tacit benevolence as Hamlet does his mother with demonstrative bitterness: "Assume a virtue if you have it not'' (Hamlet, 2.4.I62). For Aristotle teaches that virtues are acquired by being practiced before they are truly possessed (Nicomachean Ethics II03 a-b). �21 So also should students listen to each other in the Heraclitean mode: Suppress animosities and aversions, go for the significant gist in one another's talk. The question "Did you mean . . . ?" is helpful respect made audible. After all, the seminar was intended to bring us out of the isolation of studious reading and the rigidity of recorded, written speech, and to introduce responsiveness into the life oftearning. The underlying hypothesis here, which we hold to through thick imd thin, is that to be human i )� given a chance, intelligent. Now intelligence has this feature, one that has been the millennial preoccupation of thoughtful people: �\Jhat we each think with is our very own intelligence-which makes us interesting to one another-and that what the intellect is about is common to us all-which makes it possible for us to hear one another to begin with. In my hurried summary of the liberal arts and the tutorials devoted to them I left out the music tutorial and the chorus. Among the Greeks, music stands near the apex of the liberal arts; it is the prime mode of praising God for the Hebrews; and it stands close to theology for certain Christians. (See, e.g. , Plato, VB"IJJ� Republic 530d ff.; i'Aiste6:e-Rsaiics Psalm 33:3; Luther, "On Noble Music"). Our president recently put music at the center of his convocation address, and then, to confirm his words, the college sang. ' For as we are rightly called a talking college so we are surely a music-making community. As words are to our thoughts, so is music to our feelings. Without music our program would be radically incomplete; we would be neglecting the affective root of our nature, our sensibility, and our passions. We have been called a severely intellectual college, and this could be an accusation rather than a compliment, if we did not also have a place in the program for cultivating the very sense, hearing, that both takes in linguistic �22 utterances addressed to the intellect and also hears tonal structures calling to our passions. In the music tutorial we learn how passions are informed by number, not by the merely quantitative but by the wonderfully qualitative mathematics of tones in a scale. Moreover, we consider how sounds and words respond to each other, and we attend to a relation of sensation and thinking which we expect to carry over into all our learning­ that tenacious thinking is replete with feeling, that steady passion is contoured by thought, and that the sensory surface itself, be it conduit or last stop, is deeply questionable. And finally, in Chorus, we are the singing college. In talking we face toward each other and speak to each other, turn and turnabout, vice versa-that is the very meaning of con-versa-tion. But we sing with rather than to each other, and we do it mostly not in tum but simultaneously. We are together in the presence of something we are at once hearing and doing, receiving and producing; we are absorptive and responsive, listening to ourselves and to our fellow choristers. It's like hearing a heavenly lecture, for that's how I imagine the angels listen. And that is the end of this merely earthly lecture, addressed to the parents over our student's heads, so to speak, but really meant for them. So thank you all for listening. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 22 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 Talking, reading, writing, listening: a lecture for parents and students Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-11-04 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 04, 2011 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series (during Parents Weekend). Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 2011-11-04 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 Brann, Eva T. H. Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/12">Audio recording</a> Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/071884928c03ae207de14a3f374811b2.mp3 f511bfe1dc8362fc31732a869b96fc2a 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures 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 mp3 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:20:38 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 Memorial for Elliott Zuckerman Description An account of the resource Memorial service for Annapolis Tutor Elliott Zuckerman, October 27, 2019. The program includes musical tributes and eulogies by Jamie Young, Kirk Duncan, Dylan Knight Rogers, Eric Stoltzfus, Eva Brann, Christopher Nelson, Chester Burke, James Siranovich, Jonathan Tuck, Zena Hitz, Howard Zeiderman, and the St. John's College Ensemble. 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 2019-10-27 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Young, Jamie Zuckerman Duncan, Kirk Rogers, Dylan Knight Brann, Eva T. H. Stoltzfus, Eric Nelson, Christopher B., 1948- Burke, Chester Siranovich, James Tuck, Jonathan Hitz, Zena, 1973- Zeiderman, Howard Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Signed permission forms have been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audio recording of my lecture available online." 