26 20 5655 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1da78b8bc8c88e5895ab09b8629eeeec.pdf 9314b0a32c0373ac8746a6c6ed2eaa26 PDF Text Text The St. John's Review Volume XLV, number three (2000) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann James Carey Beate Rubm V<in Oppen Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Blakely Phillips The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welc?me. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's ·College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore. ©2000 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John's Public Relations Qffiu and the St. John's College Print Shop ��Contents The Liberty Tree: A Memorial What's In a Name? Why Should We Remember? The Liberry Tree on St. John's College Campus Annapolis, Maryland, June 3, I999 ................................................ 5 Dr. Edward C Papa!fuse The Liberry Tree Ceremony............................................................ I I October 25, I 999 Christopher B. Nelson Essays and Lectures What Was New About the New Republic? ................................ I9 Harvey Flaumenhift What, Then, is Time? .......................................................................47 Eva T.H. Brann The Taking of Time ......................................................................... 67 Douglas Allanbrook Nature and Creativity in Goethe's Elective AJfinities............•••••..85 Astrida Orle Tantillo Three Poems Pears Preparation While You Are In The Hospital .................................................. IOJ Laune Cooper Review Mind in the 04Yssey.......................••......................••.....•.....•........... !07 Seth Benardete's The Bow and the Lyre Paul Ludwig �1 1 1 1 1 1 , 1 1 1 , 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 �-.:f What's In a Name? fj- Why Should We Remember? The Liberty Tree on St. John's College Campus Annapolis, Maryland Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse President O'Brien, Governor Glendening, Comptroller Schaefer, ladies and gentlemen: Today,* we not only pay tribute to the largest known Tulip tree in America as a Maryland Treasure well worth saving, but also, through the miracle of modern genetics, we ~ommence its cloning as a living memorial to those who have struggled over the years since its birth to define the meaning of Liberty. Indeed, there is no greater symbol of resistance to arbitrary rule and of the advocacy of representative government than a Liberty Tree. One historian, John Higham, has even suggested that the Liberty Tree replace Uncle Sam as "a compelling symbol of American identity:' The idea of Liberty embodied in a living tree comes from Boston in 1765, when the Sons of Liberty chose a stately elm under which to voice their opposition to the Stamp Act, a British-imposed tax on newspapers and official documents. They also commissioned Paul Revere to design a medal that each member wore that bore the image and the caption "Liberty Tree:' The best known and most articulate critic of the Stamp Act was a resident of Annapolis, Daniel Dulany, whose stirring words helped marshal all of the colonies to resist taxation without representation. • Dr. EJwan.J C. Papenfuse is State Archivist of Maryland. He delivered these remarks on the occasion of designating the Liberty Tree a Maryland Treasure by the Maryland Commission for Celebration 2000 on June 3, 1999. �6 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Undoubtedly, Dulany and the Sons of Liberty also supplemented their words with such protest songs as the popular "Liberty;' first widely published in 1763, which begins Hearts of oak are we still, for we're sons of those men who always were ready, steady boys, steady, to fight for our freedom again and again. and has a chorus Come, chear up, my lads, to our country be firm, As kings of the ocean, we'll weather each storm, Integrity calls out, uFair Liberty;' see, Waves our flag o'er our heads, and her words, are, BE FREE The Stamp Act was repealed, but in its place carne ever more repugnant and repressive laws passed by a Padiarnent in which Americans had no vote. By September 1775, the citizens of Annapolis, like their counterparts in the other twelve colonies, returned to their Liberty Trees to condemn the oppression and launch a resistance that would end in independence. This time a new song was composed by Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, which again was instandy popular. Called 'The Liberty Tree;' one verse in particular resonates the meaning of liberty as succeeding generations of Americans have come to define it: The celestial exotic struck deep in the ground, Like a native it flourish'd and bore; The fame of its fruit, drew the nations around, To seek out its peaceable shore. Unmindful of names or distinction they carne, For freemen like brothers agree: With one spirit endow'd they one friendship pursued, And their temple was Liberty Tree. �PAPENFUSE 7 The British so hated Liberty Trees that when they occupied the seaports of Boston and Charleston they cut the Liberty Trees down. The Boston Liberty Elm became fourteen cords of wood to fuel the British campfires, while the stump of the Charleston Liberty Oak was burned to remove any trace of its existence, only to have its roots made into heads of canes, one of which was presented to Thomas Jefferson. Annapolis was never occupied and its Liberty Tree would become the town's oldest living survivor of the Revolutionary era, ultimately playing a role in our nation's history, not unlike that of Annapolitan Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who became the revered last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. As a symbol and shelter to Liberty, the history of this Liberty Tree did not end with Washington's resignation as Commander-in-Chief, nor with the ratification of the Treaty of Peace, both of which occurred but a short distance away in the historic Old Senate Chamber of the State House. Over time, it was visited by a number of distinguished citizens and became the site of celebration, including the 4th of July. In December I 824, the Marquis de Lafayette returned from his horne in France to speak in its shadow, having witnessed a revolution in his own country in which over 60,000 Liberty Trees were planted, and in which the Liberty Tree became a general symbol of adherence to its principles. Lafayette came to Annapolis to thank Maryland for the citizenship bestowed upon him some forty years before, and to receive, once again, the accolades of a grateful people for the part he had played at Washington's side during the Revolution. One hundred and four years later, in I 928, even President Calvin Coolidge would speak here in tribute to the principles for which this tree stands. Beginning its life as a sapling 400 orso yeats ago, and now nearly IOO feet tall with branches spreading 60 feet wide, this magnificent tree proudly symbolizes the constant struggle to define and defend what is meant by �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 8 'Liberty'. It has weathered debilitating storms that cast its limbs on the sleeping Civil War soldiers encamped beneath it. A fire in its trunk renewed its life but required tons of concrete and reinforcement bars to keep it standing. To keep it alive requires careful and constant care. An offspring today flourishes on English soil at Kew Gardens. Soon each of the original I3 states will have a genetic duplicate, fulfilling in fact the historic motto of the Maryland General Assembly which dates back to the time of the Revolution: Crescite et Multiplicamini, Grow and Multiply. In its most recent history, however, lies the most meaningful testimony to this tree's distinguished past. Under its branches, successive generations of St. John's students have debated and discussed the great books of the world, held their commencements, and, for recreation, have battled the Navy with croquet mallets and wooden balls. As Clemenceau, France's World War I Premier, is thought to have said, "Liberty is the right to discipline oneself so as not to be disciplined by others:' Today we too often take liberty for granted. Like the students of St. John's, we should stop and think of how we got where we are, how much pain and travail we went though to get here, and how so many people &om so many different nations have managed to come together here to live in relative peace. We live in a great nation in which liberty carries with it a great deal of responsibility. It is most important that we pause now and then, perhaps in the shade of a great tree such as this, to reflect on what Liberty is all about and to recall the words of Thomas Paine in I775: From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms, Thro' the land let the sound of it flee, Let the far and the near,-all unite with a cheer, In defense of our Liberty Tree. Thank you. �PAPENFUSE 9 Sources: Documentation for these remarks ts available at the Museum Without Walls on the Maryland State Archives web site: http://www.mdsa.net ��-..:f Liberty Tree Ceremony fj:- Christopher B. Nelson Introduction I don't quite know how to greet you this cool brisk morning, as we all feel such a deep sense of sadness over the duty we must perform today. So we will do our best to celebrate the great life of the Liberty Tree and the good things that it stands for. I am Christopher Nelson, president of St. John's College. I want to start by setting out the protocol for this morning's ceremony, providing you with an explanation for our action, and telling you what we will be doing with the wood and leaves once the Liberty Tree is down and what the college will be doing for an appropriate memorial and commemora- tion. First, let me thank all of you for being with us to pay tribute to this venerable old friend, this symbol of America's most treasured prize: the independence and liberty of our people. I want especially to thank: • Governor Glendening for joining us • Janet Owens, our county executive • Dean Johnson, mayor of the city of Annapolis • Louise Hayman, executive director of Maryland 2000 • The several members of the Maryland legislature who are here, including our own representative, Richard D'Amato • And most of all, the many, many friends of the Liberty Tree gathered here today. Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis Campus of St. John's College. These remarks were delivered on Octobrr 25, 1999, �12 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW When I have completed these introductory remarks, we will hear a few words from the Governor, from Louise Hayman of Maryland 2000, county executive Janet Owens and Mayor Dean Johnson. I will speak for the college. We will then have a presentation of colors by the U.S. Marine Corps Color Guard, followed by a moment of silence during which the bell in McDowell Hall will toll thirteen times, once for each of the thirteen original colonies. Mayor Dean Johnson will present a commemorative wreath to be laid at the foot of the Liberty Tree. We will then dedicate an offspring of the Liberty Tree as a monument to its natural parent. This is the tree now standing just opposite the Liberty Tree on the front of our campus, grown from a seedling of the Liberty Tree planted IIO years ago, and now a majestic tree in its own right. After that dedication, I will introduce a special guest who will place a bouquet of flowers at the foot of the new Liberty Tree. This will be followed by the singing of the national anthem, authored by one of our alumni, Francis Scott Key, and sung by one of our faculty members, Peter Kalkavage. That will conclude the ceremony. Following the ceremony, workmen from The Care of Trees will begin the difficult work of raking down the tree. The college will save all the wood from the tree that can be preserved. We will haul it off campus to a site where the wood can be cured for use at a later date. Mementos of the tree will then be made available to all who want a piece of the Liberty Tree. We are still determining what form those mementos should take. In the meantime, we have already removed a few low hanging branches and plan to distribute to everyone present this morning commemorative leaves from the tree. College representatives staffing the reception table will distribute leaves to everyone following the ceremony. We also have at those tables copies of summaries from the lengthy report of arborist Russell Carlson, the last in a succession of tree experts the college consulted in an effort to save the tree. �NELSON 13 At those tables, we have two books available for written comments by members of the public. Some of you may wish to express your sadness over the loss of the tree, others to share a story about it, and some to suggest what we might do with the wood. I invite all of you to take the time to sign the books and add your thoughts and comments. The Decision to Take Down the Tree Almost six weeks ago, on September sixteenth, hurricane Floyd hit the area, bringing high winds and dumping over twelve inches of rain on the city of Annapolis. Area work crews are still cleaning up the damage caused and clearing the countless trees downed by the hurricane. The Liberty Tree suffered a fifteen-foot crack extending from the split at the first huge branch off the stem and well down into the trunk itsel£ A second crack has developed along the main stem. The cracks indicate both that the tree has decayed and that the wood is brittle. Because the trunk is filled with concrete, stress from the wind has been causing the tree to pivot. The tree was deemed a safety hazard and a fence was erected. The college gave notice to all that the area within was unsafe. During the first several days afi:er the storm, the college called in several experts to examine the damage to the tree. The local tree company that has been under contract to rake care of the tree since 1959 advised that it be taken down, saying that it posed "an imminent risk of failure" and that it was already "in the process of failing:' Other private firms, the state Department of General Services, the National Arboretum and other sources were consulted, and all reported to the college that the Liberty Tree could not be saved. College officials sought help from the governor and comptroller of Maryland. The governor and the Department of General Services arranged for the arborist who cares for many of the state's large trees to take a look at the Liberty Tree. On October fifteenth, we received the twenty-seven-page report of this arborist, Russell Carlson. He found that the tree was "now structurally weakened to a degree that it poses a hazard to any person or object �14 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW within reach of its branches:' He declared it to be "at great risk of massive structural failure:' He further found that the decay in the tree was progressing at an increasing pace and that the decline in the tree's structural integrity could not be reversed. The uentire tree now consists of a hollow shell of wood, sometimes only two or three inches thick ... much below the safe threshold level:' Afi:er examining the alternatives including pruning and mechanical supports, he concluded that even the "process of installing these support mechanisms and shortening the canopy would be detrimental to the tree, and would result in a more rapid decline of its vitality:' He concluded, 'The only prudent course of action ... is to remove the tree now. It is inherently unsafe, and at a high risk of failure:' The tree has lived a long and valiant life and has already been on life support for the last century. Notwithstanding the health and beauty of its canopy, its structural support is no longer sufficient to carry its weightany weight-and its hollow shell is too fi:agile to support external means of reinforcement. The crack has widened in the weeks since hurricane Floyd and the tree is now standing only because of the cables already strung through the tree. The pressure on those cables too is growing. Tulip trees grow rapidly and typically die early, usually within their first 100 years. Their wood is soft and brittle. Well-maintained, longlived, protected and healthy trees may survive to 250 years. None other we know of has lived past 400 years as the Liberty Tree has. In other words, this may be not only the last surviving Liberty Tree fi:om the days of the Revolution, but the oldest known tulip tree, too--and it now is in the process of dying. It is with a heavy heart that we take the tree down now before it does damage to others. We hope to leave a stump at the base and surround it with a protective iron fence. When the stump has produced new suckers in the spring, suitable stock for cloning, we will remove the remainder of the stump and its concrete interior, and make room for a clone or seedling to take its place in the same spot. A cloning project is now underway in �NELSON 15 laboratories at tbe University of Maryland, part of a project undertaken by the Maryland Commission for Celebration 2000. [It was not possible to preserve tbe stump of tbe tree, Ed.] I want to thank the governor, his staff and tbe Department of General Services for tbeir support in helping us tty to find a way to save tbe tree, tbe controller, too, and his staf£ and tbe Maryland Commission for Celebration 2000 for tbeir prescience in starting a cloning project four months before tbe hurricane hit. I tbank also the many friends who offered advice and financial support as we agonized over tbis decision. The Liberty Tree at St. John's College St. John's College is the tbird oldest college in the United States, tracing its origins to I696. Yet tbe Liberty Tree was a mature tree back tben. It began irs life long before Isaac Newton ever gave tbought to tbe notion of universal gravitation to explain why tbe tree's broken boughs might fall down toward tbe eartb ratber tban away to the heavens. Back to tbe days of Cervantes, before the dawn of modern science, before classical music was ever conceived-this tree's birtb predates tbe majority of the great books on tbe St. John's College classical program of education. It stood tall and majestic in tbe years before tbe Revolution to serve as a popular public meeting place in colonial times. And, of course, it was here tbat Annapolis residents planned tbeir own tea party before burning tbe vessel Peggy Stewart in I 774. Francis Scott Key, a graduate of tbe college, was an admirer of tbe tree, and one of his classmates, John Shaw, penned a poem entitled "The Ancient Tree;' one of many poems written about tbe tree by students of tbe college over tbe centuries. In tbose days, two hundred years ago, when irs age was tbought to be approaching 400 years, irs condition was even tben described as fragile. Hear tbe opening lines of John Shaw's I 797 poem: The ancient tree, autumnal storms assail, tby shattered branches spread tbe sound afar; �16 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW thy tall head bows before ·the rising gale, thy pale leaf flits along the troubled air. General Lafayette was greeted beneath its boughs in I824 and Civil War soldiers camped here too. It has suffered through wind and storm, lightning strikes and hurricanes, even fire and a gunpowder explosion in its hollow trunk. For the past seventeen years, students &om the college and midshipmen from the Naval Academy have fought their annual battle on the croquet field of honor beneath this tree. And for as many years as memory can serve, seniors have received their diplomas beneath the tree during the college's annual commencement ceremonies. The Liberty Tree has served generations of students as a symbol of the world they would enter upon leaving these halls-a world touched deeply by the idea of individual political freedom under the rule of law, in a nation rooted deeply in these principles with the perennial promise of renewal. But this tree has also served these students as a symbol for the kind of education they began at St. John's College. I am speaking of a liberal education. This word "liberal" is related to the word "liberty;' and the college's own motto is built on a Latin pun over the root word for liberty. It goes like this: Facio liberos ex libecis libris libraque I make free men from children by means of books and a balance These two things, government by the people under law ... and liberal education, ought always to be linked together in the minds of our students and in the minds of all thoughtful Americans if we wish to remain a free society dedicated to preserving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. �NELSON 17 Let me see if I can be more clear about this relationship. Consider this formulation for education: I go to school to learn a trade so that I can get a job and earn a living. Now, there is nothing wrong with wanting this much &om an education. It is really quite useful. But there is something terribly wrong with wanting nothing more. After all, does that formulation sound like "the pursuit of happiness?" No; it may be a necessary condition for life, but it is not sufficient for living a good life--a life concerned with happiness. You must ask more of your education than how to make a living if you care about living a good life. Liberal education is concerned less with the means-the "how-to"--of achieving your desires, and more with the ends themselves. A liberal education frees the individual &om the limitations of thinking about means, and helps him to think about life's purposes. To distinguish good &om evil, you must free yourselves &om the prison of ignorance, the constraints of convention, and the bonds of prejudice and popular opinion. Liberal education has to do with that kind of liberation. The health of the nation depends on its citizens experiencing that kind of liberation. The power to choose one's own ends in a government <if the people and by the people carries with it the awesome responsibility of knowing something about what the purposes of government ought to be-which ends are good and which are bad, which ones are conducive to the management of private affairs alone, and which are concerned with the public good-those purposes that ask what it means to have a government for the people. These then are the principles of liberty to which we dedicate ourselves at St. John's College, and it will behoove us to recall these purposes with other symbols once this dear tree is gone. The closing refrain &om another srudent's poem &om I896, dedicated to this tree, now seems appropriate: Farewell, thou noble Poplar Tree! Each rising sun but hastens our advent �18 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Upon the stage of life, when we must leave Thee, Poplar, Yea, how soon; but sun ne'er shed A brighter glow in human heart than doth Thine image, Poplar: and although decades Have rolled away, and Fortune kind called To us position with the foremost, still Unquenched will be the spark of love which draws Us to thee, Poplar And now we turn to the next generation. 1;, 1889, a seedling of the Liberty Tree was planted on the opposite side of the front campus near the Greenfield Library. We will, at St. John's College, begin a new tradition next May, weather permitting, by celebrating commencement under its limbs. We hereby dedicate it to that purpose and to carry with it the memory of its parent and the symbol of political freedom for which it stood Thank you all for joining us this morning. Please feel free to stay to sign the comment books, take your Liberty lea£ and observe the beginning of what promises to be a long and difficult tree removal project. Farewell, dear Friend. Farewell, thou noble poplar. �--:g What Was New about fj- the New Republic? Harvey Flaumenhaft Practical people ofi:en have a certain disdain for theory, since theory does not tell you what to do here and now, about this or that particular. Be glad that it doesn't-since, afi:er all, if theory did tell you what to do, there would then be no need for you. The decisions that you are called upon to make could be made instead by a computer program. The very value of theory for the man or woman of affairs depends upon the difference between theory and practice. Theory does not determine practice; it informs practice. What I mean by that is not that theory supplies practice with its information; I mean, rather, that theory gives practice its form. The terminology, the premises and the methods that are now in use by practical people as they go about their business are all the outcometo a surprising degree--of theoretical reflections that arose unexpectedly and controversially but eventually carne to be taken for granted. Unless much of what we think were taken for granted much of the time, we would not be able to cope with the complex and ever-changing world, and so we usually do not worry much about theoretical questions. We do not keep wondering what ultimate standard of success to use in judging what we do. We do not relenrlessly pursue the question of what questions are the best to ask, or try to fi:nd an answer to the question of what makes answers adequate or even relevant. Sometimes, however, in unprecedented or in critical moments, we cannot take such things for granted. And even in quiet times, amid circumstances that do not seem momentous, we sometimes get the feeling Harvey Flaumenhaft is Jean at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College. This lecture was delivered there on August 28, 1998. Earlier versions were delivered at Anne Arundel Community College, Arnold, Maryland, on May 5, 1987, and at the National Defense University: Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Washington, DC, August 27, 1990. �20 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW that unless we reassess prevailing modes of thought we shall miss out on hidden opportunities, or else drift gradually downward to disaster. In order to make ourselves more thoughtful about the fundamental things we take for granted-to get some perspective on our handling of the urgent particulars of the here and now-there is nothing better than considering the thinking of first-rate minds of other times or places. For doing this, we Americans have a ready resource of our own, one guaranteed to be not only somewhat distant but at the same time also especially relevant to our needs. The United States was, after all, the first "new nation"-the first country that attempted to make fundamental innovations by reflection and choice, an effort that requires hard thinking. The records left to us by the American founders can help us to rethink for ourselves a very serious effort by some very thoughrfUI practical men to consider the foundations of politics. Those who laid the foundations of the new American nation were raised on the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity. They admired the virtue that sprouted from the soil of the ancient republic, and they sought to revive republican government, which had fallen into disrepute. They sought to revive it, however, on a new foundation and in a new form. They rejected the classical philosophy that articulated the foundation of the classical city, and they rejected the classical city as a model of political organization. Under the influence of modern philosophers, they believed that the understanding of nature (including human nature) had recently taken some great steps forward, and had thus made it possible for even greater progress to be made-if only those who led the way saw dearly what they were trying to do, and could articulate it dearly enough, and promote it courageously enough, to gain and keep a following in a country so fOrtunately endowed with natural and with human resources as was America. The attempt of the American founders to progress beyond the classics cannot be understood without understanding what it was that they sought to go beyond, and why. Among other things, it is not easy to �FLAUMENHAFT 21 understand how to fit together, on the one hand, the rejection of classical philosophy and the classical city, and, on the other hand, the admiration for classical virtue. To understand those things requires theoretical reflection. Among the American founders was Alexander Hamilton-a man admired, even by his enemies, for penetrating to the foundations of practical questions, for relentlessly pursuing a line of thought to the end, and for expressing his thinking with extraordinary clarity. 1 During the Revolutionary War, Hamilton was aide-de-camp to George Washington, the Commander-in-Chief of the American army. He was a prime mover in the effort that produced the new Constitution of the United States, and he was responsible for the classic account of its meaning, The Federalist Papers, the writing of parts of which he assigned to collaborators. When Washington became the first President of the new republic, Hamilton acted as a kind of prime minister in his capacity as Secretary of the Treasury, creating the financial basis for national security and prosperity. And when Washington was called from retirement to preside over the creation of an army during America's quasi-war with France, Hamilton was placed in charge as second-in-command to the aged chie£ There can be no doubt that Hamilton was a most practical man of affairs. It was nonetheless his belief that, however much the practice of government might differ from the activity of theory, no one could be a statesman who did not engage in theory. His theoretical reflections informed the words by means of which he accomplished his deeds--deeds that did much to shape the world around us and also to shape the minds with which we, even now, observe and deal with that world. That is why I propose to consider Alexander Hamilton's account of the problem of popular government and its solution. It raises questions about how to relate the classical political thought of our tradition to the world that we inhabit as Americans. So, let me turn now to my subject. It might be called "the effective republic:' �22 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW The New Foundation When the new Constitution was first proposed, its opponents argued that it would not be safe. So much power should not be placed in any government over a country so extensive as the United States of America, they said. Alexander Hamilton replied that this argument wandered from the real question. It is absurd, he said, to give a government the job of directing the most essential interests of the nation, while not daring to entrust it with the powers that it needs for doing the job effectively. The people, he agreed, should be vigilant and carefUl to see that their government is so formed as to be safely vested with the requisite powers. But the question that he thought the critics should address was this. did the structure of the proposed government render it worthy of the people's confidence? It was beside the point to attack the proposal for giving the government too much power. If there was to be a government extending over the entire United States--if the states were to remain united-then the powers of the Union would have to be at least as great as those proposed, said Hamilton. Without the powers proposed to make it a more perfect union, the very incompletely united Union would fall apart. The extent of the country, far from arguing against the powers proposed, was itself the strongest argument in Javor of a powerfUl government-for no weaker government could preserve the union of so large a country. But the adversaries of the Constitution wished to keep the Union, even though it required what they were unwilling to accept--effective government of the Union. HLet us not attempt to reconcile contradictions;' insist- ed Hamilton, "but firmly embrace a rational alternative:' The question of the extent of the Union's powers could not be the real question, because the alternative to the Union was not a real alternative for choice. It could become such an alternative only if there were a reconsideration of the spir- it of modern life, and of the modern view that derives civil society from an equality of natural rights. From the principles of modern government came the foundation that supports the structure of modern government. Modern government is, fundamentally, representative popular government; and the representative republic when perfected is extensive. Only a rejection �FLAUMENHAIT 23 of the large republic could justifY the refusal to generate an effective government of the Union, which might become ever more completely the government of the nation. Hamilton therefore had to discuss why the large republic is, in principle, better than the small. The only serious republican alternative to the extended republic is the very small republic. The opponents of the proposed Constitution, said Hamilton, keep referring to Montesquieu, who wrote that a republican government must have a small territory. But they have not drawn the right conclusion from the principle with which they so readily agree. They have not noticed that when Montesquieu recommended a small extent for republics, the size that he had in view was far smaller than the limits of almost every one of the American states. If the opponents of the Constitution were right that the liberties of the United States would probably be easily subverted under a government having the powers proposed, then there ought at once to be an end of all delegated authority. The people should resolve to recall all the powers which they have previously let go out of their own hands, and, in order to be able to manage their own concerns in person, they should divide themselves into very many, very little republics--into as many states as there are counties. Hamilton insisted that if Americans refused to the government of the Union those extensive powers which are needed to maintain an extensive republic, then limited monarchy is what they would eventually get, at best. More likely, they would end up living under several little despotisms. America's best hope for effective government in a republican form was the Constitution that had been proposed. Hamilton gave several reasons why the small republic is undesirable. One reason is the overwhelming urgency of mere safety from external danger. It overwhelms, afrer a time, even the ardent love of liberty. An independent small republic, unable to withstand the power of a great enemy, is in a terrible situation; so is an independent small republic continually at war with neighbors as small as itsel£ And mere confederation is no solution to the problem of external defense. �24 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW The requirements of external defense, moreover, do not conflict with considerations of internal welfare. The extensive republic is better than the small one, not only because it is safer from external danger, but also because it is safer within. It is also more prosperous within. Let us examine these reasons more closely. The public councils of a large jurisdiction are more likely to act impartially than are the public councils of a smaller one, which does not contain so great a variety of interests. Councils with jurisdiction over a more exten- sive territory, containing a greater variety of interests, are less apt to be tainted by the spirit of faction. They are more out of the reach of those occasional ill humors or temporary prejudices and propensities which frequently contaminate the public deliberations in smaller societies that are less diverse. These evils beget injustice toward and oppression of a part of the community; and they engender schemes that gratifY a momentary inclination or desire but terminate in distress, dissatisfaction, and disgust. It is harder for these evils to produce an effect when a variety of interests must get together on a large scale--as they must before they can do much harm in an extensive republic. Extensiveness, moreover, not only presents an obstacle to the predominance of partiality in the public councils of the whole; it also helps to repress fuction in local councils, as well as local insurrection against public authority. When a country is extensive, local disorders are disorders merely in a part, and hence may be overcome by those other parts that remain sound. Consider the ancient history of the small republic. In the republics of old, the people's true condition was that of a nation of soldiers. In those barbarous times, war was the principal business of man. The people of antiquity were poor, and the maxims they lived by were ferocious. The classical republics were inflated with the love of glory. The assembled people, jealous of authority, were an ungovernable mob.When not fighting against other peoples, they clashed tumultuously among themselves. Among themselves, they alternated between anarchy and despotism; with others, between despotism and servitude. �FLAUMENHAFT 25 But eventually came those humane innovations of later times which accord with the pronouncements of enlightened reason. Not heroic display but profitable business, it came to be acknowledged, is the business of government. The industrious habits of a modern people, absorbed in gainful pursuits and devoted to productive improvements, are incompatible with the condition of a nation of soldiers, where civic life centers on an assem- bly of warriors whose delight is domination. The industrious habits of a modern people are incompatible with the condition of a nation of citizens absorbed in being citizens; for if merely the power of appointing officers of government were ordinarily exercised by the people at large, the people would have little time for anything else. If those who might otherwise go about their business, with enterprise and industry, instead were busy where the action is, the citizenry would be impoverished-unless the action were that collective piracy which supported the armed splendor of antiquity. But modern humanity discountenances fierce rapacity; modern enlightenment looks not to dominion and to plunder, but to commerce and to industry. The common good, the good that is common to common men, requires that participation in government be uncommon. Government by the people cannot secure popular safety and prosperity. A people's liberty is not a stage or an arena for displaying popular action. It is rather a protective fence, which, properly erected by popular fear and desire, and prudently managed by wise and energetic leadership, may become a productive force. Liberty is that security for life and property which is provided by checks and controls on government. It was want of safety against the power of their governors that first led ancient men to popular government, said Hamilton. The interests of the people required government intimately connected with the people. In the first, crude attempts to institutionalize this connection, government for the people was identified with government by the people. Modern enlightenment, in founding government on the equal right of every man to secure his safety and prosperity, had revived the ancient prejudice against establishing power far from the hands of the people who are to be affected by the exer- �26 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW cise of that power. The modern doctrine of equality had, however, also generated a modern improvement which permitted government to be popular while freeing it from the defects of government by the collective body of the people. This principle of popular representation, said Hamilton, gave to modern republics the decisive advantage over ancient republics. Only in the small republic was it possible to have direct democracy, government conducted directly by the assembled people. But the very good reasons for having popular government at all are reasons that argue in favor of representative democracy, and against government conducted directly by the assembled people of a small republic. It is sometimes said that a direct democracy would be the most perfect government if only it were practicable. Experience had proved, said Hamilton, that there is no political observation more false than that. Small commonwealths are jealous, clashing, and tumultuous--the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord, and the miserable objects of universal pity or contempt. Unceasing agitations and frequent revolutions are the continual scourges of small republics. In the ancient democracies, where the people themselves assembled, the field of debate presented an ungovernable mob, which was incapable of deliberation and was capable of every enormity. In these assemblies, the enemies of the people systematically brought forward their plans of ambition; they were opposed by their enemies of another party; and it became a matter of contingency whether the people subjected themselves to be led blindly by one tyrant or by another. Thus no &iend to order or to rational liberty can read without pain and disgust the history of the commonwealths of ancient Greece. They were a constant scene of the alternate tyranny of one part of the people over the other, or of a few, usurping demagogues over the whole. This, together with the lack of a solid federal union to restrain the ambition and rivalry of the different cities, ended-afi:er a rapid succession of bloody wars-in their total loss of liberty and their subjection to foreign powers. It is impossible to read the history of the small republics of ancient Greece and Italy without feeling horror and disgust at the distractions �FLAUMENHAFT 27 which continually agitated them, and at the rapid succession of revolutions which kept them perpetually in vibration between tyranny and anarchy, enjoying only brief and occasional felicity amid the furious storms of sedition and party-rage that repeatedly and frequently overwhelmed them. The original government of most had been monarchy, which had sucetunbed to its natural disease, despotism. In reaction, those communities had established popular governments in which (except for Sparta) the jealousy of power hindered the people from trusting out of their own hands an authority competent to maintain the repose and stability of the commonwealth. Thus they had erected government to keep them safe from each other and from strangers; then, finding themselves not safe from their government, they exchanged it for one which lefr them even less safe from each other and from strangers. But a government framed for durable liberty must pay as much regard to giving the magistrates a proper degree of authority to make and execute the laws with vigor, as to guarding against encroachments by the magistrates upon the rights of the community. Just as too much power leads to despotism, so also too litde power leads to anarchy, and both lead eventually to the min of the people. These well-known maxims had never been given sufficient attention in adjusting governmental frameworks, and so the advocates of despotism had been able to draw arguments not only against the forms of republican government, but even against the very principles of civil liberty, from the disorders that disfigure the annals of the small ancient republics. America, however, was the beneficiary of progress. If it had been found impracticable to devise models of a structure more perfect than that of the small ancient republic, then the enlightened friends to liberty would have had to abandon the cause of republican government as indefensible. But it did not have to come to that, for the science of politics--like most other sciences--has been greatly improved. Now well understood is the effectiveness of various principles, which the ancients either did not know at all, or only knew imperfectly. These principles are powerful means for retaining �28 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW the excellencies of republican government while lessening or even avoiding its imperfections. Hamilton gives a catalogue of things that tend to the amelioration of popular systems of civil government-things that he says are either totally new discoveries or else have progressed towards their perfection principally in modern times. After listing the regular distriburion of power into distinct departments, the introduction of legislative balances and checks, and the institurion of courts composed of judges who hold their offices during good behavior, he comes to the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own elecrion; then he says that he will venture, however novel it may appear to some, to add one more, on a principle which has been made the foundarion of an objection to the new constitution: the enlargement of the orbit within which such systems are to revolve. In comparing our governments with those of the ancient republics, we must not hesitate to prefer our own, because every power with us is exer- cised by representarion, not in tumultuous assemblies of the collective body of the people, where what almost always has to govern is the art or impudence of the orator, rather than the utility or justice of the measure. However, it is only by enlarging the orbit within which popular systems are to revolve that full effect can be given to the principle which makes the modern American republic superior to the ancient republic-the principle of representation. And, with reciprocal action, it is only by representation that republican government can be made extensive. The celebrated principle that no government but a despotism can exist in a very extensive country has been misunderstood. It relates only to democtacies where the whole body of the people meet to transact business, and where representation is unknown. The New Problem We must, said Hamilton, prefer our own governments to those of the ancient republics, because every power with us is exercised by representa- tion. But jealousy of power has prevented our reaping all the advantages �FLAUMENHAFT 29 which we ought to have obtained from the example of other nations. This jealousy of power has rendered the constitutions of the American governments in many respects feeble and imperfect. Americans threw off the British monarchy, not because a free people cannot have a prince, but because the British monarch refused to recognize that a free people must have its own representatives. Great Britain is a free country because its inhabitants have a share in the legislature through representation. In no government is consent safely given once for all time: a people not represented will be a people oppressed, and representation requires an intimate connection of interest between the representative and those he represents. The requisite intimate connection of interest does not, however, require that the body of representatives mirror the citizenry in all its multitudinous socio-economic variety. Indeed, the true and strong bonds of sympathy between the representative and the constituent are polirical-the twofold requirement that the representative depend upon the constituent for continuance in office, and that the representative and his posterity be bound by the laws to which he assents. The end of government is to secure the safety and prosperity of the people, who are its source. Government by the collective body of the people endangers and impoverishes the people. Popular representation, while securing the people against themselves (by removing government from the hands of the collective body of the people), also secures the people against the government. Only, however, if things are properly arranged. The body of representatives is different from the body of the people. The representative body is superior to the people in its ability to serve the people's interests. The representatives' interests, however, are not superior to the people's interests. Representatives might nonetheless come to think that they are. Safety requires, therefOre, that the members of the representative assembly be numerous, and also be frequently elected. That is not enough, however. Government flowing from the people must be divided to work for the people. Some partition of governmental power is essential to free government-indeed, the very definition of des- �30 potism is: a government in which THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW all power is concentrated in a single body. Absolute monarchy is its most obvious form, but no single body, not even a representative assembly, is a safe depository of ample unchecked power. In a nation itself made up of states, the particular state governments may contribute to safety against the general government of the whole by their multiplying the depositories of power. From one point of view, the state governments are the parts of the whole. But there is something problematic in a multiplicity of depositories of power that are wholes of a sort similar to the whole of which they are parts. The government of such a whole (the parts of which themselves are wholes) verges on being a mere league of governments or a government over governments-that is to say, no government at all. If the whole is not to be an anarchy, the parts must lose their similarity to the whole, thus leaving the government of the whole a great mass of power deposited in a single representative body. However urgent may be the question of the partition of power among the component parts of a compound republic (that is, a nation of states), the central question is that of the partition of power among the several departments in a single government. There is a sense in which good government is thoroughly representative. Under the proposed Constitution, Hamilton pointed out, the President of the United States himself would be a representative of the people. He would act to protect the people against an unfaithfUl Congress. Nonetheless, the proper name "The House of Representatives" belongs most properly to that one of the several governmental branches which is the representative body. By means of representation, the people obtain public servants, whom the people hire to free themselves for business other than the public business, and whom they can fire for acting as if free to neglect their tie to the people. The ends of representative government are served by government conducted according to law-legislation is the most manifestly public of acts--and legislation by a numerous assembly most represents the multitudinous people. The �FLAUMENHAFT 31 legislature seems to represent the immediate being of the society. There is no question that free government requires a freely elected popular assembly. The question is what else it needs. Though representative government is perfected by the partitioning of governmental power, it is diffirult to maintain such partition in a government that is thoroughly representative. Insofar as the parts do not approach being whole governments themselves, the parts must be differentiated organs. But one of them, the popular legislative assembly, the part most properly called representative, tends to primacy and even hegemony. The partitioning of power, and even the intermixture of the powers of the parts, are partly explained by the need for checks upon power, and for balance to preserve the system of checks. But the partitioning of power cannot be understood unless one understands the parts as differentiations of power, each with its own peculiar property. Representation is necessary to the foundation of good government, but representation is not the whole of it. Popular representation freed the populace from continual contention and for productive industry, while safeguarding them against their governors. Americans had accepted this governing principle, Hamilton thought, but imperfectly. Representative popular government could succeed as an alternative to the discredited participatory popular government only by developing administrative effectiveness. By itsel£ representation did not suffice to protect the people against turmoil and invasion, and to manage their prosperity. The people had to choose: government by the people, affecting democratic workings-or government from and for the people, effecting popular works. The proper end of government is popular, as also is its source. Popular representation is the fimdamenral reliance for keeping the ends of government popular. According to Hamilton, while the Chief Executive is in a sense a representative, the representatives in the most precise signification are those officials who are most numerous and have the shortest duration in office of all the men publicly elected. On the other hand, Hamilton also thought that while �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 32 uthe administration of government" (the actual business of governing) is in its "largest sense" the work of all the parts of the government11 legislative, executive, and judicial-yet in its most precise signification" the administration of government is the work of the executive part. The most popular part of government, the numerous assembly of representatives with short duration in office, cannot itself do the actual detailed work of governing. Government flowing &om the people must be divided to work for the people. Partition prevents bad deeds by multiplying the agencies which must cooperate to act. The powers needed to do much of anything are separated, on the presumption that although the several depositories of power will have difficulty coming together, and staying together, in order to do bad things, they will nonetheless come together, and stay together, in order to do good. But the fear that leads to precautions against government's doing bad may lead to arrangements that keep government &om doing much good. In a government amply arranged for safety against government, adequately arranging for effectiveness of government is a problem. The problem is twofold: to concentrate power sufficiently for many wills to act as one, at one time, soon enough; and to stabilize policy sufficiently for many actions to be in concert during a long time, for constant purposes. Unless the powers of government are apportioned to promote effectiveness, those who take part in the mutable affairs of the multitudes of men massed in political society will be uncooperative and improvident. Good government--a system of liberty that is effective for protection and prosperity-must concentrate power and keep policy constant. America's new order of the ages would not last for ages if the founders could not &nd a way to make the means of safety also efficacious. The man who most sharply posed the problem rried to show the way to a solution. It was Alexander Hamilton who taught what it takes to administer a republic. The people are the beginning and the end of good �FLAUMENHAFT 33 government, he thought, but between the source and the outcome operates that organization of means which is administration. Popular representation is of little avail without effective administration. Republican statesmanship required that American principles be restated. Government flowing &om the people must be divided to work for the people. Partition can promote good deeds by differentiating agencies so that different sorts of work are done. The very device for diminishing danger from government can be employed as well for promoting effectiveness of government. Effectiveness of government had two ingredients fur Hamilton: unity and duration. Neither of these is characteristic of the numerous and short-lived popular representative body that is both characteristic of free government and fundamental to good government. Nonetheless, both ingredients of effectiveness could be infused into parts of a popular government properly partitioned. To see how, let us consider the Presidency and the Senate. Both institutions were attacked by opponents of the Constitution. From the Presidency, they said, monarchy would arise; &om the Senate, aristocracy. Hamilton defended the constitutional provisions for both Presidency and Senate, as necessary to the success of popular government. Let us first consider some of Hamilton's arguments concerning unity in the Presidency, and then some others that he made concerning duration in the Senate. The One Ingredient of the Solution The true test of a good government is irs aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration, said Hamilton, and rorms of government differ in their aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration. Hamilton presented himself as someone who is able to estimate the share that the executive in every government must have in its good or bad administration. The single-minded attention to security &om abuse of power, he said, does not attend with due care to the mischief that may occur when the �34 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW public business cannot go forward at critical seasons. Whenever two or more persons are engaged in any common enterprise, there is always a danger of difference of opinion, and there is peculiar danger of personal emulation and even of animosity if it be a public trust or oflice clothing them with equal dignity and authority. Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike, or because they had once been consulted and happened to disapprove. The principles of a free government require submitting to the inconveniences of dissension in the formation of the legislature. In the legislature, moreover, prompt decision is more often bad than good. There, deliberation and moderation are often promoted by the differences of opinion and the jarring of parties that may sometimes obstruct salutary plans. In the executive department, however, dissension does no good that counterbalances the harm which it does to what should be the characteristic features of the executive: vigor and expedition. A numerous legislature is best adapted to deliberation and wisdom, and is also best calculated to conciliate the confidence of the people and to secure their privileges and interests, whereas a single executive is best because the proceedings of one man are most eminently characterized by decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch. Hamilton presented a list of the sorts of "executive details" that constitute what seems to be most properly understood by the administration of government: "the actual conduct of foreign negotiations, the preparatory plans of fi:nance, the application and disbursement of the public monies, in conformity to the general appropriations of the legislature, the arrangement of the army and navy, the direction of the operations of war; these and other matters of a like nature:' The apportiomnent of power into several depositories is not an itemby-item distribution guided only by the wish to prevent abuse by equilibrating the capacity for abuse: there are sorts of work into which the various powers of government have a natural tendency to be sorted. The �FLAUM EN HAFT 35 executive power has an inherent nature: it is not a convention produced by the Constitutional Convention. What our Constitution does is to vest the executive power, with certain expressed exceptions and qualifications, in an official called the President, and the executive powers which it enumerates are not exhaustive of the President's powers. There is unanimous agreement that the vesting of the executive power in the President ought to be interpreted in conformity with other parts of the Constitution which express exceptions and qualifications. There is also unanimous agreement that it ought to be interpreted in conformity with the principles of free government. About the meaning of the latter, however, there is antagonistic disagreement. According to Hamilton, free government must not only be free, it must also be government. Free government need not simply be popular; it may also be monarchical. The idea that a vigorous executive is inconsistent with the spirit of republican government is, to say the least; not without its advocates; but Hamilton places them in a dilemma: those who are unfriendly to the proposed Constitution because its executive is energetic must choose between government that is republican but bad, and government that is good but non-republican. Opposition to the energetic executive must be abandoned by enlightened well-wishers to republican government, for energy in the executive is a leading characteristic in the definition of good government. Energy in the executive is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks, and it is just as essential internally. Internally, it is essential to the steady administration of the laws, and it is also essential to the protection of property against those irregular combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice, as well as to the secu- rity of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, faction, and anarchy. Whatever may be our theory about the preferability of republican over monarchical government, practice shows the necessity of an energetic executive. Hamilton's problem is to persuade enthusiastic defenders of �36 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW republicanism that a due dependence on the people, and a due responsibility-the two things which constitute safety in the republican sensecan consist with an executive attacked as monarchical because of its ener- gy. The chief or central difficulty with which Hamilton must contend is the fear that a concentration of governmental power in one man, the chief executive, is not safe. Americans' habits and opinions impede the effort to protect their rights and promote their interests. They resist being governed, because they fear being oppressed. It is often best in a monarchy for the prince to relinquish part of an excessive prerogative in order to establish a more moderate government, better adapted to the happiness or temper of his people. A government characterized by the absolutely unqualified monarchical principle is less truly energetic than is its antithesis, free government. But, although freedom has this tendency to energize government through the extensive feelings that identifY public and private, it also has a tendency to enfeeble government, through the fear and the fear-manipulating envy which resist the concentration of power in men elevated above their fellows to exercise public authority. Freedom is not identical with energy: fi:eedom energizes when the requirements of energy are not ignored. A country like Great Britain, in which the principle of freedom has been joined to the monarchical principle, may have both governmental energy and popular enthusiasm. Early in the American Revolution, Hamilton declared himself in favor of what he ca!Ied "representative democracy;' and also urged an arrangement for administration by single men that he said would "blend the advantages of a monarchy and republic in our constitution:' Executive energy is essential to good government, however much it may be thought to be not republican, said Hamilton, and unity is the first ingredient of executive energy. This argument-that an executive authority lacking unity would be exercised with a spirit habitua!Iy feeble and dilatory-applies with principal weight to the first of two methods that destroys the unity of the executive: the arrangement for a plurality of magistrates of equal clignity and authority. That feeble arrangement is also �FLAUMENHAFT 37 unsafe, owing to the danger of differences that might split the community into the most violent and irreconcilable factions. Thus there are not likely to be many advocates of this arrangement. More numerous were the advocates of the other method that destroys executive unity. This second method-the method more popular in America--ostensibly vests executive power in one man, but subjects him wholly or partly to the control and cooperation of others who are the members of his council. To this arrangement, which makes a council's conrurrence constitutionally necessary to the operations of the ostensible exec- utive, the argument that a plural executive is an executive lacking energy does not apply with equal weight, Hamilton concedes; but he says that it does apply with a weight which is considerable. Harniltoris argument then goes on to turn against itself the argument for an executive council. Not only is the executive in this method still quite feeble (even if not so feeble as in that other plan), an executive with a council is also in fact unsafe. The method of an executive council, as much as the other method for plurality in the executive, tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility, thus depriving the people of their securities against infidelity in elected officials. Those securities are the removal and punishment of wrongdoers, and (even more important in an elective government, because more commonly required) the censure of public opinion. The council in the British monarchy helps keep Britain free: it increases responsibility-from no responsibility whatever, to responsibility in some degree (though only in some degree, for the King of England is not bound to do what they say). But the American executive with a council would be less responsible, and would therefore be more dangerous to republican liberty. To recognize that many cannot exercise executive authority well, but to stop short of vesting that authority in one, is in fact to reduce the security against infidelity to the people. A few may combine more easily than many, but are harder to watch than one. The state government of Hamilton's immediate audience, he points out, has no council except for the single purpose of appointing to offices. �38 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW The republican fear of unity in the executive seems to make its last stand on this ground of appointments: even if there is only one chief magistrate, there must be many other magistrates; to allow him to name them all by himself would make him a lone magistrate, followed by his friends and servants. Hamilton therefore takes note of how the President, while making appointments under the proposed Constitution, will be subject to the control of a branch of the legislative body. What sort of arrangement is best calculated to promote a choice of the right men to fill executive offices? The legislators themselves are not to be the holders of executive office-they themselves are not to constitute the administtation. If the power of appointment is to be placed in a body of men, that body must be not the people at large, but a select body of a moderate number. Men in a select body of a moderate number, however, unlike a numerous and dispersed people collectively, are regulated in their movements by a systematic spirit of cabal and intrigue; which spirit of cabal and intrigue is the chief objection against reposing the power of appointment in such a body. The resolutions of a collective body are frequently distracted and warped by a diversity of views, feelings, and interests; and nothing ls so apt to agitate men's passions as personal considerations, whether relat- ing to themselves or to others whom they are to choose or prefer. Hence, the process of appointing to office when an assembly of men exercises the power will be a display of attachments and animosities that will result in a choice, not for merit, but for what gives to one party a victory or to many parties a bargain. One man, by contrast, will have fewer personal attachments to gratifY than will a body of men, each of whom may be supposed to have as many as does that one man. Moreover, a single man with the sole and undivided responsibility will have a livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard for reputation. He will be led by the concentration of obligation and interest to investigate with care what qualities merit appointment, and to prefer with impartiality men who have those qualities. Hence, to analyze and to estimate the peculiar qualities adapted to particular offices, one man of dis- �FLAUMENHAFT 39 cernment is better fitted than a body of men of equal or perhaps even of superior discernment. However, to reduce the danger of evils from one man's uncontrolled agency in appointments, it would be well to restrain him by making it dangerous to his reputation, or even to his political existence, fOr him to play favorites or to follow popularity. An effective check will be the requirement of the Senate's cooperation for appointment to office. Such a check would not impair executive energy: the Senate restrains only by the power to concur or not; the President retains the initiative. The Other Ingredient of the Solution Hamilton argued that there would be more constancy under the proposed Constitution because the Presidency would be a seat of resistance to harmful change, and of persistence in beneficial action. But the feature most characteristic of the Presidency was unity, not duration. Another part of government received a name that suggested lasting a long time-namely, the Senate. With respect to number, the few Senators are more than one but less than many; with respect to number, the Senate and the House of Representatives differ from each other only in degree, while both differ in kind from the President: bodies of men are more or less numerous, but unity is not numerous at all. The Senate is distinguished by duration: the body, for at no time can its membership change for the most part; and its members remain in office longer Senate is a continuing entirely, or even than any other officials elected in the republic. As the President is the incarnation of nnity, so the embodiment of duration is the Senate. When the New York RatifYing Convention discussed the provisions for the Senate, an amendment was proposed: no person should be eligible as Senator for more than six years in any period of twelve years, and the legislatures of the several states should have power to recall their Senators and to elect others to serve for the remainder of the time for which those recalled had been appointed. Hamilton spoke against the amendment. �40 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW He began by speaking of the noncontroversial end, We all are eager to establish a republican government on a safe and solid basis, he said. We must therefore mix the ingredients that make for safety with those that make for solidity; we must not think that we have established good government when we have provided only for republican safety. The choice of means to the noncontroversial end is most controversial. Nothing was more natural than that, in the commencement of a revo- lution which received its birth from the usurpations of tyranny, the public mind should be influenced by an extreme spirit of jealousy. To resist these tyrannical encroachments and to nourish this jealous spirit was the great object of all our institutions--and it was certainly a valuable object, he said. But the zeal for liberty became excessive. In forming our confederation, this passion alone seemed to actuate us, and we appear to have had no other view than to secure ourselves from despotism. Safety from despotism is certainly one important object of good government. But there is another object, equally important, which enthusiasm kept us from attending to. Our exclusive attention to tying the representative to the people has kept us from seeing the need also to embody in our government another principle, a principle of strength and stability in the organization of government, and vigor in its operations. In every republic, he said, there should be some permanent body to correct the prejudices, check the intemperate passions, and regulate the fluctuations of a popular assembly. A body instituted for these purposes must be so formed as to exclude as much as possible from its own character those infirmities and that mutability which it is designed to remedy. It is therefore necessary that it should be small, and that it should hold its authority during a considerable period. We shall never have an effective government unless our government has within it some stable body which will pursue a system, will guard against innovations that lead to instability, and will have the opportunity to know what must be known for directing public affairs. �FLAUMENHAFT 41 The people do not possess the discernment and stability necessary for systematic government. To deny this would be flattery, which their own good sense must despise. Yet these ttuths are not ofi:en held up in public assemblies-although they cannot be unknown to any who hear me, said Hamilton. The reason for this seems to be that the people are not only lacking in information but are also misled by artful men or by men of influence whose views are partial. The body of the people in every countty intend the good end; it almost goes without saying that the populace desires public prosperity. The people's leaders in America, however, need to be told that the people's deficiencies do not include an incapacity to bear being told that they have deficiencies. The people are capable of recognizing that it is misleading flattery to tell them that they need not provide against their deficiencies. A part of the misleaders are misled by partial views that can be enlarged; a part of them, artful and ambitious, may be overcome by leadership that holds up in public assemblies the ttuths not ofi:en publicized in enthusiastically republican America. Because two objects need to be conciliated, there ought to be two distinct bodies in our government. One of the two bodies is to be immediately constituted by, and peculiarly to represent the people. Being dependent on the people and possessing all the popular features, it will have a quick sensibility of the ideas of the people; this body, being made up of representatives elected for a short term who shall be closely united to the people, is the representative body. In addition to the representative body, there is to be another body: a permanent body with the firnrness to stand against popular fluctuations and to pursue the public interest, the ttue interest of the people, as the arts of demagogues and designing men play upon and generate popular dissatisfactions. The next day, Hamilton spoke again. He began by pointing out the source of the difficulty: ttuth in the matter under debate resided not in a single principle, but in a judicious combination of principles. There is a double object in forming systems of government-safety for the people, and energy in the administration. But one element in administrative ener- �42 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW gy or governmental strength is stability: without stability as well as security for the rights of the people, government is not government, The principle of stability in government and the principle of safety for the people are best combined by instituting one branch peculiarly endowed with sensibility, and another with knowledge and firmness, Through the opposition and mutual control of these bodies, the government in its regular operations will perfectly combine individual liberty with governmental strength. The principle of caution, of a laudable anxiety for the safety of the people, is the principle justly applied in reasoning about the representative house. However, we constantly have it held up to us that, as it is our chief duty to guard against tyranny, it is our best policy to form all the branches of government for this purpose, But, replied Hamilton, experience shows that when the people act by their representatives, they are commonly irresistible; when the people have an organized will that pursues measures, they will always prevail. And the principle that justly applies to the representative body would destroy tl1e essential qualities of that which is senatorial. We should not impose the same principles upon branches of government designed for different operations. The two houses were built for different kinds of work. The differences laid down in building them were meant to be embodiments of differences in nature. The House of Representatives was designed primarily to keep the people safe; the Senate, to keep the government steady. The Status of the Solution Hamilton's two themes of unity and duration are the two aspects of his one problem: to give effectiveness to the American constitution of republican liberty. Hamilton presented himself as the great friend of republican government, not-as his opponents charged -its secret foe. He said that what he sought was this: by the establishment of properly differentiated parts within governmental machinery founded upon popular representation, to give to the republic the effectiveness without which it would be discredited and destroyed. �FLAUM EN HAFT 43 It was not simply to get things done that Hamilton was a proponent of constitutional arrangements for energizing and stabilizing the exercise of governmental power. Things may get done, soon and so as to last a long time, even when a constitution makes for fragmented and mutable government. If the machinery of government provided by the constitution is lacking in effectiveness, then a political machine unknown to the constitution may be improvised to do the job: effective decisions can be made and enforced by a boss sitting in the back room, and then sent up front for dignified promulgation by those who formally preside; or the man who presides up front with a popular air of republican humility may himself do the effective work, operating his own machine in the back room. But constitutional arrangements that necessitate such extraconsti- tutional arrangements so that the public business may in some way go forward are dangerous and demeaning. Hamilton repeatedly declared himself "iiffectionately attached to the Republican theory:' He said that he had "strong hopes of the success of that theory;' but in candor ought to add that he was "far &om being without doubts:" ul consider its success as yet a problem;' he said. As yet, successful republican government was not an accomplished fact but a project to be accomplished-for "it is yet to be determined by experience whether it be consistent with that stability and order in Government which are essential to public strength & private security and happiness:' In the circumstances, he said, republican theory ought to govern governmental practice. 11 1n the abstract:' or neglecting the circumstances here and now, the nonrepublican theory may seem to be better. "Permanent or hereditary distinctions" of political rights are an essen- tial part of the British constitution, a constitution that is good, as well as being the best that there yet has been. Experience thus shows that the nonrepublican theory can be successful in practice. Experience, moreover, gives cause to doubt whether the republican theory can be successful in practice. But "every good man" ought to have "good wishes" for the republican theory's essential idea, the "idea of a perfect equality of �44 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW political rights among the citizens:' The republican theory has a more desirable constitutive principle than does the nonrepublican theory. The nonrepublican theory would seem to be better only because the republican theory would seem to be less practicable. The republican theory 11 merits "the best efforts to give success to it in practice." It has hither- to from an incompetent structure of the Government ... not had a fair trial, and ... the endeavor ought then to be to secure to it a better chance of success by a government more capable of energy and order:' Hamilton had repeatedly "declared in strong terms;' he insisted, "that the republican theory ought to be adhered to in this Country as long as there was any chance of its success:' The republican problem could be solved only by the development of a republican form of government that did not lack the aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration. If such a form were not developed, warned Hamilton, if popular prejudices against being governed were flattered to the point of inciting those popular propensities which bring on the self-destruction of popular government, then monarchy would after all prevail. Proclaiming long and loudly the merits of the British constitution, Hamilton tried to teach emphatically what he thought Americans needed most to learn-the lesson that government cannot be good unless it joins to private safety public strength• In rejecting the hereditary principle in government, a British inheritance from less enlightened times, Americans had not cast off their unenlightened parochial prejudice against executive energy. But the necessity of executive energy was rooted in the nature of things: in some way or other it would return; and if refused a stately republican admission, it would break violently through the front door-or enter by stealth through the back. In some way or other, Hamilton thought, the public business would go forward, or the government would cease to be. His wish was that the public business might go forward in a way not &tal to liberty and to honor. Monarchy under the free British constitution produced a good administration, but the independent Americans did not have the materi- �FLAUMENHAFr 45 als for a constitution of the British sort: their failure to solve the republican problem would produce a tyrant or a boss. Previous experience had shown the republican theory to be doubtful. But republican government might succeed if "so constructed as to have all the energy and stability reconcilable with the principles of that theory:' Not only would Americans "endure nothing but a republican government;' but it was "in itself right and proper that the republican theory should have a fair and full trial:' Considerate and good Americans should wish for a true test of the republican theory in America, said Hamilton, and should therefore advocate republican institutions of the greatest possible energy and stability. Republican government would be vindicated as a good form of government only if it could thus be formed for durable liberty--only, that is to say, if it could thus be made effective. 1 Citations for the passages here paraphrased and quoted from Alexander Hamilton will be found in my book The EJftctivt Republic: Admirristraticm and Constitution in tbt Thought of Alexaudrr Hamilton (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). ��-;f What, then, is Time? !j:- Eva Brann When our dean asked me to lecture this September it was because I've just completed a book on time, and I'm happy to have the opportunity to talk about it. There seemed to be three possible kinds of profit that I figured might come to you and to me if I gave what 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. When the time comes to write, whether it's a small paper or a long annual essay, never think: 'Tve 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, something that 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 reenacted, 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 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. Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at the Annapolis Campus of StJohn's College. Her book is entitled: What, Thm, Is Timt (Lanham, MJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). This lecture was delivered at the Annapolis campus, September 4, 1998. �48 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 &om experience, Of the things that have urgently interested me &om time to time, the mention of Being and Nonbeing, for example, provokes mostly stupefied noninterest, 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, St. Augustine. It comes &om the eleventh book of his Confessions, which we read in the sophomore year. Here is the whole 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 -&om two ends at once, intellectual puzzlement and deep-felt irritation, and it developed, as really good questions do, from annoyed fascination to serious interest. The intellec- tual 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. But if I �BRANN 49 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 worddifferent 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 mean that there is a future coming and our business is to form a reception committee for it. Some see this Future with a capital F as a doom, as in Yeats's great poem, uThe 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 St. John's College forty-one years or almost IS,OOO days. Sometimes it seems like �50 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW forever and sometimes it seems like a day. What accounts for this mad elasticity of time? But besides these time-ruminations 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 phasenature. In fact, a new hero of mine, Octavio Paz, whom I discovered through an alumnus of St. John's, 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 mysel£ Imagine what a pleas" ure 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 _founJ.-that writers on time who lived millennia apart in time and who were wodds 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 upon 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 200,000 books and articles written �BRANN 51 between I 900 and now. Of course, much of it is piffling, but much of it is, I am sure, thoughtful. 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 Husser!. Since many of you will not have read them, though all are on the Program, 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 to do, although their similarity on the point of time is most spectacular in view of their diametric opposition on everything else that mat- ters. 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 for- mal sort of similarity. Images are absent presences or present absences; they are not what they are, they are made of Being and Nonbeing. 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 inimitable Yogi Berra. When someone asked him: fiWhat time is it?" he replied: You mean 11 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 fur most of us an indispensable help, is not thinking, since to understand what others think is simply a different activity &om the thinking that goes directly, with- �52 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW out 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 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 I 905 paper on what came to be known as the Special Theory of Relativity. What 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 tight away: It might appear possible to overcome all rhe 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 ... �BRANN 53 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 narural, time. Einstein goes on to show that for any stationary Here far away &om 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 rums 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 rwo and a half millennia and quote to you what is the most famous, most o&en cited definition of time. It comes &om Plato's dialogue called Timaeus. Timaeus is a 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 picrure 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. �54 THE S"I JOHN'S REVIEW 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 modern 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'll be happy to hear any arguments you might have. Among other points then to be made, some, 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 puts time into nature. For this so-called absolute time, which has no observable 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, irs infinite spaces, irs primary forces, irs 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 sen- sibility 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 �BRANN 55 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, but 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 ttod Twice the familiar ttack, 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 said to be their past. But I, for one, just cannot imagine what it is like to live in the unchanging Here and not 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: How could I have empathy with, feel my way into, that which has no inside? So the outer world becomes in this respect opaque, and this is the price to be paid for making a philosophical choice. In coming to conclusions in philosophical inquiries, I want to say as an aside, it is always a matter of what we 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 on time that there are two kinds of time. They �56 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW might be called succession-time and phase-time. 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-afi:er, 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 11 even the successions of nature turn 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 shrifi: 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 respect to before and after. What the deep meaning of all this is can't come out unless we follow up what Aristotle means by motion, number, before-and-afi:er. 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 discussed, is this: if time is the number of motion as a progression in which the parts come before and afi:er, 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 fi:om the fact that it takes �BRANN 57 place over distance. Distances are representable as mathematical lines, and these lines must be continuous-no elements can be missing. So time, as Aristotle himself 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 anum- ber 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 comes the critical question: When the soul is counting, 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. �THE ~l. JOHN'S REVIEW 58 Now let me leap 2000 plus years ahead. For Aristotle, time originates with the counting soul. To my mind, Aristotle's true modern successor, the one who takes Aristotle's 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. 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 topof-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: ul 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 consti- �BRANN 59 tutional 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. Both Aristotle and Kant have been primarily interested in what I have called succession-time, the steady chain of before-and-afi:ers 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 rwo 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 Husser!, who takes up rwo millennia later exactly where Augustine had !eli: off. a fi.tsspot. 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. �60 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Our mind or soul is distended and that makes it capable of holding time, so to speak. How distended, how stretched? Here is Augustine agam: 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, 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 postrnodern writers, taking their departure &om 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- �BRANN 61 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 together there at once, in the eternal Now. To be human, then, is to have a 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 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. Husser!, 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 succession-line sinks away into vertical memory in an orderly and continu- ous 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. Husser! is the founder of a way of inquiry called Phenomenology. Its chief feature is that it excludes all questions of existence and realiry, 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 fur Phenomenology and Husserl's lectureseries known as The Phenomenology '!f lnternalTime-Consciousntss is the great firstfruit of his method. �62 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Husser! 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 Husser!, The horizontal axis, which represented the world's time for Augustine, represents an internal time-flux, a contin- uous sort of subjective succession-time, for 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, Husser! 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? Husser!, 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 think that phase-time is the fountain and origin of all time. Every phenomenon of time is derivative from the fuct that we have past, present and future. To me the most astounding circumstance of our temporal life, surpassingly strange but apparenrly 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 �BRANN 63 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 rhan 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 the past 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 '!f 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, usual- ly called duration, has to be accounted for as well. I think it works as follows. �64 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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-a&er 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, retrospectively, time is thought of--not felt-as a continuum that is continuously cut by a point-like Now, the kind of Now in which nothing can happen, So my description of time, which leaves time as what I call "a wellspecified 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 future conversation. 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 �BRANN 65 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. ��--:f The Taking Of Time fj- by Douglas Allanbrook Part One Consider the short Latin verse: Deus creator omnium:' St. Augustine examines this verse towards the end of his chapter on time in The Co'!frssions, a chapter which comes at the end of his autobiographical examination. Try to memorize it, to inscribe it permanently on your minds: Deus creator omnium." Consider its aspect on the written page. Read it out loud It is now 11 11 present to you in space as you take the time to read it-as convention pre- scribes-from left to right, though it could be written &om right to le&. It would take the same time to read : "muinmo rotaerc sueD:' Once I have the verse in mind, however, and utter the syllable De, the whole of the verse's future begins to pass through my present utterance into the past. If I have the verse memorized it is--of course-all of it present in some unspeak- able manner in my memory. If I recite it, give life and breath to it, its direction is by no means reversible: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end It is in this sense analogous to God's relation to his creation, except for the fact that our verse was made, not created, and has an earthly author, the estimable Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose--a formidable rhetorician. The time it takes to recite our verse may be longer or shorter depending on the speed with which it is read. By paying attention to the motion of the second-hand on your wrist watch, you can tell you how long it took for you to recite it. You count as the second hand sweeps past and, if in one recitation you count up to ten and in a second recitation you count to seven, you say the second recitation is faster than the first and that the first is slower than the second. When you have done this you have not done very much, though it is your attentive mind which has done it. It has numbered a motion and compared it nmnerically with another motion. It's not, howevDouglas Allanbrook is tutor emeritus at St. John's College. This lecture was delivered at Annapolis on February 17, 1995, and at Santa Fe, November 12, 1993. �68 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW er, as if you had taken rhe true measure of rhe verse. If, experimentally, you slow up rhe recitation excessively, you will run out of brearh. If you speed it up too murh, it will sound breathless. Your lungs and your brearh are now fixing limits to rhe rime taken for rhe performance of rhe verse, Our bodily organs and our senses do provide a mean for us; they guide us into a pleasing lengrh of time ("Deus creator omnium"). The senses also judge of anorher relation, a fimdamental relation which obtains between syllables of our verse. While rhis ratio may be roughly numerable, its presence is signalled to us--and is immediately present to us--via our bodily senses, You may develop a notation for rhis which might seem to be completely numerical or metrical (quarter note; half note), but such a notation does not hit rhe mark. All of the traditional names which attempt to label what is going on catch rhe essence of rhe ratio more correctly. Here are just a few of rhem: rhe eloquent Latin terms, elevatio and deposition; rheir Greek equivalents, arsis and thesis; or simply our English upbeat and downbeat. How does rhe measuring of rhe second syllable by rhe first syllable occur physically; how is us measured by De in rhe word Deus in our Latin verse? What has transpired? When rhe second syllable has been uttered it is compared physically wirh rhe first syllable; our body's attention is directed to a happening in time, directed not by our ability to compare 2 to I, but by rhe physical force of our feet and the motion of our brearh as it is inhaled and exhaled. It is an event, not a cognition, though we are well aware of it. (It is not unlike our primitive sensing of same and other, and rhe connection this has wirh our ability to compare I to 2.) Once rhe first pairing is established, future rime seizes us: we suspect rhat the next syllables will be like rhe opening ones, rhat rhere will be a knowable and sensed double: DeuS gives tise to c;:,;;, anorher iamb. 1 We will be able to dance or at least walk steadily to what is awaiting us, and we are not disappointed Our pulses adjust to it and our feet can so easily give us a down beat. The meaning of rhe words now has its soul, its brearh, its animus; our hope for rhe future becomes realized as rhe verse moves rhyrhmically rhrough rhe present moment of sense, on into rhe past. God becomes rhe creator of everything, starting from ground zero, �ALLANBROOK 69 as we prepare to say the word Deus, and ending as ending with the very thing itself as we say the word omnium---everything. Consider now a verse that may be more familiar. It is in the English language, though it has a Scotch accent. "My love is like a red, red Rose:' My and is are up-beats even though My has a lot more weight than the innocent little copula is. When "my love" is safely tucked into the past, my anticipation of the future is rhythmically capped when is is notched with like. A marvel occurs when, with the memory of the past two iambs ("My love is like") firm in our memory, we get a simple little article, a, followed by two reds and a rose: My love is like a red, red Rose:' Of course the first iamb, My love" 11 11 has not the gravity, at least to the general public, of 11 Deus our Latin verse, 11 ; however, has not the excitement that is generated by a simile. The future awaits us when a simile is broached. What will it be like? A red, red, Rose. What a happy consummation! Think about the second red. The first one comes as the downbeat of an iamb--a red, the second one as the first word in a pair that ends with rose. Consider the force of the three ri. Now for a verse much closer to us than that of Robert Burns, though it may be that only to certain rather aging Americans does it seem so irrunediate. This generation's rhythmic habits may well be different. Here goes: "I can't give you anything but love 2 3 4 Baby!" Read it out loud: it starts with a jolt on I, foot down, first person singular. Once we have heard it with its catchy tune and rattling snares we tap our feet. Can't help it. After its slamdunk into love on the first down beat of the third measure you can't help but begin counting empty time (2, 3, 4!) so that Balry!, in all its sweet fecklessness, gives us a double jolt on the fourth down-beat of the piece. There's an endearing insouciance, a sophisticated sappiness in the whole verse. Its con- struction pulls us into the act, making us both witty and sexy as the 1--the (g<>--<lances through its slice of time, deprecating itself and fi:nessing us into the universal seduction game! The "My love.. in the verse My love is like a red, red Rose" is more mysterious than the 'T' in "I can't give you anything but love,-Baby!" My points to its down beat love; but that is something that can't be pointed to, 11 �70 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW let alone defined. In reciting the verse we could, if we wish, imitate the longs and shorts of our Latin verse: uDeus creator omnium"-"My love is like a red, red Rose"-but there's no necessity for it. English verse depends on stress, not length. In either performance, however, the foot comes down on the important words kve and like, The rest of the quatrain takes off from the like and plunges the rose first into spring-time, June, and then, in the next two verses, into a simile that is the heart of this essay. Here is the quatrain: My love is like a red, red, Rose That's newly sprung in June. My love is like a melodie That's sweetly played in tune. A melody has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is a wordless and memorable piece of time, coiled up in our mind's winter like a tulip bulb ever ready to unfold when spring arrives, Is love like a melody? Love is a hope, an anticipation, looking ever forward to a consummation that would mark its demise. All similes are double-edged: they are both like and unlike what they refer us to. That is the pathos of all similes and in particular of this simile: My love is like a melodie That's sweetly played in tune A melody can be repeated over and over again, Its very reality lies in its not being real! Love is not like that. We must look back at the first verse we examined, which is by now firmly stored up in your memory: uDeus creator onmium." St. Augustine places his discussion of this verse, as you may recall, at the very end on his chapter on time, a chapter which in its turn is placed at the completion of the autobiographical section of his Co'!fessions. The unfolding of his life's time has led him-almost of necessity-into both a meditation �ALLANBROOK 71 and an explication centered upon the word time. It is only with this in mind that the sense and meaning of his analysis of the verse gets its full import. Let it be stated hypothetically: if God created everything, then time is indeed part of that creation and accompanies every created thing in the course of its life here in this created world. That world has a beginning, a middle and an end, as does the life of a man and the history of the world. A melody or a psalm in such a world might well then be a true image of creation, and not merely a construct that taunts us with both its likeness and its pathetic difference: not a simile, not a metaphor. Just as at this moment in his life he both looks forward with anticipation and backwards into the halls of his memory, so when Augustine is about to recite our verse his expectation extends fotward into the future over the whole extent of the psalm. Once he begins reciting, whatever he plucks from the future and lets fall into the past enters his memory, what he calls his faculty of "looking back at:' The life of this activity is both backwards to memory and forward in expectation of what he is about to recite. In other words his--and our-present attention is what the future passes through on its way to the past. As I progress, expectation lessens and memory increases. Here are his exact words: And what is true of the whole psalm is also true of every part of the psalm and of every syllable in it. The same holds good for any longer action, of which the psalm may be only a part. It is true also of the whole of a man's life, of which all of his actions are parts. And it's true of the whole history of humanity of which the lives of all men are parts. This tremendous conclusion completes his discussion of time and memory, and the verse chosen- Deus creator omnium, C'God the creator 11 of everything")--substantiates in its words what the action of his attention performs. The moments, weeks, months and years of our life, the totality �72 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW of such parts, the very ages of man, are not one damned thing afi:er another, mere perturbations in the sea of becoming-tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow-; they have a true beginning, a true middle, and a true end because and only because they were created by God. Given this understanding, our psahns and our speeches reflect this: they are true images, not the paltry work of our so-called creativity with its games of simile and metaphor, When we give voice to them we lend them the life of our breath and of our movements which serve to measure their lengths and to round out their periods. Genesis tells us our breath was the breath of life, our "inspiration;' breathed into us by the Diviniry, that very breath which measures our syllables and our feet. This is the literal meaning of both the famous word psyche and its Latin twin animus. Our enlivening, our first aspi- ration, was from God, our first inspiration. For most of us such statements seem to issue from the mouths of either saints or madmen; we are not, like St. Augustine, rhetoricians seized by the blinding, ever-present moment of ultimate attention, Grace. Our poems are not the Psahns or the Bible and our lifetimes are opaque. We take our time differently, and the perennial memorability of our constructs, of our cherished lyrics, of our caged nightingales, are--of necessity-fraught with pathos as we cottfront the tricky sea of self-love, and swim like drunken boats in a medium which sets no limits, which has no port of arrival, nor any hope of one! Part Two All poems are time-pieces-always constructed, always formal. The best of them are like an excellent Swiss watch, unswervingly acrurate. They make us catch our breath as we are paced through their matchless lengths. I propose now to get down to brass tacks, to present to you three marvelous sonnets, one Italian, one English, and one American. All three of them, being Italian or Pettarchan sonnets, follow a pattern of eight lines followed by six lines: an octet followed by a sextet, as you can readily observe if you glance at your scores. (They are scores, as this is an essay whose subject is music.) �ALLANBROOK 73 Read carefiilly to yourself the first and by far the earliest of these sonnets so as to have something in your ears before any discussion of them ensues. Que! rosignuol, che si soave piagne Forse suoi figli o sua cara consorte Di dolcezza empie il cielo e le campagne Con tante note si pietose e scorte; E tutta notte par che rn' accornpagne E mi rammente la mia dura sorte; Ch' altri che me non o di ch'i' rni lagne, Che'n dee non credev'io regnasse Morte. 0 che lieve inganar chi s' assecura! Que' duo be'lurni, assai piu che'l sol chiari, Chi penso rnai veder fra terra oscura? Or cognosco io che rnia fera ventura Vuol che vivendo e lagrimando impari Corne nulla qua giu diletta e dura. e There were sonnets around the literary landscape before Pettarch; he, however, firmly established the form with his many, many sonnets to the Lady Laura: one set was written ~~In Vita di Madonna Laura'1-"In the life of Lady Laura"-and another set written "In Morte di Madonna I.aura"-"In the death of Lady Laura:' To those of you who do not know Italian the reading of the sonnet may be somewhat irksome as it could only have be a musical experience for you if you can mouth the proper sounds of the words, and for those who are not acquainted with Italian they are merely words. If you examine closely the scores you will note that the separate lines, the measures as it were, all contain eleven syllables, the famous undecasillabe employed throughout the Commedia by Dante. There is also a rhyme scheme which is in the octet, abba abba �74 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW and in the sextet, cdc cdc, rhyme being a rhythmic device which chimes like sounds at the ends of measures, underlining the last downbeat. As all Italian words end in vowels it strains less the Italian poet to rhyme than his English brother, though the rhymes in this particular sonnet are all double: compagne-m'accompagne-lagne, consorte-sorte-Morle. In the sextet: s'assecura-oscura-duraJ chiariimpari. Once we are accustomed to Italian sonnets, whether they be in English or Italian, our anticipation of what is to come is specific, and pleasure results as we see the fUture slipping past us with the lengths and accents we expected, but with the actuality of the sounds-that is the words-brand new. If we are acquainted with Italian the particular meaning of the rhymed words reaches a climax at both the end of the octet and at the end of the sextet: sorte, Morte--fate, death-, and at the end of the sextet oscura, dura--dark, harsh. Here is a rough but adequate translation: That nightingale that is weeping so smoothly, perhaps for his little ones or for his dear consort, with sweetness fills the night with so many notes both pitiful and accomplished. It is also my companion all night long, and reminds me of my own hard fate: I cannot blame anyone but myself for believing that she was a goddess and not subject to Death. Oh how easy it is to be secure in one's self-deceit! Who ever thought to see beneath the dark earth those two eyes dearer than the sun? But I recognize that my bitter path means living and crying at the same time, bitter and harsh as anything here below. �ALLANBROOK 75 The nightingale is famous. Its very name is beautiful in many languages: Nachtingal, Nightingale, Rossignol, Usignuolo, Bulbul. We are told constantly that its chirpings are beautiful and without fUrther thought we apply our human word song to its nocturnal emissions. What has the nightingale to do with the life and death of Laura? Some have gone as far as doubting that the Lady Laura existed. Others, who enjoy a mixture of philosophy and criticism, would admit that while Petrarch may have met her during the years he lived in Avignon, he "idealized" her. She is, without a doubt, nearly immortal in the countless songs and sonnets written to her by Petrarch, just as he himself has gained immortal fame as the author of her praise. The fourteen-line form, known forever after as the Petrarchan sonnet, has a most particular sub- ject matter, a subject matter which is inseparable from its formal structure. In its first eight lines, the octet, the sonnet pays attention to something in nature. In its concluding six lines, the sextet, it takes a look,_ as in a mirror, at the author, or at all of us, in contradistinction to nature. This is the artifice or the nature of a sonnet. In one important use of the word nature we are all of us as natural as the nightingale. But the nightingale is not self-conscious, and we are. In this our natures differ. Is it a fallacy to feel sympathy with nature, and to feel that it, in its turn, is sympathetic to us? If, as seems to be the case, modern biological science demonstrates that we share DNA with the humblest of one-celled creatures and worms, that we are in fact akin to them, what follows for us? Does the fact that all life is akin induce sympathy or even empathy in us or in them? We can't soar like the gimlet-eyed eagle, though we are remarkably like the sluggish worm both spatially and temporally: food in the front end, digest in the middle, and out at the other end. Beginning, middle, and end. As it is so wittily put by Gilbert and Sullivan in a song addressed to a grieving tit-willow: '"Is it weakness of intellect, birdie' I cried, 'or a rather tough worm in your little inside?"' Nature is a slippery word. It so easily becomes a red herring, a deception designed to lead us on some defiantly theoretical trip. In so many �76 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW books and in so many arguments this word is employed as a pawn in some artful game. We, almost all of us, also say commonly that nature has its ways of taking time: summer and winter, spring and fall, generation and corruption. The sun and the moon have their periods as do our physical bodies. Analogically our very sentences are periodic (as are our melodies) and the entrancing completions of our rhythmic verses are a musical device which enhances this "natural" phenomenon. Does great nature mock our symmetries or are we imitating her tak- ings of time, her comings to be and her passings away? If she eternally returns as the seasons roll by and the great sphere rotates, then indeed Laura's death is not consonant with her, and the nightingale's courtship is indistinguishable fi:om lament. Look over the sextet of the Petrarch sonnet again: Oh how easy it is to be secure in one's self-deceit. Who ever thought to see beneath the dark earth those two eyes clearer than the sun? But I recognize that ·my bitter path means living and crying at the same time, bitter and harsh as anything here below. When Augustine at the end of his dissertation on time analyzed for us Ambrose's verse "Deus creator omnium;' he, as a trained rhetorician, one might even say as the ultimate rhetorician, was well aware of the full meaning of the words he was looking at. If God is the creator of every- thing, he is creator of time. God's time it is and not our time, or nature's time. The creator's time has a true beginning, middle, and end as do our days and years, as do our lives. as do our syllables, our phrases, and our periods. All of these aforementioned things are true images of God's time, a tracing of his reality, and the ever present now, the ultimate moment of attention, is indeed the moving finger of eternity. Let us now take up Augustine's analysis again. This time we will operate upon it; it will suffer a violent sea change in the process. Instead of �ALLANBROOK 77 11 1 employing his verse Deus creator omnium" ( God the creator of everything") we will substitute the sonnet of Petrarch we have been examining. For what is true of the whole sonnet is also true of every part of the sonnet and of every syllable in it. The same holds true for any longer action of which the sonnet is only a part. It is also true of the whole of a man's life, of which all of his ,actions are only parts. And it is true of the whole history of humanity, of which the lives of men are only parts. Time is now the locus of pathos; it is in truth our time, our brief span, our transient moments and days which find their image in our syllables and in our phrases and in our periods. History's great paragraphs pass befOre our eyes in all their awful sameness. We seek solace in the crystallizing moments of present attention, moments which seek to memorialize our lives by fixing rime within our human constructs with the aid of words and with the aid of music. A priest wrote the next sonnet and he speaks of a priest's business--the administration of the sacraments. It is, nevertheless, a true sonnet both in form and in content. if indeed it is proper to separate the two. Felix Randal the furier, 0 he is dead then? my duty all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardyhandsome Pining, pining, rill time when reason rambled in it and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended? Sickness broke him. Impatient he rursed at first. but mended Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom Tendered to him. Ah, well, God rest him all road ever he offendedl �78 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears, Thy tears that touched my heart. Child, Felix, poor Felix Randal How far from then forethought of. all thy more boisterous years, When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers, Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal! On reading the score, note the rhyme scheme: in the octet, abba abba -all ended, -handsome, --and som~ --all contended; --mended, --began som~ ransom, --offended. In the sextet, ccd ccd --endears, -tears, -Randal; --years, -peers, -sandaL There is not a fixed syllable count but rather an astonishing, fulsome line whose rhythm lopes along with a prose-like spring. While the Petrarch sonnet begins with "Q.