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 Zuckerman, Elliott Eulogies Music Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Abbott, Robert Charles, Jr. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Zuckerman_Elliott_MemorialService_2019-10-27 Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/89b849ef04ab118959d4c10bc7a0b8b6.pdf df1e351180fe413f4f4c503ea6df510c PDF Text Text This .naienai may De protected by Gopynght iavi- (Title 17 U.S. Cod^ 1794 DEPTH AND DESIRE EVA BRAl'IN St. John’s College Annapolis, Friday, August 31, 1990 �St. John’s College Library. .Apn.T.iolis. Marv'and- DEPTH AND DESIRE Eva Brann Annapolis, Friday, August 31, 1990 y an old tradition the first lecture of the year is dedicated to ____the new members of our college, to the freshman students and the freshman tutors. It is a chance to tell you something about the shape and the spirit of the Program that governs St. John’s Collegeand not only to tell you but perhaps even to show you. I think I am right in this spirit v/hen I begin by examining the class-name I just called you by: freshmen. A freshman, my etymological dictionaries tell me, is a person "not tainted, sullied or worn," a still-fresh human being, where "fresh" means, so the dictionary points out, both "frisky" and "impertinent." Later on in the year you will learn a weighty Greek word applicable to persons of frisky impertinence. They are said to have thvmos. spiritedness or plain spunk, a characteristic necessary for serious learning. This spirited frame of mind is perfectly compatible with being shy and secretly a little scared. In fact, to my mind, it is a sign of quality in newcomers to be anxious for their own dignity in the way that shows itself in spirited shyness. It is our business, the business of the faculty and of the more responsible upper class students, to help your spiritedness to become serious, to emerge from the shyness- whether it be of the quiet or the boisterous sort, to help you channel your energy into a steady desire for learning and to direct your boldness toward the discovery of depth and, moreover, to help you without leaving you tainted, sullied, and worn out. I keep saying "help," because although great changes are bound to take place in you in these next years- do but behold the seniors: unsullied, untainted, unworn and transfigured- we none of us know who should get the most credit besides yourself: the Program, our teaching, your friendships or just plain time passing. At any rate, the spirit of the college is invested in seriousness, a certain kind of seriousness— not dead seriousness but live seriousness, you might say. This seriousness shows itself on many occasions: in deep or heated conversations in the noon sun or at midnight, in marathons of effort and in the oblivion of sleep, in devoted daily preparation and in glorious goofing-off, in the B 1 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE willingness to try on opinions and in the need to come to conclusions. What does your school do to induce this very particular kind of seriousness? When you chose to come to St. John’s you were, perhaps, attracted by the fact that the mode of teaching normal in higher education is quite abnormal here. I mean lectures. Only one lecture a week is an integral part of the Program, on Fridays at 8:15 P.M. Now the chief thing about a lecture is that it is prepared ahead of time. For instance, I began working on this lecture in March. A lecture ought to be the temporarily final word, the best a speaker has to give you at the moment. It should not matter whether the surface of the speech is brilliant or drab, as long as it is a deliberate and well-prepared opening of the speaker’s heart and mind to the listeners. As such it carries authority. These authoritative occasions are obviously important to the life of the school. Yet our normal way is not the prepared lecture but the focused conversation which is effervescent rather than prepared, provisional rather than authoritative, and participatory rather than reactive. Your tutors will not tell you but ask you; they will not demonstrate acquired knowledge, but the activity of learning. One reason why the teaching of new tutors- and some of your classes will be taught by newcomers- is often most memorable to freshmen is that their learning is genuinely original and keeps sympathetic pace with yours. There is an irresistible but false local etymology of the word tutor as "one who toots," perhaps his own horn. What the word tutor really signifies is a person who guards and watches learning. We are deliberately not called professors because we profess no special expertise. Since you will not be told things, you will have to speak yourselves. What will you speak about? The Program will ask you to focus your conversation on certain texts- they might be books or scores or paintings. These texts have been selected over the years by us because they have the living seriousness I am trying to speak about. To my mind texts, like people, are serious when they have a surface that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to fulfill that desire. Here then, is my announced theme for tonight: the depth that calls forth desire. To delineate that depth I must once again distinguish our kind of conversation, the kind associated with such texts, from the 2 BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE kind of fellowship to be found in other places. All over this country, and wherever the conditions for some human happiness exist, there are people who know all there is to know about some field that they till with a single-minded love. This is the blessed race of buffs, aficionados and those rare professionals who have had the grace to remain amateurs at heart. They study history or race stock cars or do biology or fly hot-air balloons. My own favorite fanatic is the young son of a graduate of St. John’s. This boy is persistently in love with fish, with the hooks, flies, sinkers, leaders, reels and rods for catching them, with the books for studying them, with the aquaria, ponds, lakes and oceans for observing them. When I first met him he looked up at me shyly and asked if I knew what an ichthyologist was. Since I knew some Greek I knew the etymology of the word and could tell him that it is a person who can give an account of fish, so he was satisfied with me. This boy may have his troubles but he is also acquainted with bliss. TTiis kind of concentrated bliss we cannot deliver to you, except perhaps in limited extracurricular ways. Instead we, or rather the Program, will drive you through centuries of time and diversities of opinion, while depriving you of the freedom and the serenity to till and to master a well-defined field of your own choosing. You will study Greek and invest hours in memoiizing paradigms, but your tutorial is not a Greek class- it is a language tutorial in which Greek is studied only partly for its own virtues, and partly as a striking and, for you, a novel example of human speech and its possibilities. You will study Euclid and demonstrate many prepositions, yet your tutorial is not intended to make you geometers but to allow you to think about the activity of mathematics. In short, you will be asked to read many books carefully and to study many matters in some detail only to find them passing away, becoming mere examples in the conversation. And these fugitive texts will almost all bear their excellence, their worthiness to be studied exhaustively, on their face, for we try to pick the ideal examples. This procedure is practically guaranteed to keep you off-balance, even to drive you a little crazy, since you will not often have the satisfaction of dwelling on anything and of mastering it. How do we dare do this to you? Here is a strange but unavoidable fact: Those who plow with devotion and pleasure and increasing mastery some bounded plot on the globe of knowledge often undergo a professional 3 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE deformalion. They lose first the will and then the ability to go deep. To be sure, specialists are often said to know their subjects "in depth," but that is not the depth I mean. Let me illustrate with an example I have a special affection for. I began my academic life as an archaeologist, and the first thing archaeologists do is to dig deep past the present surface of the earth, or rather they scrape it away layer by layer. But with every stratum they scrape away they find themselves at a new surface, the surface of a former age. They poke into time- a magical enough activity-but they do not pretend to pierce the nature of things. For example, there would come up from the depths of a well-shaft an ancient pot. I would catalogue it by naming its form, say; kotvle. a kind of cup; by giving its dimensions: H. 0.108 m.; diam. 0.135 m; by describing its proportions: deep­ bodied, narrow-footed; by interpreting the picture painted on it: a rabbit- this is the pot-painter being funny- jumping a tracking hound from behind; by conjecturing about the provenance and the stylistic influences: made in Attica under Corinthian influence; and by assigning a date: third quarter of the seventh century B.C. Was I required to consider what I meant by dimensions, proportions, styles, images, funniness, influences, places? Not a bitthat would have meant time out and profitless distraction from my business, which was to know all about the looks and appearances of the pottery of Athens in early times. What this Program of ours offers you is exactly that time out, and that splendid distraction. People will say of you, when you have graduated, that you have 4 BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE acquired a broad background. But your education will have been broad only in a very incidental and sketchy way- certainly not in the fashion of a close-knit tapestry that is a continuous texture of interwoven warp and woof. Many of the books you are about to read do tie into one another. Sometimes a book written by an ancient Greek will (I am not being funny) talk back to one written by a modern American, or the opposite— the strands that connect these books seem to run back and forth and sideways through time. But some books will stand, at least as we read them, in splendid isolation, and all in all the texts we study do not add up to a texture of knowledge: There is no major called "Great Books. How could there be competence in a tradition whose moving impulse is to undercut every