<el rosignor' ('That nightingale"), this sonnet begins with a proper name, Felix Randal, and then names his profession. He is a farrier, or blacksmith. The natural event reported is the reception of the news of his death. "Oh he is dead then?" It is cast in the vivid present and immediately followed by "My duty all ended;' a completed perfect tense. The rest of the octet takes past time as it progresses: "pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it.'' A single past event-"Sickness broke him"-and what transpired afi:er-"he �ALLANBROOK 79 cursed at first, but mended I being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some I months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom I tendered to him"-a past perfect moment. The octet ends with a third person imperative, a prayer for all future time in reference to what is past: ''Ah, well, God rest him all road ever he offended:' With hope and prayer the blacksmith's time will be consonant with God's time. The sextet then proceeds to pack a wallop, but not until its last three lines. It begins with a present general statement: ''This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears." Then we are thrust back to past time as bearing witness to the general statement. "My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quelled thy tears, thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal:' A mere priest might have stopped here, but the time-artist, the poet, seizes the moment of compassion, his memory and imagination placing it against the blacksmith as he was in his prime, working at his forge. How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers, Didst fetter for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal! The extraordinary phrase "How far from then forethought of" crams time into a capsule. The regular iambs concentrate our attention; the reit- erated consonantsf and th give added intensity: "How far from then forethought o£'We could-though we needn't-recite it with long and short syllables as was done in our Latin verse: uDeus creator omnium,-~~how far from then forethought o£'The last two verses of the sextet and of the sonnet stamp an image so vividly upon the mind's eye that the very conceit of the poem loses its feeling of artifice as the poem clangs into its last rhyme of sandal with Randal and the figure of the man, the blacksmith Felix Randal, resounds in our ears. �80 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers, Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and batter ing sandal! The then in "How far from then forethought of" has become a now, present to us in all its pathos if we pause to think back at the opening of the sonnet: "Felix Randal the farrier. Oh, he is dead then?" The last sonnet, by Robert Frost, begins, not with a nightingale or with the death of a man, but with an anonymous bird singing in its sleep. We are not told whether it is a robin or a lark or a whippoorwilL It is a plain sounding sonnet, its sophistication arising out of its seeming simplicity. It employs, with three notable exceptions, short Anglo-Saxon words. A bird half wakened in the lunar noon Sang halfWay through its little inborn tune. Partly because it sang but once all night And that from no especial bush's height, Partly because it sang ventriloquist And had the inspiration to desist Almost before the prick of hostile ears, It ventured less in peril than appears. It could not have come down to us so far, Through the interstices of things ajar On the long bead chain of repeated birth, To be a bird while we are men on earth, If singing out of sleep and dream that way Had made it much more easily a prey. The octet reports an event in nature; the sextet-as is traditionalcomments on the natural event, bringing in not so much the poet as all of us "men on earth" as the focus of attention. The metric structure �ALLANBROOK 81 adheres strictly to the rules of the game: there is a ten syllable count. It is written in iambic pentameter, the bread and butter of English versification. Unlike Shakespeare's habits with the pentameter, there are no caesuras after the first two feet, however. The rhyme scheme differs from that of the other two sonnets and sounds with the close clang of rhyming couplets: noon-tune, night-height, vmtriloquist-desist, ears-appears, Jar-ajar, birth-earth, way-prry. When a Latinate word crops up in the fifth line it sticks out, the sound of it and its placement having everything to do with its meaning: vmtriloquist. The poet himself is a ventriloquist in this sonnet. He's a plain old bird using plain old words. You can't put your finger on him. Where is he? The next line delivers over to us the most famous of all Latinate words having to do with poesy: inspiration. We have one more Latinate word in the sextet: interstices, a crabbed and fussy word. With these simple observations in mind, peruse the poem once again: A bird half wakened in the lunar noon Sang halfway through its little inborn tune. Partly because it sang but once all night And that from no especial bush's height, Partly because it sang ventriloquist And had the inspiration to desist Ahnost before the prick of hostile ears It ventured less in peril than appears. It could not have come down to us so far, Through the interstices of things ajar On the long bead chain of repeated birth, To be a bird while we are men on earth, If singing out of sleep and dream that way Had made it much more easily a prey. �82 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW It's part of the pleasure of the piece that it is not a nightingale singing for its mate; it's some plain feathered creature. It is not singing in some imagined garden, some sylvan grove reminiscent of our ancestral Eden, It is happening in some plain old woods. To be sure, the moon is out as the bird is "half wakened in the lunar noon:' The singer's Hinspiration" is not the source of his singing, quite the contrary: his "inspiration, is a cautionary impulse to desist from singing before danger appears. There is no snake that will imperil him in this non-Eden. He must be alert for a fox or a marauding owl which could silently swoop from below or above and consume him utterly. Very much a report on nature and certainly intended as a palliative for the "pathetic fallacy:' In addition to being most "American;' this sonnet is decidedly a 11 modern" sonnet. It is, as we would expect, this aspect and reflection which comes to the fore in the sextet, The word nature, if we dare employ it any longer-and many are the writers and lecturers who brandish it about with equanimity-is now part of a new bali game, a game in which time and distance leap far beyond the limits of imagination. We are nowadays beyond even the old "modern" view of Pascal, who was aghast when faced with the infinity of space: 'The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me;' he wrote. We cannot, as he could not, conceive of the cosmos as a glorious ornament. How consoling it would be to have a crystalline sphere with a proper, finite diameter! Our mathematical artifices in this century have plunged us far beyond Pascal into a numbing beginning of an explosion emanating from a near infinitesimal point, an explosion that coagulates into something that is no longer matter, as if we had ever known what that was! Black negativity reigns at the center of our galaxies, and there are simply too many of them either to imagine or to conceive. Vision ceases. It is almost with a sense of relief that we turn from such matters and consider our men on the moon and their view of our home, our blue and cloud-shrouded sphere, enveloped in its gaseous life preserver. Back down on earth we take time as evolution presents it to us. We have no choice but to accept being's timetable as estab- �ALLANBROOK 83 lished by Darwin, and our reading of the geological record, rhe long bead chain of repeated birrh, as Mr. Frost states so succinctly. Benearh our gaseous envelope, in our little corner of the universe, something remark- able confronts us, something more wondrous than a miracle. We men on earth hear a bird singing in its sleep and pay attention to it. Borh man and bird have emerged from evolution's long and solidified game of chance. We are both of us, bird and man, the residue of evolution's random but ordered production of all of our dear and memorable species. What a coincidence; we are aware of each other. It cannot have been planned! It did occur, however. Frost's sonnet is full of this wonder; it calls attention to a simple event and rhe poem itself becomes a memorial, an artifice that escapes from time by fixing our attention upon a moment in time. It is also a cautionary sonnet. God is not looking at rhe bird nor looking afrer him. The bird could well be dead if he were not a ventriloquist, cunningly throwing his voice, singing from a certain undetectable height, and having rhe inspiration to stop singing before the onslaught of a marauding fox or a cruising owl. All of our songs and sonnets are constructions, cages in which we place our nightingales. They are made out of our breathing, our walking, and our heartbeats: the physical lumber of our existence from day to day. They are all cautionary tales in which we celebrate and lament our timeridden lives, and in which we preserve for future generations our bestcrafted observations, like insects preserved over millennia in Baltic amber. What we do when we are wide awake is pay attention to our existence, to its duration, and to our place: what, where, and when. These celebratory constructs are our perennial poems; they fix us with fUll self-conscious- ness in that moment of observation and parhos. They are rhe nearest we have to a definition of ourselves as we peer forth from rhis obscure corner of an unimaginable universe, observing, wondering, and preserving. Some of you may be wondering, remembering rhe opening of this essay, if St. Augustine has been lefr far behind, if I have not insisted that all our poems are either pagan or secular. Perhaps so. It is perfectly clear �84 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW that there can be no music in Paradise: that ultimate construct is out of time, eternal. ("Is there no change of death in Paradise;' begins a canto of Wallace Stevens.) When we recite--or even better, sing-and intend to ourselves the meaning of "Deus creator omnium;' we assent that God, the creator of everything, made the world and established its time as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. We make of the history of the world a celebratory hymn of praise, a psalm, an ultimate period. We can quote Augustine backwards and try it on for size: What is true of the whole history of humaniry, of which the lives of men are parts is true also of the whole of a man's life, of which all his actions are parts. The same also holds good for any action of which the psalm is a part and what is true of the whole psalm is also true of every part of the psalm and of every syllable in it. There is another psalm which sings so eloquently of this same thing: "Let everything that has breath, Praise the Lord;' a psalm set with per-. fection by Stravinsky at the end of his "Symphony of Psalms:' Bear in mind however that when our priest played at poet he took time as a true time-keeper. The last lines of his incomparable sonnet speak in never-to-be-forgotten words the pathos of self-conscious human existence when face to face with death, time's end. How far from then forethought o£ all thy more boisterous years. When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal. I. In Latin, meter is quantitative. �~ fj- Nature and Creativity in Goethe's Elective Affinities Astrida Orle Tantillo Both in his literary and personal life, Goethe has the reputation of being a lover. Yet, it is difficult to pin down his views of love from his literary texts. Werther is a great romantic who refuses to give up his love for Lotte, while Faust is so caught up in his own sphere of enjoyment that he cruelly forgets about Gretchen. The poet who uses the naked back of his mistress to tap out hexameters 1 is the same novelist who preaches the virtues of renunciation in Wilhelm Meister. In his autobiography, Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und W.hrheit), Goethe provides us with sketches of his views on love. He describes in great detail his first and youthful loves-Frederica, Charlotte, and Lili-and how he literally runs away in order to escape romantic attachments with them. He then describes how these flights become intimately entwined with his art. His powers of creativity exist symbiotically with his capacity to love: his artistty stems from his ability to turn the reality of his romantic experiences into poetty. He tells us, for example, that he himself was Werther, but instead of actually shooting himself, he does it on paper and thereby escapes Werther's fate (HA 9:588). Love inspires the young Goethe to write a novel about suicide, but art makes possible his own escape (HA 9:588). For Goethe, art becomes a means of overcoming limits in order to gain new freedoms and insights. This relationship in itself is perhaps not at all unusual when speaking of writers and their work. Goethe, however, extends this view of creativity into the natural realm. According to his natural philosophy, nature is not limited to the procreative in its expressiveness, but finds other creative avenues as well. Both organic and inorAstrida Orlc Tantillo is Assistant Professor in the German Department at University of 1Ilinois at Chicago. �86 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW ganic natural entities are capable of overcoming regular Hlaws" of nature in order to create new entities and forms. This essay examines the relationship between love, nature, and creativity in Goethe's most scientific novel, Elective Affinities. During the course of his novel, Goethe compares natural and human artistry. The characters in the novel are successful to the extent that they are able to be creative. Their creativity, however, is not limited to innovative endeavors, but is closely linked to their ability (and inability) to find creative solutions in the face of personal obstacles. Similarly, throughout Goethe's scientific works, plants, animals, and inanimate colors strive to be creative in the face of struggles or obstacles, And like human artists, plants and animals are capable of creation beyond and apart from sexual reproduction. Even colors possess a myriad of creative possibilities in their various interactions with the world around them, Moreover, time and time again, Goethe draws parallels between nature's works and his own, whether he likens the process of writing an essay to the growth of a plant' or applies Aristotle's principle of compensation' to both organic forms and literary works (HA 1:201-203). Goethe's scientific works therefore provide a philosophical and non-literary context for the importance and role of creativity in Elective Affinities. A generation before Darwin! Goethe hints in some of his scientific works at how plants and animals may break out of a necessitous gene pool through eros and create a new species. In other words, Goethe suggests that animals are not limited to procreativity in their creative endeavors, but that they may have the ability to evolve and change their forms as their environment or other conditions warrant. For example, in a review essay' on the anatomist d'Alton's works on sloths and pachyderms, Goethe describes how an animal may, through an exertion of its will, change its own form and its way of life. In the middle of this scientific commentary, Goethe asks for our indulgence. He wishes to deviate &om scientific prose for a moment in order to use more poetic expression. He then begins a kind of tale or fable about a monstrous spirit, which we �TANTILLO 87 could well recognize as a whale in the ocean. Goethe's fable, as we shall see, is an evolutionary one. This monstrous spirit attempts to live on land. At first this creature feels constrained by its new environment. Soon, however, it sprouts monstrous or enormous limbs to help him carry his mon- strous body around on land. This whale goes through a period of experimentation as it tries to find the correct balance for its limbs in its new environment. The first creative attempt of this creature backfires-it grows disproportionately large gangly limbs out of an "impatience" to gain freedom on land (GA 17:350). Goethe, however, describes another attempt of a monstrous spirit which is more successfUl in its endeavors to produce a new form for itself. He writes of a later cousin of the first creature, an Unau (a type of sloth), which forges a more balanced approach to the limitations of a new environment. This cousin, which successfully challenges some limits, while accepting others, creates a new body for itself which approaches the "mobile ape genus:' Goethe similarly examines the mobility and the creativity of particular species, in a less fancifUl manner, in several other scientific works. In his review essay6 on d' Alton's works on rodents, Goethe discusses a vari- ety of different kinds of rodents and describes how their particular method of balancing their wills against necessitous limirs leads to deliberate artistry, warfare, and even the creation of new creatures. In this essay, Goethe describes teeth generally for all animals as a "shackle of nature;' a shackle which determines their development. He links the clumsy state of cows to their "incompleteness of chewing" and explains that their teeth keep their development close to the ground and occupied with food. His examination of the rodent family, however, shows how nature's very shackle leads to creativity not only in the animal's activity, but also in the formation of new animals. Goethe's description of the main characteristic trait of rodents, incessant gnawing, illustrates how this activity has far-reaching creative implications. This gnawing may be regarded as a kind of almost convulsive passion (GA 17:355) or as a Hcontinuous exercise, a restless drive to �88 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW be occupied" (GA 17:357) which finally escalates into a "destructive fit" (GA 17:357). Afi:er satisfying their needs, the rodents still would like to live in more secure plenty. They exert their passionate energy toward the gathering or collecting drive as well as toward other activities, which leads, according to Goethe, to some deeds that at first appear to be very similar to II deliberate artistry". 7 For example, the obsessive gnawing of beavers enables them to build elaborate dwelling spaces for themselves, Whereas many of Goethe's contemporaries, such as d'Alton, believed that animals create their dwellings out of "dumb instinct," Goethe argues the opposite. In d' Alton's mind, there is no great difference between a beaver's dwelling and a snail's shell. Both are created out of an animal's unconscious instinct for shelter. 8 Goethe, in contrast, argues that a rodent's passionate drive leads to highly creative acts-acts that appear to be more closely related to human artistic activities than to determined natural ones. A rodent's creativity, however, is not limited to its collection of nuts or to its building of elaborate housing structures, but has far greater possibilities. In discussing the various members of the rodent family, Goethe further illustrates how limitless the variations of the structure of these creatures can be. He suggests in this essay that species may evolve and change over time. While he admits on the one hand that animal forms are in part determined and static, he also argues on the other hand that the forms can change and transform themselves into infinite varieties over the generations (GA I7:354). In other words, an animal is not limited simply to reproduction in its ability to create, but it may change its very form from one generation to the next, He stresses the versatility of the rodents and describes how their capricious will (Willkiir) leads to the creation of so many different forms that a close observation of them may cause us to fall into a kind of insanity (W..hnsinn). He then points to the variety of different rodents, including beavers, flying squirrels, and rabbits, and describes how different environments led to the formation of each rodent type. He further explains how these rodents are very similar to very dif- �TANTILLO 89 ferent animal groups. He describes how rhe rodent species "leans as much toward the carnivores as toward the ruminants, as much toward the apes as toward the bats, and resembles still orhers which lie between these genera" (my translation). If any doubt is left about the creative heights the rodents can achieve, Goerhe links upright posture in squirrels and in human beings, contending rhat borh stem from the same desire (GA I7:355-56). This tendency, which Cornell calls "Faustian excess;' is a striving to break free of limits imposed upon rhis creature (485). Goethe's account of passionate striving extends into the inanimate world. He demands in his Theory of Colors (a work which he thought eclipsed all of his poetry") that we analyze colors according to their actions and passions. He explains that we can only understand colors if we study them as we would rhe behavior of human beings. Notably, some colors are more active (e.g. yellow), while others are more passionate (e.g. blue). Their interactions an4 unions, moreover, are seen as acts of procreation. Goerhe characterizes the entire Theory of Colors as a kind of play in which the individual stories of various colors form the plot of an intricate drama. And like any play, it must be experienced visually if one is to experience its full effect: A good play is only half present in the written text. The greater portion of it draws on rhe glitter of the stage, the personality of rhe actor, the power of his voice, the distinctiveness of his gestures, even the intelligence and favorable mood of the audience. This applies all the more to a work on natural phenomena. If rhe reader is to enjoy and make use of it, he must actually have nature before him, either in fact or in the activity of is imagination. 10 This scientific work becomes a drama in every sense of rhe word as we witness colors that act in various ways. The main plot of this play is a kind of love story between yellow and blue and rhe dilemma they face. They can eirher choose an earthly marriage and meld into the color green �90 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW or they can aspire towards heavenly heights and meet through intensification in the ideal color pure red (HA I3:478-79, 52I). Although both green and pure red are formed by the union of two opposing colors, red is the more perfect union because it is able to reconcile, without destroying, the characteristics of each opposing color (HA 13:499-500). [Notably, the drama here echoes that work which critics tend to think of as Goethe's best-Faust. Faust has a double nature and laments that the two souls in his breast are not at peace (HA 3:4 I, lines I I I 0-22). He, too has a choice in the direction he may take. Faust is successfUl in his gamble, and in the end, we literally see a unified soul ascending towards heaven.) Goethe does not, however, speak of love and creativity in nature sim- ply metaphorically. Like the natural philosopher Lucretius, Goethe believes that animate and inanimate nature act similarly, 11 and that the human and the non-human realms are in some way a reflection of each other. Goethe's world is an active and interactive one, in which colors, chemicals, plants and people-all have characters and all influence one another. He therefore believed that human beings stand to learn about themselves from the inanimate world. As we now turn to Goethe's novel Elective Affinities, we can begin to trace the theme of creativity and necessity in the human realm. Having an overtly natural scientific premise, this novel gives us an opportunity to witness the successfUl and unsuccessful human attempts to overcome limitations through creativity, especially those limitations presented by love. Elective Affinities, on many levels mirrors the themes of his scientific works. However, where nature often seems human in his scientific works, the characters in the novel see their own actions in light of natural principles,12 Moreover, where Goethe's example of the rodents demonstrates how one can use desire to strive to reach beyond one's self-whether to create collections, build intricate structures, or create entirely new physical forms--the characters in the novel illustrate how limiting natural desire may be when not accompanied by creative striving. �TANTILLO 91 One of the main themes of the novel is marriageY Two of the main characters, Charlotte and Eduard, have recently wed after the death of their respective first spouses. Although they were childhood sweethearts, both initially married for money and position. Their current relationship to each other drastically changes with the arrival of the Captain, Eduard's close friend, and Ottilie, Charlotte's young and beautiful niece. The novel takes its title from an eighteenth-century chemical principle of attraction, "Wahlverwandtschtiften;' translated as "elective affinities" or telations by 11 choice:' 14 This conveniently ambiguous name, suggesting both marriages and chemical bonds, asks us to examine not only the actions of human beings but also the actions of nature in matters of love. Is love at first sight, in essence, at all different from the reaction between limestone and sulfuric acid? Conversely, if even the elements are viewed as possessing a kind of will and choice in their actions and interactions, should not human beings, too, be able to free themselves from "fatal" attractions? In the novel, the characters themselves discuss the theory and make analogies to their own lives. The focal point of the discussion is what happens to a pair of united elements once a third party is introduced. As in Goethe's characterization of passionate squirrels and colors, the chemical formula within the novel is also described in passionate terms: tender elements unite, flee from one another, search for one another, and show marked inclinations for particular partners. Where the Theory if Colors presents a love story between blue and yellow in which we study their actions and passions, the chemical theory of elective affinities portrays a love-story among the inanimate elements. One of the main characters, the Captain, even echoes Goethe's instructions from the Theory if Colors. he lectures another character that one can only understand these natural elements (with their various unions or marriages, divorces, and reunions) if one is an active observer and has these elements before one's very eyes (HA 6: 275-76). The basic premise of the principle of "elective affinities" is rather straightforward: opposites will attract and form a new union. Charlotte and �92 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW the Captain, however, see completely different dynamics at work behind the theory. Charlotte, responding to her husband's fascination with the udivorces" or the separations of the elements, cannot abide the word "divorce:' even when merely referring to chemicals. She laments: HDoes this sad word, which unfortunately we hear so often in society now, also occur in the natural sciences?" (36; HA 6:273) She then denies the term "elective" or "choice" either to the elements or htunan beings. Instead, she stresses the power of necessity and opportunity: "I would never see a choice here, but rather a necessity of nature, and possibly not even this; for after all it may be perhaps only a matter of opportunity. Opportunity occasions relationships, just as it makes thieves" (37; HA 6:274). Strikingly, in her own life, fi:ee will has litrle to do with her choices, Her first marriage was arranged. Her second, to Eduard, comes about because both of their spouses die unexpectedly, giving Charlotte and Eduard the opportunity to marry. In contrast to Charlotte's rather deterministic interpretation of the theory, the scientific-minded Captain believes, in a manner reminiscent of Lucretius, 15 that both human beings and the elements operate under the rubric of fi:eedom, In observing the interactions between various chemical elements, the Captain believes "that it is justifiable to apply the word elective affinity, because it really does look as if one kinship was preferred to the other and chosen before it" (36; HA 6:274). His interpretation emphasizes that nature's most simple elements do not act in a predetermined or mechanistic way, but are to a certain degree free to choose their own partners, During the course of the novel, the Captain, like his view of the elements in the theory, will fi:eely move fi:om place to place (HA 6:258; 479) and be willing to go fi:om partner to partner. 16 Given that each of the characters sees a radically different dynamic at work within the theory, a question for us becomes whether the events in the novel validate either of these character's views-Charlotte's deterministic view of nature or the Captain's opposing one of free will--or whether they point to another possibility. �TANTILLO 93 Many critics side with Charlotte, claiming that nature represents necessiry and that Goethe is illustrating our unsuccessful battle against nature and necessity. 17 Such interpretations revolve around a mistaken impression of Goethe's natural philosophy and do not take his creative view of nature into account. Nowhere in his scientific writings does nature seem simply determined or for that matter simply &ee. Nature, as the examples of the rodent species and evolving whale demonstrate, may at times be highly creative. Indeed, that we are to view colors as characters with actions and passions (or elements as passionate beings), further demonstrates how creative Goethe believes nature may be. Even Charlotte does not see nature acting differently &om human beings. If she views nature as determined, it is because she believes human beings to be so. Similarly, the Captain thinks the elements are free because human beings are. Strikingly, although these two characters have diametrically opposed opinions on love and freedom, they agree with Goethe's basic tenet that human beings and nature are similar. One of the difficulties in trying to interpret the role of nature is that the tone of the novel is never consistent. Occasionally it is ominously serious: one child goes insane, another drowns, and both Ottilie and Eduard die. At other times, however, it is playfully, even maliciously, ironic. Charlotte, the character who most defends societal norms, also rearranges tombstones for aesthetic reasons. The institution of marriage is vehemently defended, but its champion is the eccentric bachelor, Mittler. The greatest critic of marriage, the unhappily married Count, cannot wait to marry agam. Nor are Goethe's own comments on the book very elucidating. He hints to one friend that the novel contains an all-pervasive theme (GA 24:636). He also claims, much as he did about Werther, that the novel is highly autobiographical-that he experienced every line within it (GA 24:395). When accused of being a heathen, he defends himself by saying that he killed off Ottilie (presumably for her sins), 18 yet in his autobiography he tells us her character was based upon a Christian saint. At one �94 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW time he claims to hate Eduard (GA 24:219), while at another he admits to admiring his capacity to love.I'' If we return to text and examine the main relationships in the novel, then Ottilie and Eduard's relationship seems to support Charlotte's deterministic interpretation of the chemical theory. Eduard and Ottilie act very much as if no freedom of choice exists for their lives. Opportunity has brought them together and once it has, no force seems strong enough-whether societal customs, paternal emotions, or duty to one's guardian or spouse-to pull them apart. At the end of the novel, the narrator even characterizes them as representing not two human beings, but one (HA 6:478). Ottilie and Eduard, in their love for each other, do not appear to have any freedom to refuse their affinity. Their passion for each other appears to be too strong for rational choice to play a role in their relationship. Conversely, Charlotte and the Captain's relationship seems to support the Captain's view of nature. They seem so free from lasting attachments that they unite and separate at wilL Charlotte marries rwice without love and therefore cannot understand why Eduard and Ottilie cannot renounce each other. After she first is widowed, she does not think of Eduard, the love of her youth, for hersel£ but attempts to unite him with Orrilie. When her attempts fail, she marries Eduard primarily because he is so persistent in wooing her (HA 6:246). Although Charlotte eventually falls in love with the Captain, it does not stop her &om either encouraging him to accept a promotion that includes an arranged marriage, or when that falls through, from trying to play match-maker berween Ottilie and the Captain. Similarly, the Captain spends most of the novel drifting in and out of romantic alliances, whether to the neighbor girl in the "Novella" or to Charlotte. Given that events in the novel support both Charlotte's and the Captain's opposing natural views, how then are we to interpret the novel? Perhaps the most important issue within the chemical theory and its rei- �TANTILLO 95 evance for human beings is not whether nature is free or determined; at times it may be free while at others determined. Neither extreme view (that love is a necessitous force or that we may freely choose it) seems an adequate explanation for the events in the novel. If we return to Charlotte's and the Captain's discussion of the chemical theory, we discover that an important aspect is missing from both of their interpretations: both fail to address in any detail the creative function of the theory. Neither discusses the consequences of chemical unions, i.e. the creation of new entities. Charlotte appears to be more concerned about avoiding divorces, while the Captain is fascinated by the elements' ability to move from one partner to the next. The characters' inability to focus upon or understand the creative aspects of nature within the chemical theory becomes reflected within their own creative endeavors throughout the novel. Their limited and often failed artistic attempts come to reflect their personal limitations. Unlike the creative beavers, the evolving whale, or the procreating colors, the characters do not seek creative options. When we first meet Charlotte, she is putting the finishing touches on a "moss hut:' The irony of this moss covered hut is heightened by the way Charlotte treats the windows. To her, the windows are frames, the view is a painting she has created by landscape gardening (HA 6:243). Charlotte's relationship with nature is analogous to her relationship with human beings. Like her efforts to tame and cultivate nature, she hopes to restrain and civilize others. She believes that since she can control her emotions and renounce the Captain, Eduard and Ottilie should be able to renounce each other. But as her landscaping techniques are faulty, and only make nature a greater adversary to the inhabitants of the manor, so too does her plan of control backfire in the human sphere: had she agreed to a divorce earlier, neither her baby nor Ottilie would have died (HA 6:460). Similarly, the Captain believes he has a great deal of control over nature. His naesthetic" endeavors involve many mathematical calculations. He believes that by carefully measuring and mapping nature one will have �96 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW mastery over it. For example, he calculates the exact number of stones that need to be taken away from a cliff in order to build a better paththe exact number, moreover, that will then be needed to build a new wall. So too, he believes he has a solution to get rid of beggars: they are to receive money, not upon entering the town, but upon leaving it. His rational calculations, however, fail to take the powers of nature into account. His newly created shores crumble beneath the spectators' feet, and beggars are not daunted in trying to receive money both within town and while leaving it. Eduard also attempts to practice art on nature. The first time we encounter him, he is grafting shoots onto fruit trees (HA 6:242). Eduard's efforts here, as in music and love, are sterile. The trees do not produce fruit as they did before. This metaphor of grafting is used throughout the novel. Charlotte hopes that her baby will act as a grafTed shoot (HA 6:4 19), uniting the family, but Eduard has his eye on another young shoot: Ottilie. The middle-aged Eduard hopes to rejuvenate himself and produce new fruit through Ottilie, but both nature and society reject such forced and artificial attempts at creativity. In his own attempts to unite himself with Ottilie, Eduard stubbornly insists on getting his own way, but will not trouble himself with the details (HA 6:447-51). He believes that love itself is his talent and that he is already a master of it (HA 6:355). Similarly, the more Ottilie falls in love with Eduard, the more she abandons her own creativity to become like him. She proves her love to Eduard by adopting his handwriting to the extent that one can no longer distinguish his handwriting &om her own. She eventually gives up her own domestic pursuits and takes up Eduard's of gardening. Ottilie's and Eduard's artistic attempts mirror their personal failures. Eduard plays the violin abominably but insists that the others listen to him. Ottilie intentionally learns to play pieces, not as they are composed, but in accordance with Eduard's mistakes. In consciously mimicking Eduard's unconscious mistakes, Ottilie rejects art to choose mediocre conformity. �TANTILLO 97 In this novel, art generally reflects the characters' limitations. Even the minor characters do not attempt to be creative when they practice art, but remain largely imitative. For instance, when a large party is bored, they put on tableaux vivants. They search through copperplates and tty to imitate, through elaborate stagings, selected pictures (HA 6:392-94). In essence, they imitate imitations of art. The fact that the characters are trapped in imitation is closely linked to their failures in love. Indeed, the only dilettante who is praised in the novel is an architect whose love for Ottilie makes his paintings come to life (HA 6:370). One of central Cteative" events in the novel is the conception of the baby, Otto. On the night the child is conceived, the biological parents engage in spiritual adultery, with very strange consequences. While making love to each other, each spouse thinks of another: Charlotte of the Captain and Eduard of Ottilie. "And so the absent and the present were interwoven-miraculously enough--seductively and blissfully each with the other" (HA 6:32I). The result of this nocturnal indiscretion? A baby who bears a resemblance to Eduard (HA 6:420), has Ottilie's eyes, and is otherwise the spitting image of the Captain (HA 6:42I). As the baby grows older, his resemblance to Eduard drops out of the account, and he becomes more and more like Ottilie and the Captain (HA 6:455; 459). The baby's procreation is symbolic of the artistic limitations of the individual characters. Charlotte and Eduard, on their own, had not yet been able to conceive a child. Otto is only conceived with the participation of ali four of the main characters. His existence, moreover, further demonstrates that nature is both necessitous and capricious. Biology plays a role in that he is born of Charlotte and resembles Eduard. However, his resemblance to the other characters indicates that nature can break free of its regular laws to create this being. We witness the triumph of love, not mind, over matter. Love demands its rights and creates a ttue representational picture of the facts. This triumph of spiritual love, however, comes at the expense of natural love. The maternal instinct appears to be destroyed. The baby is largely ignored by its biological mother. Ottilie, the 11 �98 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW spiritual mother, is a careless guardian, She simultaneously reads, walks and carries the baby. Due to her carelessness, the baby dies in a boating accident. Once again Goethe's irony comes into full play as Ottilie loses her balance in the boat while carrying the baby and the book in the same hand. Afi:er the baby dies, one would expect someone to mourn his death. Again, Goethe appears to tease: the mother has no reaction, while the biological father is pleased. Almost everyone is relieved as this little being dies. His death is not tragic because no one has chosen to love him. Here the parents are even free to refuse an aflinity. If the baby demonstrates, albeit in a very bizarre way, the creative powers of love,20 the relations between the pairs, demonstrate the limitations of love. One might reasonably ask what alternatives these characters really had. In the novel, two characters, the Count and the Baroness, have situations similar to Ottilie and Eduard's: their marriage is delayed because the Count's wife will not grant him a divorce. Unlike Eduard and Ottilie or Charlotte and the Captain, however, this couple creatively work around the obstacles, They meet whenever possible, but they also attempt to keep up some appearances for the sake of society. Although not immediately, they eventually find togetherness afi:er the death of his wife. And once again, they do not immediately marry, but wait for the time of mourning to pass (HA 6:390). Goethe explored even more radical relationships in an earlier play, Stella. In a scenario similar to Elective Affinities, a man is torn between duty to his wife and child, and love for a younger woman. Tragedy is averted in the play because the women agree to a rather unconventional solution. They agree to share the husband and occupy "one house, one bed, and one grave"(HA 4:346). Afi:er the play was banned, Goethe rewrote the ending which parallels that of the novel: the husband and the lover kill themselves, In Stella, Goethe openly explores the most radical of solutions through art, By so doing, he presents both sides of the coin. We see the mistakes which lead to tragedy, but we also see radical, partly ironic, solu- �TANTILLO 99 tions. As a novelist, Goethe is able to explore and weigh, and at the same time ask that we too explore and weigh, intricate moral questions. Certain situations cannot be understood in terms of a simple opposition between good and bad. The novel, as the two different endings to StelL., forces us to consider anew society's standards. Goethe, however, is not a nihilist or a relativist, even in matters of love. He acknowledges and respects limits, partly because as an artist and scientist, he realizes that if one is to advance and create new and higher forms, one requires limits and obstacles if only to overcome them. When he describes an organism's attempt to flourish and strive towards beauty and creativity, he stresses that superfluity of resources is just as damaging to an organism as scarcity. In a conversation with Eckermann, Goethe turns to the example of an oak tree in order to discuss how beauty arises in nature. He suggests that an oak tree is beautifUl only if it has struggled with opposition and competition as it has grown. Harsh conditions may be "favorable" as long as they are balanced against good ones. If, however, the oak tree grows in a moist marshy place, and the earth is too nourishing, it will, with proper space, prematurely shoot forth many branches and twigs on all sides; but it will still want the opposing, retarding influences: it will not show itself gnarled, stubborn, and indented; and, seen from a distance, it will appear a weak tree of the lime species; it will not be beautiful-at least, not as an oak. (IS April I827; GA 24:618-19) Like an indulged or spoiled child, the oak tree that never has to face adversity will never have a beautiful character. It will not have grown at a measured pace, but will grow disproportionately. Goethe spoke also of a plant that is over-watered in his "Metamorphosis of Plants:' Although such a plant will grow continuously, it will never intensity its form to reach its greatest articulation of form. Similarly, while the conditions for the oak tree's growth ensure survival, they do not enable it to reach the height of its potential. The most ideal conditions for the oak are mixed ones. The oak must have enough nourishment to grow, while it must also engage in some �100 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW struggles: "a century's struggle with the elements makes it strong and powerful, so that, at its full· growth, its presence inspires us with astonishment and admiration" (GA 24:6I9). Beauty arises only if the tree has faced some adversity that acts as a check upon its desire to thrive. And while numerous different circumstances influence the development of the tree outside of its control (the conditions of the soil, the climate, the proximity of its other neighbors, etc.), the individual tree actively participates in the entire process as well. It has a will that expresses a tendency (Tendenz), drive (Trieb), and striving (Bestreben). Goethe's natural world is comprised of entities which are always struggling to achieve new kinds of perfection and new ways of flourishing as they attempt to overcome the limits presented to them either by the outside environment or by their own forms. And just as nature oversteps its own boundaries to create a new kind of perfection (GA 17:106), so too Goethe describes how a master artist intentionally deviates from the norm in his works to create a masterpiece (HA 12:169). In the end, the failure of the main characters of Elective Affinities in their artistic endeavors is a reflection of their failures in their personal lives. They never attempt to use their love to reach beyond their passions and attempt innovative solutions to their problems. Charlotte and the Captain, despite their feelings for each other, remain largely wedded to the laws of society. Neither initiates creative options until it is too late. Ottilie and Eduard, the most passionate of the characters, similarly do not try to use creativity to channel the destructive nature of love. When Charlotte buries them together as the last act in the novel, they, like the color green, are finally joined together at the expense of their individual lives; NOTES !.Goethe, "Romische Elegien" (Y), vol. I, GJtthts Wtrkt: Hamburger Ausgabe (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, I960) I 60. References to this edition will be hencefOrth cited in text as "HA:' 2. See my article, "Goethe's Botany and His Philosophy of Gender;' Eighterntb~Crntury Life 22 (!998):128-31. �TANTILLO 101 3. Aristotle, PariS of Animals 655a I8-34, 657b 5-35, 664a I-I4, 674a 32-6I8; Cmrmtian of Animals 749b 5-750b5; 750a2I,35. 4. The extent to which Goethe was a precursor to Darwin is a debated point. See John F. Cornell "Faustian Phenomena: Teleology in Goethe's Interpretation of Plants and Animals;' Journal cf Medicine and Philosoplry 15:489; George A. Wells, Goethe and the Development cf the Sciences 17 50-1900 ( Alpen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff and Noordhoff, 1978) 28; Timothy Lenoir Goethe and the Sciences: A Re-Appraisal, cd. by Frederick Amrine, J. Zucker and Harvey Wheeler (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., I986) 27. 5. Goethe, "Die Faulticre und die Dickhautigen," vol. 17, Gedenkausgabe drr Hirke, Briife und Gespriirhe (Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1949) 347-54. This edition will be henceforth cited in text as "GA." 6. "Die Skelette der Nagetiere, abgebildet und verglichen von d'Alton:' 7. For further discussion, see Cornell (286ff). 8. Eduard Joseph d' Alton, Die Skelete der Nagethiere, abgebildet tmd verglichen (Bonn: In Commission bei Eduard Weber, I 823) I -2. 9. Conversations with Eckermann, February 19, 1829, John Oxenford translation (San Francisco: North Point Press reprint, I984). [(GA 24:328)] 10. Translated by Douglas Miller, CcetM Scirntifir Studie; (New York: Suhrkamp, I988) I62. (HA I3:32I). I I. Goethe was quite familiar with Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. He even planned to write a poem similar in scope to Lucretius' poem. See Grete Schaeder, Gott und Welt: Drei Kapitel Goetbescber Wrltanscbauung (Hameln: Fritz Seifert, 1947) 286. 12. Many commentators have noted the importance of The Theory if Colors in interpreting Elective Affinities. See, for example, Loisa Nygaard, "'Bild' and 'Sinnbild' ;• Crnnanic &virw, 63 (I988):58-76; John Milfull, "The Idea of Goethe's Wahlverwandtscbajten,"Germanic Review, 47 (1972): 83-84; Alfred G. Steer, Goethe~ 'iflective Aifinities:"Tbe Robe o/ Nessus (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990), 4 I; Hans Reiss, CortbrJ Navrls (Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, I969), 206-7. 13. Walter Benjamin is the most notable critic who takes exception to this statement in his essay "Goethes Wahlverwandtscbciften," Gesammelte Schrijten, ed. by Rolf Tiedermann & Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt Suhrkamp, 1978) I3Iff. I 4. Goethe takes the terms "Wahlvetwandtschaften" from the translated title of the chemical treatise "De attractionibus electivas."The treatise was written in 1775 by the Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman and was translated into German by Heinrich Tabor in I 782. I 5. Specifically, the Captain's opinion of elective affinities seems to mirror Lucretius's claim that since "nothing comes from nothing;' animal and human will must find �102 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW its origins in the most basic unit: the atom. See De Rerum Natura, trans. by W.H.D. Rouse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), lines 2.220-23; 253-60. I 6. He begins the novel as Eduard's second self (HA 6:267). He then joins briefly with Charlotte, but then leaves the manor when offered a job promotion which includes an arranged marriage. Moreover, during the story of the neighbor children, we discover that he was in all likelihood engaged as a young man to another woman. Towards the end of the novel, he once again hopes to be united with Charlotte. I 7. Marita Gilli, "Das Verschweigen der Geschichte in Goethes WablvtrWandtschtiften oder Wie man der Geschichte nicht enftlichen kann;' Sie, und nicbt Wt'r, ed. by Arno Herzig, lnge Stephan, and Hans G. Winter (Hamburg: Dolling and Ga!itz, !989) 553-65; Milfitll, 94; Albert Biclschowsky, Guth" Srin Leben und srine I#rke (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, !907), 2:383; Emil Staiger, Goethe (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, !956), 2:495; Reiss, 209; Friedrich Gundolf. Goethe (Berlin: Bondi, 1920) 553. 18. Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebuch vom 28. Juni 1843. Cited in HA 6:623. Thomas Mann explores the possible Christian implications die to this remark in Gesamrnelte Werke, Band IX, Rcden und Aufsiitze, "Zu Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften;' Frankfurt, I 974. 19. Letter to Karl Friedrich von Reinhard. Weimar, Feb. 21, 1810, GA 19:597. 20. Other commentators, such as Steer (54), believe that the baby represents a criticism of loose Romantic practices in love and marriage. Atkins attempts to explain away the baby's appearance by pointing to possibility of intermarriage among the families in the past ("Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Novel of German Classicism;' Gennan Qu'fterly, 53 (!980) n.29, p.35). �-.:f Three Poems fj:- Laurie Cooper Pears All summer long on a I2.5-horsepower John Deere I cut grass in 43-inch swaths, each week holding back the jungle that would otherwise begin, the wildness that waits just below surfaces for an opening. I cut grass in 43-inch swaths, each week vigilant, keeping safe the gardens, the house, our lives from the wildness that waits just below surftces for an opening. The days grow shorter. My shadow spreads across the lawn. Vigilant, I keep safe the gardens, the house, our lives. Now it is November, the last mowing of the year. The days are short. My shadow spreads across the lawn. Soon winter's white palms will try to press the chaos down. It is November, the very last mowing of the year and there are fallen pears, at least 200 on the ground daring winter's white palms to press their chaos down, unyielding to my tractor's slow, insistent blade. Fallen pears, at least 200 on the ground. They are silent, sunned breasts or low, harvest moons that will not yield to my slow insistent blade. Or they are a gathering of golden, swollen wombs. Laurie Cooper lives in Chaplin, Connecticut, and is a 1988 graduate of St. John's College, Annapolis. �104 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Silent, sunned breasts and low, harvest moons hold their gaze though I turn quickly away. Even a golden gathering of lost, swollen wombs cannot distract me from my essential task. They hold their gaze, though I keep turning away. Time slithers past. The grass has not yet grown to haybecause I will not be distracted from my task. But when you come outside to kiss me, you've grown old. Somehow time has passed. The grass is not a tangle of hay but your hair is gray and your lips purple from the cold as you come outside to kiss me. I see that you are old. On your breath is a fuint scent of fermented pears. Though your hair is gray and your lips purple from the cold, I must keep cutting the grass in 43-inch swaths. Your breath's scent of fermented pears is lost to the wind as I ride past on my I2.5-horsepower John Deere. �COOPER Preparation If sometimes I find myself imagining the thick unmoving whiteness of your hands lying properly at your sides or nicely folded on your chest, the heavy scent of a gardenia fastened there, an organ softly swirling tones through a darkened vestibule, If sometimes I imagine all of this, it is because I am stunned by the life that moves in every grain of us, how when we embrace it is only the beginning, and never enough. It is also the end: there will be a last time that our skins will touch. One of us will be cold, the other warm and dying. 105 �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 106 While You Are In The Hospital At home, I think I see small pools of blood forming in corners of the bathroom ceiling, but they are clumps of ladybugs, having found their way in through the old wood of this leaning house. They are slow and silent as they mount each other, wrap their spindly legs around, cling. In the hospital, beneath the syncopation of intercoms and monitoring machines, there is a silence: a woman in a room down the hall contemplating her amputation, snowstooped trees through your window, fear. Here, mail arrives daily: merchandise sales, conference announcements, friends sending cheer. I sort it into piles to keep, recycle, discard. I think of love I've left, and lost, and never known. If I could really love, I would take away these tubes dripping lipids and glucose into your blood. I would liquefY the things you love and Rood them through your veins: our sleeping dogs' rhythmic breathing, huge orange trumpets of the amaryllis we thought would never bloom, the crunch of the gravel road coming home. If I could really love, I would climb onto your narrow back and wrap myself around, guarding like a ladybug, or Achilles' mighty shield. �--:£ Mind in the Odyssey !j- Paul Ludwig Veteran readers of Homer will find Seth Benardete's book The Bow and the Lyre to be an exciting and at times disturbing meditation on the Odyssey. For those wary of the maddening difficulty of Benardete's oracular style of writing, the present volume is more readable than some of his previous works. Benardete's explications of texts rarely fail to strike a nerve. Beginning readers of the Odyssey who use The Bow and the Lyre as a companion volume may be so overwhehned by the ingenuity of his interpretations that they lose the inclination to interpret the Odyssey in any other way. At the same time, many readers with firm prior interpretations of the Odyssey will be repelled by Benardete's conclusions. Among them: Odysseus on his return commits gross injustice against the suitors; Penelope and Odysseus, when finally reunited, fail to achieve love or intimacy. Before we come to grips with these substantive issues, Benardete's method of reading Homer merits considerable attention. He tteats poetry as proto-philosophy. The Bow and the Lyre is intended to explore the extent to which Homer anticipated Plato's thought, hence the subtitle "A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey:' Those who hold that poetry asserts nothing will lay aside the bopk as useless to them. When, for example, Menelaus keeps his grip on Proteus- despite the latter's shape-shifting, does this story of a god who is one thing despite becoming many things mean that Homer is wrestling with the philosophical problem of being vs. becoming? Many readers would be loath to say so. Benardete recognizes that his interpretations may seem "forced and willful" (p. xi) if he repeatedly discovers Platonic thoughts in earlier Greek poetry. But readers who fear that Benardete is merely digging up what he himself has Seth Benardete. The Bi.Jw and tbt Lyrt: A Platonic Reading of tbr Odyssey. Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Paul Ludwig is a tutor at St. John's College. �108 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW buried are, he suggests, like people who would question their luck if. wandering in a dark wood, they came across a clearing in which they could take their bearings. One problematic method of reading is the principle of logographic necessity &om the Phaedrus, i.e. the assumption that the placement of every detail in a piece of writing has a purpose and contributes to the overall meaning if only the reader can find out how (a principle Benardete elsewhere admits is mythical). Homer never seems to nod in The Bow and the Lyre; the slightest commission or omission can be seized upon and have meaning wrung out of it. An amazing assertion early on highlights the difficulty inherent in this method: "No one in the Iliad dies in pain;' meaning that Homer never explicitly says that X died "in pain:' Teeth can grip the dirt in the paroxysm of death, but if Homer does not say it is painfUl, it is not painfUl. Reading Benardete can be infuriating because of such claims, even though they are often adduced in support of a larger argument which Benardete can and does sustain on other, more substan- tial grounds. The principle of logographic necessity implicitly contradicts longstanding trends in classical philology, in which apparent inconsistencies in Homeric epic are typically explained away as the result of diverse sources knitted into a motley whole. Benardete, by contrast, is able to make his principle pay high returns when he provides alternative explanations for such problems as the unsatisfactory ending of the Odyssey, where the jarring quality of the final scenes--e.g. the dismemberment of Melanthius, the strangeness of hearing conversations in Hades a second time, Odysseus's cruel teasing of his father Laertes, and the falseness of the forced reconciliation between Odysseus and the relatives of the dead suitors-all scenes which most readers would prefer to ignore, are fUlly integrated into his troubling interpretation. The substantive issue of greatest concern is Odysseus's choice between immortality and mortality. he refUses the immortality offered him by Calypso, choosing to remain a man. The treatment of this theme is among the most fruitfUl in The Bow and the Lyre. What good does �LUDWIG 109 Odysseus see in mortality? On the one hand, the questing of Odysseus's mind, his desire to see the cities of many men and know their minds, would not be possible or even necessary if he stayed with Calypso, since Odysseus presumably would have access to divine knowledge once he became a god. This implication merely puts a fine point on the problem since seeking knowledge entails the desire to find it why would Odysseus, of all people, turn down divine knowledge? The answer comes at the "peak of the Odyssey;' when Odysseus goes to rescue his men from Circe,- who has turned them into swine. On the way, Hermes shows him that things have natures. The nature of the moly, a plant with black root but white blossom, enables Odysseus to resist the magic of Circe, who transforms men such that their bodies become pigs but their minds remain human, Just as nature teaches that, in a plant, blossom goes together with root, no matter whether they are as different as white from black, so Odysseus learns that, in man, mind goes together with body. This knowledge is proof against a magic which would claim to separate body from mind. For such a reading to work, Circe's magic cannot be taken literally. Since mind and body always go together, Circe cannot truly have changed the men's bodies into pigs while leaving their minds human. Later, Circe admits it was the mind (not body) of Odysseus that was proof against her enchantment. But her statement is odd because the men's minds were not supposed to be enchanted any more than Odysseus's: only their bodies were said to have undergone change. This problem was recognized in antiquity: the two descriptions of enchantment contradict one another (I 0.329 with 239-40). If Circe's version is accepted, then the men's minds were affected: they believed an illusion about their bodies being changed into pigs. The men were superstitious because they lacked knowledge of nature; hence their "bestiality" was not literal. The moly/enchantment episode becomes a symbol of the emergence of philosophy. By contrast, a conservative reading might say that the efficacy of the moly's nature lies in its being (at most) an herbal antidote to Circe's �110 drugs THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 11 (if not mere medicine" in the sense of a magical talisman). On the conservative reading, Homer would not have understood the full implications of his word physis (nature). For Benardete, it is the revelation of physis which is at stake. Lest we suspect that such an interpretation is wholly his own invention, Benardete quotes a scholiast to the effect that taking the moly meant taking the complete logos. A god (Hermes) thus gives Odysseus access to knowledge which, apparently, was hitherto a divine preserve. Knowledge of nature allows Odysseus to share the gods' knowledge without becoming a god himsel£ Calypso's later offer to make Odysseus immortal thus appears ungenuine: in the light of nature, Odysseus sees that a transformation in which his body became deathless and ageless would also destroy the unity of body and mind which makes him Odysseus. Belief in the separation of mind from body, at least in the case of Circe's enchantment, produces only bestiality. By refusing immortality, Odysseus seems to achieve a humanity which Benardete regards as the peak of humanity, not open to everyone, since man's being, the inseparability of mind and body, is not complete unless he has knowledge of that being, i.e. unless he knows about the inseparability. Benardete's chief preoccupation is that Odysseus may achieve this knowledge only to forget or reject it. Odysseus seems subject to two temptations, which arise from his given name and his punning nom de guerre. In the cave of the Cyclops, he puns on the two Greek words of negation, ou and mf, when he tells the Cyclops his name is Outis, No-one. This clever idea keeps the other Cyclopes from coming to Polyphemous's aid when he cries out after his blinding. Odysseus's heart laughs when he comprehends that his name Outis and his metis (cleverness or mind but also No-one) fOoled the Cyclops. Mind is no-one. The universal applicability of mind means that mind is the property of no one in particular: pure mind is sheer anonymity. If Odysseus comes to think of himself as pure mind, then he believes in his own unconditionality, a type of godhead. But this is a paradox because anonymity means being a nobody, a �LUDWIG 111 person without fame, the opposite of a god. No sooner does Odysseus think himself beyond the Cyclops's reach than he vaunts himself and his victory: he wishes Polyphemous to know his real name, so that Polyphemous may know whose mind got the better of him. Odysseus's mind is thus not disembodied but conditioned by the emotions of pride and anger. Driving Odysseus to assert his triumphant mentality, his unconditionality, is an emotionalism which belies it, and which arises from his true name, the origin of which Homer reveals shortly before the slaughter of the suitors: his grandfather named him Odysseus with a pun on odyssamenos, angry or hateful. Anger such as he expresses against the Cyclops who threatened his life, and whom he taunts, is related to pride, the desire to be somebody, to be famous. Eventually the suitors, whose consumption of Odysseus's household would reduce him to a nobody, must bear the brunt of his pride, even though their crimes do not rise to the level of capital punishment. Benardete regards this pride as an inadequate view of death, an attempt to escape death through glory, as though in a shade existence one could continue basking in one's fame (contrast I 1.482-91 with 24.80-94), a belief which entails a forgetfulness of the humanizing knowledge of the inseparability of body and mind. Odysseus's quest for justice against the suitors is thus characterized by the most gross injustice, which in turn implies a lack of self-knowledge. Readers who always thought that the suitors got what they deserved and that Odysseus was both wily and good will experience constant annoyance with The Bow and the Lyre as Benardete again and again exculpates enemies and minor characters in the Odyssey solely with a view to inculpating Odysseus's own behavior. From the Cyclops (who punishes liars and, his cannibalism notwithstanding, is a vegetarian) to the Lotus-eaters (if Odysseus had not used force to drag aboard ship the ones who partook, they would at least have remained alive, unlike the rest of his crew), to the crewmen who ate the cattle of the Sun (Odysseus's imploring them not to put in at that shore and then making them swear an oath not to touch the cattle was insufficient warning), to the suitors themselves (self-defense �112 THE ~1. JOHN'S REVIEW forced them to plot Telemachus's murder), Benardete tries radical readings on for size, None should perhaps be taken as his final word, but the interpretive license can be breathtaking: angry at the crew for opening the bag of winds, Odysseus puts in at the harbor of the Laestrygonians and loses his men on purpose. The issue of Odysseus's injustice is set up as a contrast between justice and necessity: getting rid of Ithaca's disaffected princes is politically necessary to secure the throne for Telemachus, Odysseus's self-righteous anger may render him incapable of distinguishing when he is acting out of Machiavellian expediency and when he is exacting justice, The Cyclops's cave exemplifies the problem in microcosm. After Polyphemus has eaten two of his men, Odysseus's first thought is to draw sword and run him through. Then he realizes that they would all be trapped in the cave, unable to move the huge stone blocking the entrance, They need Polyphemus alive to remove it; hence the plan of blinding him. For Benardete, the heroic but vain act of killing the Cyclops while trapping oneself in the cave would have been justice. When the practical question of escape comes to the fore, necessity overwhelms justice, The blinding is therefore technically non-just or even unjust, since it is administered in a spirit of selfish expediency. Odysseus's anger then reinterprets expediency as justice, As with the Cyclops, so with the suitors: the political expediency which necessitates their removal effectually empties their punishment of justice. When the suitors see death staring them in the face, they make an eleventh-hour promise to pay back the property they have used up. Why, Benardete asks, could not Odysseus have accepted the suitors' promise? He knows one answer: because there is no means of holding the suitors to that promise, and they could just as easily return in force after they have been let off the hook. Practicality necessitates their deaths. For Benardete, nothing practical is allowed to interfere with justice, which must be perfect and spotless if it is to be justice at all. It is worth noting the narrowness of the choice he offers us. The only way Odysseus could �LUDWIG 113 have fulfilled justice was to act in a naive, hopeful and self-wounding fashion. Similarly in the Cyclops's cave, the only course Benardete considers just was for Odysseus to cut off his nose to spite his face. These alternatives seem parodies of justice. Would not conventional justice prescribe that the Cyclops deserved death for his cannibalism but also concede that necessity allowed only a lesser sentence to be carried out? Benardete offers no argument other than an implicit one: maiming the Cyclops was too happily coincident with Odysseus's selfish interest for us to believe that the maiming in any way was just. That an action was motivated by selfish interest is a popular criterion for judging actions, but it is also a notori- ously broad criterion. Conventional justice has seldom proscribed one person's injuring another who threatens him, in order to defend his own life. Some stronger critique of Odysseus's violence against the Cyclops is surely needed before we can accept Benardete's conclusion. Likewise if the suitors do not deserve death (a big assumption), their own willfulness has nevertheless put them in a situation in which, for them to receive any punishment at all, the punishment must be death. Their crime has only two possible rewards: death or ruling Ithaca. Surely the latter is the less just of the two alternatives. The Bow and the Lyre at various points suggests the alternative punishments of a beating for the suitors and a "stinging rebuke" for the disloyal slaves. But it is unclear on whar grounds Benardete could ever argue in favor of inflicting punitive justice on another human being. His Homer, looking on from a "perspective beyond justice," does not condone the anger of Odysseus but rather, in the title sentence of the book, distinguishes the bow from the lyre, i.e. the life of action from the life of observation and thought. There is something too easy about making the theoretical life the only just life if said justice is achieved only because the theoretical man does not have to act in the world. To cite a Platonic example: when the Thirty tyrants tried to deputize Socrates to help round up Leon of Salamis for what was to be an extrajudicial killing, Socrates "justly" did not obey. Instead, he went home. He did not warn Leon, he �114 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW did not try to restrain his fellow deputies, he did not raise a rebellion in the streets. Justice conventionally understood would have required a more fUll-blooded action, If this is the way in which the Homeric perspective is beyond justice and injUstice, then no man of action, no Odysseus, can ever be righteous. Why then does Benardete recur constantly to justice, particularly justice with an impossibly high standard? What he must mean is that Homer deprecates punishments such as the slaughter of the suitors, the hanging of the slave girls, and the dismemberment of Melanthius without reference to their justice. Homer would deprecate the bloodshed because it is inhumane, and Benardete would have moved to a standard different from justice, a standard such as "humanity" (the term he used to describe Odysseus' knowledge of mortality). Penelope and Odysseus's failure to achieve intimacy is a crucial interpretation which clarifies Benardete's assumptions. Why are husband and wife so distrustfUl that they must test each another instead of falling into one another's arms? Benardete signals that he knows but is unimpressed by Penelope's reason for testing Odysseus, She has long feared that an impostor might deceive her into giving hersel£ only to find that she has been hopelessly compromised. As Benardete also points out, Penelope's erotic longing is so powerful that she mistrusts her own strength to resist seduction, and she has thrown up high walls to guard against its ever happening, even while she simultaneously uses sexual charm to gain time for Telemachus, a beautifUl example of love allied to intelligence, For Benardete, however, caution and prudence imply the absence of love. Just as practical necessity compromises justice irretrievably, so mind hardens heart. The same assumption underlies both pairs, justice/necessity and love/prudence, since Benardete characterizes the expediency which drives out the blind emotional wish for justice as the insight of cold calculation. Mind and heart seem simply incompatible. Here again, the strictness of the dichotomy which Benardete brings to the text makes it unclear how Penelope and Odysseus could ever have fUlfilled his high standard of emotional love except by becoming mindless. Readers who had thought �LUDWIG 115 that the Odyssey taught how to love wisely will find no Jane Austen in this pantheon. As should be clear, Benardete deprecates choosing a heartless mind. What prevents Odysseus from being dehumanized by Circe, who like Calypso wishes to keep him, is his heart or manliness, a strength of soul "that can be lost or diminished regardless of knowledge" and which responds to the call of justice when she offers him food and drink before his comrades have been set free. The theme most difficult to assess is the withdrawal of the gods &om contact with man at the close of the age of heroes. Teiresias prophesies that Odysseus must undertake a second journey to carry Poseidon's fame so far inland that the people he meets will mistake an oar for a winnowing fan, i.e. he must act as missionary to people who have never heard of the sea nor of its patron deity. His mission symbolizes a new religious dispensation which will obtain not only between Poseidon and landsmen ·but between god and man everywhere: the aloofness of the gods will inevitably give rise to misunderstanding and the need for intermediaries. Ignorance, superstition and dependence upon priestcraft will characterize the new age. Benardete compares it variously to quasi-Biblical prophethood, to the pity and fear of Greek tragedy, and to Plato's Cave. The moral aspect of this religiosity implicates the guest-host relationship: kindness toward strangers and beggars will no longer arise out of generosity but out of fear that a beggar may prove to be a god in disguise. Mistaken identity, the mistaking of a somebody for a nobody, is the crime of the suitors when Odysseus comes disguised as a beggar. Their punishment can only be proportional to their crime if they have, in fact, insulted a god in disguise. For Benardete, this is a morality of "entrapment;' characteristic of the human type who will flourish in the new regime: slaves elevated beyond their desert such as the swineherd Eumaeus who resents Melanthius's insults and the extra labor the suitors imposed upon him and who takes out his resentment on Melanthius by helping to dismember him Homer's frequent direct address of Eumaeus would otherwise be odd if it did not signifY that he is the addressee of the Odyssey and �116 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW the low type who will hereafter interpret the poem as the vindication of justice, In this reconstruction of Homer's rhetorical project, Benardete is ret- icent about the intended reception of the poem among other categories of its audience. Since an age of heroes is always perceived as pre-existing whatever age one happens to be in, it follows that Homer is not ushering in a new age but fabricating a mythical transition to explain how his audience arrived in its current, unheroic age. His audience will enter a new age only to the extent that this new explanation succeeds in bringing about a revolution in their thought, For Benardete, the majority of us, like the swineherd, are intended to misconstrue even this new lie about how the heroic age ended, and to be confirmed in our low morality: one wonders to what good end. Presumably the grandeur as well as the shortcomings of Homer's Olympians will give students of nature a hand up toward appreciating the grandeur of the cosmos and man's place in it Would a third category of Homer's audience have been intended to ennoble themselves by taking, however ignorantly, Penelope and Odysseus (and Achilles) as paradigms for their own morality, or is the revolution intended to eradicate the last vestiges of heroism? The contribution of The Bow and the Lyre is to have opened up a vista on Homer's story, and the book constantly forces engagement with the original, The strong reactions it provokes serve to lay bare the assumptions which each of us brings to the text. Though the reader may disagree with the relative weight assigned to certain premises, the awareness of alternative possibilities is always present in the book. Readers who strike -out on their own will tend to meet Benardere coming back from wherever they were headed.- �LUDWIG 117 �� 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2000/3 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Carey, James Ruhm von Oppen, Beate Sachs, Joe Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Phillips, Blakely Sachs, Joe Papenfuse, Dr. Edward C. Nelson, Christopher B. Flaumenhaft, Harvey Allanbrook, Douglas Tantillo, Astride Orle Cooper, Laurie Ludwig, Paul Description An account of the resource Volume XLV, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 2000. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_45_No_3_2000 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/762197996e87f8fd9e4162eb7a400867.pdf 4bf0764e67e9d4f6f66da6cf54944c62 PDF Text Text The St. John's Review Volume XLVI, number one (2000) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T H. Brann James Carey Beate Ruhm von Oppen Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. ltllliamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Blakely Phillips The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Harvey Flaurnenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptiOns are $15.00 for three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore. ©2001 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John's Public Relations Offiu and the St. John's College Print Shop ��Contents Essays and Lectures Plato and the Measure of the Incommensurable Part One: The Paradigms of Theaetetus ....................................... S Amirthanayagam David We Nietzscheans ............................................................................... 45 John Jfrdi The Power & Glory of Platonic Dialogue................................. 84 Carl Page The Discovery of Nature ............................................................ .! IS James Carey ��Plato and the Measure of the Incommensurable Amirthanayagam David Part One THE PARADIGMS OF THEAETETUS: A fresh interpretation of the geometry lesson (Theaetetus 147c-148b) and its significance for Plato's development* I find the grounds for a new reconstruction ofTheodorus's geometry lesson (Theaetetus I47c-148B) in the detail of Plato's prose. I shall first present this reconstruction, and then discuss the significance of the mathematics involved, both in itself and for the development of Plato's later philosophy-nothing less than a revolution in his thought-which is represented by the sequence of dialogues Theaetetus, Sophist, and Politicus. Early in the Theaetetus Socrates has already raised the animating question of the dialogue: what is knowledge? Theaetetus answers by pointing to different types and objects of koowledge, such as the things Theodorus koows (geometry) and the koowledge of craftsmen (I 46c). We did not want to count its sorts and objects, says Socrates (I 46E), but to find out what "koowledge" itself is. He adds that if one does not know what the word "day" refers to, if it is a mere name, there could be no illumination in defining it as oven-maker's clay and brick-maker's clay. Besides, the simple answer to "What is clay?" would be earth mixed with water (147c). Perhaps Socrates is asking for an account that connects a name to a nature. At any rate, Theaetetus Amirthanayagam David is a tutor at St. John's Coilege, Annapolis. * Many thanks to Ian Mueller and the members of the Ancient Philosophy Workshop at the University of Chicago, 1990-91; to Howard Stein, University of Chicago, for a detailed critique; to the members of the Theaetetus study group at St. John's College, Annapolis, in the spring of 1999, especially Curtis Wilson, Chaninah Maschler, and Joe Macfarland; to Eva Brann; and to my late teacher, mentor, and friend, Arthur W. H. Adkins. �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 6 thinks he has just encountered an example of such a thing in the course of a lesson given by Theodorus, to him and his young friend also called Socrates. (Theaetetus looks like the famous Socrates; young Socrates bears his name; there is a third companion and fellow wresder mentioned (I 44c), who remains an unknown.) What Theaetetus had done in response to the lesson ofTheodorus was to come up with new names-or rather, to apply old names in a new way-so as to demarcate for the first time two different kinds of square roots. Some heretofore neglected particles occur in Theaetetus's description of Theodorus's lesson; here is John McDowell's translation: El£.: IlEpi: 6vvafl£WV "tL YJflLV El£o0r.opo£ oO£ ifypmp£ "ttJ£ "t£ ,;pGwoo£ n£pL Kai n£v"tinooo£ ano<paivwv ClLL fl'f]KEL oVflflE"tpOL "tTI s:_/ ... (./ JtOuLUL<;t, KUL 0'\J"tW KU"tU flLUV EKUO"trJV / ' npompO'UflEVO£ flEXPL "trJ£ EJt"taKmOEKanoOo£. ov - '/C./ Theaetetus: Theodorus here was drawing diagrams to show us something about powers-namely that a square of three square feet and one of five square feet aren't commensurable, in respect of length of side, with a square of one square foot; and so on, selecting each case individually, up to seventeen square feet. Note that "powers'' is misleading here. Wilbur Knorr points out ~/ ~ / that u'\JVUflL£ and u'\JVUflEL mean "square " an d "'m square "throughout Greek mathematical literature, including in Hippocrates of Chios, who was a contemporary of Theodorus and Theaetetus; he shows that Plato also uses the terms consistendy in this sense, citing the Republic 587D, Timaeus 54B, and Politicus 266B. 1 �DAVID 7 The use of 'tE-KUL in Greek composition signals a grouping by the writer; the paired elements in this case are 'tTJs; 'tp Gtol\os; (the square of three feet ) and JtEV'tEJtolios; (the square of five feet). The balance and symmetry of the formulation, 't'ils; 'tE 1:pGtolios; JtEPL KUL JtEV'tEJtolios; with JtEPL accented in postposition, seems to suggest a natural balance in flanking elements. I was led to wonder, could there be something special about this pair of squares in the context of Theodorus's investigation? Since he takes up each square individually ( Ka'tC't ~-tLav £Kclo-t'Y}V ), is there a reason why these two are paired? On reading the linking particles with their natural sense, the connecting phrase Ka'L oV'Loo shades into a non sequitur: after proving something about a pair of squares, Theodorus "in this way" selects each square individually. But if this pair served as paradigms for the later squares, a better sense can . be giVen to ' KUL </ O'U'tOO ... npoaLp01Jf.LEVos;: once he had proved something about the two paradigm cases, Theodorus could thereby pick out in advance (npompEOf.LUL) each succeeding case, reducing them one by one to either of the paradigm cases, up to the seventeen-foot square. This reading would be consistent with Plato's phrasing: l(ypatj>E ... aJto<pai:vwv governs only the three- and five-foot squares, about which (nEpL) Theodorus would have formally demonstrated something, and npompO'Of.LEVos; covers each of the following cases, which he would have only needed to "piclt our:' A simpler reading of Kat OU'tW would suggest that Theodorus covered only the odd number squares: having started with three and five, he continues this way in order (the series being three, five, seven, etc.). Certainly, the sense of npompEO[.LUL only demands that there be some kind of advance selection involved, whether the cases of three and five formed a paradigmatic basis for the selection or merely established a pattern of successive odd numbers. It may also be that the criterion of selection preceded and included three and five, not as analytic paradigms but simply as first cases; pe<haps Theodorus was pick- �8 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW ing out individual numbers because they were already known or intuited to have incommensurable roots, and the object of his lesson was to offer proofs of the fact. On this reading, one would need to explain why he omitted the case of two. But on this reading as well, and indeed on any other, one must still ask why three and five should be paired; and we observe that only in these two cases is there an explicit reference to the giving of proofs. The next sentence in the passage has caused a lot of trouble, most recently in the unfriendly debate between Knorr and Miles Burnyeat in the pages of Isis. 2 ~ St" , 1 EV uE 'tUU't'l'] ' / ltW<; EVEO?(E'tO. At that point he somehow got tied up. The question comes to this: did Theodorus get "tangled up" in the case of the seventeen-foot square, or did he merely stop (for some reason or no reason) at that one? Inference from the many examples in the lexicon under EVEXO~UL suggests the former, but Burnyeat, following Mansfield, argues that instances of this word which mean "get entangled" furnish in context an explicit cause for the difficulty.' Knorr's reconstruction of the proofs, by means of Pythagorean triangles and number triples, ... entails the division of the problem into classes of numbers, represented by the numbers 3, 5, 6, and I?. Each class requires a treatment differing from the others. But the method, successful for the former classes, fails at I 7.' Burnyeat rejects this reconstruction, and the reading of nw<; no evidence for the treat- £vfcrxno that it implies, because he sees �DAVID 9 ment by classes in the text. My reading would help to supply that evidence: the cases of three and five could be seen as paradigmatic for the other cases, representing in Knorr's scheme all numbers of the form (4N+3) and (8N+5). There is no evidence, however, for treatment by jour classes. The class of numbers represented by six in Knorr's solution need not have been part of Theodorus's lesson as it is described in the text; we hear only of three, odd-number examples (and this may in itself be evidence that Theodorus only covered the odd numbers). It is perhaps a weakness of Knorr's reconstruction that the number seventeen does not fall into either of the classes represented by three and five, but is made to represent a separate class. It is a strength, however, that it shares this class (8N+ I) with all the odd square numbers (nine, twenty-five, etc.); Knorr suggests that the failure of the method in this case is what led Theaetetus to a new approach, precisely via the distinction between square and non-square numbers. 5 There is a serious objection to Knorr's approach, however. His proofs of root-incommensurability for the classes ( 4N+3) and (8N+5) do not themselves depend on the proofs for three and five; the general cases must be proved independently, with a dose of algebraic manipulation. Indeed, if Knorr wants to avoid the worst kind of anachronism, involving the use of zero, the cases of three and five (N=O) must be specifically excluded from the proofs. There is no hint in the text, however, of this kind of generalization. My reading allows only that the individual, concrete proofs for three and five may have been the paradigms for the later cases. The generality would in that case have to be contained in these very proofs. ... , , Knorr argues cogently that 1tcpL <'lVVU[!EOlV "tL ••• cypmj>E means that Theodorus "proved something [about squares J by means of diagrams;' rather than that he merely drew the squares or that he only proved something about them. 6 Where moderns are accustomed to express the generality of arithmetical solutions through algebraic for~/ �10 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW mulae, those Greek mathematicians whose work culminates in Euclid's Book VII appear to have used geometrical diagrams in this capacity, as themselves the immediate means to convey the universality of a proposition in arithmetic or number theory. I therefore sought something in the structure of the possible diagrams for proving incommensurability of the side in the cases of the three- and five-foot square that made them each essentially paradigmatic. The reconstruction requires successful proofs which suggest through the generality of their diagrams an applicability to an infinite number of cases, but which appear to involve a difficulty in the case of the seventeen-foot square. The solution was surprisingly forthcoming: it requires but two simple theorems, one for each paradigm case, which fall out from the Pythagorean dot-arithmetic (also reconstructed in our time, with considerable elegance, by Knorr); and it satisfies all interpretations of the activity implied by ypa<jlELv. In fact, each of Knorr's own criteria for a reconstruction of the lesson' is met most elegantly by this method. I constructed the roots by using pairs of successive integers, following Malcolm Brown's lead.' When each of these pairs-{I,2}, {2,3 }, {3,4 }, etc.-is taken as leg and hypotenuse of a right triangle, the desired sequence of squares, equal to the sequence of odd numbers, is produced on the remaining legs: 1 4 9 �DAVID 11 The odd numbers therefore form a kind of natural sequence in their square representations: they can be understood as the first "offspring" in two dimensions of the natural numbers in one, when these are successively "mated" by means of right triangles. The objection that the text seems to say that Theodorus proved something about squares in general-and hence an assumption in reconstructions that he covered the case of six and a puzzle as to why he left out two-can be met by considering that in the context of a Pythagorean geometrical arithmetic, the odds beginning with three form a distinct and natural genetic grouping among the square versions of numbers. The text bears without strain the sense of a movement &om general to specific. Theodorus proved something about squares: namely, about that natural sequence of squares which begins with three and five, that they are each incommensurable with the unit length. Moreover, the allusive quality of the description would suit an association with a well-known Pythagorean construction such as the one drawn above. The three-foot and five-foot squares are the first two constructed by means of these pairs of the natural numbers. The form of proof is reduction to absurdity. Take the first case: the side of the three-foot square (or the "three-foot side") must be either commensurable or incommensurable with the side of the unit square (or unit side"). 11 Assume it commensurable. Then there exists some ratio of numbers, A:B, between the three-foot side and the unit side. Take this ratio in its lowest terms; then either A is odd and B is even, or B is odd and A is even, or both are odd. But the hypotenuse is even: B �12 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Therefore both A and B must be even (by Knorr's Theorem V.I4 about Pythagorean triples ).9 Hence either A or B or both must be odd and even simultaneously, which is an impossible situation for a number. The three-foot side and the unit side cannot, therefore, have the ratio of a number to a number, and they are incommensurable. 10 The generalization immediately follows &om the diagram: all of the roots constructed by a triangle with an even hypotenuse-i.e., constructed byrhe pairs {I,2}, {3,4}, {5,6}, {7.8}, etc. yieldingv3, v7, VII, VIS, etc, on the remaining legs--generate the same paradox (that a number must be simultaneously odd and even) if they are assumed to be commensurable with the unit side. Each of these triangles has the following paradigmatic form in the diagram drawn in the course of the proo£ on the assumption that there is some numerical ratio A:B between the root and the unit: A~<B oddx B The five-foot square, constructed by means of a triangle with an odd hypotenuse, presents the only alternative paradigm produced by these numerical pairs: 2 t~-· evenx B �DAVID 13 The right-hand figure represents the numerical relations between the sides of the triangles in the proofs for all the cases involving an odd hypotenuse-i.e., those triangles built with the pairs {2,3}, { 4,5}, { 6,7}, etc., yielding v5, v9, VI3, etc. on the remaining legs. In each case, assume that the particular root is commensurable with the unit. Then it has a ratio of a number to a number with the unit side, A: B. In lowest terms, one or both of these numbers is odd. If B is even, the hypotenuse is even, and so A would also be even, as before; hence B must be odd. Then A must also be odd, since it is a given that the other leg is even; if A were even, the two even squares on the legs would equal the odd square on the hypotenuse, which is impossible. But if A is odd, the square on the remaining leg must be equal to a difference of odd squares. This could only be true if it were a multiple of eigbt. 11 A square that is a multiple of eight is also a multiple of sixteen. It must therefore have a side that is a multiple of four. Since B is odd, this side is equal to a rectangular number, (even) x (odd), and the (even) side must itself be a multiple of four, if the whole number is also to be a multiple of four. We must therefore pick out and examine each of the relevant cases in turn, to see if the even member of the number-pairs is a multiple of four. If not, the condition is not met, A can be neither odd nor even, and there can be no ratio of numbers A:B such that the respective side is commensurable with the unit side. In the case of {2,3} and the five-foot square, for example, we find the condition unmet, since two is not a multiple of four: the five-foot side is therefore proved incommensurable with the unit side. In the next case-the nine-foot square constructed by the pair {4,5}-the condition is in fact met, and the nine-foot side (i.e., three) happens to be commensurable. Meanwhile, the side of the thirteen-foot square, constructed by the pair { 6, 7}, is proved incommensurable, for six is not a multiple of four. This establishes the paradigmatic nature of the two proofs and their diagrams. The cases of three and five involve the only two kinds �14 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW of triangle produced by the constructiog number-pairs: those with an even hypotenuse and those with an odd. For the former diagram we must invoke the theorem that if the hypotenuse is even, both legs of a numerical right triangle are also even; for the latter, that a difference of squared odd numbers is always a multiple of eight. (These theorems are easily demonstrated by means of dot-arithmetic.) The assumption io each case that the constructed side is commensurable with the unit side-that it has the ratio of a number to a number with the unit side-leads to the violation of an underlyiog principle: in the threefoot case that a number cannot be both even and odd; io the five-foot case that a number cannot be neither even nor odd. But when we come to the case of the seventeen-foot squarewhich in this reconstruction does not constitute a separate paradigm, but is an example of the construction iovolving a triangle with an odd hypotenuse-the method appears to fail: 8B 8 Because eight is manifestly a multiple of four, we cannot prove, by means of the second of our paradigm proofs, that the root of the seventeen-foot square is iocommensurable with the unit. This represents a distinct entanglement, Theaetetus next says, in McDowell's translation, C..vJ_1,.., ,._)I 'I'][!LV O'UV ELO't']A{}i 'tL 'tOLO'tJ'toV, EltELC\'1'] lmetpot ., , ,;o nA.ip'Jos; ai C\uvaf!ets; ... - ,. C./ EqJULVOV'tO, rtELpa8'1'jVUL 01JAAa~ELV ELs; EV, �DAVID 15 t.f 1 I O't<{l naaa<; ,;av'ta<; , ' npooayonE'UOO[-IEV 'tU<; 1\'UVU[-IEL<;. Well, since the powers seemed to be unlimited in number, it occurred to us to do something on these lines: to try to collect the powers under one term by which we could refer to them all. The o'iJv in the first line, however, is most naturally taken as continuative! and not as some kind of ambiguous disjunctive. Here is my paraphrase of the above sentence, filled out to show how it follows on the peculiar problem brought on by the case of the seventeen-foot square: Then [in our difficultyJ something of this sort occurred to us: since the squares [equal to odd numbers which have incommensurable sidesJ were appearing to be unlimited in multitude, to attempt to collect them under one term, by which we shall in future call all such squares [thereby distinguishing them from squares equal to odd numbers which do have commensurable sides]. It must be remembered that the seventeen-foot square foiled our technique by behaving like the square of an odd number (e.g., nine), a number with a rational root: the square on the even leg of its proof diagram was a multiple of eight. It is therefore natural that the idea for a new start, which occurs to Theaetetus in his perplexity over the breakdown of Theodorus's method, involves first distinguishing between those odd numbers with a rational and those with an irrational root (later classified as types, respectively, of square and oblong number). �16 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Several kinds of interpretation of the passage must fall by the wayside. Theodorus's "lesson" is not a pedagogical exercise, where the answers are already known and the cases selected for display. Nor is the episode included by Plato merely to make historical concessions (however vague or however specific) to the achievements of Theaetetus and his instructor. Theodorus's was a genuine investigation, which lighted on a genuine perplexity; Theaetetus's new definitions, which keyed his fUture researches, grew out of an attempt to resolve this perplexity. We may now reconstruct Theaetetus's reasoning in full. Two aspects of Theodorus's technique break down in the seventeen-foot case, The first is the principle, which underlies the preceding proofs, that a number must be either even or odd. In this case the principle leads to no absurdity; indeed, the proof presents no obstacle to the idea that the side of the seventeen-foot square is a normal odd number(!). The fUndamental Pythagorean clivision among numbers by even and odd, which in a sense characterizes the UpL{}[.lbc; concept-the "even and odd" is sometimes used as a synonym for apL{}[.loc; in Plato-proves to be of limited utility in the study of incommensurable lengths. Theaetetus must look for a new fundamental characteristic of number in which to ground the investigation of incommensurability. The second breakdown occurs in Theodorus's method of construction. Each of the odd numbers is figured as a square. This is possible because every odd number equals a difference of consecutive square numbers (in Pythagorean tenus, the odd numbers are the series of gnomons which produce one square number from another). Our method for generating the odd squares, by constructing right triangles with pairs of consecutive integers (producing consecutive square numbers on the hypotenuse and remaining leg), works for this reason, But when all the odds are figured as squares, one cannot make out the perfect, rational-sided squares among them (like nine, twenty-five, etc.) from the rest. The method points this up by failing to distinguish between such perfect squares and cases like seventeen. �DAVID 17 Theaetetus tackles both problems in one deft move. He makes a fresh division of all number (,;Clv apLElf!OV nav,;a) which will now isolate perfect squares from the rest, in place of the distinction by even and odd. If my interpretation is correct, an entanglement in a demonstration based on a geometrical representation of odd numbers by Theodorus has led to a geometrical distinction amongst all numbers by Theaetetus. The new name he was seeking for the odd squares whose sides are incommensurable is "promecic;' or oblong; which is to say, they are no longer thought of as squares at all. This category includes, of course, many even numbers as well, and the new generality is marked by Theaetetus: three and five and na<; o<; al\uva,;o<; >/ , / ·""~· . LaO<; 'LOUKL<; YEVEOuuL, " every num b er wh'lCh ts una bl e to b e generated as equal-times-equal;' belongs to the new class (I48A). The even-odd distinction belonged to number as such; the new one arises from a geometrical interpretation of number. But the whole problem of incommensurability arises in the interface between number and magnitude: hence the new definitions might be expected to suggest new solutions in this difficult domain. Theaetetus for the first time exploits the breakdown of the geometrical analogy so that it becomes heuristic: whereas in geometry, every rectangle can be reduced to a square of equal size, whose length of side is the geometric mean in relation to the sides of the rectangle, a promecic number cannot be reduced to a square number. The side of the square which equals a promecic number becomes the new referent, in Theaetetus's scheme, for the word 1\VVUf!L<;;, it is described by " Theaetetus as incommensurable with a f!T]KO<;, his name for the side of a true square number. The geometrical analogy allows this 1\uvUf!L<; to be conceived of as the irrational geometric mean between the rational factors of an oblong number. Theaetetus first describes the promecic number, in relation to the square number, as 't0v 'toLvuv f!E'ta¥;U 'tOU'toU, "the number which is in between it:' (I47E) On the level of plane numbers, this makes �18 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW sense; oblong numbers (2, 3, 5, 6, 7, etc.) are scattered in between the square numbers (4, 9, 16, etc.). On the level of the associated lines, however, this description becomes far more interesting. The llvv6.f.lEL£ lies between the f.l~K'I] as geometric means which bring them into relation. The unifjring power of the mean proportional is one of its seminal virtues. Theaetetus's achievement is to conceive of the irrational roots for the first time as mean proportionals. This allows them to be seen no longer as perplexing and intractable, but as types of beings that in fact unite all number-no longer stumbling blocks to number theory, but the essential intermediaries that relate I numbers to each other. To describe both the f.l'I]KO£ and the ll'UVctf.tL£ ~ as sides of squares is so emphasize their nature as mean proportionals: a f.lTJKO£ is the rational geometric mean between the unit and a square number; the 1\uvctf.tL£ is the irrational geometric mean between two I ' f.l'I]K'I], the ratwnal factors of an oblong number. What was once unutterable and unreckonable can now give an account of itself: a 6-Dva~-tLI;, lying . . in between," is commensurable with f.t{]Kos; in square only. So successful was this account that such a line, commensurable in square, is henceforward called p'l]'tO£ in the ancient world, 12 though it is still irrational in modern terms. Theaetetus's new definitions allow these kinds of irrational lines to be seen not as the opposite of what is rational or utterable ( ct-'Aoyct or ., ctp-p'l]'tct), but only as "other;' different in kind. This classification ofTheaetetus's may well be the specific paradigm for Plato's solution to the Parmenides problem (see Sophist 257B f£). Not-being is not the > I opposite ( EVctV'tLOV) of being, says the Eleatic stranger, but what is , oth er, E'tEpov m reratton to b emg; moreover, t h e nature o f t he · · other is proved to exist and "to be chopped up in small bits distributed over all beings in their relations to one another" (Kct'tctKEKEp~ ~ \ , I ll II' f.lGt'tLOf.lEV'I]V £1tL 1tctV'tct 'tct OV'tct 1tp0£ ctAA'I]Act, 258D-E). Behind the metaphor lies a mathematical paradigm: Theaetetus has distributed the not-rational amongst all number (1:ov apt{h!ov c'' )· �DAVID 19 Jtdvt:a ). as the geometric means which define the relationships between numbers. The notion of the heuristic paradigm takes on a central significance for Plato in the Politicus. It informs a new conception of philosophical inquiry.~' One is to approach the unfamiliar and unknown by placing it alongside the known and the familiar, so that elements (G'tOL)(fLa) and combinations (G'VAAaf:laL) in the latter become paradigmatic for possible ways of interpreting the former. The whole analysis of weaving in that dialogue is meant to serve as an instructive paradigm for the analysis of the statesman. Theaetetus's classifications demonstrate this method. By bringing alongside something familiar from geometry-the reducibility of rectangles to equal squares via the geometric mean-he is able to discern a new classification of all number, one which elegantly circumscribes the irrational. The "paradigmatic method" is to characterize his future researches as well. The commentator to Euclid's Book X (thought to be Pappus implies that Theaetetus took the arithmetic, harmonic, and geometric means, all of them now considered rational, as models for three new, profoundly irrational lines, the binomial, apotome, and medial. 14 At the end of Book X (Prop. I I 5), the last of these is then shown to define a further, infinite class of irrational lines. At each stage. the unfamiliar is made known by means of the familiar; the appr]l:OV is analyzed and combined in terms of the elements and syl' ' !abies of the pr]l:Ov. At Theaetetus 202B, Socrates describes a dream which teaches him that elements are af,oya, while combinations are pr]1:d'L. It is therefore fitting that Theaetetus's act of combination (G'VAAaf:ICLV EL<; EV, 147E), based on a geometrical paradigm, renders its object prrc:6v. The Eleatic stranger intends, at Politicus 278E, that this kind of inquiry by means of paradigms may bring us to a • . '" t " state of wakmg, mstead of a dream (uJtap avt' ovupa·toc:;). * * * * * * * �20 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW The peculiar nature of the irrational geometric mean between rational factors, Theaetetus's 1\vvcqw;, may well have served as the paradigmatic inspiration for Plato's new solutions to the Parmenidean and Protagorean paradoxes. This will become clearer as we examine the peculiar ontological and epistemological characteristics of this 1\uvaf.tL£. With regard to its ontology, viewed from the geometrical standpoint, the irrational mean offers no intrinsic difficulties; it is a stable entity, a side of the square equal to a given rectangle, easily and elegantly constructed inside a circle.!' But with regard to the way it comes to be known-the way it comes to be measured, from the arithmetical standpoint-it turns into a very shifty thing. To measure a liuVUf.tL£, we have to make a promecic number more and more square, so that its rational factors (f.tllK1'J) come to approximate the root. We do this by interpolating arithmetic and harmonic means between the two factors.16 It can be shown (as by ProclusY' that for any two factors A and B, the harmonic mean C and the arithmetic mean D stand in this relation: A:C::D:B This means that the rectangle AB equals the rectangle CD. Since AB is our oblong number, CD is an alternative representation of it. If one then interpolates two new means between C and D, and continues the process, one generates pairs of factors of the same number that become more and more equal, which give successively closer rational approximations to the geometric mean from above and below. Note that however many means one interpolates, the rational factors remain unequal, and oblong numbers never actually become squares. As Theaetetus describes an oblong number, "a greater and a lesser side always contain it:' (I48A) Brown argues, following Toeplitz, that the use of "always" (O.c() is significant here in its technical sense (i.e., that of Euclid's X. I and X.2), and implies the application of a continued process. 