wisdom in favor of a yet deeper one? There is not even agreement whether this tradition of ours advances or degenerates with time, whether its authors are all talking about the same thing, though in a different way, or in apparently similar ways about quite incomparable things. Here is what the books do seem to me to have in common: They intend to go into the depths of things. All the authors, even those subtly self-contradictory ones who claim that there are no depths but only surfaces, are deep in the way I mean. This desire for depth, then, is what will hold your studies here together. There is a word for this effort, to which it is my privilege to introduce you tonight. The word is philosophy. The term is put together from two Greek words, philos. an adjective used of someone who feels friendly, even passionate love, and sophia. which means wisdom or deep knowledge. When I say that your school is devoted to philosophy, the love of deep knowledge, I mean that all our authors want to dravv you deep into their matter, whether by words, symbols, notes or visual shapes. Incidentally, in a few weeks a lecturer, a tutor from Santa Fe, will come and contradict me; he has told me that he will say that what we do needn’t bear the name of philosophy at all. Let that be a subject for future discussion, and let me come to the heart of my lecture tonight. It is .he question what depth is and how is possible. 1 think we are alj inclined to suppose that literal, actual depth belongs to bodies and space and that people or texts are deep only by analogy, metaphor cally speaking. I want to propose that here, as sj often in philosophy, it is 5 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE really the other way around: it is the body that is deep merely metaphorically, as a matter of speaking, while the soul and its expression alone are deep in the primary sense. Certainly the depth of a body or a space is elusive. If a body has a perfectly hard and impenetrable surface, its depth must be forever beyond our experience— a kind of hard, inaccessible nothingness. On the other hand, let the physical body have a hollow in it— such caves are powerful allegories of depth and you will in the next four years come across some famous holes: the grotto of Calypso, the underground chamber in Plato’s Republic. Don Quixote’s cavern of Montesinos. Now ask yourself: Where actually is the depth? The containing boundaries of the hollow are all faces of the body, and no matter how deep you seem to be inside the body, you are still on its surface, just as I argued before about archaeological excavations. Now consider matterless bodies, geometric solids. Euclid says in Book XI that a solid has length, breadth, and depth, but he gives us no way to tell which is which: it depends on your perspective- in fact all three dimensions are lengths delineating the surfaces that he says are the extremity of the solid. What is inside that solid, what its inwardness or true depth is, he does not feel obliged to say. These are questions you might want to raise in your mathematics tutorials: Can one gel inside a geometric solid? How? Bodies, I am suggesting, are either too hard or too involuted or loo featureless or loo empty to have true depth. Only divine or human beings and the texts they produce- texts made of words, notes, paint, stones, what have you- can be literally deep or profound. For I attribute depth or profundity to that which is of a truly different order from the surface that covers and hides it. And it must be the inside and foundation of just that surface, so that we can gain entrance to it through that particular outside and through no other. Every depth must be sought through its own proper surface which it both denies or negates and supplies with significance: the surface that hides its own depth is never superficial. Human beings seem to me the most obvious example of such depth. All human beings have a surface, namely the face and figure they present. I personally think that in real life almost all people also have an inside, their soul, their depth. But there are some famous novels in which characters are described who are nothing but 6 BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE empty shells. Against their impenetrable surface those whom they attract by the insidiously unflawed beauty peculiar to facades that hide nothing break themselves, or if they tear through, they fall into nothingness. However, these are fictions, and actual human beings have by the very fact of their humanity an inner sanctum. We begin by noting, casually, their face, their demeanor. As our interest awakens we proceed to read more carefully, to watch their appearance ardently for what it signifies. If we are lucky, they may open up to us, as we do to them. If we go about it right, this interpretative process need never come to an end, for the human inside, or to give it, once again, its proper name, the soul, is a true mystery. By a true mystery I mean a profundity whose bottom we can never seem to plumb though we have a persistent faith )n its actuality. I think that for us human beings only depths and mysteries induce viable desire. For love entirely without longing is not possible among human beings. Many a failure of love follovs on the- usually falseopinion