18 (This technical" sense is in any case rooted in the everyday 11 �DAVID 21 usage of this adverb, whose sense is both distributive with respect to instances of the subject, and frequentative with respect to the verb.) The text may be seen to allude to the continued process of interpolations described above, and to the fact that it can never yield equal sides for a rectangular number. The geometric mean stays in between: while A: X:: X: B, so also is C: X:: X: 0, and C': X:: X: 0'. The interpolated means "trap" the buvaru~ length within an arbitrarily small interval. Each successive interpolation divides the previous interval between the rational factors by more than half: the new arithmetic mean cutes off exactly half from above, and the new harmonic mean some more from below. By Euclid's X.I-a central theorem in applying the method of reciprocal measurement, &vtlvcpa(pEOL~, which is associated with the mature Theaetetus-it follows that the interval between the successive pairs of arithmetic and harmonic means can be made to shrink smaller than any given magnitude. It is not only this interval that evanesces, but also the difference between the geometric mean and each of the other two means respectively. This means that the difference between the true length of the geometric mean and each of its under- and over- estimates is evanescent, and there is a strong inducement to see the irrational mean itself as characterized by the narrowing oscillation of its extremes. This is not a nai've interpretation of the measuring process: in the case of a rational geometric mean, or [.lflKO~, there is a number inside the interval which the estimates approach; but in the irrational case, there appears to be no normal numerical entity involved, and we do not know how exactly the mean behaves inside the decreasing rational interval which defines it. We only know that at each stage, it lies in between the harmonic and the arithmetic estimates, while approaching each of them in turn to less than any given difference. There is evidence in the Epinomis that an irrational geometric mean was thought of as oscillating between the arithmetic and harmonic ones (see 99 lA-B). In a passage which extols. the ubiquity and power of �22 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 'tO bLltAdOLOV; "the double," in proportions, the Athenian stranger turns to the means associated with this interval. He gives standard definitions of the pair of rational means (amounting to the fact that the arithmetical is equidistant from its extremes, and the harmonic differs from its extremes by the same proportional part of eath one); he then points out that in the interval between six and twelve, they are ' ., / . called the 'Y]~WALOV and the EltL'tpL'l:OV. He adds that m between these same ones (to{rtOJV a{nffiv f.v 'tClJ !J.EOq:>) is a proportion that has been given to the dance of the Muses, "which turns itself about to one or the other of these two" (en:' a~cpO'tEpa O'tpE,/ ' cj>O~EV'YJ). We first observe that the a'pLflWJ<; concept involved not just concrete assemblages, but also urepetition" numbers (i.e. &~£, 'tpL£, etc.). 19 Therefore if we investigate any example of doubleness, or utwice;' we are just as specifically studying "the two" as when in studying a particular isosceles triangle, we can prove things about all isosceles triangles qua isosceles. The interval I2:6 is an example of 2:I, of 'tO biJtAdOLOV bLdO't'Y]~U or the "double interval." 20 The practical advantage of studying higher multiples of a given interval is that the rational means can be interpolated without fractioning the unit. In the interval I2:6, the arithmetic and harmonic means are nine and eight respectively; hence the stranger describes their ratios with the lower t.. / ) /' extreme as the 'Y]~LOALOV (9:6 reduces to 3:2) and the Em'tpL'tOV (because 8:6 reduces to 4:3). If we then interpret the object which turns itself about Elt' a~cp6'tEpa as the oscillating geometric mean between the two rational means, the other phrase describing it (mv'n.ov atl'tWV EV 'tt\) ~f'mp) becomes explicable; for we recall that this object is not only the geometric mean in the interval I2:6, but also in the interval 9:8, defined by the pair of rational means (the referents of 't01J'tWV atm:ov) inside I2:6. Since the division between nine and eight happens also to represent a division in the seventeen steps of the epic hexameter, the dance of the Muses, the writer draws �DAVID 23 a connection between the dynamic geometric mean in the double interval and the turning point in the dance. At Parmenides 129B, a young Socrates asserts that "if someone proved that similar things in themselves ( atna O[!OLa) became ' / dissimilar ( UVO[!OLa), or the dissimilar similar, that would, I think, be a portent:' Theaetetus's lluva[!L~ is the portent made manifest: insofar as it i~,the length of a square, the one which equals an oblong number, it is O[!OLOV; but insofar as it is approximated to the point of identity by unequal rational factors, it is forever UVO[!OLOV. < / O[!OLWOL~ is the principle Theaetetus has applied to number; in the new arithmetic, one makes unlike" ( &.vO~oLOL) promecic numbers more and more square, or "like" ( O~OLOL). The upshot is that arithmetic becomes conceived of as a kind of geometry, and indeed, by the time of the Epinomis, the entire activity of geometry is characterized as the "making like" of numbers that are by nature unlike. (Epinomis, 990d) The Athenian stranger is led to describe this numerical geometry as a wonder, of divine and not human origin. Perhaps he is think' ing about the 1\uva[!L~, the portent which it seeks to generate. I earlier suggested that the relation of the 1\vva[!L~ to all number stood in direct analogy with the nature of the "other" to all being. This "other" was the basis for Plato's new conception of not-being; he was concerned to show both that it exists and that it is distributed over all being in its inter-relationships (Sophist 258D-E). This second characteristic seems clearly to implicate the &6va[!L~ as a paradigm; but does Plato ever try to demonstrate its existence) If this object, like and unlike, at rest and oscillating, is to be the object-paradigm which recasts all the hoary debates and turns them on their heads, he must have been at pains to show that it actually exists. A key passage in the Politicus answers this expectation. The Eleatic stranger highlights its importance by pointedly referring to the pivotal argument in the Sophist about not-being: just as there the hunt for the sophist was saved by the argument that not-being exists, 1:a 11 �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 24 1.1 ' "' '- I "" ' 11. OU'tW KaL VUV 'tO 1ti-.EOV au KaL el-.aTIOV f.lE'tprJ1:a npooavayKame'ov yL'yveo8m f.l-.1 ' ,, ' ' , J' ' ' ' ' ' r. 1tp0£ a~~,~~,'Y]~~,a f.lOVOV a~~,~~,a KaL 1tp0£ 't'Y]V 'tOU I I ,/ ' s._' S.. I )/ f.lE'tpLOu yevemv; ou yap u'Y] uuva,;ov ye OU'tE '). ... :1 )/i '). ... ..... ... .. 1t011,L'tLKOV OU't' a~~,~~,oy 'tLVa 'tWV 1tEpL 'ta£ npasEL£ fmO'ti](.lOVa Uf.l<jlLO~'Y]'trl'tW£ yeyovE/ ' , VaL 'tOU'tOU f.l'Y] SUVOf.lOI-.Oy'Y]8EV'tO£. (Politicus, 284B-C) so also now, are we not compelled to say that the greater and the less come to be measured not only against one another, but also toward the generation of the mean? For it is impossible at any rate, that either the statesman, or any one else who has knowledge about practical affairs, should indisputably come to exist, if this is not agreed on. Politics, practical undertakings, and works of art direct themselves to what is fitting ('to f.lE'tpLov). If such a thing cannot be proven to exist, the possibility of 'tt:XV'Y] itself comes into question. The stranger proposes a new division of the science of measurement (f.lE'tp'Y]'tLK~ 283o ). The first part involves measurement of greater against less; this would determine relative excess or deficiency, and, presumably, whether or not there was a common measure (by the technique of &v8ucpciLpeOL£). The second part involves measurement towards a .J ' / J I ,... mean separated from extremes ( EL£ 'tO f.lEOOV a1to;!KL08'Y] 'tWV ioz6.,;wv, 284E); and it is likely that the geometric mean, the mean proportional, is especially meant. Since this mean is the one which squares the greater-by-less, bringing extremes into balance and making the lxvof.lOLOV O'f.lOLOV, it must be the one whose preservation brings beauty to works of art (284A-B); the famous "golden" mean is a species of geometric mean. The method of interpolating pairs of rational means as greater and lesser approximations of the geometric mean admirably suits the terms of Plato's description: �DAVID 25 ,. / .., ')' "" . flELl;;ov 'tE ct[lct Km EAct't'tov flE'tPELOfuL l-11'] ' ~~'\ "). , ' ' ... 1tp0£ ct11.A1']11.ct [-!OVOV, ctf..f..ct Km ...,. ' ,.... I I npo£ 't'I']V 't01J flE'tpwu yEvEmv. (284D) The greater-and-less are at the same time measured not only against each other, but also toward the generation of the fitting. Note that "greater-and-less" are paired off by 'tE-KctL, and that they are to be measured "toward the generation" (y{vEOL£) of the mean. At each stage of the interpolations, one is not comparing the extremes with each other to find their common measure or their relative excess or deficiency, but one is manipulating the pair of extremes to generate a number in between them. Take the case of B less than A, for example; one does not subtract B fi:om A to find their difference, but rather one adds the pair together and halves the result, generating the arithmetic mean (D). (In the case of the double, 12:6, we get D (12 + 6)/2 18/2 9.) Then one multiplies the pair together and divides the result by the arithmetic mean, to produce the harmonic mean C. (C (12•6 )/D 72/9 8.) C and D then become the new pair of greater-and-less (D' (C + D)/2 (9 + 8)/2 17/2 8 I/2; C (C•D)/D' (9•8)/(17/2) 72/(17 /2) 144/17 8 8/17). Notice how the product of eachpair({C,D}, {C',D'}) remains the same (72) and how quickly the interpolations converge (the difference between C and D' is already only 1/34th part of the unit). The whole process is continually generating the [-IE'tpwv, the geometric mean which runs in the middle of them all (flE'tct!;u) and = = = = = = = = = = unites the series of pairs into one = = = = = (cruf....A.af3el.v E~~ £~). But if the mean is never reached, can it be shown to exist? The proof would appear to depend on the ontological interdependence of the arts, the [-!E'tp{ov, and the pairs of greater-and-less. The stranger �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 26 declares that we must suppose both that the arts exist, and that the greater-and-less are measured toward the generation of the mean: ,, ' / , , .... / 'tOU'WV 'tE yap OV'tO<; EKELVU EO'tL, KUKELVWV )/ ' ..... 21 OVOWV EO'tL KUL 'tUU'ta, [.1.1'] ' ' ,.. '-U I I I/ '""' liE OV'tO<; JtO'tEpOV 't01J'tWV OVIiE'tEpOV U1J'tWV ,, ' EO'taL JtO'tE. (284D). For if this [the mean J exists, those [the greater-andlessJ exist, and if those arts exist, these [the greaterand-lessJ also exist, but if one of them [the mean or the arts J does not exist, neither of this pair [the greater nor the less J ever will. The passage is admittedly very difficult, in text and translation, because of a possible ambiguity as to the referents of the correlated demonstratives; but it seems clear that an existence proof is at issue. That the greater and the less exist, no one would dispute. But if we deny the existence of either the [.LE'tpLOV, or the arts, each by means of which the greater-and-less are made known and defined, we run the risk of denying existence of this pair of fundamental opposites. Hence we accept, provisionally at least (284D), the existence of the mean. The greater-and-less measured against one another discover a common measure or the unit-Plato's paradigm, perhaps, for that which is. Measured toward the generation of the mean, they discover a measure in between the greater and the less, which still is greater-and-less; a measure that is always coming to be, in the relations between things that are. In this relational mode of being, Plato has his paradigm for the "other;' and a beachhead against Parmenidean ontology. * * * * * * * �DAVID 27 Plato's answer to the Protagorean conundrums on flux is also based on this new branch of f,I,E'tPYJ'tLK~, measurement toward the y€vEGL<; of the mean. At Sophist 24 7D-E, the stranger sets it down as a provisional solution to their paradoxes, that whatever possesses a power (6-tiva[,!,L<;) to act or be acted upon, even only once, is truly existent, and then formally defines beings (t:a OVTU) as OUK a'A'Ao 'tL JtA~V OVVU[,!,L<;, nothing else than OUVU[,!,L<;. It is highly unlikely that such a word could be both novelly and proximately applied by Plato without some sort of cross-reference. ' This answer, that being is O'UVU[,!,L<;, comes after the stranger has cornered these thinkers into admitting that the incorporeal exists in some way. The "flux theorists" have then to say what being is, in a way that covers both the corporeal and the incorporeal (247D). I must therefore show how Theaetetus's OUVU[,!,L<; is a saving answer on both these levels. Let us turn to the Theaetetus, where a Protagorean theeory of sensation based on mutual measurement gets a thorough setting out by Socrates, and where once again the non-corporeal is required to exist. Brown has led the way, by showing that Socrates's version of the Protagorean theory of sensation is modeled on the continued process of interpolation to approximate the geometric mean.22 The odd expressions in this passage of text become happily explicable on these terms. Here are some of Brown's list of correlations: uthe object sought is ... an 'in-between' (f,I,E"ta1;u n) (I54A), which ... is to be identified by a process of 'measuring and being measured' (n:apaf,I,E'tp01lf,I,E8a ...n:apa[,i,E'tpou[,i,EVOV) (I54B)"; "the object determined 'is nothing in itself, but is becoming for someone always' Is;.\ '1' l\ J ' I e. / ) '\"'.' ) \ , 8 ) ( O'UuEV ELVUL EV av,;o Ka8 av"to, a~~.~~.a 'tLVL UEL YLYVEG aL (I 57A-B; cf. I53E)"; and "the intermediate stages of the process are 'infinite in number, but paired off' (n:'A~8EL [,i,EV UJtELpa, o[O'U[,i,U OE) (I56A-B):' In this last passage we can add some very telling details: it is out of the coming together and rubbing against one another �28 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW ' , ' / ' v (OfA.LALa<; 't£ Km 'tpLljJEW<; npo<; aA.A.T]A.a) of that which has the power (lluvaru<;) to act, and that which has the power to undergo, that the infinite, twinned offspring come; these paired offspring, the sensed thing and the sensation of it, are "forever falling out together . ' ' ') . an db emg generate d"('' 01JVEK1tLJt'tOUOU KUL YEVVW!lEVT]For UEL O.eL O'UVEKn'Grcouaa, we could as well pave rendered: heing interpolated together, in a continued process:' The notion that an object of sense and a sensation are mutually measured, and that they are infinite, paired-off interpolations, can hardly belong to any "common sense" 11 theory of sensation; Brown can produce a concrete, mathematical anal- ogy which could have motivated this otherwise bizarre formulation. The key to this analogy is that Socrates's Protagoreans explain the phenomenon of sensation as one of mutual measurement of object and percipient. This way of thinking, by the old version of !lE'tp'f]'tLKi], leads to their positions on the ultimate relativity of experience; measurement n:pot; ' '" af...A.'Y]Aa generates a common measure or unit, but since each percipient and the entire world of sense are in constant flux, and their interaction with one another changes them both, this unit is redefined by each sense event. Unity in sense-experience is therefore dependent on the particular state of a human being at a particular time; man is the measure of all things. Plato's solution is to apply the new theory of measurement: he accepts the premise of mutual measurement in sensation, but he can now generate a kind of unity that is independent of subject and object, at the same time that it embraces them, To call the opposed poles of measurement lluva!lEL<; (156A) is to signal their relation, not to each other, but as first approximations of the mean proportional which defines and unites them both. One has not done away with flux by any means; Socrates ill and Socrates healthy each define different intervals with the same wine, so that the series of interpolated means are also different (yielding the sensation of sweetness in one case and bitterness in the other, 159c-E). But one has analyzed sense phenomena in a way that �DAVID 29 reveals unique classes within them; the geometric means define infinite series of correlated sense experiences. The point of defining being as liuvarw;, the capacity to act or be acted upon, even only once, is to show that even the most random and isolated phenomenon, occurring once to a single percipient, in and of itself defines an infinite class through the mean it generates. The upshot is, Brown observes, that "the flux of phenomena may after all be 'saved' for knowledge." 23 The ingenuity of the approach is that the very fact which made such experience seem intractable for science, that the 11 tubbing" of perceived object against percipient observer changes them both, is now made the essential condition for generating unity in phenomena (represented by the geometric mean) via a continued process. This is the same ingenu- ity that Theaetetus displayed when he solved the problem of incommensurability by newly exploiting the relation between geometrical figures and numbers, which had created the trouble in the first place. The need to admit the existence of the incorporeal is demonstrated by the need for some faculty within us to account for our ability to compare data, to recognize what is common to all and to categorize experience in terms of the philosophical oppositions (i.e., being and not-being, like and unlike, etc.). 24 Theaetetus is convinced that this is done by the soul, and cannot be done by any one of the bodily sense organs; for which he is called "beautiful" (KaAO£) by Socrates (185DE). If this faculty can compare sense data from different organs, then its work consists in comparing means, which are expressed as ratios in terms of their respective extremes (like the ~[J-UJAWV and lm:('tpt'tOV in the Epinomis passage, 991B). Therefore this faculty compares ratios, and its activity must be the calculation of proportions ( avaA.oy(snv). As strained as this might sound, Socrates' choice of words \:>ears out the analogy: the word used to describe this faculty's ability is auA.A.oytO[J-0£ (186D) ; the verb which characterizes its activity is &vaA.oyfso[J-m (186A) and the products of its work are 'b.va.A.oyLO[J-a'ta (186c) . The theory of sensation had entailed that the �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 30 objects of sense be commensurable with their proper sense organ (sU[t[tE'tpov, I56D). But one cannot hear through sight or see through hearing (I84E-I85A). Therefore the faculty which has to compare and to u square" the data from different sense organs, must deal with problems of incommensurability. We have already seen how Theaetetus's lluva[ttt; has helped to facilitate such studies, The answer that being is llvva[ttt; is therefore shown to resolve both the corporal and incorporeal aspects of flux theory as Socrates presents them-in suth a way as to gather them into one account-if an explicit reference is taken to Theaetetus's lluva[ttt;, and the new branch of measurement science. Sense phenomena can then be shown to have a ratio (ii"J(ELV A.oyov). because object and sense organ generate a mean, and the percipient soul becomes a kind of A.oytatLKOt; or J.lE'tP11'tlK6; (uratio-" or umeasure-calculator") , because the new techniques allow for the handling of incommensurability. Clearly, the aims of Plato's application of measurement theory to sense perception are not the same as those of modern science. No actual measurements are generated, for example. (The whole thing turns a bit silly if numbers are plugged in.) Plato's aim might rather have been, in the spirit of ancient astronomy, to u save the appear11 ances:' As I understand this notion, it does not mean to reduce the appearances to measurement!' To save the appearances is, in Brown's phrase, to "save" phenomena for knowledge, by supplying a rational construct in the form of a mathematical model that could account for, or at least correspond to, the perceived data, This is the kernel of a paradigmatic method. There is no necessary entailment of a claim that the model has a causal relationship to the appearances, or that it represents the physical reality standing "behind" the appearances; it has rather the free, associative illumination of a paradigm. This was true even for Ptolemaic astronomy, where the principle of uniform circular motion did eventually generate accurarely predictive models for the perceived non-uniform orbits in the heavens. This achievement in �DAVID 31 astronomy of predictive correspondence between hypotheses and phenomena set a standard thereafter for the saving of appearances. In Plato's time, however, Eudoxus devised astronomical models which could not have been accurately predictive; yet they could still have been seen to u save" the appearances, in that such salvation might have been seen to come through the ascent itsel£ from the spangled particularity of sensual observation to the realm of the mathematical. Rather than recording the movements of the decorations on the celestial ceiling, which one perceives by sight-see Plato's disparaging remarks on the current state of astronomy (Republic 529A f£)-Eudoxus was developing models for them, based on the mathematics of uniform circular motion, which one grasps by argument and reason. To reduce the disorder and particularity of appearances in the sensible world to mathematical generality and principled order would be to save the appearances-for reason, and from chaos. The reduction requires at least a qualitative correspondence between paradigm and reality; hence Eudoxus's models had to be able to reproduce retrogressions in the orbits of the outer planets. It took a considerable refinement in the models and the observations-and possibly in philosophical outlook as well-to achieve the quantitative correspondence in Hipparchus and Ptolemy, where the retrograde motions were given by the models in magnitude and in time. Even Ptolemy, however, is concerned to distinguish his work and discipline as mathematics, and not physics or theology, although it makes some concessions to these other fields. To the mathematician, in contrast with the physicist or theologian, the existence of different, equivalent models, such as eccentric circles and epicycles, or even heliocentricity and geocentricity, is a point of contemplative delight; for those others, a point of anxiety and dispute. When it comes to the sublunary sphere, Plato accepts the premise of radical flux. He apparently held this view all his intellectual life (see Aristotle's biography, Metaphysics 987a30f£). All things are in motion, and so are their measures (i.e., the individual percipients); hence the �32 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW measurements they take-i.e., individual perceptual judgements of things as to their sensible quality or size-are also in flux, (The same wind can appear hot and cold to different people, I52B.) The premise of flux apparently entails the premise, "nothing is one in itself" (I52D); this is the mathematical version of the relativist premise, uthere is no objective measure:' Different percipients-and the same percipient at different times-represent different measures, and hence there exists a problem of radical incommensurability between individual perceptions. There can therefore be no question of a quantitative application of measurement theory to the phenomena. The very fact that perceptual events and judgements are judged to be completely unique and individual (fl\tov-see, eg., I 54A) should suggest that they are not susceptible to general treatment of any kind, let alone to mathematical treatment. The world of sense, when approached in terms of these kinds of premises, ought not to be salvageable for knowledge. All the same, for the metaphor of sensation as measurement, a notion attributed in the Theaetetus ultimately to Protagoras (I52A), there is life yet, The new branch of measurement science can supply an intriguing model for at least a qualitative saving of the appearances, Here, as in the sublunary sphere, we also have things and their measures, extremes and means, continually changing. But this does not prevent them from being related to a single magnitude-to two definite magnitudes, in fact, for the size of the rectangle contained by each pair of interpolations, as well as its geometric root, remains the same. Hence there can be a kind of unity predicated of a continued process of change; and so perhaps a predication of unity need not be precluded from sense experience, even in a world of unceasing flux, In addition, the measure of the root of this constant magnitude represented by the rectangles, the geometric mean approximated by the arithmetic and harmonic means, is a measure that is continually coming to be, but never is. As such, it is uniquely suited as a qualitative model or paradigm for perception, which seems to share this property in the sensi- �DAVID 33 ble world. That which is ("ta Ovta.) comes to be, as a perception, through a continued process of measurement with the percipient. The first step in applying the new kind of measurement as a theory of perception would be to say, with the Eleatic stranger, that being (,;a bv,;a.) is liuva.w~. * * * * * * * The vastly different implications of the two kinds of measurement are brought out by Socrates' example of the dice (IS4c). If one compares six dice with four dice they look greater, but if one compares six dice with twelve, they look less. This seems to involve a paradox, because nothing can ever become greater or less in size or number while it remains equal to itsel£ Two other postulates are said to contend with this one and with each other in our souls, when we think about the six dice becoming greater and less: anything in respect of which nothing is added or subtracted is neither increased nor diminished, but is always equal; and that which did not exist before could not exist afterwards without a process of becoming (I54A-B). Brown has pointed out that the way Socrates compares six with four and twelve-that the difference in each case is half of the compared term (I 54c )--is an explicit recognition of six as the harmonic mean in the interval defined by four and twelve as extremes. 25 He then takes the reference to the harmonic mean as an allusion to the geometric mean in the interval, to which the three postulates mentioned above apply in a mathematically interesting way-a way that justifies Theaetetus's dizziness at such paradoxes (ISSc). This is by way of defending Plato against the likes of Bertrand Russell, who refers to Plato's difficulties in these matters as "among the infantile diseases of philosophy:' 26 The text does not support Brown's defence, however. Socrates and Theaetetus seem genuinely perplexed by any three-term comparison, whether among dice or between the size of Socrates and �34 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW two stages of a growing Theaetetus (I55B-c). This is because the art of measurement (but not necessarily philosophy) is in its infancy; measurement n;po<; aA.A.l']A.a can only distinguish the greater and the less, and the intermediate objects inevitably called up by a three-term comparison become equivocal in a rather straightforward way. The concreteness of the cited examples-remember that Plato always talks about dice-may help to reinforce the odd intuition that an object changes into its opposite while staying the same. The new branch of f.tE'tpl']'tLKi), measurement toward the generation of the mean, legitimizes the intermediate. It generates objects that are definitively ubetween" all rational numbers, as we have seen. Plato's deft presentation points the way to the mature science of measurement. Comparing six dice to four and twelve is to measure tangible quantities against one another, so as to cause perplexity about the relativity of six; seeing 6 as the harmonic mean in the interval 12:4 is to see it as a generating approximation of the only non-relative, or utransrelative:' entity inside the interval: the geometric mean or mean proportional. As one generates it geometrically, it exists unchanged and remains equal with itself. As one generates it arithmetically, it is now greater now less, now increased and now diminished, continually com- ing to be. The geometric mean is therefore an exception to each of the three Protagorean assumptions about relativity, just as it was to the Parmenidean ones about sameness and being; and we have already seen how Plato tries to prove that it exists. Brown was right, therefore, in recognizing the reference to the harmonic mean and its allusion to the geometric mean, but he was at least partly wrong about the significance of the allusion, That the same number or magnitude can be called both greater and less seems to be regarded as a genuine paradox; the problem can be nullified by rethinking the process of measurement, as a generation of means, rather than as a direct comparison of quantities. A mean is a mean in relation to what is greater and to what is less; the greater and the less, in turn, are �DAVID 35 so in relation, as extremes to a mean. Hence extremes and means can only exist and be defined in terms of each other. A mean is therefore a thing which demands to be comprehended on all these terms: it is one thing remaining the same as itself, and it is greater, and it is less. The concatenation of these properties is no longer paradoxical, but rather uniquely definitive, in the case of a mean. The trick is therefore to define numbers and magnitudes, where the purported paradox of relativity is observed, as means. This is precisely what Theaetetus has already done. Not just the incommensurable roots (buVU[.IEL~). but , all numbers and commensurable lengths (f.IYJKYJ) are recast as geometric means between the unit and square and oblong numbers (that is, as sides of the square representations of all numbers). This is once again to resolve a difficulty by redefining its terms, and to resolve a paradox by exploiting its own conditions. Theaetetus can cure his dizziness by turning the problem upside down. To reclassify rational and irrational lengths as types of means is to make these relativistic creatures, with their seemingly paradoxical mixture of properties, the very standards of measurement; the 11 in-between, now takes on the substantive exis- tence in measurement science which once belonged exclusively to number. By referring to the problematical, "in-between" six in such a way as to identify it as the harmonic mean in an interval, Plato would seem to be hinting at this kind of a solution during Socrates' very articulation of the paradox. I do not mean to suggest, here or elsewhere, that the algorithm of interpolating means is some kind of cryptic code to Platos meaning. For one thing, a mathematical model needs to be interpreted before it can be interpreted; in itself, the means algorithm is about measurement in the abstract and nothing else. (Even here, however, as I have suggested, the question what is a mean?" and the follow-up does it 11 11 exist?" can have serious philosophical consequences, such as the postu- lating of a relational mode of being.) What I do see is the persistent heuristic and often playfUl application of a paradigm. The most seri- �36 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW ous and striking interpretation of this paradigm is as a theory of sense perception; but there are other exemplars in the Theaetetus. At I 80E, Socrates, tells Theodorus that by advancing little by little (Km;a Gf-UKpov), they have unknowingly fallen into the midway position between the Parmenideans and the Heracliteans ( Et~ 'tO [.l{aov JtE1t'tWK6,;E~-recall aE'i. CJ'UVEKJtLJt'tQUGct, I 56B); their plight is compared to that of the people caught in the middle of a wrestling school tug-of-war, who are dragged toward opposite sides of the dividing line. On the one hand, this image is amusing and self-explanatory, and fully realized on its own terms. But one can discern behind it the notions, entirely neutral in themselves, of incremental interpolation toward the measurement of a mean, and oscillation around the meas- uring line. The mathematical model can hardly be said to explain or to interpret the image. The reverse is in fact the case: it is the tug-of-war which interprets, and gives content to, the paradigm. But just as in the case of Socrates's dice, an awareness of the underlying paradigm can suggest lines of thought that are textually based, and yet not necessarily part of the literal intention of the interlocutors in the dialogue. A mean is something which brings into relation and, in this sense, unites its extremes. It is therefore of considerable interest for a student of Socrates and Plato to wonder what a mean position between the Parmenideans and the Heracliteans might be like. The means algorithm and the image of the tug-of-war can be seen to do a double duty: conceiving of opposed positions no longer as opposites but as extremes is the first step towards our some day, as we still say, "squar- ing" them, generating a solution in the mean between them; while at the same time, the image of being caught in the middle and pulled to either side captures the present predicament of the participants in the dialogue. A significant portion of the Theaetetus is devoted to an exhaustive, case by case analysis of the possibility of false judgement, depending on the premise that with regard to each thing one might have an opin- �DAVID 37 ion about, one either knows it or one doesn't. But Theaetetus is forced to adopt this premise of polar, or opposite conditions when Socrates asks him to leave out the states which lie in between knowledge and ignorance (ftE'tal;u 'tOlJ'tWV, I88A), such as learning and forgetting. I think few readers would agree with Socrates's daim here that these intermediate processes have no bearing on the discussion. Does not the text rather invite the reader to consider, on his own at any rate, the nature and the implications of such mean states as learning and forgetting? Are they not significant in themselves, and especially crucial as a basis for the task at hand, an investigation of the cognitive mechanism which might result in false opinion? The midway cases of learning and forgetting exhibit the paradoxes we have come to expect of means: it would seem that in the midst of these conditions, knowledge and ignorance are both present in the mind at the same time and about the same thing. In the middle of the dialogue (I72c-I77B), Socrates digresses to paint the portraits of two incompatible human types, the man of the city and the philosopher. The opposite qualities of these figures take on a new significance if the figures are interpreted not as opposites, but as extremes. The reader will notice that the philosopher described is not in fact like Socrates: he is rather a latter-day Thales (I 73E ff.), an astronomer, physicist, geometer, and general investigator into the abstract natures of things; a man more reminiscent of Arist.ophanes's parody than Plato's Socrates. In the Socrates of the Theaetetus, we see instead a mean between extremes, between the man of the law courts, whose time and speech are strictly circumscribed, and the philosopher, whose time and speech are all his own (I72D-E). Socrates has the leisure, on the one hand, to pursue an investigation into the definition of knowledge with Theaetetus, including time for fresh starts and digressions (I 72D); on the other, we are reminded quite pointedly, by way of ending the conversation and the text, that Socrates has to break off until the next day so that he can keep his appointment in court, to �38 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW meet Meletus's indictment. Socrates' time is not his own; and his life will depend upon his ability to speak the speech of the law courts. It is tempting to compare Socrates' two patterns, his "paradigms set up in the midst of existence" (176E), with the paradigms of Theaetetus. The divine and the perfectly just would be figured as foursquare and O[J.OLOV, and the. human and the political as inherently heteromecic. A tragic dimension emerges if one interprets Socrates's models as themselves an investiture of the models of the measurement paradigm. We are encouraged to become more and more like the divine and the just; but it is a structural feature of the interpolation algorithm that however equal it becomes, the rectangle can never become square. The flight from our mortal nature toward the divine is described by Socrates as ~[J.O'i:Wm£ or assimilation to god; ~[J.o(wm£ itself (Socrates repeats the word, I 7 6B) is then explained as becoming 1\{Kawv and dmov in the com~any of <j>p6vrJOL£. But in the mathematical setting, the process of O[J.o(wOL£ can never be completed; and the suggestion in this context may be that ultimately the divine is irreconcilable with the human, that the life of pure philosophy is finally incommensurable with the life of the city. The demands of the philosopher, who asks "what is man?" (I74B), can never completely escape the demands of society, and its conventional expectations of man. The life and death of Socrates embody a paradigmatic dilemma: however long and full the measure of his days, and hence however long the process, through the purgations 'of philosophy, of assimilation to the divine, of becoming truly just and holy and wise,-there will come a day of reckoning by a different number, and the city will lay its claim to him. A further note about the dice: the interval I 2:4 is a species of the Tp~.:rtA.amov 1\LaOTrJfJ.U, 3:1. The interpolated means, beginning with eight and six, are therefore fourth-multiple approximations of the side of the three-foot square. The full significance of the example is .now manifest: it illustrates the new way to investigate incommensu- �DAVID 39 rable lengths, taking up again the first ofTheodorus's cases, and applying the continued process involved in the squaring of Theaetetus's oblong numbers. * * * * * * * In addition to that portentous entity, the o-6va!H~. two methods associated with my interpretation of the geometry lesson, proof by reductio ad absurdum and the method of exhaustion, also become paradigmatic for Plato in this trio of dialogues. The former may have long since been the inspiration for Socrates's familiar technique of reducing his interlocutor to perplexity. It shows up at various stages of the argument in the Theaetetus, as for example at I 54C-D, where Theaetetus is reduced to both affirming and denying one of the Protagorean postulates we have just discussed. Whereas in mathematics, this method achieves the positive result of refuting a hypothesis, and proving its contrary, Plato romanticizes the notion somewhat for philosophy; he is interested in perplexity itself as a heuristic state, and marks the wonderment that it brings on. in Theaetetus as a sign of his being a philosopher (I SSc-D ). But Plato also relies on the rigorous conception of the proof: at a crucial point in the Sophist, it is proved that some of the forms and genera must mix with each other and others not, only because the other two possibilities-that none of them do or all of them do-have been reduced to absurdity (252E). The upshot is an unexpected discovery of the philosopher and his science, while Theaetetus and the stranger had been looking for the sophist (253c). Dialectic is the science which divides things by form (?too~) and genus (yrvo~). and he who is capable of this science is the one who can best discern the complex interrelationships among the formswhich ones unite others, which are parts, which wholes, and which stand apart from mixing (253D-E). �40 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW The method of division, which characterizes the investigations into the sophist and the statesman and which is identified with dialectic (253D-E), is based on the method of exhaustion. This is the postclassical name for the continued process of measurement we are now familiar with, One "exhausts" a magnitude by continually cutting off rational segments of it, each of them more than half of what is left. If these rational u shavings" are strung together, one can approximate the length, say of a geometric mean, to an arbitrarily high degree of accuracy. Once again, as Plato invests the mathematical paradigm with the dress of the dialectical process, he romanticizes it: at Sophist 261AB, Theaetetus complains that as they get closer to their quarry, the sophist keeps throwing "problems" in their way, like successive defensive walls (npo~ArJ[!U'ta); the stranger assures him that any attacker , r ' ; , ' who can rnake "contmuous progress rorward"(' 'tO rtpoa8EV act. EL~ npmtvm) should be confident of success. And to be sure, while the stranger never fails to string together the divisions which measure" his subject (e.g., at 268C-D for the sophist), his main concern is at least equally with the division process itself, and with the training it provides in distinguishing classes (see Politicus 285C-D). But there is still a concession here to the mathematical: at Politicus 287c, the stranger advises that in these procedures, one must divide by a number as close as possible to two, This serves a double purpose; it maximizes the number of divisions that will need to be made, thereby increasing a student's experience with the handling of kinds, while also providing the minimum subtraction required (more than half)," to guarantee the 11 u exhaustion" of the subject. The aim of the division process is still to produce a definition, and in this sense it can be seen as a refinement on the original Socratic methodology. But definition is here seen, perhaps for the first time explicitly, as a kind of measurement; this is a return to the root mean- ing of the term, which involves the setting of limits or boundary marks (Clp'LsELV). The Forms only enter the picture as the necessary �DAVID 41 terms of division, and the measures generated, to ''trap" the undefined object in an exhaustive process. It would seem that a considerable point of departure for this new vision of dialectic lies in the notion of forms as measures. That the philosopher and the philosopher's art can be characterized by these continued processes marks a stunning change in Plato's thought. Brown draws the following conclusion: ... in Theaetetus, and apparently in response to a lively sense of the mathematical achievements of this companion and colleague, Plato seems to be yielding somewhat to an epistemological suggestion derived from Theaetetus's notion of continued processes. This would involve thinking that opinion, and perhaps even perception, if they can be processed in just the right way, ought to be taken seriously. Further, it would involve his thinking that knowledge is not fully characterized by the fixed and finished objects (Ideas) toward which it may proceed, but that it is at least partly characterized by the approximating process itsel£ This would mean that at least in one aspect of it, knowledge is a continued process of learning.28 I would make a stronger claim for Plato's development: the more usual theory of forms, which involved forms as paradigms in the sense of ideals, has been reformed or even replaced in these dialogues, on the inspiration of the new measurement paradigms created by Theaetetus. That Plato himself recognized a development is evidenced by his curious wording at Sophist 248A: he there refers to certain idealists, who do not believe in motion and mixing, as nthe friends of the forms" ('to:U; 'tWV c'L6wv q)LA.ov~). That Plato could use such a phrase, in relation to what is usually thought of as his singular philosophical achieve- �42 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW ment, must have staggering implications for those who would chart the history of his thought. Did these friends of the forms use to be friends of his? Or were they the older gentlemen described somewhat unflatteringly at 25Ic, possibly older, rival Socratics? If so, was the original theory of forms perhaps a Socratic or a Parmenidean invention? However these questions are answered, and whatever is the true measure of the distance between Plato and the "friends of the forms;' the sum total of my arguments is that there was a revolution in Plato's conception of epistemology and ontology, necessitated by the existence of the curious object at the heart of the new measurement science: the irrational geometric mean between rational factors, Theaetetus's <'iuvarw::;. This object and this science serve as paradigms for a brave new approach to some very old and perplexing problems. Perhaps there are grounds for a revolution in our sense of Plato's development, to match the turn in the man. Notes I. Wilbur R. Knorr, Evolution of the Euclidean Elements (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1975), 65-9. 2. Wilbur R. Knorr and Miles F. Burnyeat, "Methodology, Philology, and Philosophy, Isis, I979, 70:565-70 3. Miles Burnyeat, "The Philosophical Sense of Theaetetus's Mathematics:' Isis, I978, 69: 489-5I3, on pg. 5I3. 4. Knorr, Evolution, I 92 5. Ibid., 192 6. Ibid., 69 f£ 7. Ibid., 96 (In full: "(a) The proofs are demonstrably valid. (b)The treatment by special cases and the stopping at I 7 are necessitated by the methods of proof employed. (c) The proofs will be understood to apply to an inhnite number of cases. (d) No use may be made of the dichotomy of square and oblong numbers in Theodorus's studies, either in the demonstrations or in the choice �DAVID 43 of cases to be treated. (e) Theodorus's proofs utilize the special relations of the lines in the construction of the dynameis. The geometrical methods of construction are of the type characteristic of metrical geometry as developed in Elements II and are closely associated with a certain early style of arithmetic theory. (f) But the arithemetic methods by which Theaetetus could prove the two general theorems , on the incommensurability of lines associated with non-square and non-cubic integers, were not available to Theodorus:' 8. Malcolm Brown, "Theaetetus: Knowledge as Continued Learning;' Journal of the History of Philosophy, I969, 7:359-79, on pgs. 367-8 9. Knorr, Ewlution, I 58 IO. This proof is given by Knorr, Evolution, I84 I I. Ibid., I 59 I2. see Euclid's Elements X De£ 3 I3. see Plato's Politicus, 278b-e 14. see Euclid, The Elements, 3 vols., Vol. 3, ed. Sir Thomas Heath (Annapolis: St. John's College Press, I947), 3 IS. see Euclid ILI4 andVI.l3 I6. Brown, "Theaetetus:' 371 f£ I7. Proclus, In Platonis Timaeum Commentaria, 3 vols., Vol. 2, ed. Ernst Diehl (Leipzig: Teubner, I903-6), I73-4 18. Brown, Theaetetus;' 371 I9. see David H. Fowler, The Mathematics of Plato~ Academy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I 987), I 4 f£ 20. see Plato's Timaeus 36A for this usage 2I. The reading of B and T; editors usually read touto 22. Brown, "Theaetetus," 3 7 6-7 23. Ibid, 377 24. see Theaetetus, I 85c 25. Brown, "Theaetetus:' 3 74 26. quoted in Brown, "Theaetetus:' 373, note 38 11 �44 2 7. Euclid, X. I 28. Brown, "Theaetetus;' 379 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW �-.::f We Nietzscheans !ft- John Verdi Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844.* He went to good schools, studied hard and by the time he was 24 had been appointed professor of philology at the University of Basel. He abandoned the academic world after about ten years, and began to live here and there in France, Switzerland, and Italy, never remaining in any one place for more than a few months. His life was solitary, but not unhappy. In 1889 he suffered a complete mental collapse from which he never recovered. He died in I 900. While he flourished and was writing the books for which we remember him, virtually no one paid any attention to his work. Now it seems that everybody has something to say about Nietzsche. What Martin Heidegger wrote of him a few decades ago might still be true today, that Nietzsche is "either celebrated and imitated or reviled and exploited:' I Nietzsche has excited and polarized people throughout the twentieth century. Even now he remains as enigmatic as Plato: we are forever uncertain what he believes and what he intends. Consequently everybody has something to say about Nietzsche, even Nietzsche. He calls himself a ''godless anti-metaphysician;' a "very free spirit," an 11 irnmoralist;' an uartist," one of the umore spiritual beings of this • age, horne1 " II£ 1 " ptous, u• ess, 1ear ess, mcomprehenst'ble." An d m Ecce Homo, his last book, he says: "I am not a man, I am dynamite ....! contradict as has never been contradicted and am nonetheless the oppo11 11 11 ' " John Verdi is a tutor on the Annapolis Campus. This lecture was delivered on March 26, 1999. *I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Hwnanities and St. John's for having given me the opportunity to spend much of the last two academic years (1997-1999) studying Nietzsche. I'd also like to thank the members of last semester's study group on The G191 Science for their insight, enthusiasm and good spirits, and for helping me learn how to read Nietzsche more carefully and more critically. �46 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW site of a negative spirit. I am a bringer of good tidings such as there has never been." 2 I have kept in mind while preparing this essay that some of you may have never read any Nietzsche, others may have been introduced to him only recently or haphazardly, and still others may know him alltoo-well, What I have to say about Nietzsche shall focus on one of his books, his most comprehensive, coherent, and accessible book, Beyond Good and Evil, in particular on the Preface, because I believe that here at St. John's our best public conversations usually focus on books, not on people or "issues:' The essay comes in five parts, Each of the first four parts begins with, and subsequently comments on, some of the Preface, so that by the time I have finished the last of these, you will have heard the entire Preface. In the last section of the lecture I shall suggest that Nietzsche aims in part to re-establish, re-vivify, and transmogrify an ancient tradition of spiritual exercises, going back at least to Socrates, exercises which Pierre Hadot says had as their goal "a transformation of the world;' and "a metamorphosis of our personal• 113 Ity. Part One Supposing truth is a woman-what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have understood women badly? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been inept and improper methods for winning a female? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won-and today every kind of dogmatism stands sad and discouraged. 1j it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who assert that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the �47 VERDI ground-even more, that all dogmatism is breathing its last.' In the first line Nietzsche alludes to Machiavelli's remark in The Prince about fortune. Machiavelli writes: Fortune is a woman ... and one sees that she lets herself be won more by the impetuous than by those who proceed coldly. And so always, like a woman, she is a friend of the young because they are less cautious, more ferocious, and command her with more audacity. 5 Machiavelli also says that "fortune shows her power where virtue (virtU) has not been put in order [so as] to resist her;' and that the prince is "prosperous who adapts his mode of proceeding to the qualities of the times" ( ch. 25). Later, Nietzsche says that Machiavelli cannot help presenting the most serious matters in a boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he risks-long, difficult, hard, dangerous thoughts and the tempo of the gallop and the very best, most capricious humor.' Nietzsche's own style, which is inextricably interwoven with his thought, can often be described in just such terms. "[T]here is art in every good sentence-art that must be figured out if the sentence is to be understood!"' Nietzsche wants us to recognize from the opening of the book a certain kinship he has with Machiavelli in both content and style. Nietzsche continues the questioning by asking if all philosphers, at least to the extent that they have been dogmatists, have not been clumsy in courting truth and winning her heart. He implies that truth �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 48 cannot be discovered by some method, as Descartes had hoped, but only won by someone able to command her. Nietzsche doesn't tell us if all philosophers heretofore have been tactless dogmatists. He hints that they have usually taken a fruitless approach to truth, but the allusion to Machiavelli, and the description of his style, suggests that he at least was hardly a gruesome and awkwar~ suitor. Most philosophers, however, have been too grave in their search for truth, not gay and playful enough to have gotten very far with her. But what does Nietzsche understand by dogmatism anywayl Recall that Kant had set himself the task of criticizing dogmatism in The Critique of Pure Reason, where he characterizes it as the presumption that it is possible to make progress with pure knowledge, according to principles, from concepts alone ... and that it is possible to do this without having first investigated in what way and by what right reason has come into possession of these concepts.8 Kant believes that when we employ concepts dogmatically-that is, to "yield strict proof from some principles a priori"-without first having made them give an account of their origin and a justification of their use, they lack the power to yield truth, but create illusion in its place, Kant and Nietzsche both challenge dogmatism as that mode of thinking which sets arbitrary limits to the questions philosophy may ask. Nietzsche disagrees with Kant in at least two important ways. Kant believes in a class of truths which are both necessarily so and about the empirical world of experience, not merely about logic or the relationship of pure concepts to one another. These synthetic a priori truths constitute the substance of arithmetic and geometry, and also the foundations of classical mechanics, namely, Newton's three laws of �VERDI 49 motion. The examples Kant gives are that seven plus five equals twelve, that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and that in every transfer of motion between bodies, action and reaction must always be equal. For Nietzsche the central question of Kant's Critique--how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?