that we have exhausted the other person’s inside, that there is no further promise of depth. It is not only in respect to living human beings that depth calls forth desire. This college would not be the close human community that it is if you did not get to know some human beings deeply- which is called friendship. But such love is only the essential by-product (to coin a contradictory phrase) of our philosophical Program, a program that encourages the love of certain para-human beings. These para-human beings are the expressions of the human soul, our texts, as well as the things they talk about. Let me take a moment to ask whether this particular desire for depth I keep referring to is common among human beings or even natural. I say it is absolutely natural and very common. You will see what I mean when I tell you what I think is the nature of desire. Desire seems to me to be a kind of negative form or a shaped emptiness in the soul, a place in the spirit expecting to be filled, a kind of psychic envelope wailing to be stuffed with its proper contents. Now take a long leap and ask yourself what a question is. A question is a negative form or shap^ emptiness in the mind, a place in thought waiting to be filled, a psychic envelope ready to be supplied with its proper message. Questions therefore have the same 7 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE structure as desires. In fact questions are a subspecies of desire: a question is desire directed upon wisdom or knowledge. Therefore I might go so far as to say that this school teaches the shaping of desire— because here we practice asking deep questions. Now I think that very many, probably all, human beings would like to ask such questions if they only knew how. That is why the desire for depth is both common and natural. What we most often, or at least most programmatically, ask questions about are those texts I have been mentioning. As I have intimated, such a text, particularly a text of words, is a curious kind of being, neither a living soul nor a mere rigid thing. What a book might be, such that it could have genuine depth, is a question that should arise over and over in the tutorials and the seminars. That books do have depth is shown by the fact that they induce questions, the directed desire to open them up. I want to end by giving a sample of a deep text and a demonstration of the beginning of a reading, a mere knock at its gate, so to speak. The text is a saying by Heraclitus. Heraclitus flourished about 500 B.C. He was early among those who inquired into the nature of things, and he had a contemporary antagonist, Parmenides. You will see from your sheets that Heraclitus said that it is wise to agree that "All things are one." Parmenides said things that, on the face of it, seem similar, but whether he meant the same thing as Heraclitus, or something opposite or something incomparable- that is a matter of ever-live debate. In any case, Heraclitus and Parmenides together embody the great principle of our tradition that I mentioned before; you might call it the "the principle of responsive differentiation." However, I shall not try to talk about Heraclitus’s actual wisdom tonight- that along with the previous questions; "What is philosophy?," "What is a solid?," "What is a cave?," "What is a book?," I leave to future discussion. I shall attend only to the preliminaries with which Heraclitus surrounds his wisdom. Heraclitus’s book is largely lost, though as far as we know it was not a treatise but a book of sayings. Even in ancient times it had a reputation for depth; the tragedian Euripides said of it that it required a Delian diver- the divers from the island Delos (which means the "Manifest" or "Clear") were evidently famous for diving deep and bringing things to light. DEPTH AND DESIRE BRANN The saying I have chosen goes: oOk tuou dXXdc Tou Xdyou dxouaavTas dpioXoydv 90ip6v laTiv Iv -irdvTa flvai Transliterated it reads ouk emou alia tou logou akousantas homologein sophon estin hen panta einai. On the surface this saying is in Greek and needs to be translated. Since I have argued that surfaces are, like traditional Japanese packaging, an integral part of the contents, they must be carefully and patiently undone. Now to put Heraclitus’s Greek into English is, up to a certain point, not hard. Your Greek manual will tell you about the "accusative absolute" and about various infinitives, and your Greek dictionaries will give you the meaning of "listening," of "wise" (which you are already familiar with in philosophy), and of "agree." But then you look up logos. "Logos" is one of the tremendous words of our tradition, to which it is, once again, my privilege to introduce you. Without even looking it up, I can give you the following meanings: Word and speech, saying and story, tally and tale, ratio and relation, account and explanation (that was the meaning which occurred in the word "ichthyologist"), argument and discussion, reason and reasoning, collection and gathering, the word of God and the son of God. As you learn Greek you will see what it is about the root-meaning of logos that makes this great scope of significance possible. But how are you to choose? You are caught in a vicious circle: Unless you know what Heraclitus means by logos you cannot choose