-leaves at least one "truth" unassailable and immune from question, namely, that there exist synthetic judgments which are true a priori. For Nietzsche the prior question is, Why is belief in such judgments necessary? Why must man believe them to be true? In fact, Nietzsche believes that dogmatism exists whenever a philosopher needs to resort to any kind 11 of given;' any truth he claims is "evident," whether it be Descartes's 11 1 think;' Hume's "impressions and ideas," or Socrates' belief that the search for truth will make us better people. He says, There are still harmless self-observers who believe 11 that there are immediate certainties"; for example, "I think;' ... as though knowledge here got hold of its object pure and naked, as "the thing in itself;' without any falsification on the part of the subject or the object. But that u immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself;' involve a contradiction in terms; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!9 The second way Nietzsche differs from Kant-and perhaps from all other philosophers before him-lies in the very value each attributes to the kind of truths dogmatists seek. For "the secret wish and hidden meaning of all dogmatic aspirations" has been that their truth is supposed to be a truth for everyone. Yet, 11 whatever can be common," value:' 10 Nietzsche says, "always has little And with this Nietzsche catches all of us up short, for what else can truth be if not something universal? Of course my truth" and your truth" can differ in trivial 11 11 �50 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW ways, in the sense that umy experience" can differ from yours. But Nietzsche is talking about the truths of philosophers, that is, truths about being and becoming, knowledge and ignorance, good and eviL In fact, Nietzsche worries deeply about truth, and expresses this at the beginning of Part One of Beyond Good and Evil, when he raises two astounding questions: what is the source of our will to truth? And what is the value of this will? The first question, Nietzsche says, brought him to a long halt; but it was the second question that brought him to a complete stop. "Why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?" These are the questions the Sphinx really put to Oedipus, the questions behind the riddle. For Socrates, the answer to both questions suggested in the Symposium and elsewhere, is that truth is intelligible and that everything intelligible is beautifuL Nietzsche, however, believes that our intellectual conscience demands that we consider other possibilities. The truth as such about life may be unintelligible; it may be ugly. He says: Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish ...The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. 11 The dogmatists' belief in the value of truth, "truth for its own sake;' must itself be scrutinized, in order to uncover its origins, which may lie deep in the cave of human instincts and drives. [F]or all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness and lust, �VERDI 51 [and that the J good and revered things [might be J insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things-maybe even one with them in essence. 12 Having thus challenged dogmatic philosophers in the first three sentences of the Preface, Nietzsche then suggests that perhaps dogmatism has already been knocked down, that it may even be dying. So why the hoopla of the opening sentences? Well, not Nierzsche but certain uscoffers" or tidiculers" claim that the end of dogmatism has arrived. I suspect that Nietzsche does not believe this himself for one minute. The myriad forms dogmatism takes can become clear to us only after we recognize the scope and implications of Nietzsche's questions about the value of truth. Any activity based on a search for truth "for its own sake" is dogmatic, because it precludes raising the question, "Why seek truth?" And where questions are forbidden, dogmatism rules. In The Gay Scienee he puts it this way: 11 [w Jill to truth" does not mean "I will not allow myself to be deceived" but-[ and] there is no alternative"! will not deceive, not even myself"; and with that we stand on moral ground....Thus the question "Why science?" leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, history are "not mora1"? 13 The scoffers who think they see all dogmatism in the throes of death do not recognize what it really is or the extent of its presence. These are perhaps the skeptics Nierzsche later criticizes, who believe that their newly won "objectivity" demands that they refuse to affirm or deny. "They no longer know independence of decisions and the intrepid sense of pleasure in willing-they doubt the 'freedom of the �THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW 52 will' even in their dreams." 14 Nietzsche is not one of the scoffers, and skepticism is not an adequate response to dogmatism. "[T]he worst of harbors is better than to go reeling back into a hopeless infinity of skepticism." IS Part Two Speaking seriously, there are good grounds for the hope that all dogmatizing in philosophy, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may never- theless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the rime is very near when it will be comprehended in case after case what really has been sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers' edifices as the dogmatists have built so far: any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mis- chief); some play on words perhaps, a seduction by granunar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts. (Preface) Once Nietzsche rejects those cnttcs of philosophy who have ingested the "gentle, gracious lulling poppy of skepticism;' he suggests that dogmatism might manifest merely the growing pains of philosophy, the naive attempts of a youthful beginner, full of ardor and noble ambition. When Nietzsche tells us there are grounds for this hope, he has in mind such signs as the decline of belief in Christian dogma, which he announced in The Gay Science with the pronouncement, "God is dead:' 16 This decline has come about through the ever-increasing �VERDI 53 severity of the Christian demand for truthfUlness, and along with it has come a growth in pessimism, that is, in the possibility of raising the very question of the value of existence. To Nietzsche these are signs that philosophy is beginning to shed its worn out dogmatic skin, one which had been needed, and had served a usefUl purpose, but may have outlived its time. Nietzsche views these events as full of hope for philosophy's future. He cares about philosophy, and it means a great deal to him that the so-called death of dogmatism not signal a death of philosophy itself. but a coming to maturity after the necessary naivete of its youth. Nietzsche's philosopher is the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the complete development of manY Unlike the scholar and the scientist, a philosopher demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or a No, ... about life and the value of life. 18 Nietzsche then holds out to us the further hope that soon we shall be able to see on exactly what kinds of foundations "unconditional philosophers' edifices" have up to now been built. He first mentions "any old popular superstition," from which he singles out what he calls uthe soul superstition;· one form of which is the subject and ego 11 superstition:· For Nietzsche, 11 superstition !I is not necessarily a bad word. At certain times during the development of a people, superstition is "actually a symptom of enlightenment;' a "delight in individuality;' and a "sign that the intellect is becoming more independent:' 19 At those times superstitions can give rise to 11 individuals" who mark the "highest and most fruitful stage" of a culture. But once a supersti- �54 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW tion has outlived its usefulness, its remains, deeply embedded in the beliefs of a society, can function as a basis for the erection of colossal fictions, which Nietzsche believes need to be exposed, weakened, and dismantled. Nietzsche's criticism of the soul and ego superstition begins with a characteristically brief critique of "materialistic atomism" in Part One of Beyond Good and Evil, an argument which rests ostensibly on the suggestion made in the eighteenth century by Boscovich that atoms might be understood not as particles or substances, but as centers of force or fields of influence. Nietzsche compares him favorably with Copernicus, when he says that [wJhile Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does not stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last part of the earth that "stood fast"-the belief in "substance," in "matter;' in the earth-residuum and particle-atom. Then he goes on. One must, however, go still further and also declare war, a remorseless war to the knife, against the "atomistic need" which still lives a dangerous afterlife where no one suspects it.... [O]ne must also, first of all, give the finishing stroke to that other and more calamitous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest, the soul atomism, by which Nietzsche means "the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible:' He leaves the way open to a new version of the soul-hypothesis, such as 'mortal soul; and Soul as 11 1 �VERDI 55 subjective multiplicity; and 'soul as social structure of the drives and affects' :• Nietzsche then goes on to question the belief that we possess uimmediate certainti' of the existence of the self" or the 1:' 11 11 When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, "I think," I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove; for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being thought of as a cause, that there is an "ego;' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking. It was pretty much according to the same schema that the older atomism sought, besides the operating "power;' that lump of matter in which it resides. Nietzsche even suggests that the soul superstition supports the false distinction between ufree will" and "unfree will/' or between that which is a cause of its own motion and that which is not. When we project and mix this symbol world [of cause and effect] into things as if it existed in itself;' we act once more as we have always acted-mythologically. The "unfree will" is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills. 11 The second kind of foundation for dogmatism which Nietzsche uncovers is language. He returns repeatedly throughout Beyond Good and Evil to the theme of the power of language to falsifY, mislead, and seduce. In fact the book has begun with a joking bit of grammatical �56 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW metaphysics, for part of the significance of the opening question"Supposing truth is a woman-what then?"-turns on the fact that in German, as in the Romance languages and in Greek, the noun for 11 truth" is feminine. Nietzsche seems to be saying, let's see what we can do with grammar, what we can spin out from an accident of language. English provides no simple way of capturing this subtlety, an example 11 of Nietzsche's own capricious humor." But grammatical jokes are deep, as Wittgenstein said. The falsifYing power of language, and the philosopher's responsibility to recognize it and make use of it, lie near the heart of Nietzsche's concerns in Beyond Good and Evil. In section 20 he writes: The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar-l mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions-that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems. Later, in section 34, he asks even more trenchantly: What forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of utrue" and ufalse"?...Why couldn't the world that concerns us-be a fiction? And if somebody asked, "but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?"-couldn't one answer simply: why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too? Is it not permitted to be a bit ironical about the subject no less than the predicate and object? Shouldn't philosophers be permitted to rise above faith in grammar? �VERDI 57 Even what he refers to as the "fundamental faith of the metaphysicians in opposite values" rests on the awkwardness of language which "will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation:' In a short and unfinished early essay, entitled On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense, Nietzsche argues that not only does language not adequately represent reality, but also that only through our collective forgetfulness of the origin of truth and falsehood are we led to imagine that language does have this power. Nietzsche suggests that the concept of truth originated in a social agreement to end the "war of each against ali;' which established "the first laws of truth:' The fact is that "the creator of language ... only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors:' 20 Language, therefore, is rhetoric, because it u conveys an attitude or opinion, a partial view rather than an essential knowledge of the thing" ( R, xiii). Concepts are formed through equating what is essentially unequal. through seeing the individual as a representative of a kind rather than in its full particularity, which would be closer to our actual experience. Concepts simplif)r experience and therefore falsify it. This seems to me to be a complete reversal of what Hegel says in the section in The Phenomenology on Sense-Certainty, which is a view of our awareness of the world according to which it is at its fullest and richest when we simply open our sense ... to the world and receive whatever impressions come our way, prior to any... conceptual activity. 21 Hegel argues that when the subject of sense-certainty is asked to say what he experiences, he finds his attempts to be empty. If he tries to speak of the 11 here" and unow" which he is experiencing, not even . , he h unse If can know wh at h e means by "here" an d " now," an d "I" �58 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW unless he means something universal, beyond the immediate place, moment, and person, For Hegel the particular is nothing other than the irrational and the untrue. Nietzsche, however, believes that the initial effort to verbalize experience and thereby bring it to consciousness constitutes the first falsification of experience, the first lie, the original sin of language. "Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual....But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be." 22 Thus, Nietzsche does not mean to say that language "falls short" of reality, or that it could perhaps be improved to reflect reality better. No, even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond to the essence of things: that would of course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite. What then is truth) A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.2' Nietzsche does not suggest that truth could be anything but a kind of agreement about words, and therefore a falsification. He himself uses every manner of grammatical and rhetorical device in his writing. But we can become less forgetful of the origin of truth, perhaps to our �VERDI 59 benefit. What he says in section 24 of Beyond Good and Evil might now seem less paradoxical than it usually does on first reading. There he writes that only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far-the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but-as its refinement! This account of language poses serious problems for Nietzsche's own writing. He knows that he cannot remove himself from the "nets of language" 24 except by remaining silent, which he might have done by employing a different medium for his art. But the tradition he intends to call into question has itself been established and nourished through language, and so he believes his critique must also be accomplished through words. The third cornerstone for the grand edifices of the dogmatists has been laid by bold extensions of narrow, limited, personal human experiences. The naivete of the dogmatist allows him to create facts for all mankind from a parochialist perspective. Nietzsche writes in a section srx: Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy has been so far: namely the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or inunoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown. �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 60 "There are moralities;' he says in section I 87, which are meant to justify their creator before others. Other moralities are meant to calm him and lead him to be satisfied with himself....With others he wants to Wreak revenge, with others conceal himself.... Of Kant in particular Nietzsche says: Even apart from the value of such claims as "there is a categorical imperative in us;' one can still always ask: what does such a claim tell us about the man who makes it? The answer Nietzsche puts in Kant's mouth is, "What deserves respect in me is that I can obey-and you ought not to be different from me." Part Three The philosophy of the dogmatists was, let us hope, only a promise across millennia-as astrology was in still earlier times when perhaps more labor, money, ingenuity, and patience were lavished in its service than for any real science hitherto: to astrology and its "supra-terrestrial" claims we owe the grand style of architecture in Asia and Egypt. It seems that all great things first have to bestride the earth in monstrous and frightening masks in order to inscribe themselves in the hearts of humanity with eternal demands: dogmatic philosophy was such a mask, for example, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia and Platonism in Europe. �VERDI 61 Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be conceded that the worst, most lingering, and most dangerous of all errors so far was a dogmatist's error-namely, Plato's invention of the pure spirit and the good in itself. But now that it is overcome, now that Europe is breathing freely again after this nightmare and at least can enjoy a healthier-sleep, we, whose task is wakifulness itself. are the heirs of all that strength which has been fostered by the fight against this error. To be sure, to speak of spirit and the good as Plato did meant standing truth on her head and denying perspective, the basic condition of all life. Indeed, as a physician one might ask: "How could the most beautiful growth of antiquity, Plato, contract such a disease? Did the wicked Socrates corrupt him after all? Could Socrates have been the corrupter of youth after all? And did he deserve his hemlock?" (Preface) Nietzsche does not deny the greatness of dogmatic philosophy, a greatness at least as powerful as astrology, to which we owe the magnificence of the pyramids and other grand edifices throughout Asia. He implies that astrology is a mask, perhaps a mask which had to be worn by what he calls "real science;' before it could expect human beings to be equal to its demands. Dogmatic philosophy, too, he hopes, has been simply the shocking and terrifYing mask philosophy has been required to wear, to allow it to make its way into the hearts of men. The teaching of the Veda in Hinduism is an example from Asia of such a disguise, while Platonism has been the European version of the mask. Nietzsche singles Plato out from among the many dogmatic thinkers of European philosophy, because his error has been the worst �62 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW and most dangerous, that is, his invention of the pure spirit and the good in itsel£ One might even be tempted to suggest that the sum and substance of Nietzsche's negative teaching is that there is no pure spirit and there is no good in itsel£ Is Nietzsche's disagreement with Plato on these two important matters enough to explain why he calls Plato's error the worst and most dangerous? Other dogmatists have held similar views: Lucretius comes to mind as a materialist who seems not to have believed in pure spirit, and as for not accepting the good in itself, I can suggest HegeL Nietzsche says that Plato's influence through Christianity has been enormous; this might be good reason to take aim at him. But even this seems not to be enough, especially considering with what great respect Nietzsche always viewed Plato, who possessed, he says, "the greatest strength any philosopher so far has had at his disposal" (I9I). Besides, Nietzsche goes on in the Preface to say that the specific form of dogmatism Plato represents has been overcome, and that Europe is once again breathing freely; But this release from the so-called Platonic nightmare only allows us a more comfortable sleep. For the heart of Nietzsche's struggle with Plato is that in order to speak of the spirit and the good as Plato did, he had to deny perspective, which Nietzsche calls "the basic condition of all life;' and which he often couples with its correlative concept, interpretation. Perspective, as Nietzsche understands it, is not equivalent to "point of view" in the sense that one might be able to adopt other points of view, positions from which to look at something-say, a sculpture-but from which we might shift, to get a new take on things. All ordinary seeing through the eyes is perspective seeing in this sense, but is not what Nietzsche means by perspective. Another more subtle view of perspective could be the experiences of Leibnizian monads. Leibniz writes in the Monadology that because of the infinite multitude of simple substances there are, as it were, just as many different �VERDI 63 universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, corresponding to the different points of of view of each monad. 25 [E]ach simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe. A monad differs from a body in that space and time are both qualities of the monad, and not extrinsic to it. That is, a monad is not in space in any usual sense. Nietzsche sometimes sounds like Leibniz, as when he says that [i]nsofar as the word "knowledge" has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings ....It is our needs that interpret the world. 26 Just as each monad reflects God from a unique perspective, so, too, we might think, we interpret the world each from our own unique perspective. Nietzsche's "will to power" might be one such perspective. Perhaps some perspectives are better than others! just as some monads reflect God more fully. And maybe Nietzsche believes "will to power" is one of those better perspectives, perhaps the best one. On either account-perspectivism as analogous to visual optics or to the spiritual optics of Leibnizian monads-perspective would itself be understood from a vantage point outside perspective. In the case of the eye, one admits the existence of objects to be seen and space in which both we and the objects co-exist. In monadic perspective, the reflections are not essentially spatial but spiritual: God is the object which the monads "view" or "reflect." And so on this account, too, perspective in the end requires at least a viewer and a viewed. When we turn to uinterpretation;' there, too, we would require a text, a scene, a �64 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW clue to be interpreted by an interpreter, The number of possible perspectives and interpretations need not be limited in either account, and it is imaginable many will exist alongside one another. Nietzsche, however, for whom perspective is "the basic condition of all life;' holds a different understanding of it, one which seems to teeter on the brink of conceptual incoherence. It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than mere appearance; it is even the worst proved assumption there is in the world. Let at least this much be admitted: there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective evaluations and appearances." And in The Gay Science, he says: How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpre11 tation, without "sense;· does not become nonsense"; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation-that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulous conscientious analysis and self-examina- tion of the intellect; .for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these, 28 The paradox that haunts this account of Nietzsche's perspectivism can be stated thus: Nietzsche seems to be suggesting that all understanding, all knowledge, is perspectival and interpretive. But if it is, how could we know this, since the intellect would always possess only �VERDI 65 a perspectival view of its own working, not the God's-eye or objective view that it would seem to require? That is, if the intellect creates its own world, it can never discover this, because any experience it has is one which it creates. Kant side-steps this problem by accepting as given the existence of necessary truths about experience, that is, synthetic a priori truths. These serve to remove him from the total immersion in perspective Nietzsche proposes. Kant achieves his perspectival success along the same lines as does Leibniz, that is, by a conceptual dualism which permits him to entertain the hypothesis that we create experience while not at the same time committing him to the belief that that hypothesis, too, is a product of perspective. Nietzsche's thoroughgoing monism, if such we may call it, will not permit this because it does not admit that there is anywhere to stand-or even to imagine-outside perspectival knowledge. "Facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations:' 29 Truth always belongs to a perspective, much as all language consists of metaphor and anthropomorphism. There can no more be a final interpretation or ultimate perspective than there can be a last style of painting or a last school of music. And just as there cannot be a painting done in all styles, or a piece of music written in all schools, there can be no perspective or interpretation which encom- passes all perspectives, all interpretations. Nor can one adopt a perspective at will, for perspectives represent forms of life, and it is only through a new perspective that an old one can be seen as the simplification it was. This truth-that truth is creative-is essentially life-giving, according to Nietzsche, because it is itself a manifestation of the will to power of all things. An interpretation imposes an order on what is essentially without order. "Interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something:' 30 This doctrine of perspective as will to power is neither relativistic nor nihilistic: not relativistic because it does not claim that every perspective represents merely an incomplete or inadequate view of the world, as Leibniz attributes to his monads; �66 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW not nihilistic because it does not claim that all interpretations are of equal value, that all are equally life-promoting. Nietzsche's perspectivism has its roots in Heraclitus's aphorism, panta rei, ouden menei, every- thing changes, nothing remains the same. The world as such possesses no character to be discovered, but only characters to be created. 31 To return to Plaro: he is not alone among dogmatists in denying the perspectival nature of truth, but he is the classic case. In fact all dogmatism denies perspective. All dogmatism reserves at least one truth as untouchable, one Vlh ich may not be ca!Ied into question and which must therefore be considered binding on all people. The danger Nietzsche sees facing modern man is that he shall continue to sleeppeacefully now, but sleep nonetheless. Modern man is characterized especially by his belief that his freedom from Platonism and Christianity implies that he is now objective and impartial, or can be whenever he should so choose. The success of science and scholarship, and the rise of the historical sense, only serve to encourage modern man's conviction that he is on the right track to arrive at truths about nature and man's place in it, even without the support of pure mind, the good itsel£ and God. Nietzsche considers this "good conscience" of modern man to be merely another period of sleep, because the dogmatic center of the scientist's and scholar's pursuits has not yet been honestly confronted. Even the anti-Platonism of empirical science has at its core mathematical physics, and "mathematics has very much to do with the pure mind of Plato:' 32 In The Gay Science Nietzsche says: it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests ...that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.-But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie? �VERDI 67 For Nietzsche the belief that truth has been found poses a threatening seduction, threatening because the denial of perspectivism can hinder the future development and enhancement of mankind, which, he believes, requires perpetual experimentation of the most radical and dangerous kinds, including the continual overcoming of old beliefs and ways of seeing by new ones. In The Gay Science he says that "the secret of harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is-to live dangerously!' His concern is strikingly similar to Socrates's concern in the Phaedo. There Socrates wants to lure his friends away from the seductive nihilism of misology, the hatred of the logos, of discussion, because of its repeated failure to arrive once and for all at the truth concerning the most important things. For Nietzsche the belief that one has arrived at the truth, or at a method for finding the truth, threatens mankind as much as the misologist's depressing belief that the truth can never be found. Both Socrates and Nietzsche, while perhaps inhabiting opposite poles with respect to what they consider the highest values for man, nevertheless stand remarkably close in their fear that discussion and exploration about the value of life might eventually die. Part Four But the fight against Plato or, to speak more clearly and for "the people;' the fight against the Christianecclesiastical pressure of millennia-for Christianity is Platonism for the people;'-has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit the like of which had never yet existed on earth: with so tense a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals. To 11 be sure, European man experiences this tension as need and distress; and twice already attempts have been made in the grand style to relax the bow-once �68 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW by means of Jesuitism, the second time by means of the democratic enlightenment which, with the aid of freedom of the press and newspaper-reading, might indeed bring it about that the spirit would no longer experience itself so easily as a uneed:' (The Germans invented gunpowder-all due respect for that!-but then they made up for it: they invented the press.) But we who are neither Jesuits nor democrats, nor even German enough, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits-we still feel it, the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow. And perhaps also the arrow, the task, and, who knows?, the goaL.. (Preface) With the image of the tense bow in the first sentence Nietzsche alludes to Heraclitus, one of his heroes, and perhaps his model for Zarathustra. Heraclitus says: They do not apprehend how being brought apart it is brought together with itself: there is a connection working in both directions, as in the bow and the lyre. 33 Nietzsche admires Heraclitus for four reasons: Heraclitus does not distinguish a physical world from a metaphysical one; he denies being for becoming; he teaches the productive power of strife and rebukes those who would seek to eliminate it; and he rejects any cardinal distinction between man and animal. 34 From the spiritual tension produced by the struggle between Christian dogmatism and its opponents has now arisen in Europe the possibility of shooting for "the most distant goals:' Christianity, unlike Platonism proper, exists for the masses. For Nietzsche this means �VERDI 69 that the struggle with it is one of noble men against "men not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, chasm of rank, between man and man:' As a religion for sufferers, Christianity has "preserved too much of what ought to perish." 35 Europeans have for a long time felt this tension as a discomfort, something they would rather be without, so that they might sleep even better. Nietzsche pinpoints two attempts to slacken the bow. The first is the militant reformation of Catholicism by the Jesuits after the Council of Trent in 1563. It "focused on the priestly magic of the Eucharist... and the education of an elite loyal to throne and altar:' Nietzsche calls Jesuitism "the conscious holding on to illusion and forcibly incorporating that illusion as the basis of culture." 36 The great opponent of this movement, not mentioned by name in the Preface, but to whom Nietzsche refers elsewhere as uthe most instructive of all sacrifices to Christianity" (EH, II, 3), was Pascal. Jesuitism has been vanquished, but the second attempt to loosen the bow continues still, and that is the democratic enlightenment, which Nietzsche calls the heir to the Christian movement. Modern democracy is not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value. 37 The Germans, who are responsible for the invention of gunpowder (according to Nietzsche) and are to be praised for this, perhaps because it is a means of enforcing orders of rank, are nonetheless to be condemned for their invention of the press, which has been perhaps the single greatest cause of the spread of the democratic movement through the dissemination of newspapers. �70 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW The danger democracy poses for the future of man, the danger of the mediocritization of man, is, as Zarathustra says, that once the last man has become dominant, "man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to whir!...Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same:' 38 Nietzsche worries about the leveling effect of democracy because he considers man's nature to be changeable, and that it is only through culture that man's nature can be enhanced or diminished. The emergence of a higher humanity requires the flourishing of culture, which, he says, has so far been the work of an aristocratic society... a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of · rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other. 39 Democracy seeks to obliterate these distinctions and thereby to promote weakening of culture and consequently of the human species, Life simply is will to power, that is, according to 259, essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms .... Nietzsche is no democrat, but rather a good European and a very free spirit. As a European he disavows nationalism, But while Europe's democratic movement is making Europeans more similar to each other, the conditions it creates "are [also J likely in the highest degree to give birth to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive quality;' individuals whom he describes as "an essentially supranational ... type of man ... a type that possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as its typical distinc- �VERDI 71 tion:' As a good European it is "the European problem" that he takes seriously, that is, the cultivation, perhaps from this group of highly adaptable individuals, "of a new caste that will rule Europe:' 40 Nietzsche also calls himself a free spirit. Not yet a new philosopher, a philosopher of the future, but nonetheless living "beyond good and evil;' the free spirit recognizes that "everything evil ...serves the enhancement of the species 'man' as much as its opposite does:' Free spirits are [aJt home, or at least hav[ eJ been guests, in many countries of the spirit; having escaped again and again from the musty agreeable nooks into which preference and prejudice, youth, origin, the accidents of people and books ... have banished us. 41 The free spirit distrusts thought, is free of the prejudices of past dogmatism, and is left witb only one virtue, honesty. The free spirit, Nietzsche himself. still feels the whole tension in the bow, and perhaps more than that. He may also have tbe arrow in his hand, the will for tbe task, and the vision for tbe goal. This goal is the philosopher of the future. These new philosophers Nietzsche calls u attempters:' He goes on: Are tbese coming philosophers new friends of "trutb"? That is probable enough, for all philosophers so far have loved tbeir truths. But they will certainly not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for every man. The task of tbese philosophers is to create values. �72 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an 11 instrument, a hammer. Their knowing" is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is will to power.42 These thinkers, writers, preachers apply "the knife vivisectionally to the very virtues of their time...to know a new greatness of man:' They will be men of action and the makers of events, but only because "the greatest thoughts are the greatest events:' 43 Their work will be with the creation of new interpretations, new perspectives on man, and their tool will primarily be language. Perhaps there have already been philosophers of the future, philosophers concerned with the future of man. Nietzsche seems to imply that Socrates was one, when he says that Socrates "cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as he did into the flesh and heart of the 'noble: " Perhaps Machiavelli was another. I am very uncertain about both of these. But Nietzsche I think is one, and Beyond Good and Evil is an example in nuce of the work the new philosophers will be required to do. The subtitle of Beyond Good and Evil, "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future;' means to remind us of Wagner, whose music was called Zukunftsmusik, future music, and whose preludes contain the motifs of the operas they introduce, The next philosophy of the future will be post-Platonic and postChristian, since it has been Platonism and Christianity which have provided the tension for the bowshot away from themselves. It will also be post-modern in that it will have recognized the contradiction inherent in modern man's belief in detached objectivity. Finally, the philosophy of the future will be post-scientific, not in the sense that it will demand the abandonment of science as a human activity, but rather in that it will recognize that man cannot be advanced through science as long as science seeks primarily his ease and comfort. �VERDI 73 In Nietzsche's eyes the responsibility of philosophers for the future of man is enormous. The possibility exists that they will not appear, or will fail, or turn out badly. Nietzsche believes that as a species we are "still unexhausted for the greatest possibilities;' but there is no guarantee that we shall realize them. Part Five: Spiritual Exercises Nietzsche believes that all concepts, types, and species are fluid, continually subject to shifting and displacement. This radically Heracleitean stance, that everything changes, nothing remains the same, leads him to take another step with Heraclitus, that all of nature lies in its acts, and that there exists a perpetual interconnectedness of things. "If we affirm one single moment, we ... affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things:' "To say to an individual, .. .'change yourself' means to demand that everything should change, even the past:' 44 Nietzsche also believes that all knowledge requires self-knowledge first of all. In Beyond Good and Evil, 80, he writes: A thing explained is a thing we have no further concern with.-What was on the mind of that god who 11 counseled: uKnow thyself!" Did he mean: Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!" Later, in 23 I, he says: One sometimes comes upon certain solutions to problems which inspire strong belief in us; perhaps 11 one thenceforth calls them one's convictions:' Later-we see them only as steps to self-knowledge, sign-posts to the problem we are-rather, to the great �74 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW stupidity we are, to our spiritual fate, to what is unteachable very "deep down:' Nietzsche believes that knowledge is a creative act, and that selfknowledge is the act of becoming who we are, human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To this end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world.45 It seems paradoxical that Nietzsche should speak of the self at all in the light of his criticism of soul-atomism and his sweeping Heracleiteanism, The resolution lies in his notion of the eternal return of the same, that is, the belief that all events and things have occurred countless times before just as they are occurring now, and shall occur again countless times to come. When he first introduces this uncanny thought in The Gay Science, in a section entitled The greatest weight, he asks how we would respond to the proposal that "[t]his life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence:' ... How well-disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?46 �VERDI 75 And in Beyond Good and Evil, 56, he represents "the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being" as one "who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo...to him... who makes it necessary because again and again he needs himself-and makes himself necessary:' Nietzsche considers the eternal return his most incisive thought, but not because it is a novel or startling hypothesis about the universe. Nietzsche knew that it had been proposed before; he himself attribc utes it to the Pythagoreans, and a form of it can be found in Empedocles. As a proposal about the universe, it cannot be proved: by hypothesis there can be no evidence for it, since any evidence would require that there be a way to distinguish one occurrence of an event from an earlier or latet one, which would violate the condition that every recurrence be exactly like every other. According to Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernables, any purported recurrence identical in every respect to the initial event could not be a recurrence at all, but would be the selfsame event. But Nietzsche asks not simply, could you believe this eternal return?, but rather, can you want it, desire it, will it? The possibility or impossibility of the eternal return as a "fact" seems less important to Nietzsche than the act of will it would take to embrace the very concept that all things might recur endlessly. But if all things are interconnected, then what I am now requires that the world have been just as it has been, with nothing out of place. For I am a peculiar confluence of events, an intersection of the activities which make up nature. To will that all might be just as it is is to affirm myself just as I 11 11 am. To say Yes" to the entire past and future is to say Yes" to I who am in the present. This act of willing the eternal return is the act. of willing myself, of becoming who I am. It is not something I achieve once and for all, but is a continuing process, a self- and world-affirmation that constitutes the continuing creation of myself and incorporation of the world. �THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW 76 The self which is thus ever becoming itself is then not the atomic self Nietzsche rejects early in Beyond Good and Evil. It is instead an ongoing act of will, and specifically of will to power, which in forever making the self takes into itself the past, present and future. This creation is what Nietzsche means by knowledge. If this account of the eternal return and its connection with the self is not entirely wrong, then we now find ourselves in a position to suggest that Nietzsche is engaged in a new form of spiritual exercise. According to Pierre Hadot, spiritual exercises constituted part of an ancient tradition which considered philosophy to be a way of life, an effort at learning how to live, and not merely a search for truths or 11 construction of systems. These exercises correspond to a transforma- tion of our vision of the world, and to a metamorphosis of our personalitY:' Stoic exercises involved investigating, reading, listening, paying attention, meditation, self-mastery, and indifference to indifferent things. Meditation, for example, attempts to control inner discourse by rendering it coherent. Epicurus, too, emphasized spiritual exercises, such as the assimilation of brief aphorisms upon which one might meditate, and the study of physics. Philosophy seen in this light is a therapeutic activity, the purpose of which is to produce and maintain health in the soul. Hadot believes that Socratic dialogues are a kind of communal spiritual exercise, because at stake in them is not "what is being talked about, but who is doing the talking." Socrates invites the interlocutor to uan exal:nination of conscience;' and this requires that at every moment the interlocutor give his explicit consent. "The subject matter of the dialogue counts less than the method applied in it, and the solution of a problem has less value than the road traveled in common in order to resolve it:' For the ancients, according to Hadot, the goal of spiritual exercises is �VERDI 77 a kind of self-formation, or paideia, which is to teach us to live, not in conformity with human prejudices and social conventions ... but in conformity with the nature of man. 47 In Nietzsche's hands spiritual exercises become the ceaseless activity of self-examination in order to create ourselves and thereby become "he poets o f our 1· " t 1ves. One thing is nm!ful.-To "give style" to one's character-a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. 48 Nietzsche says that [ t]he Greeks gradually learned to organize the chaos by following the Delphic teaching and thinking back to themselves, that is, to their real needs, and letting their pseudo-needs die out.... This is a parable for each one of us: he must organize the chaos within him by thinking back to his real needs.49 This activity of thought and inner discourse can have the effect of "[imposing] upon becoming the character of being;' which Nietzsche 11 says is the supreme will to power:' In Nietzsche's hands spiritual exercises again assume the character of a way of life. Philosophy, "the most spiritual will to power;' thus also becomes a way to live, a continual making and re-making of the self and the world, an imposition of forms and unities on the essen- �78 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW tially formless and chaotic. Our intellectual conscience also requires that we recognize and acknowledge the values that ground our beliefs, for every belief is determined by some value. Nietzsche believes that "the only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something... [is) tryiog to live in accordance with it:' The aims of philosophy thus conceived parallel those of education. How can man know himself? ...Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? ... [T)hey constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you.... Your true educators ... reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is. 5° The best educator offers the student no more, but no less, than the opportunity to acquire iosight into his own nature. However great the greed of my desire for·knowledge may be, I still cannot take anything out of things that did not belong to me before; what belongs to others remains behiod. 51 We Nietzscheans believe that no educator, not even Nietzsche, is in -a position to prescribe to us how we are to make our lives unique. Zarathustra warns his followers: �VERDI 79 go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of of him! Perhaps he deceived you. In the last section of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche once again recalls Plato, perhaps his greatest teacher and deceiver. Nietzsche says: Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts!...What things do we write and paint ... we immortalizers of things which let themselves be written-what are the only things we are able to paint? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance!...[O]nly birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand-by our hand! This reminds us of Plato's own warning in his Seventh Letter, in which he says about what he himself has taken most seriously that I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period of attendance on instruction in the subject itself and of dose companionship, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining. The "weakness of the logos;' that is, the inability of language to capture the philosophical insight, is no more for Nietzsche than it is for Plato a reason to abandon the activity of philosophizing. Still, profound differences separate Plato and Nietzsche, a separation made �80 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW forcefully evident by Nietzsche's iotroduction of Dionysos io the penultimate section of Beyond Good and Evil, for Dionysos is a philosopher. "Gods, too, then philosophize;' contrary to what Diotima tells Socrates io the Symposium (202C-D). In closiog I would like to cite a passage from Emerson, whom Nietzsche discovered while a teenager and continued to read and admire throughout his life. It comes from his essay "Circles;' and the description is one I would not hesitate to apply to Nietzsche and which, I believe, Nietzsche would not refuse Plato, Emerson writes: The key to every man is his thoughts .... Beware when the great God lets loose a thioker on this planet. Then all thiogs are at risk, It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe or where it will end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the socalled eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of mankind are all at [hisJ mercy.52 Notes I. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. D.F. Krell. (San Francisco: Harper, I979) I-II, 4. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Holliogdale. (London: Penguin Books, I992) I6, I. 3. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Wcty of Lift. (Oxford: Blackwell, I 995) 82. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. (London: Penguio Books, I 990) Preface. J. Holliogdale �VERDI 81 5. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I985) ch. IS. 6. Nietzsche, p. 28. 7. Ibid., p. 246. 8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, I965) B, xxxv. 9. Nietzsche, p. I 6. IO. Ibid., p. 43. I L Ibid., p. 39; 4. I2. Ibid., p. 2. I3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufinann (New York: Vintage Press, I974) 344. I 4. Ibid., p. 208. IS. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I983) IO. I 6. The Gay Science, p. I 08. I 7. Beyond Good and Evil, 6 I. I8. Ibid., 205. I 9. The Gay Science, 23. 20. "On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense," Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, I979) 82. 21. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I975) 140-I. 22. The Gtry Science, p. 354. 23. "Truth and Lie," p. 84. 24. 'The Philosopher;' in Breazeale, p. liS. 25. G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, I989) 57. 26. Friedrich Nietzsche, The JtJll to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Press, I968) 481. �82 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 27. Ibid., 34. 28. The Gay Science, p. 374. 29. The Will to Power, p. 481. 30. Ibid., p. 643. 31. See Alexander Neharnas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I 985). 32. Leo Strauss, Unpublished lecture notes for a class on Beyond Good and Evil. 33. The Presocratic Philosophers rev. ed. G S, Kirk and JE. Raven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I957) 2I2. 34. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans, Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Press, I962) 5-8; See 11 also, Uses and Disadvantages," ix. 35. Beyond Good and Evil, 62. 36. See Lawrence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I996) 33. 37. Beyond Good and Evil, 203. 38. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, I966) Prologue, 5. 39. Beyond Good and Evil, 258. 40. Ibid., 242, 251. 41. Ibid, 44. 42. Ibid., 2I I. 43. Ibid., 285. 44. Will to Power, I032; Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, I990. 45. The Gay Science, 335. 46. Ibid., 34 I. 47. Hadot, 93, !02. 48. Gay Science, 290. 49, "Uses and Disadvantages;' 2, IO. 50. Ibid., 3,1. �VERDI 83 51. Gay Science, 242. 52. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, eel. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin, 1982), 229-30. �The Power & Glory of Platonic Dialogue Carl Page In Book One of his Mtmorabilia, Xen'1phon reports Socrates conversing with the sophist Antiphon. Towards the end of their conversation, Socrates speaks of sharing wisdom with one's friends: ... just as someone else takes pleasure in a good horse or dog or bird, so I take even more pleasure in my good friends, and should I possess anything good I teach it, and I recommend my friends to others from whom I believe they will receive some benefit regarding virtue. And the treasures of the wise men of old that they have left written down in books, unfolding the scrolls, I carefully go through them in common with my friends; and should we see anything good, we single it out, and we consider it great gain should we [thusJ become helpful to one another. (1.6.I4) Xenophon comments: "When I heard these things, he certainly seemed to me a supremely happy man and someone to conduct those heeding him into a good and noble life:' Xenophon's testimony to the value of books in their relation to friends is striking, given his upright character and worldly competence-a man fully capable of successfully leading others in the grimmest of life and death circumstances. He must have had rather special books in mind. What, then, is involved in reading Plato's dialogues together as friends, carefully turning their pages, seeking out the treasures that have been written down by a wise man of old? What ought we be after? Carl Page is a tutor at St. John's College. This lecture was delivered at Annapolis on November 20, !998. �PAGE 85 What would Plato have us find? What would he have happen, as the result of our reading? The answer to such questions cannot be straightforward, but the dialogue form of Plato's writings-graciously and thankfully-makes unavoidable our consciousness of what it means to read them. Looked at a little more carefully, they also make unavoidable the question of what it means to speak, write, or read in the name of philosophy, and-from another angle-they encourage meditation on what it means to speak, read, or write at all. To presume that we already know what a dialogue is for, what philosophical speech really aims at, and what we should be getting out of reading Plato, is therefore to ignore, perhaps even to violate what I shall be suggesting to you are Plato's wise and manifold purposes. In particular, your single greatest practical failing as readers of Platonic dialogue will regularly be the assumption that you can remain spectators of its dialectical drama, disinterested onlookers, that you can remain aloof from its proceedings to pick and choose among the thoughts you imagine the drama to be presenting to you. Your single greatest theoretical failing will regularly be to suppose that you know the nature of the philosophical life. I do not doubt that Plato both understood and allowed for the fact that many people would easily make both these sorts of mistake, each in his own way, but that should not lessen your resolve to be counted among the readers he most wished for. Tonight I want to assemble some reminders to help stop you falling short of Plato's potential friendship. I hope to do that, principally by recalling how thoroughly strange the dialogues are and by reflecting a little on why that might be. From the very start, therefore, you can see that my speech will be far more practical and erotic, i.e., aimed at nudging your habits and ideals, than it will be doctrinal and theoretic-which is to say, aimed at informing you of something. In this respect, my speech about Platonic dialogue reduplicates the central character of the dialogues themselves. �86 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW A few procedural observations, First, my main design is to present a view of Plato and his philosophical activity, rather than to justify my interpretation of them. I confine myself to presentation, partly because of time, but mostly because I think justification comes up as a serious question only after one is convinced that something is inter- esting enough to warrant that sort of effort-should circumstances require, It is the interest I would like to provoke first. My second note is a confession, Although much of what follows could be called methodological, I ofi:en find myself impatient and ungenerous with such reflections, with abstract worries about how one ought to do things instead of getting on with doing them. Methodology, critique, and meta-theory tend to be airy and undisciplined, they lend themselves to indecisive, apparently endless bickering, they encourage an odious sort of intellectual smugness, and their attention to matters of form is frequently at the cost of return to the concrete content (whose understanding they were originally supposed to serve). Nevertheless, any serious well-directed work does need orientation, does need some understanding of what it's about, and this is especially important for those who have only just begun, In philosophical matters, the Delphic injunction to know oneself looms as large over Socrates as it -docs over Kant, notwithstanding their disagreements over how best to fulfill the responsibility. It seems, therefore, one must at some point or other run the risks of transcendental narcissism for the sake of self-knowledge. Third, some of the topics I shall explore will sound like variations on the familiar, perhaps even tired old Straussian themes of esotericism, noble lies, persecution of philosophy, and the rest. But not everyone here has heard these important refrains. I intend to repeat my versions of a few of them eloquently and incisively, along with a couple of riffs I hope no one has heard before. I deliberately refer to "my versions" of these refrains because I disagree with an underlying assumption commonly at work in their interpretation: that philosophy is by nature politically alienated and must therefore exercise a condescending �PAGE 87 accommodation, compelled by necessity, to the city and to ordinary human life. Some of my reasons for this deep disagreement are woven into what follows, though I do not make them thematic. One last introductory word. I shall not hesitate-rather shamelessly perhapsto speak on philosophy's behalf. By my acknowledging this presumption in advance, you can at least see that I appreciate what might be questionable about my immodesty. The Oddities of Platonic Dialogue A moment ago I hinted that there is something important in the very fact of Platonic dialogues, something that goes beyond and maybe even upsets the conventional meanings typically associated with philosophy books and their academic study. This needs to be made explicit. PLATONIC ANONYMITY. The dialogues are fully dramatic, i.e., they portray logoi in action and deeds of speech but never disembodied assertions. This form is unusual and was noted by Aristotle near the beginning of the Poetics, where he speaks of "the Socratic conversation;' classing it together with the mimes of Sophron and his son Xenarchus (I447biO). Sophron was a fifth-century Syracusan writer, reputedly admired by Plato. His mimes were dramatic renderings in verse of everyday people, designed to be revelatory of their characters. Plato's dialogues are either directly performed, simply narrated, or narrated within a performed frame, but in all cases not a word is said in Plato's own voice, except the titles. The dialogues not directly performed permit external comment by their narrators, but there is never-unlike the passage from Xenophon with which I began-any authorial comment from Plato himself. In this respect, the Platonic corpus is like the body of Shakespeare's plays. Just as we must wonder exactly how far Prospera, for example, can be taken to speak for the Tempest's author, or Hamlet or Lear, so too must we wonder how far Socrates or Parmenides or the �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 88 Eleatic Stranger or Timaeus or the Athenian Stranger can be taken to speak for Plato. This question was known to Diogenes Laertius in the third century a.d., though many contemporary readers seem to have forgotten it. Despite the unremitting anonymity, however, it must be added that the dialogues are known to be Plato's and were circulated from the start under his authorship. We are therefore meant to notice that the dialogues contain no direct word of Plato's own. He addresses us, but he does not declare himsel£ Ancient rumours of secret Academic teachings notwithstanding, in his own time Plato was just as reticent about his ultimate insights and purposes, providing almost no other clues but the dialogues themselves. They are like "the lord, whose oracle is at Delphi," that neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign" (Heraclitus, Frag. 93) and, like the sibyl hersel£ "with raving lips, uttering things unlaughable, unbeautiful, and unperfumed, they reach with their voice across a thousand years, because of the god" ( c£ Heraclitus, Frag. 92). So, Plato whispers an intriguing name into our ears-Phaedrus (whom everyone knows to be very beautiful), Theaetetus (whom everyone knows to be very clever), Meno (whom everyone knows 11 to be very bad); either such names or sometimes a provocative title- Socrates' Defense Speech, An Intimate Drinking Party, Civilized Order, Regulations,-then he draws the curtain back, to disappear, not off-stage but behind the masks, bringing life to each and every one of his dramatis personae-the personae Platonis. LOGICAL DERANGEMENT. The god-inspired oracle at Delphi uttered things "unlaughable, unbeautiful, and unperfumed;' the very same qualities we meet with in Plato's oracular dialogues. Before fully realizing that strange fact, an experienced and competent reader might well approach the dialogues assuming that philosophy is meant to be or at least ought to include the art of telling, insightful speeches, and that a philosopher's discourse should be more accurate, more illuminating, more comprehensive, and more self-conscious than any of our other ways of talking. Plato's dialogues, however, present quite a dif- �PAGE 89 ferent face, despite their being finished works and despite how plainly philosophy is their centre of gravity. Individually and as a whole they are, at first sight, if not a conceptual chaos at least a tangle of conflicting and unresolved accounts, often at cross-purposes with one another, and sometimes in ways their speakers seem not even to appreciate, let alone understand. I list the most obvious features. Many of the dialogues are aporetic, i.e., they lose their way and never seem to find it again, no matter how serious the resolve with which they began. One tends to get used to this, but the failure of comfortable closure-even in the manifestly great works, such as the &public-reliably irritates any classroom of first-time readers; as, indeed, it should. Some of the dialogues that seem more doctrinally committed, more like "proper" philosophy, e.g., Parmenides, Sophist, are experienced by many competent readers, at least initially, as rather boring through much of their length, occasionally to the point of unreadability. A good handful of dialogues hardly seem like dialogues at ali, if "dialogue" be understood as an earnest effort at inquiry in common. At crucial points in almost all of them, the philosophical argument relies on images and metaphor, conventionally the tools of poetry. Worse still, poetry itself seems regularly to be denounced, while nonetheless used throughout. Even writing itself is declared some sort of mistake. Also at crucial points, the speech will sometimes turn with utter logical seriousness to myth, to what are acknowledged within the conversation as fanciful tales (Republic, Gorgias, Phaedo, Phaedrus). And yet, ali these myths and images rub cheek by jowl with the most abstruse forms of technical argumentation and intricately developed analyses, sometimes lasting for pages and pages-pages that cause painful conceptual squinting, even for the most discursively facile of readers. Yet again, logical precision can at almost any moment give way to outrageous fallacy, blatant non-sequitur, and shameless ad hominem attack. Occasionally, the whole show seems a logical farce-as in the Cratylus, the Euthydemus, and parts of the Protagoras for example-yet everyone in �90 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW the dialogue keeps a completely straight face. There seems to be no overall plan to the dialogues as a totality; one more or less would not seem to ruin their effect, and there is no single dialogue that might count as their culmination or key. Nevertheless, many are linked dramatically with one another, both temporally and topically. Worse still, some topics seem to be treated inconsistently across different dialogues, and worse again, the topical coherence of individual dialogues has seemed to many readers to leave much to be desired (Republic and Phaedrus have given this impression for centuries). Neither can one help but wonder at the apparent naivete with which the interlocutors so often proceed, only infrequently stopping to "define their terms"-as we like to say-often plainly making large and questionable assumptions, sometimes agreeing not to pursue deeper investigations, and so on, all the while talking about precision and whether we really know what we think we know, how different knowledge and opinion are from one another, and what indispensable value there is in self-knowledge. Finally, as if it were not sufficient that we never hear directly what Plato himself thinks, the character of Socrates-dearly a protagonist, though not for that reason equivalent to Plato-is depicted within the dialogical drama as notorious for his irony. Let me say straightaway, however, that Socrates' irony does not mean that he isn't serious in what he does say or that he says the opposite of what he thinks, either for amusement or social convenience. Socrates' irony is that he know- ingly never says all that he has in mind, and that he will on occasion knowingly let his speeches and his deeds contradict one another, both in the present and across dramatic time. Plato's irony is similar, if not identical, in spirit. It is an irony that Aristotle described as "graceful and generous," an avoidance of pretension, especially in matters that are "unclear and apt to cause no small impediment" (Nicomachean Ethics II27b22-31). �PAGE 91 In sum, the logical or account-giving, truth-telling face of the dialogues presents a confusing, sprawling, eclectic, thoroughly unsystematic gallimaufry of irritatingly teasing hints at philosophical depth and meaning. Beware of becoming blind to this obtrusive fact. Everyone has heard that the whole of Western philosophy is nothing but footnotes to Plato, so the dialogues must be magnificently crafted speeches. Right? Well, they are, but not in the way you might expect. Their very ugliness, their rebarbative outward appearance is itself a manifestation of the greatest craft. It is great, because we have all-by which I mean all serious readers since Plato wrote-kept coming back in amazement and expectation to these astonishingly ugly things. You will often hear it said that Plato is a master stylist, and indeed he is. He is a master stylist because he can and regularly does with facility and conviction imitate everyone else perfectly, from Aristophanes' hwnour, to Gorgias's na'ive urbanity, from Lysias's oratory to Protagoras's logic, from Hippias's vanity to Alcibiades' disarmingly attractive hubris. Yet the dialogues themselves remain lopsided, ungainly, "unbeautiful and unperfumed:'They are nothing that we expect, either as ordinary readers or as readers with more sophisticated views about the nature and tasks of philosophy. Plato's intensely ironic dialogues, then, are just like the ironic Socrates, whom Alcibiades describes for us in the Symposium. Completely ugly on the outside-short, snub-nosed, goggle-eyed-yet nonetheless suffused with a hidden harmony. Like the Silenus figures Alcibiades goes on to mention, the dialogues are cleverly contrived statuettes, ugly satyrs of undisguised desire on the outside but on the inside filled with images of gods. Alcibiades saw the gods in Socrates, but on account of his hubristic ambition to command Socrates' eros, he failed to make those gods his own. Likewise, the reader of Platonic dialogues must abandon the urge to possess. Blundering, thoughtless lovers, groping after the satisfaction of their own, preconceived lusts, will get nowhere. �92 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW THE ABSENCE OF MATURE PHILOSOPHY. Socrates seems to be a sort of conversational vulture, always hanging around to see if he can turn the carrion of ordinary conversation into a philosophical feast, More particularly, he seems to be a sort of psychic vampire as well, circling around all the promising young men, always whispering with some one or a few of them off in a cor'ler, as Callicles for example accuses him in the Gorgias. In both cases the hope and promise seem never fulfilled. There is simply no Platonic dialogue between two mature philosophers; Zeno and Parmenides happen to be present together with an inunature Socrates in the Parmenides, while the mature Socrates is present but does not engage the Eleatic Stranger in the Sophist and Statesman. As for any dialogue that actively engages truly potential philosophers, one might look to the Republic but Plato's dialogues furnish no clue as to the later fate of either Glaucon or Adeimantus, while in the case of the Parmenides, the promising Socrates is for the most part an onlooker-though he is undoubtedly educated both by what he sees and by the brief exchange that crushes his fledgling account of Ideas. It is fair to say overall, then, that while Socrates is forever interested in getting philosophy going and that as a mature philosopher he is clearly superior to all those he actively questions, we never really see philosophic conversation underway in full sail, top-gallants flying. Moreover, this omission is explicitly brought to our attention in the Sophist, whose intriguing prologue leads the eager reader to expect a third dialogue, Philosopher, once Sophist and Statesman are done. The apparent promise, however, remains unfulfilled. There never was such a dialogue published, and we are provoked to wonder if it ever could have been written. We are also invited to think about why sophist and statesman should be the topics to eclipse so bright a sun as that. The common spectacle of the Platonic dialogues is at least the deferral of fully realized philosophy and more often than not the outright failure of philosophy even to show signs of a healthy beginning. �PAGE 93 On the other hand, Plato himself is standing somewhere beyond that absence and failure, a position he underlines for us by writing himself out of a scene in which everyone would most have expected him to appear-and where he was no doubt present in fact-namely Socrates' swan-song and death, the scene that Plato dramatized in the Pbaedo. Whatever else, therefore, that Plato takes his own philosophizing to be, it cannot be what is represented in the drama of his dialogues. In particular, philosophy as Plato means it to be understood cannot be a 11 simple equivalent to Socratic conversation:' I mean that last assertion to be a little shocking. The dialogues are often thought to be mirrors or representations of real, living communications, or at least of some idealized version of living, philosophic communication. Moreover, this mirror image is by itself somehow supposed to draw us too into the same sort of living communication, as if the imitation became the deed in us by our seeing it. But Plato did not seek to encode the living communication of philosophy by imitating it via the drama that is constructed in and as the dialogue. This is worth stating bluntly: Plato did not write dialogues because he thought that the proper form of philosophy was the Socratic flim-flam that takes up so mucb of them. The dialogues are designed to make up for the fact that Plato cannot be here to talk with us as he would most desire. They are the monological half of a philosophical communicac tion that must compensate for the fact that one of the interlocutors, perhaps the wisest one, is absent. The dialogue is first and foremost a logos, Plato's logos. That it is dramatic and so on, is all internal to the fact of its having been written down and published as an artfully contrived speech by one man to the entire world. This does not sit well with a common contemporary view that there is nothing else that should emerge from Socratic inquiry except more Socratic inquiry, that the full, mature form of philosophy-disappointingly but somehow only accidentally missing from the dialogues-would be a conversation between Socrates and his equal in �94 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW logical refutation. To cut a very long and depressing story short, current intellectual orthodoxy claims that the best reasons available to human beings are always and in principle immanent to the contingent circumstances of their inquiries, that our deepest thoughts cannot but be fully conditioned by tradition and circumstance in ways that make them inevitably finite and parochial, that all insight can never be more than a single perspective, a point of view taken from within a limited horizon. This posture has the following peculiar result: to the extent that there is nothing absolute available in the contingent play of opinions, to that extent it starts to seem absolutely better to be able to refute an opinion than to assert or maintain it. Human life on the practical level no doubt calls for provisionally acceptable conclusions, but on the philosophical or theoretical level all assertions turn out to depend on the critically complacent failure to have discovered their refutations, which if not around today surely will be tomorrow-or so the fallibilist predicts and insists with alarmingly fanatical, not to say incoherent conviction. It thus also follows that the theoretically open mind ought to be an empty mind, a mind fortified with a sturdy arsenal of techniques for preventing any opinion from lodging within it. To have any opinion at all is to risk the embarrassing accusation of intellectual naivete. Whatever its own merits, this is not the view represented by Plato's Socrates or his dialogues. Although Socrates claims to lack wisdom-in the teeth of the fact that no one, either inside or outside the dialogues, believes him when he does so-it is stili wisdom that he loves, not the lack of it. Contemporary critical thinkers love the lack, and this tempts them into making a fetish of transcendental detach~ ment and to indulge an infinite, unfalsifiable suspicion for what Socrates in the Apology calls his "human wisdom" and which elsewhere turns out to be the science, note that word, the science of erotics. There is, however, a more substantial point of comparison. Although both Socrates and the contemporary critical thinker agree that most people are unhelpfully opinionated (which is by no means �PAGE 95 the same as to say that all their opinions are wrong), the critical thinker imagines that the fitting response is to work hard on disinterested mind-skills for keeping all tempting beliefs up in the air, for keeping the naivete of commitment at arm's length. For Socrates, on the other hand, the fact that most people are opinionated is a much deeper, murkier problem, tied up with what souls most deeply want and what they most deeply fear they can't get. The examination of genuine opinions, i.e., the deep-seated convictions you have about what is true, good, and beautiful, the convictions whose belief is not a matter of choice, the examination of those sorts- of opinions is a far more deli- cate matter than testing for reasonableness-even if self-styled logicians knew precisely what that really is, which they obviously don't. I say that so confidendy because I have never yet heard of a logician helping anyone understand Plato, or Hegel, or Nietzsche, for example-all of whom I take to be entirely reasonable thinkers. They haven't done much for Aristode either. Plato makes the need for something else especially clear by having his Socrates talk about two unusual and hitherto unrecognized arts: psychic midwifery in the Theaetetus and philosophical rhetoric in the Phaedrus. The reader is also meant, of course, to notice how often those same arts are portrayed at work throughout the dialogues, both by the characters and by Plato himsel£ Philosophical inquiry turns out to be a far more complex activity than tying people in argumentative knots or never being at a loss for a clever or merely correct reply. It includes a moral, soul-tending dimension that pays attention to pedagogical, rhetorical, ethical, and political matters as well, in addition to the surface dimensions of logic, analytic technique, and epistemic responsibility. TRANSITION. I have briefly considered Plato's artfully contrived anonymity, the constant baffling of our logical expectations, and the dramatic absence of philosophy in a mature form. These observations, together with the phenomena of irony, both Platonic and Socratic, plus a glimpse into certain soul-tending arts, all point to the partially �96 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW hidden yet systematically intrusive presence of philosophizing in a more complex, shadowy form than Socrates' public wrestling matches or the Eleatic Stranger's diacritical gymnastics. Plato speaks through indirection and means to indicate that philosophy cannot and ought not to speak as straight as one might at first suppose, This initially unsettling conclusion finds several well-known echoes in the Platonic epistles. "There is no composition by Plato, nor will there ever be one, but those now said to be his belong to a Socrates grown young and beautiful" (3I4c). And then in a great and famous passage from the Seventh Letter: But this much I can certainly declare concerning all these writers, or prospective writers, who claim to know the subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine or of other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is impossible, in my judgment at least, that these men should understand anything about this subject. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith. For it does not admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth. in the soul of a sudden, as light that is kindied by a leaping spark, and thereafter nourishes itself (34IB) Nevertheless, Plato wrote dialogues all his life, taking astonishing pains over their intricate construction. He cannot therefore have thought them superfluous or trivial, despite his recognition of their necessary limits. By all normal standards of truth-telling coherence the dialogues are manifestly deranged; my task now is to address the partly hidden method in their apparent madness, �PAGE 97 Philosophy in the Ironical Mode According to the reports of antiquity, Aristotle wrote Platonicstyle dialogues in the earlier part of his career. They are, regrettably, lost-all the more regrettably, seeing that Cicero praised them as golden (though what else should we expect from someone who spent the greater part of his early years in the Academy teaching rhetoric?). What we have from Aristotle are documents that may reasonably be thought of as treatises or at least notes to treatise-like expositions. As it happens, there is nothing in the Aristotelian corpus as we have it that can confidently be taken as published writing in the manner of Plato's dialogues and it is certainly the case that much of what we do have presents an aporetic, tentative, less than declarative face. Even so, and with all due allowance for hints at even Aristotelian indirection in what seem to be far more straightforward texts, the Aristotelian writings bear witness through much of their bulk to an expository, more recognizably academic style of philosophical speech than the baffling Platonic form. The comparison shows that Plato perfectly well understood what it would mean to write philosophy in that more straightforward mode-and that Aristotle knew perfectly well what it would mean to write in the ironic, self-deprecating dialogical mode. In neither case, then, is the form a stylistic quirk or an historically dictated necessity. Moreover, for both Aristotle and Plato it was a conscious decision to write at all, since Socrates, just as self-consciously did not. DIALOGUE VS. TREATISE, What is at stake in this stylistic difference between dialogue and treatise? At first glance, the Aristotelian style of telling, philosophical speeches gives one reliably direct ways of talking about and thinking about the ordered, eidetic structure of things, both human and non-human. Even if one accepts none of his specific metaphysical results or if one prefers to emphasize the open-ended, aporetic character of certain of his inquiries, Aristotle's noetic tools and cat- egories have proven themselves of permanent worth. The notions of substance, essence & accident, form & matter, actuality & potentiality, �98 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW together with Aristotle's interpretative specifications of aitia1 arche1 kine- sis, psyche, phronesis, episteme, and praxis are all ingenious and virtually indispensable devices for anyone interested in the peculiar business of philosophical articulation, Aristotle's insights constitute a huge fraction of our philosophical patrimony, and amount to a legacy we should receive with both gratitude and respect, While at least equally deserving of gratitude and respect, Plato's ironic form of philosophical telling does not emphasize in the same way the ordered structures that may be seen and understood. Rather, Plato points to what it is like to be seeing structure, what it is like to be moved by truth, to be astonished by beauty, to aim at and hope for the good. Not only that, Plato also indicates the manifold ways in which human beings variously fail and fall short in their attempts to be knowing and wise, Actuality and achievement rule in Aristotle's philosophic art, eros and lack in Plato's, The one emphasizes what may be understood, the other the fragile, unsteady soul that does the understanding. Aristotle is thus the philosopher of detachment, Plato the philosopher of integrity. Correspondingly, the danger of Platonic philosophizing is self-obsession and the narcissism of intelligent desire, while the danger of Aristotelian philosophizing is self-forgetfulness and the indulgence of theoretical hubris. Strange as it may seem, although Aristotelian exposition puts a premium on truth-telling, in the end it is more guarded. Aristotle tends to suppress the erotic, the madness of self-transcendence and the nuances of self-knowledge. In particular, he muffles what is dangerous about philosophy, whereas Plato is comparatively open about it. Aristotle provides many theoretical insights for which one can be very thankfUl, yet it is worth recalling that on the death of Alexander he had to flee Athens, pursued by an indictment for impiety. For help in understanding that disturbing fact, one will find more extensive guidance in Plato. In distinguishing an eidetic emphasis from an erotic one, I do not mean to say that the two modes are rigidly correlated with dialogues �PAGE 99 and treatises, as if Plato never really presented a philosophical idea or Aristotle never worried about the integrity of thinker and thought, Platonic dialogues can in places be as expository as Aristotelian treatises can in places be ironic and full of finesse. Both modes have their relative purposes and merits. Sometimes, one is simply ready to hear an idea, to be told how it is with things, to be shown where the joints of the world are. At other times, and for different reasons on different occasions, one needs to understand the circumstances of such truthtelling. "Aristotelians" and "Platonists" have quarreled over these mat- ters for centuries and will, doubtless, brawl for centuries more. As a matter of temperament, different human beings find themselves favoring one emphasis rather than the other, but both dialogue and exposition are equally flexible in the hands of masters. In fact, I am quite sure that philosophic masters need to be masters of both. Let me just state then that masterful philosophical articulation, in thought or in speech, requires equal command of what I shall call eidetics and erotics. As just suggested, eidetics correspond to the objects of contemplation, the intelligible nature, structure, and wholeness of things. The dimension of erotics includes how the soul is disposed to think and to act, and how responsible it remains to itself and its conditions as it engages both. As it happens, i.e., just as a matter of historical fact, the artful irony of Plato's dialogues as we have them communicates far more about philosophical eros-and its failings-in relation to the truth than do the Aristotelian writings we have. No doubt Aristotle could have told us more, and has probably told us more than is usually realized, but I think that the matter of fact rests on a matter of principle, namely, that Platonic dialogue is truer to the manifold needs and realization of lucid, philosophical existence. In particular, it is Platonic dialogue that can more reliably save us from ourselves, since it is with respect to the erotic dimension of human endeavour that we keep getting in our own way. that we are the originating sources of our own unnecessary wanderings and corruption. Eidetics tend, in comparison �100 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW though by no means mindlessly, to take care of themselves-one sign of which is that they're more teachable. ORIGINS OF IRONY. Plato hides, though not with complete invisibility, behind his characters. Chief among them is a character, namely Socrates, not only notorious among his fellow players for his irony but plainly to us his spectators coy, manipulative, and far from even-handed. Taking courage from the apparent straightforwardness of Aristotelian exposition, we can hardly forbear an exasperated cry: Why all the fuss? Why the teasing, not to say irritating indirection? What prevents philosophy from speaking forthrightly, from saying all she means? Must philosophy always play false, or perhaps play games, with our truth-telling hopes and ambitions? In short: what, if anything, calls for Platonic irony? If we cannot answer such questions, then Plato can be left to his idiosyncratic, sibylline whimsies. Unsurprisingly, the dialogues themselves furnish many clues to a more generous understanding. Given that writing dialogues cannot be all there is to the philosophical life, it will be helpful to consider such writing in light of that living whole. As I read the dialogues, actual philosophical life has four principal domains of responsibility: work, pedagogy, guardianship, and civics. By work I mean master-work, the full, unimpeded realization of philosophical insight. By pedagogy I mean the husbandry of potential and apprentice philosophers. By guardianship I mean the preservation of philosophy against both external assault and internal corruption. By civics I mean philosophy's citizenly life and duty within the larger human community that gives it birth. All four domains suggest good reasons for philosophical indirection, for less than unqualified truth-telling, though I shall not here be able to pay full attention to them all. The most common initial excuse offered for Platonic irony, for why the dialogues seem so ugly and manipulative and confusing, appeals to pedagogy, to the requirements, as it is commonly formulated, of getting readers to think for themselves. Certainly, in any worth- �PAGE 101 while education and a fortiori any philosophical education, mere instruction is not sufficient for understanding. Instruction alone leaves us, as Nietzsche put it, with a bellyful of undigested knowledgestones; enough to calm our hunger for a while perhaps, yet ultimately unable to nourish and satisfy. To the extent, therefore, that the dialogues aim at guiding and training potential philosophers, it can safely be expected that they do more than instruct, that they challenge when we get lazy, inspire when we are daunted, and that they somehow aid proper noetic digestion. As usually understood, however, this encouragement "to think for oneself" is interpreted as the develop- ment of critical thinking skills, skills that may permit you to grind down those knowledge-stones but which do nothing to help you assimilate whatever truth they may have contained. One must also be wary of supposing that such pedagogical aims, even when understood in the best sense, exhaust the possible reasons for dialogical irony, that teaching determines the boundary of Plato's communicative intent. It does not. There is another, deeper difficulty with the idea of thinking for onesel£ Namely, that everyone already does; it's part of the problem, not the solution. To quote from Heraclitus once more: "though the logos is common, the many live supposing themselves to have a special understanding" (Frag. 2). At the most important level, then, irony or stimulating indirection is a proper part of philosophical pedagogy not so much because young learners need tricky help with the hard work of assimilation-which they certainly do-but because we human knowers are constantly prone to collapse into that state of conscious- ness Hegel identified as self-certainty. Once in such a state, we can usually only be levered out again with well-meaning, i.e., noble, lies. Being in the know, the natural condition of the human soul, is so obviously our greatest adaptive advantage that we keep getting entranced by partial realizations of our wonderful capacity, we keep generalizing our local insights into global wisdoms. But how is such self-satisfied con- �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 102 viction to be moved, led out of itself. educated? How does one come to recognize that one does not know? Hegel's dialectic, to the extent that it may be thought of as containing a pedagogical response to the problem, is a logical bludgeoning that has turned out to be all but useless, except in the case of a uniquely motivated not to say perverse few. Socrates, in contrast, seduces many a complacent soul-though not every one-out of its proclivity to noetic self-satisfaction with all manner of charms and deceits, as does Plato in turn at another level of refinement, The essential psychagogical trick in most cases is to make the higher truth look somehow attractive within the perspective of the lower, more confined horizon. Plato's Eleatic Stranger classifies such tricks as belonging to that species of the image-making art that works with phantoms (fantastics) rather than with likenesses ( eikastics). The distinction is made in a dialogue entitled Sophist (236c). Philosophy's strictly educative concerns, however, have definite limits, since not every soul is capable of fully realizing her promise. We moderns do not like to hear things like this, partly because we tend to think that reason ought by and large to be perfectible by methods universally available to all and partly because we hate to think that possibilities are limited or that freedom alone might not suffice for realizing the good. Plato is more hard-headed. Serious attraction to philosophy is no guarantee at all of its fulfilhnent, as may be seen, for example, in Apollodorus of the Symposium, who was at least wise enough to know this fact about himself. Furthermore, while Socrates will converse with whoever comes his way, he does not undertake to teach everyone, Some souls he passes on to others, often guided by the admonitions of his daimonion, his divine sign:' His daimonion, of course-his little daimonic thing-is an inflection of the daimon eros, in whose affairs he is expert. So Socrates will sometimes help and sometimes turn aside those who will never be able to manage all that philosophy requires. As with most serous matters, it is a risky sort of .discrimination, easily incurring public odium. In Socrates' case, that 11 �PAGE 103 risk is the essential meaning of the historical accident that wrapped his erotic daimonion up into the civic charge of impiety, of importing new- fangled gods, an innovation partly responsible for his execution. As a final point it needs to be noted that infatuations with philosophy are not always so benign as Apollodorus's. The tyrannical ambitions of Alcibiades and Critias, for example, both gifted intellectually, were blamed on their association with Socrates, while Plato's Seventh Letterfrom which I have already quoted-exists principally on account of the havoc wreaked on philosophy's public, indeed international, reputation by Dionysius the Younger, Tyrant of Syracuse, in his efforts to make Plato's wisdom his own. My guiding question is whether or to what extent the irritating indirection of Platonic dialogue can be understood as exercising philosophical responsibility. The particular demands of teaching provide some plausible grounds, but there are others. Some of these are rather easy to overlook, once inside the comforts provided by contemporary academic freedoms. But not only are those freedoms hard-won and in need of constant maintenance (a task for which philosophy, in virtue of its disciplinary competence regarding the relation of theory to practice, is the proper guardian), neither is peace the uniform condition within our necessarily parasitic Republic of Letters. Academic politics is notorious for its pettiness and intolerance-itself a hardly accidental fact-but more significant are the manifold theoretical disputes over demarcation, hierarchy, and methodology across and between the various disciplines. Regarding these foundational and procedural reRections, philosophy's competence and even presence is held in deep suspicion by the positive disciplines. Within the so-called university, faction it would seem is the norm-no matter what ideals one might prefer or hope to see there. Not everyone can be fully philosophical, you might think that's a shame; not everyone wants to be philosophical; well, that's their choice; but not everyone wants philosophy around. That's dangerous. Hence �104 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW the need for what I called philosophical guardianship. Both philosophy and what is philosophically best in all of us cannot rely on being left alone. In either the personal or the political case, there are several intrusive challenges to philosophy's well-being within its larger community: the psychic community of manifold desires on rhe one hand; the civic community of individual agents on the other. The fights in borh cases depend on a hunger for wisdom, The Platonic dialogues emphasize two main sources of intrusive challenge, and though I shall discuss them mostly in terms of the civic paradigm, the Republic's own brilliant likeness of city to soul should keep the psychic paradigm equally in mind. According to Plato's dialogical imagery, then, the challenges come (I) from the other men of logoi, of whom the two main classes are poets and sophists, and (2) from the men of the city, who share wirh philosophy an ambition for the noble but disagree on the location of its highest form. The latter challenge also has two arms: that philosophy subverts decent, conventional politics ( Anytus, Cleitophon), and rhat philosophy is adolescent, laughable, and unmanly (Callicles, Thrasymachus). Adeimantus, who stands for what is necessary and best within the large yet still limited horizon of the city, bluntly restates these rwo accusations in the middle of the Republic: philosophers are eirher useless or depraved. They therefore deserve no place in human community, let alone to be enthroned as its only competent kings. Perhaps the clearest overall Platonic symbol of the political challenge is the dialogue entitled Socrates' Defense Speech, while an emblem for rhe challenge from rhe men of logoi may be found in that gigantomachy mentioned in the Sophist, that never-ending battle between the hard-headed, aggressive ''motion men"-whose general, so we learn in the Theaetetus, is Homer-and the gentler, more generous "friends of the forms:' Plato's implied account of rhe nature and grounds of rhese several challenges, I cannot examine in detail here but it is, I think, tolerably clear rhat the predicaments are, in all cases, serious and abiding �PAGE 105 ones. Astute Protagorean prudence, Hippian technical competence, and effective Gorgian rhetoric all seem far more beneficial-both in themselves and certainly to their practitioners-than Socratic elenchus could ever be. Socrates' wisdom appears only to numb people and make them angry or unhappy. Horner, Sophocles, and Aristophanes all seem more inspiring and companionable than philosophy's austere explanations and deflations, from which the gods are missing and in which, if the divine be mentioned at all, it seems aloof and indifferent to .human concerns. Too much talk, and talk for talking's sake, are indeed shameful and unmanly, while delving too deeply into the origins of things does indeed run risk of undermining civic loyalty, familial respect, and even the self-confidence that is a necessary condition for any worthwhile deed. All these tensions have a symbolic focus in that disturbing scenario at the end of the Republic's most memorable image: the philosopher returning to the Cave would be set upon and killed by those still shackled there, if they could get hold of him. Their opinions are not so true as they imagine them to be, formed as they are by the shadows cast from artifacts and statues of real things carried above and behind them by poets, sophists, and politicians, and they would react with hostile fear if they knew. Yet the lesson is not that the Cave-dwellers are all contemptibly ignorant and wicked; it is that pure wisdom is unbearable to the incompletely enlightened soul. I say "incompletely enlightened" because too bright a light is unbearable, only to those who can already see. There is both a fire and muted daylight in Plato's Cave. Athens that prided itself on its freedom of discourse, its accomplishment in tragedy and its welcome to the sophists, nonetheless executed Socrates and indicted Aristotle. Philosophy cannot be an unqualified human good, because it is not unqualifiedly safe to tell the truth. We all know this already. Frankness is a gift and honour reserved for close friends, and even there it's difficult. Nor should we be surprised to learn that the truth is dangerous, if-as we hear so often-that knowledge is power. Socrates let �106 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW himself be executed to vivify these sorts of unsettling facts for all thoughtful souls to come, knowing that Plato was there to write about it in a way that would keep the recognition safe within the memory of subsequent generations. The several differences between what is philosophical and what is not are none of them merely qualitative; they are &aught with threat and anxiety of an order that civility alone cannot control because their roots lie deeper than the city. Furthermore, Plato's sustained attention to the various assaults on philosophy suggests that none are to be regarded as accidental, that there are good if incomplete reasons why philosophy should suffer from them and it is therefore incumbent upon those pursuing her to understand the justice within such fates. To the extent that the assaults are not accidental, the need for irony in dealing with them is more than politic accommodation, Philosophy needs to make a peace with politics and poetry, with the healthy decency of civic life and with the consoling charms of comedy and tragedy, but such peace is at best a very unstable friendship of unequals, Moreover, the instability is reproduced within the individual soul as well. Each of us must make his uneasy peace both with the needs of practical life and with the enchantments of art, if we are to live as thoughtfully as possible, The ironical Socrates in Plato's ironical dialogues can be seen constantly negotiating these inequalities and their attendant dangers. Budding philosophers can be thankful for the tips. Guardianship and pedagogy deal, respectively, with the privations and the potentials of philosophizing. Actual or fully-fledged philosophizing remains, Insofar as irony entails in some sense a playing false, it might seem that irony could at best be only conducive to and never constitutive of philosophy's focal activity-which might for the moment be characterized as consorting with the truth. Yet irony belongs here too, I think, at the heart of philosophy's defining concern. �PAGE 107 Philosophical account-giving or truth-telling has to be ironical to the extent that what philosophy is obliged to mean cannot in principle be given all at once. Philosophical comprehensiveness entails primacy, universality, and lucidity, i.e., its truth-telling must be a self-illuminated knowledge of ultimate principles in relation to what is. Among other things, this implies that any philosophical account aims at simultaneous knowledge of the conditions that make possible and justify its thematic claims; it must not only tell the truth, but somehow also tell the truth of its telling as well. These conditions for the possibility of a speech, however, cannot be given along with the content of the speech-at least not in the same, linear, thematic way. Hence the logical necessity for a two-faced mode of speaking: one aspect to declare what one wants to say, the other aspect to show that one knows exactly how and why one can say it. Such a two-faced mode of speech is properly called ironic because it cannot state all that it means at once, though it is not thereby prevented from evoking the wholeness of the understanding it articulates-on the condition~ that is, of a generous listener with an eye for reading between the lines. Failure to appreciate that philosophy requires at least this sort of irony easily leads to measuring its discourse by a mathematical standard, since the latter is a reasonable measure for interim, though never for primary, insightfulness. Similar failures have also been responsible for many a foolish trek across the transcendental desert in search of presuppositionless beginnings. One further consequence is that philosophical speech, because both primary and comprehensive, cannot be univocal in principle. This is the deep ground of philosophy's ancient quarrel with poetry and why metaphorical speech is so emphatically integral to the texture of Plato's dialogues. I have just argued that fundamental speech, and this would be in whatever situation we find ourselves moved to give it, has to be two- faced. It follows that univocal speech-i.e., the speech that gives the appearance of managing to say all that it means-is not only second- �108 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW ary but also contingent upon that primary equivocation. Univocal speech is therefore radically unstable, bounded and made possible in its qualified way by a tacit agreement not to press inquiry beyond a certain point. Part of our human experience of this fact is the disturbing discovery that plausible arguments can apparently be made on both sides for virtually anything-the so-called dissoi logoi of the ancient sophists-and that almost no one is ever persuaded by rational, i.e., purely univocal, words alone. In the absence of philosophy or fundamental speech, any assertoric stand thus depends as much on the will to maintain it, on agreement to abide by the axioms that make it possible, as it does on the content of those axioms themselves. Perversely, then, it becomes possible to take a stand in words without the corresponding insight and so too without the corresponding resolve or choice that deemed the axiom worthy-or, rather, one takes a stand with an alternative, unspoken resolve. That's why Aristotle said that the difference between the sophist and philosopher lies in their resolve, their proairesis, not in the arguments they give, Yet note that even philosophy cannot logically repair the breach caused by any such willful detachment of speech from the soul's orientation and insight. In other words, philosophy cannot in words alone compel the sophist to come out of hiding. This is an important lesson of Plato's Sophist and it is also the reason Thrasymachus blushed, for he eventually had to betray his sophistry once he had committed himself to the theoretical probity of "precise speech:' It was a noble and educative blunder, In sum, therefore, human logoi can never by themselves reveal the soul that makes them-and so we must pay as much attention as we can to deeds as well, One of the most important resources of Platonic dialogue is, I suggest, their ability to let us see how speeches are anchored in a soul's resolve, despite the fact that a soul's true love cannot in principle be deduced from the things it says. TRANSITION. Philosophical insight depends on a complex of conditions, both extrinsic and intrinsic, to which I have pointed under the �PAGE 109 topics of work, pedagogy, guardianship, and civics. In their light, I have sketched several ways in which irony is native to how philosophy must deal with what is non-philosophical, with what is potentially philosophical, and with the truth itsel£ Unlike Athena, human wisdom does not actually spriog fully formed from the head of Zeusthough what the myth means to say is that wisdom, once she has arisen, cannot be fully explained in terms of genealogy alone. Also unlike Athena, human wisdom has no nectar and ambrosia with which to fortify itself against the many forms of mortal decay. This means that no matter how like a goddess, pure theorizing on its own is by definition irresponsible. It also follows that no part of erotics can be set aside on the plausible yet mistaken grounds that eidetics are philosophy's only proper concern. Socrates' erotic science may be shady and ironic, yet it nevertheless belongs to philosophical life quite as essentially the rest. With this granted, however, it will always remain to consider when and to what extent one need or ought to talk out loud about such things. I accept, therefore, that my entire speech, no matter how correct it may be, remains vulnerable to being judged either tactless, or trivial-to the extent that it does not emphasize eidetic content. Why Plato Wrote Dialogues Philosophical truth-telliog, the sustaioing activity of philosophical life, has to be two-faced. Hegel's impressive dialectical logic is a concerted effort to smooth out this acknowledged need for irony, an attempt to resolve self-illumioatiog iosight into a special sort of discursive linearity, into a proof that manages to demonstrate its axioms as it deduces its theorems. His experiment in philosophical discourse is weak, however, on two maio counts. First, the logic of Hegel's proof \s io the end not as methodical as hoped for, indeed required. Ingenuity is still needed io order to make the crucial transitions, an iogenuity that Hegel from time to time facilitates with quite remarkable philosophical poetry. A further sign of this same weakness is his �110 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW embarrassment over giving introductions, which he knows he should not in all strictness use but which he writes anyway. Moreover, since the introductions are where Hegel encodes the suppressed erotics of his philosophic art, i.e., what he means to be doing as a man here and now in love with philosophy, that's exactly why everyone finds them so intriguing and often more interesting than what follows. Plato avoids the dialectical inconsistency of such introductions, remaining truer to Hegel's own insight that philosophy cannot ever in principle begin to prove itself, that it cannot put itself on trial before the tribunal over which it presides as judge. Perhaps Hegelian dialectic comes as close as philosophical discourse ever can to an exhaustive, rationally systematic, univocal self-explicitation. The question, though, is when or whether we really need such a thing. Plato wrote a defense speech for philosophy, but he quite deliberately named it after Socrates, not himsel£ The second major weakness of Hegelian dialectic is it's being so forbidding and dull. This is an important criticism. It says that Hegel's philosophy by and large fails, as I noted earlier, to seduce, fails to enflarne theoretical eros, fails sufficiently to help us make insight our own. Platonic dialogue, in contrast, is remarkably seductive-the unattractive patches notwithstanding. In fact, part of its seductiveness is to make itself confusing and exciting by turns, whereas Hegelian dialectic plods along in the same old difficult way page after page. Knowing that Plato can be wonderfully lucid and inspiring from time to time, forces the reader to seek a reason and so too a meaning for the times when the text is experienced differently. There is nothing more inspiring than the suspicion of a hidden life, une vie inconnue, half-hidden depths in which we might swim if only we can prove strong enough. Platonic dialogue is a complex three-dimensional speech, rather than a linear, discursive one. Its axes are drama) argument, and character, all three of which follow their independent but mutually interpenetrating logics. Take book one of the Republic. Why does Polemarchus interrupt? How does his account of justice follow up on the account his father, �PAGE Ill Cephalus, seemed to give? What is the relationship between Polemarchus and Cephalus? Who is the better man and why? What things seems good and best to Polemarchus? What things most noble? What is there in a man like Polemarchus that inclines him to think of justice and friendship in the way he does? How exactly did he get talked into agreeing that justice is trivial and base? Are his mistakes consistent with the partial goods for which he stands? What do Socrates' examples tell us about Polemarchus's mistakes? What is Socrates trying to do for Polemarchus? To what extent, if any, is he successful? Why does he care about Polemarchus at all? Why does Socrates argue so fallaciously in proving that justice does no injury? What did he understand about Polemarchus to know he could get away with the fallacy? Why is Polemarchus so enthusiastic in his final agreement to be a "partner in battle" with Socrates? How does all this relate to Polemarchus's action at the very beginning, when he waylays Socrates and Glaucon? How does it fit with his later interruption, in book five, when he objects to women and children in common? What is Plato showing us about the limits of Polemarchus's understanding of justice? About its merits? Why is Polemarchus there, between Cephalus and Thrasymachus? And so on. Not until you have some reasonable answer to all of these sorts questions, and scores besides, can you have begun to understand Plato's meaning, his logos, in these four or five pages. You need to become proficient in a multivariable calculus that simultaneously integrates along the three dimensions of drama, argument, and character to produce a shimmering hologram of meaning. This dimensional complexity allows the dialogue to mean more than what it says in its arguments and to reveal more than its narrative depicts. It opens up a maximum of triangulation between uncertain souls and their shifty speeches. Aporia, then, is superficial. It belongs to only one or two of the