the right English translation, and unless you discover the right English word you cannot know what he means by his saying. However, sensible people find ways to scramble themselves out of this bind. Try a meaning that makes good immediate sense: choose "reasoning." Listening not to me but to my reasoning, it is wise to agree that all things are one. This yields a saying that is particularly pertinent to us, since 8 ov'er dcor. For J �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE look into each other’s faces, we must not get stuck on personalities. Each seminar member has a right to say: "Never mind me, answer my argument." Heraclitus is introducing a great notion into the Western world here: Not who says it matters but what is said. But there is more signifying surface to the saying. Listen to its sound and notice that in the second line the word homologein sounds like logos. "Agree" is a good first meaning but it does not preserve the similarity of sound. Homologein literally means "to say the same." Let me try that, and for "my reasoning" I will substitute "the Saying." BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE Here I shall stop. But although I am ending, I am not finished— and neither, of course, are you. If you have in fact listened not only to me but also to my argument, and if you are possessed by the proper freshman spirit, now is your moment, the part of the Friday night lecture that is the true St. John’s: the time for questions. If you listen not to me but to the Saying, it is wise to say the same: that all things are one. Now what sense does that make? What Saying? Whose saying other than Heraclitus’s own? Suppose the translation did make sense, then Heraclitus is saying that there is a saying that can be heard beyond his own, a speech to which we must listen, a speaking that it would be the part of wisdom to echo in what we say. What impersonal speech could that be? Heraclitus in fact tells us not what the logos is, but what it says, for he bids us to say the same: "All things are one." What if this saying, of which no human being is the author, where a power whose saying and doing were one and the same? What if its speech were an act? Let me play with a third, somewhat strange, version: Once you have listened not to me but to the Gathering, it is wise similarly to gather all things into one. Here logos is translated as gathering or collection. It is the power that gathers everything in the world into a unified whole, the organizing power we are invited to imitate by giving a comprehensive account of the universe in speech. The logos speaks primally; our logos becomes deep by imitating it. I think by now the text has begun to draw us through its surface into its depth. You can see that it demands of you the playful seriousness I mentioned at the beginning, a seriousness that calls out all your capacity for careful attention to surface detail as well as your willingness to dive into the depths. 10 11 �A NOTE ABOUT THE TEXT This lecture was written and edited in WordPerfect 5.1. All headings, subheadings, and body text are set in Times Roman. Typesetting, editing, and printing were done at the St. John’s Print Shop. �ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE PRESS ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 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 Depth and Desire Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 31, 1990 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. 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 1990-08-31 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 College freshmen Depth (Philosophy) Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Brann_Eva_1990-08-31 Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/859fc44a9287028c87b3114dba083ad4.mp4 1489873f26bd6c4824e2ca7aeeabcda8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp4 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:45:12 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 On the Originals of Fictive Mental Images Description An account of the resource Video recording of a lecture delivered by Annapolis tutor Eva Brann on September 3, 2021 as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Ms. Brann describes her lecture: "Most people have 'mental images,' pictures and voices that don't occur through the eyes and ears but behind them. Most of these are memory images whose originals are things seen or heard in the outside world. Some, however, are inner events, imaginary images that are not copies of reality but our own inventions, for example, dreams. We call these 'images' as well. So what are they images of? What are the originals of fictive mental images? And derivatively, what are the originals of artful fictions such as epics, novels, and paintings? Of whom is Homer's Achilles the truthful portrait?" Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. 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 2021-09-03 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource moving image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp4 Subject The topic of the resource Imagination Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses 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 Brann_Eva_2021-09-03 Friday night lecture