relevant dimensions and is therefore only an aspect of the whole. The characters may be in perplexity, and maybe the reader is too, but Plato �112 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW is not. His pictures of perplexity are too finely drawn to be themselves expressions of the depicted anxieties; they are too precisely located and elaborated not to be the subject of a higher-order interpretation. What foolishness would impel anyone to spell out ignorance and error so intricately, and with such great pains at so great a cost of time, if he did not have a view of what they meant? F,or all the reasons examined above Plato conveys his interpretations obliquely, but that does not mean the dialogues bear out no logos. On the other hand, Plato's logos is a delicate and subtle thing, not easily separable from the theatre it animates. It is a sure sign of having failed to understand Plato fully when one is forced to leave or dismiss any single part of the dialogue as incidental, as wrapping, as form rather than content. Plato does not dress up otherwise independent, philosophically sober propositions in gaudy, entertaining dramatic garb, as if through some aesthetic quirk he liked to do it that way. There is indeed the thing that he means to say, but it is not captured by the naked propositional bodies you might take to be under the theatrical fancy dress. As I have just indicated, for example, the philosophical meaning of Polemarchus is more than the partially correct proposition that justice is doing good to friends and harm to enemies. Among other things, he casts significant light on how and why the proper discipline of spiritedness is integral to philosophy, and why friendship is the soul of justice. Quite in accord with a principle Socrates announces in the Phaedrus, everything in the dialogue is meaningful and everything serves the overall meaning Plato would communicate. This raises yet another matter of philosophical tact. According to what I have just said, it should be possible to spell out Plato's meaning in non-dramatic terms. To be a correct translation, part of such an exposition would have to be ironical and it would have to encompass at least the sense of all the implied erotic elements as well as the eidetic ones. Nothing obvious prevents such a gloss, yet even if correct, it remains to ask whether such a flattened out account could do all or �PAGE 113 ~ven much of the work Plato intended and which the dialogues have, in fact, done and continue to do. The answer would have to be, I think, no. In one sense, Ideas-by which I mean the fundamental archai and intelligible structure of all things-are just not a problem; the predicament is that human souls for the most part fail to be ruled by them. That's something no amount of theory can fix. I asked the question: what, if anything, calls for the strangeness of Plato's dialogues, what could justifY their indirection? A natural instinct, on first hearing such a question, is to look for reasons that might force or compel the response, reasons why things could not be done in any other way. In the present case, however, the instinct is misleading. The serious grounds for Platonic indirection I have considered do not, I think, necessitate the dialogue form. Without being necessitated, however, Plato's dialogues are a beautifully effective response to the many things philosophy always finds needing to be done. In my own view, they are the most beautifully effective response we have yet witnessed. A beautiful, noble, and effective response to abiding necessities is certainly grounds for praise, but this is not all there is to admire. By the ambiguous testimony of his letters and by the seamless consistency of his dialogical irony, Plato could not have been writing as an intellectual to express his thoughts or as a scientist to circulate his results. Perhaps it is hard to imagine there could be any reason for writing left, besides vanity or madness. Yet, Plato worked at something, and no one has ever doubted, despite the derangement and indirection of the texts, that they' are all somehow for the sake of philosophy. I add: for the sake of keeping philosophy alive and well. Plato wrote for the love and care of philosophy, for its realization and well-being in living souls as well as in real cities. He saw clearly in what senses its husbandry, preservation, defense, and even its central truth-telling activity called for-though without necessitating-something like his two-faced books. Among other things, he aimed at philosophy's survival as a cul- �114 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW tural entity in the tradition we think of as Western civilization. In this he was successful. Unbelievably successful, as may be seen in the fact that two-and-a-half thousand years later: here we all are, still vitally interested in what Plato had to communicate, in what a man like Plato understood the life of wisdom to be. Moreover, we keep being affected by his enigmatic communication, both directly as we study and through myriad historical reverberations at work behind the scenes of our own present educations. Even after all this time, we keep taking good things away from his amazing gift. The dialogues, then, are the instruments of Plato's megalopsuchia, the unhurried means of a rare but great and noble deed, the sort of deed yearned for by all men of the highest human excellence, Plato's great-souled project was to create the real, on-going world in which we are all now able to carry on with philosophy; he cleared the space, he gave the laws, he holds up the firmament. As a great-souled man, all honour and praise are Plato's due but we cannot expect him to be impressed by such external rewards, His ambition was for a deed large, beautiful, and impressive in itself. The reward for such deeds is the overwhelming pleasure of actually doing them, though that too is hardly the central reason for which they are undertaken. No great-souled deed can be great, if it cannot be described in terms of a single-minded devotion that transcends selfish purpose, Yet it does not follow from this that devotion to such an end is purely selfless, The great-souled man is himself fulfilled by his devotion to what transcends ordinary ambition, Thus, Plato wrote not only for others. He also wrote for the love and care of philosophy in regard to himself. in regard to his own glories and satisfactions as a wise, superior, and fortunate man. He also wrote his dialogues as an exhibition of prowess, and for the sake of joy in the exhilarating exercise of his own powers and command. In the end, Plato wrote dialogues for the same reason God created the world: because he could. No one, absolutely no one, has come anywhere near matching him since, �....:; The Discovery of Nature fj:-- James Carey On the orcular seal of St. John's College, enclosed within the Latin motto, H Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque;' 1 are seven books and a balance. The books stand for the quadrivium and trivium of the seven liberal arts, i.e., arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, on the one hand, and grammar, rhetoric, and logic, on the other. The balance stands for natural science. The founders of our program initially tried to find a way of regarding natural science, or as we say today "science;' as contained implicitly within one or more of the seven liberal arts. This attempt, which apparently involved such ventures of fancy as interpreting mathematical physics as a subset of the liberal art of music, was unsuccessful. The founders of our program carne to realize that natural science needed a symbol of its own, and they settled on the balance. This was a good decision, for, aside from allowing for the elegance of the College's motto, it recognized a real distinction between the seven liberal arts and natural science. As regards the correctness of this distinction it suffices to note that during the Middle Ages there were many religious believers who understood themselves to be committed to the seven liberal arts, even to be practitioners of these arts. They did not see any conflict between being practitioners of the liberal arts and belief in the Bible. None of the claims made by these arts, even the claims made by astronomy as it was practiced then, were thought to be in essential conflict with those of the Bible. The case is otherwise with the claims of natural science, not only with those of modern natural science, which of course had not appeared yet, but even with the natural science of classical antiquity. It is not for nothing that, as the introductions to physics, chemistry, and biology textbooks never tire of telling us, "science" stagnated in the Middle Ages. James Carey is a tutor and former Dean at St. John's College, Santa Fe. This essay is an expanded version of a lecture given at St. John's College in Santa Fe on August 22, 1997. �116 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Now, the object of natural science is, of course, nature. Natural science is the knowledge of nature. I am told that there is no Hebrew ' word that adequately translates <j>'UOL<;, the Greek word for nature, and that the concept of nature is foreign to the Bible, at least to the Hebrew scriptures. If this is true, it would suggest that the concept of nature was unknown to the ancient Hebrews. And if those people, who were aware of so much, were unaware of the existence of nature, then the existence of nature could hardly be said to be self-evident. It is not self-evident, then, that natural science has an object, Or, more precisely, it is not self-evident that natural science has the object it thinks it has. We are often told that it was the Greeks who discovered nature, and that this discovery is the origin of what is thought to be the uniquely Western enterprise called philosophy. If something was discovered at some more or less identifiable point in the past, was until then unknown, and continued to be unknown by those who were not apprised of this discovery, then the existence of the thing in question can hardly be called self-evident, since it pertains to the very sense of what is self-evident that its existence is recognized and uncontested by all, or at least becomes so once it is pointed out, The very discovery of nature by the Greeks, if it really was a discovery, implies that the existence of nature is not self-evident, But no lesser a thinker than Aristotle tells us that the existence of nature is self-evident. In the Physics, we are told that animals and the parts of animals, plants, the elementary bodies earth, fire, air and water, and all such things have a principle of motion and rest within themselves, and are distinguishable from beds, coats, and the like, which have no such intrinsic principle of motion and rest, The latter are caused by art, whereas the former have natural causes and exist by nature. Having located the basis for the distinction between natural and unnatural things in the presence or absence of an intrinsic principle of motion and rest, Aristotle proceeds to say, �CAREY 117 As for trying to prove that nature exists, this would be ridiculous, for it is evident that there are many such things [i.e. things that exist by nature], and to try to prove what is evident through what is not evident is characteristic of a man who cannot distinguish between what is known through itself and what is known not through itsel£2 To try to prove that nature exists is a failure because it is self-evident that nature exists. Any propositions that one might invoke to serve as premises from which one could deduce the conclusion that nature exists would be less evident than this very conclusion, and for Aristotle all so-called proofs that deduce the more evident from the less evident are not really proofs at all. But, again, this consideration by itself does not cast doubt on the proposition that nature exists. The reason the proposition that nature exists cannot be proven is then, again, not that it is false or even doubtful, but that it is self-evident. Examples of self-evident propositions include certain propositions of the broadest generality, such as the so-called principle of noncontradiction, and certain propositions of the most restricted particulari- ty, such as that I have a headache right now. Neither of these propositions can be proven, but this is not because they are unknowable. The reason these propositions cannot be proven is rather that they possess such immediate evidence that they cannot be deduced mediately, so to speak, from propositions possessing greater evidence. A self-evident proposition is one that, to use Aristotle's expression, is 11 known through itself:' It is not known through otherpropositions. According to the passage from the Physics that we were just considering, that there :rre things that exist by nature and that nature itself exists are propositions that are known through themselves, propositions that have the character of being self-evident. �118 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Of course, a proposition's being unprovable is hardly a sufficient condition for its being self evident, for all false propositions are unprovable and, to say the least, none of them are self-evident. Moreover there is a whole class of propositions that cannot be known, by the ordinary means of knowledge at any event, to be either true or false, such as "He has a headache:' For if he tells us he has one we cannot prove that he is not lying, although we may have no good reason at all to suspect that he is lying. There is some evidence that he has a headache, but this evidence lacks the compelling character of either demonstrative truth or unqualified self-evidence, We take it on faith, so to speak, not irrationally and not without some evidence, not just as a hunch or a blind guess, but still without apodictic certainty, that he is telling the truth when he says that he has a headache. So we have grouped unprovable propositions into four classes: I) self-evident propositions of extreme universality, such as the laws of logic; 2) self-evident propositions of extreme particularity, concerning things I know about myself: my feelings, my reactions, and so forth; 3) false propositions; and 4) matters of faith or, if you like, matters of opinion solely. When Aristotle says that the proposition that nature exists is self-evident, he does not say whether its self-evidence is due to its extreme universality or its extreme particularity, but presumably he thought it was one or the other, In either case, his contention is that the existence of nature cannot be proven, And if Aristotle is right about the unprovability of the existence of nature, but wrong in his claim that the existence of nature is self-evident, as the alleged discovery of nature would imply, then the proposition that nature exists is either a falsehood or something like a matter of faith, Before proceeding further along these lines we need to look a bit . c1 oser at what 1s meant by u nature."In common par1ance nature II " refers typically to the whole order of things that are, as yet, untouched by human art, things such as plants, animals, the sky above, the earth below, and so forth. Since no one denies the existence of this order of �CAREY 119 things, of thiogs not dependent on human ingenuity, the existence of nature would indeed seem to be self-evident. And yet Aristotle himself does not define nature merely as that which is not produced by art. Rather he defines nature, as a principle and cause of being moved and being at rest in the thing to which it belongs, in virtue of that thing and not accidentally.' Aristotle presents this definition of nature about fifteen lines prior to his claim that the existence of nature is self-evident, and indeed alludes to it in the sentence immediately preceding the one in which he makes this claim. So he is not saying merely that it is self-evident that there is a difference between natural beings and artifacts, but more broadly that it is self-evident that the former differ from the latter precisely by having nature within themselves, where nature is construed precisely as "a principle and cause of being moved and being at rest;' a principle that is essential to what these natural things are. It appears to be Aristotle's teaching, then, that it is the existence of nature, understood as this very principle, that is self-evident. The first attestation of the Greek word for nature occurs in a wellknown passage from Book I 0 of Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus's companions have been bewitched by the goddess Circe. While treating them to a feast she gave them an evil drug that caused them to forget their fatherland, after which she cast a spell on them with her wand and turned them into swine. When Odysseus hears of this catastrophe he sets off to rescue his companions. But as he approaches the great house of Circe, he is met in the sacred glades by Hermes, "of the golden wand and in the likeness of a young man:' Hermes tells Odysseus that he has a potent herb (<j>ap[taKov e'aEJA.bv) that will keep Circe from being able to bewitch (El~A.l;m) him. Hermes then draws the �120 THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW root from the ground and shows Odysseus its nature (qn)mv). Odysseus says, The root was black, but its flower was like milk. The gods call it moly. It is hard for mortal men to dig but the gods are capable of all things.~ When Odysseus afterward enters Circe's house, she attempts to bewitch him as she has done to his companions. Her attempt fails, and she exclaims to him in amazement that no other man has previously been able to withstand the drug she has just given him. Her understanding of Odysseus's resistance to her witchcraft is that, the intellect (voo<;) in thy breast is one not to be charmed (aK~A.orp:o<;). 5 We note that Hermes does not create this antidote to Circe's evil drug. He does not produce it out of thin air with a wave of his wand, so to speak. And though he knows the name that he and the other gods call the herb, he is apparently not able to bring it into being or even to make it emerge out of the earth by simply invoking this name. He has L to draw (pvnv) it out of the ground. The herb is not a human artifact. It is not even a divine artifact, i.e., a creature in the Biblical sense. The herb grows in the earth independently, so far as one can tell, of any contribution on the part of gods or men. By virtue of growing in the earth independently of the making capacity of intelligent beings, it has the nature that distinguishes it fi:om products of art, no matter who the artisan might be. And, as most of you are aware, the Greek word for nature, <j>vm<;, and the Greek word for plant, <j>V'tOV, are cognate. Both words stem from the root <j>v- which means "to grow;' " to put c th" as m u to put rort h buds" or even u to procreate," . . i J.Ot , t.e., to beget a like offspring out of one's own being. The nature of the herb is its growing, the thrusting down of its roots into the earth and the stretching out of its leaves and flower toward the light. It is this activ- �CAREY 121 ity occurring independently of gods and men that Hermes shows to Odysseus. When Odysseus asserts that "the gods are capable of all things" in this episode, we should not forget that this assertion forms one clause of a compound sentence. It is hard for mortal men to dig, but the gods are capable of ail things. All things are possible for the gods, even the digging up of this plant, Odysseus seems to say. This, however, is a strange way of expressing the omnipotence of the gods. 6 Moreover, it is not impossible for mortal men to dig this plant up as well. It is only hard ( KaA.m6v) for them to do so. What distinguishes the gods from mortal men, what is advanced as an instance of the gods' omnipotence, and a support for the ostensibly pious claim that "the gods are capable of ail things," is the relative ease with which they can dig up the herb compared to the greater effort required of mortal men. So nature makes its appearance in Greek thought as an activity of immanent producing, of development and growth, organization and articulation, an activity that owes nothing to gods or men. And he who knows it possesses a knowledge that renders him immune to certain divine charms or bewitchments? We note that this whole episode is not narrated first hand by Homer but by Odysseus. It is by no means certain that Homer intended us to believe Odysseus's account of this adventure. But he surely intended us to see Odysseus as a man whose intelligence is illuminated by a knowledge of the natures of things, and so to some extent by a knowledge of nature itsel£ Homer appears to be representing Odysseus as a type, or prototype, of the philosopher. Now it is a virtual dogma in the history of ideas that the discovery of nature by the Greeks was a unique achievement. But this dogma is false. At least one other people discovered nature independently o£ �122 THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW and probably before, the Greeks, and yet understood it in essentially the same way that the Greeks did. In ancient India there emerged a wide variety of speculative schools of thought. 8 Some of these schools contented themselves with merely extrapolating the consequences and presuppositions of the reigning Vedic religion; others attempted to penetrate to and think through the immanent monism that they discerned or claimed to discern as the implicit teaching of the Vi'das; others depreciated the authority of Vedas without rejecting them altogether, invoking their authority only when it was convenient to do so; and still others rejected this authority openly and across the board. Finally, one school of speculative thought subjected the fUndamental claims of religion to a ridicule more explicit and vehement than anything comparable occurring in the West prior to the last century. Prakriti is a Sanskrit word that is sometimes translated as "nature." In general, this term names the material order of things, though construed dynamically rather than as mere extended and inertial stuff. The prefix pra- could be translated as "forth" and is cognate with the Latin pro- as in "project"-to throw forth, or "produce"-literally, to lead forth. The root of the word prakriti is which means to do or to make. And the suffix -ti, like the Greek suffix -sis, the Latin suffix -tio, and its English derivative -tion, with all of which the Sanskrit -ti is cognate, refers to the process of doing something. Motion is the process of moving, <j>UOL<; is the process of growing, or as we noted earlier the process of putting forth, as in putting forth buds. And prakriti is the process of making forth. The Sankhya school of speculative thought regarded prakriti as one of the two fUndamental principles responsible for the articulation of the world. The other principle they held to be purusha, or pure consciousness, Neither principle is reducible to the other, so the Sankhya school taught, and both are needed to account for the phenomenal complexity of the world and the correlative consciousness of it. 9 It .would be a mistake to regard purusha as a kind of ersatz divinity, as athe- vkr �CAREY 123 ism is one of the teachings of this sthool. 10 Because purusba is pure consciousness it cannot act at all. It is just an inert, even impotent, witness. But it is still a co-original principle that does not derive from prakriti any more than prakriti derives from it. Though there are a plurality of purusbas, there is only one prakriti, albeit internally differentiated and in a process of development, even evolution. This development is provoked by the presence of the inactive purusba. The chief problem with this account is making sense of how the unconscious prakriti could be understood to be provoked to development by the presence of a mere witness. This problem has an analogue in Greek thought. In the , passage from the Odyssey that we were considering, the <j>uaL<;, i.e., the nature or growing, of the moly plant is an unconscious process that is nonetheless presumably directed upward toward the light, though, to be sure, only because it is at the same time directed downward into the earth. Since nature is not art, this directedness is self- directedness. And yet it is an unconscious self- directedness that occurs not only in the presence of the earth but also in the presence of the light to which the plant reaches out. For Aristotle, nature itself is a duality: it is both matter and form. Matter is nothing actual in itself but is, rather, a mere potentiality for assuming different forms, and hence is better spoken of as "material:' It has no existence independent of form. The prime formal and immaterial principle is the unmoved mover who is pure intelligence, having only itself for its object, and moving the natural order as ultimate object of the latter's desire. Desire is all on the side of the material component of nature, inasmuch as desire expresses an as yet unactualized potentiality. There is a teleological directedness not only in unconscious though living plants, but even in the inanimate elements-earth air, water, and fire-where it is found as an impulse ( OP!!~) toward a proper end ('tEAO<;), this end being the natural place of the element, the place in the cosmos where it belongs by nature and to which it will return by nature if removed from it unnaturally, i.e., by force. Just like the Sankhya conception of prakriti, qr(im<; as Aristotle �124 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW presents it is a process animated from within. But it is so animated only because its material principle is paired with something else, ultimately, as in Sankhya, an intelligence or consciousness not reducible to matter, and to which matter in turn is not itself reducible. Whether or not the irreducibility of the form-material distinction, and the separate existence of an unmoved mover that is pure intelligence ultimately moving the whole natural order as well as the cosmos itself, though only as object of desire, is Aristotle's last word on the matter, it is surely his first word on the matter. But his first word is problematic, for it is that nature is a principle (6.p)(rJ) of motion and rest intrinsic to things that exist by nature. If nature is a duality of form and material, with at least one formal principle transcending nature altogether, it would seem that the two component members of this duality, form and material, would be the real principles. Nature would not itself be a principle but rather something derivative and secondary. Aristotle does not press this point, but the claim that nature is a principle, an absolute origin and source of motion and rest, would suggest that neither the material nor the formal conditions of motion exist altogether independently of nature. 11 And it is in the concept of nature as a principle in the full sense of the word, i.e., as a source immanent within the world, an original and originating source that does not itself originate from another yet more original source, that we reach what one might call the properly philosophical concept of nature. For it is in this concept only that nature is not reduced to the activity, to the artistic production of a transcendent artisan, whether this artisan be conceived as a separate intelli- gence, a demiurge, or the Biblical God. 12 On looking back again at the passage from the Odyssey, we note that nothing is in fact said about a source of light toward which the moly plant grows. Nothing other than the growing itself is presented as the cause of the growing. Nothing other rl1an nature is responsible �CAREY 125 ·for the directedness of nature. Moreover, right after reporting that Hermes showed him the nature of the moly plant, Odysseus says that, The root was black, but its flower was like milk. The contrast, in this [tEV ... DE clause, between the blackness of the root concealed in the darkness of the earth and the whiteness of flower above, suggests that the two aspects of nature are less form and mate~ rial than the manifest and the unmanifest. The white flower, the accomplished product of <jn)mc;, is visible to anyone who casts a casual glance in its direction. Without seeing the root, however, one might well think that the plant was just propped up in the ground by a god. The exposure of the black root at work in the darkness beneath the surface of the earth, which exposure is accomplished only with a measure of effort, purports to show that the plant is not the product of any artisan at all, but is the product of an activity of producing that is immanent within the plant and not distinct from it. And, as we noted earlier, it is this activity that is nature. Now nature understood nonphilosophically and simply as the order of what comes to be independently of human ingenuity, the order of what comes to be ualways or for the most part," 13 needs no special discovery. The return of the seasons, the rapid growth of plants afi:er rain, the way in which animals beget their offspring, and all such things happen in a manner manifestly different from man's production of tools, clothing, and the like. The awareness of this difference is not only prephilosophic, but prehistoric as well. This awareness is surely not absent from the Bible, where some such conception of the natural order, even if not named as such, is presupposed as the necessary background against which miracles stand out as signs of supernatural intervention from beyond. And, indeed, once the Greek way of looking at things was encountered by members of the Jewish community around the third century B.C., the word qromc; found its way into some of �126 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW their writings. 14 The term "nature" also occurs several times in the New Testament epistles. There it refers precisely to this regular order, and even takes on a normative sense: the natural use of something as opposed to an unnatural misuse of it:S Moreover, Aristotle had already noted that nature, used more generally, can also mean the essence (or being-----Ouo{a) of anything. 16 It need not have any immediate reference to motion and rest. And this use also appears in the New Testament, at the culmination of the arresting formulation of the Christian vocation that is found in the Second Epistle of Peter. The addressees of this eP.istle are told that they have been called by Christ to his own glory (&bsa) and virtue: in order that you might become participants of the divine nature. 17 Needless to say, this New Testament use of the word unature" has only the most tenuous connection to the concept of nature that we find in the Odyssey and in later Greek philosophical thought. The discovery of nature as the sole and immanent origin of the things that are is, as we noted earlier, typically held to be an achievement of the peculiar genius of the Greek mind. Nothing really comparable to this properly philosophical conception of nature seems to have emerged elsewhere, except under the influence of Greek speculative thought. After all, in the Sankhya school in ancient India the starkness of the concept of prakriti is mitigated by the concept of a complementary presence of a multiplicity of pure consciousnesses, existing independently of prakriti and not derived from it. But, in fact, we do encounter the properly philosophical concept of nature, unmitigated, in another school of speculative thought that existed in ancient India. This school is called Lokayata, from the Sanskrit word loka, which means world. 18 The Lokayata teaching is this worldly,'' with a vengeance. All that is, including consciousness, is 11 �CAREY 127 reducible to or derivative exclusively from the four material elements of earth, water, fire, and air. The expression "my body" is merely a grammatical formula and the self it seems to point to as something distinct from the body and its owner is a linguistic fiction. 19 There is only this world, a hereafter does not exist, and death is exactly what it appears to be: There is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world.20 There is no world other than this; there is no heaven and no hell; the realm of Shiva and like regions were invented by stupid impostors ... 21 Moreover, there is no immaterial and invisible order of existence: Only the perceived exists; the unperceivable does not . extst... 22 There is no divine artisan: Who paints the peacocks, or who makes the cuckoos sing? There exists here no cause excepting nature.23 . Nature is the sole cause of the manifold things that are, at least of the things that are not made by man: The fire is hot, the water cold, refreshing cool the breeze of morn; By whom came this variety? From their own nature was it born.24 �128 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW The Sanskrit word that is translated here as "own nature" is not prakriti but svabhava. The prefix sva- means one's own. The word bhava to which it is attached means being, or becoming. Its root is vbhu, which is cognate with <jru, the latter being the root of the Greek word for nature. One might think, however, that being and nature should be kept distinct, and that a more accurate translation of the above clause would be, By whom came this variety? from their own being was it born. Aside from the cognate relation of bhava and qn.Jm,;, there is the striking fact that, as we just noted, the concept of nature got so broad11 ened in the West that it came to signify the essence, the what-ness" of even eternal beings and relationships. One speaks, to repeat, not only of the nature of plants and animals, but also of the nature of mathematics, the nature of logic, the nature of ttuth, and even the nature of eternity. Still, this way of using the word "nature'' takes its departure, and is claimed to derive its justification, from an earlier conviction that what is fundamentally real is the immanent and temporal order of existence, that being is nature, nothing more or less.25 This conception that what is fundamentally real is nature, regarded as a principle intrinsic to the world that lies before our eyes, a principle not distinct from this world as its originator, is then a conception that is not unique to the speculative tradition that originated in ancient Greece. It is paraded quite nakedly in the Lokayata school of thought that emerged in India around 600 B.C. If indeed the discovery of nature, in this strict sense, and the emergence of philosophy are two sides of the same coin, and i£ furthermore, philosophy is not a peculiar dispensation of a blind and inscrutable fate but a possibility coeval with man, it would be surprising if nature were discovered within one intellectual tradition only. �CAREY 129 In any case, the discovery of something of interest leads naturally to reflection on the thing discovered. And this holds true of nature as well. The discovery of nature leads to natural science. And there was natural science in ancient India just as there was in ancient Greece. We have all heard about how primitive "science" used to be before we moderns got it straightened out, by making it empirical, objective, mathematical, precise, useful, and so forth. It is the case, however, that the emergence of modern natural science, along with all its spectacu" lar achievements both practical and theoretical, is accomplished in large measure by ignoring and forgetting the questions that animated premodern ·natural science. It is accomplished by getting down to brass tacks, assembling some empirical data, taking some measurements, crunching some numbers, and so forth, in a word, actually doing science rather than just talking about it, as it is sometimes put rather irritably. And one need only browse through a copy of Aristotle's Physics to see how different both its subject matter and manner of presentation are &om, say, a contemporary physics textbook. On the one hand, the latter is replete with mathematical formulas, and these are virtually absent from Aristotle Physics. On the other hand, equally absent from the contemporary textbook, and propelling the argument of the Physics, are questions as to what certain things are: What is motion? what is time? what is place) what is the infinite? and the like. And, most fundamental of all, what is nature? Since the word "physics" comes from the Greek word for nature, one would expect the contemporary physicist to be more interested in trying to find out what nature is.26 But, the contemporary physicist might respond, we already know what nature is. It is matter in motion. We have been exceedingly successfUl in determining the laws that govern matter in motion, so suceessful, in fact, that all premodern science reveals itself as useless in comparison. And the contemporary physicist is right. The premodern investigation of nature was virtually without utility. Utility, however, is hardly an adequate criterion of knowledge. One repeatedly hears for- �130 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW mulations of the kind, "we now know how to do such and such:' We now know how to split the atom, we now know how to put men on the moon, we now know how to cure such and such a disease, etc. This "know how" that we have acquired is undeniably impressive. But the knowledge of how to do something is not equivalent to the knowledge of what something is, to knowledge of the nature of the thing in question. The philosophers who founded modernity were quite explicit about the technological orientation that would characterize the new science of nature. The plan was to conquer chance, to put nature on the rack and torture it for the relief of man's estate-in general, to render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature. The philosophers who founded modernity were hardly indifferent to the nontechnological, impractical, and intrinsically theoretical question of what nature is. Were they indifferent to this question of "what-ness" they would not deserve the name of philosophers at all. It has been argued, convincingly I think, that the unprecedented orientation toward utility that characterizes modern Western science stems from a deliberate decision on the part of the philosophers who founded modernity to enlist the support of ordinary nonphilosophical human beings, i.e., the overwhehning majority of human beings, for the theoretical enterprise. Ordinary human beings should support the quest for knowledge because of the material benefits this quest will bring to them, Prior to modernity, the quest for knowledge was regarded by the nonphilosophic multitude as at best useless and foolish, at worst prideful and impious. Today unimpeded theoretical enquiry enjoys almost unqualified prestige in the eyes of the public, and consequently an immunity from meddling, censure, and persecution by religious authorities, whose political influence was incomparably greater prior to the commodious living made possible by the achievements of modern sctence. Beneath the glitter of technology, however, and indifferent to the public applause it evoked, genuinely philosophical speculation about �CAREY 131 nature continued unabated. If nature were the fundamental reality, and the source of all that is, including the human mind, how could it be mastered by the human mind? How could the producer be mastered by the product? The problem of the relation of mind to nature, or rather, since nature deprived of form got reduced to mere material extendedness, the problem of the relation of mind to matter, became the most vexing problem of early modern philosophy. Variants of this problem were certainly entertained earlier, not only in classical antiquity but, not surprisingly, in India as well. In the Lokayata school consciousness was asserted to be a product of material interaction. The consciousness that is found in the modifications of nonintelligerit elements is produced in the manner of the red color out of the combination of betel, areca-nut, and lime. 27 The Lokayata school thus managed to assert a materialistic monism. All is one, and this one is matter. But Lokayata seems never to have gotten beyond simply asserting this monism. The Sankhya school was unimpressed with the Lokayata assertion, inasmuch as what it exhibited in boldness was not paired with an adequate appreciation of the problem: exactly how does mere material interaction give rise to something so apparenrly different from matter as consciousness? This question appears to be unanswerable. The Sankhya school did not wish to retreat from avowed atheism by introducing a divine consciousness as the transcendent creator of the multiplicity of individual consciousnesses that exist, nor to reduce this multiplicity of consciousnesses to different aspects of one immanent consciousness. And so the adherents of the Sankhya school posited this multiplicity as an original and underivable given. 28 And they successfully offset the charge of covert theism by making these consciousnesses absolutely impotent,29 attributing all action to prakriti, i.e, to material nature. �132 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Aristotle's express teaching on this matter also is similar to that of the Sankhya school. The first mover, or thought thinking itself or, better, intellect knowing itself, is indeed described as fully active, beyond all potency but not thereby impotent. Its activity, however, consists, as we noted, not in what it does to anything else, but in the autarchic unaffected self-activity of self- knowledge, and i11 what it only thereby, so to speak, "inspires" other things to do. Where the multiplicity of individual human minds comes from, i.e., what the origin of human consciousness is, is not clear. Still, Aristotle's teaching that nature is a cos- mos teleologically constituted and replete with forms, though hardly answering the perplexing question about origins, at least keeps consciousness from appearing to be an anomaly within the natural order. This teaching was not congenial to the spirit and intention of early modern philosophy. For the mathematization of nature that was required in order to reduce it to theoretical clarity and distinctness, and to make possible the consequent domination of nature by art, i.e., to make possible technology, required reducing all apparent formal causes to material causes, and eliminating final causes altogether. As a consequence of this reduction, the philosophical investigation of the relation of mind to nature ran right into the so called "mind-body problem:' Most of the attempts at solving this problem seemed contrived, and some were so extravagant and unconvincing as to cast rea- sonable doubts on the sincerity of the thinkers who proffered them, Contemporaries could not help but wonder whether some of these thinkers were not materialist monists disguising as mind-body dualists. One early mbdern philosopher who advanced monism with as much frankness as circumstances permitted was Spinoza. According to Spinoza, there is only one substance, or real being, namely God. God has infinite attributes, of which only two, namely, extension and consciousness, are possible objects of human knowledge and experience. The bodies we see around us and our own bodies as well are but modes, or modifications, of these two accidents of God. They are not, �CAREY 133 however, modifications of the attribute of extension merely, for they exhibit another feature in addition to just being spread out in space. They resist being penetrated, being moved when they are at rest, being brought to rest when they are in motion, and having their motion accelerated, decelerated, or altered as to its direction. In a word they resist any influence from without. This resistance of a body to influence from without, to influence from another, can be expressed positively as an endeavor (conatus), an exertion, a striving even, to preserve itse!f in whatever state it happens to be in. Aristotle, as we have seen, had also argued for a kind of striving ( op~t~) as propelling the natural motion of even inanimate bodies. But Spinoza's conatus is not self-direction toward an end, a "t[A..o;, that is at some remove from the present state of the body in motion. It is not self-direction so much as self- preservation. This attribute of a body, its endeavor to preserve itself, which is also called, misleadingly, uinertia;' does not exist separately from the extendedness of the body, though it is, again, not reducible to the attribute of extension. If bodies lacked this attribute of endeavoring to preserve themselves and possessed instead only the attribute of extension, they would not be bodies, material bodies, at all. They would be three-dimensional geometrical figures only. If a body's extendedness is the outwardness, the exteriority of a material body, the aspect that can be perceived by an outside observer, then the endeavor to preserve itself is its inwardness, its interiority. This endeavor to preserve itself cannot be perceived by an outside observer though it can be more or less deduced from the "behavior" of a body when subject to the pressures of other bodies from the outside or from the experience of the observer when he stops merely observing this body and tries to do something to it. The interiority of a body can be "expressed" when it is provoked, so to speak, by something exterior to it. The endeavor of a relatively simple body, such as a billiard ball, to preserve itself in the state it happens be in, in spite of outside interference, can be rather easily grasped, for it can be encountered as a felt pressure against one's �134 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW own body. But all bodies possess this endeavor, the human body included. And the much greater complexity of the human body, including the complexity of the brain and nervous system, allows for much more variegated expressions of the endeavor to preserve itsel£ But this endeavor to preserve itself is still the inwardness of the human body, just as in the case of a simple body. So two things, apparently, are claiming to be the inwardness, the interiority, of the human body. They are, on the one hand, the mind, and, on the other, the endeavor of the human body to preserve itself in whatever state it happens to exist in, the inertia" that the human body has in common with all bodies. Are these apparently unrelated things, the mind and the human body's endeavor to preserve itself in whatever state it happens to be in, in some way related? Spinoza offers fl a starding answer to this question. The mind, both insofar as it has clear and distinct ideas, and also[!] insofar as it has confused ideas, endeavors (conatur) to persist in its being for an indefinite duration, and of this endeavor (conatus) it is conscious. 30 Since, as Spinoza goes on to say in the sequel to this passage, the essence of the mind is constituted by both adequate and inadequate ideas, the essence of the mind consists in its striving to persist in its state, in its striving not to reach beyond itself but to preserve itself in its present state. The essence of the mind is this conatus. And though the mind is something altogether different from extension, it is not something altogether different fi:om, much less separable from, body. The mind is, rather, one though not the only instance of the conatus of the complex human body, the attempt of this body to preserve itsel£ The conatus of a simple inorganic body, such as that of a billiard ball, is then only the primitive prototype of the human mind." Inertia, it �CAREY 135 11 turns out, is not quite so inert" as it sounds. After all, it consists in resistance to outside influence and in the endeavor to maintain itself in whatever state it happens to be in, regardless of how it got there. Now, whatever one makes of the above account, in particular whether the striving for self-preservation rather than, say, "will to power;' best defines the inwardness common to all bodies, this account does have the considerable merit, from the perspective of philosophy, of maintaining an absolutely necessary, nonfortuitous connection between mind and nature. 32 For although Spinoza says that the one substance is God, and that we thinking human beings are but modifications of its attributes, he also calls this one substance "nature:' God is not a transcendent being, but nature itsel£33 Nature, material nature, is however more complex than meets the eye. In fact, the only attribute of nature that literally meets the eye is extension in space. The other attribute, consciousness, has to be directly experienced or deduced. But Spinoza says that nature has many more attributes than just these two, an infinite number in fact. By this claim he seems to point to a certain inscrutability in the workings of nature. This comes out in his distinction between natura naturata, literally, "nature natured;' by which he means the productions of nature, i.e., the 11 natural beings, and natura naturans, literally, nature naturing,, i.e., the producing of the natural beings, or nature proper. It is this latter sense that most closely corresponds to the distinction that we encountered between a plant, a !j>utO'v, and the growing of this plant, its !j>vm~, its nature proper. Spinoza also argues that this sole existing substance, nature, is both the necessary being and necessary in all its operations. Nature, natura naturans, does not freely choose to create its products, the whole complex of natura naturata, as does the Biblical Creator. Nature, again, is not transcendent to its products but immanent within them, and so a sharp distinction cannot be made between natura naturans and natura naturata, of the kind one must make between the transcendent God and his freely created creatures. Accordingly, the necessity that �136 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW holds for natura naturans-a necessity that Spinoza argues for at the same time that he maintains it to be in large measure inscrutable-this necessity has to hold for natura naturata as well. Nothing is contingent in nature, neither its producing nor its products, Whatever exists has a necessary connection with what came before, and this system of necessary connection in the world that lies qefore our eyes is inviolable and eternal. The indemonstrable and hence no more than hypothetical character of Spinoza's assertion, and similar assertions, of an inviolable necessity of connection, or strict determinism, in the natural order was exposed by Hume. Hume reasons as follows. The concept of an event, of something happening in time, can be imagined without connecting this event in the imagination to a preceding cause. For example, I can imagine the sudden appearance of a second essay right next to this one, though to_ be sure I have no reason at all to expect that such a sudden appearance will occur. Furthermore, I can imagine this event taking place without having to imagine a cause of it. 34 And what can be imagined can be regarded as possible, at least until it can be shown to be impossible, by some kind of argument, one that does not beg the question. To put it another way, the idea of having a cause or, for that matter, producing an effect, has no analytic connection with the idea of an event, an idea of something that happens. Having a cause is not part of the meaning of an event, in the way that being a closed figure is part of the meaning of a circle. And so I can think, without contradiction, of an event as not having a cause in a way I cannot think of a circle as not being a closed figure. Of course, from a consideration of the mere concept of an if.fect I can indeed deduce that it must have a cause. This is what is meant by an effect. But if.fect and event do not have the same meaning. More is thought in the former than in the latter. And so from a consideration of the mere concept of an event I cannot deduce, by logical principles alone, that it must have a cause. �CAREY 137 But even if one cannot demonstrate on logical grounds exclusively that every event must have a cause, experience, at least, would seem to teach us this. Does it? The cause of an event is not just something that happens before the event, or even something that happens, so far as we can tell, invariably before the event. It is not mere temporal succession that is meant by the relation of cause and effect, but necessary connection. Now, according to Hume, though one can see temporal succession, i.e., one can see a certain event follow another, once, twice, or an indefinite number of times, one cannot see necessary connection. If necessary connection exists at all it is invisible, a conceptual matter and not an appearance. And so it is not directly accessible to experience. Nor is it indirectly accessible to experience by means of an inference from experience. For if I see two distinct events occur in a certain temporal order on one occasion only, it would be a mistake to infer that they are necessarily connected in that order. For example, if the first time I observed someone carry an umbrella outside I observed a rainstorm occur shortly thereafter, it would be a mistake to infer that carrying the umbrella outside was the cause of the rainstorm. And if I observed this same order of succession, this sequence, on a second, third, or a fourth occasion, it would still be a mistake to infer a necessary connection between the two events. But how many times does this succes- sion have be observed for one to be able to infer, logically, that the prior event is indeed the cause of the latter? No number of successions, no matter how large the number, really suffices to justify an inference to a necessary connection between the two events. If it is a faulty inference to say that just because B followed A on one occasion they are therefore necessarily connected, as effect and cause respectively, then it is an equally faulty inference to say that just because B followed A on many occasions they are therefore necessarily connected. To be sure we come to expect the same succession to hold in the future that has held many times in the past, but this expectation has no properly logical basis. As Hume says, it is more a matter of habit than of reasoning. Reason �138 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW finds necessity of connection not in matters of fact but rather in logical relationships only, in determining what belongs to or follows from the meaning of a given concept, as for example an enclosed figure follows from the meaning of the concept of a circle. 35 According to Hume, then, there is no way of determining whether necessity of connection exists in nature at all. Now, to return to Spinoza, the only evidence of an underlying self-contained necessity properly called natura naturans, can be found in natura naturata, i.e., in the productions of natura naturans and their ostensibly necessary intercon- nections. The inability, then, to know with certainty that there are necessary interconnections in these productions, casts doubt back on the necessity of the producer, on nature construed as the necessary being, i.e. as natura naturans, thereby rendering Spinoza's whole system ques- tionable.36 Finally, even if, contrary to what Hume attempts to show, one could determine that a given event or even all events that fell within one's limited sphere of experience had a cause, one could not infer with certainty that absolutely all events, especially those remote in time or space from the necessarily limited sphere of one's experience, also have causes, much less must have them. And if one cannot know that absolutely every event must have a cause, then one can hardly know that absolutely every event must have a natural cause, a cause of the same kind as the event, and that it cannot instead have a supernatural cause. Hume, to be sure, argues against miracles. But his argument does not get beyond trying to show that there cannot be a sufficient reason for believing in miracles, particularly for believing in reports of miracles. This, however, is strictly speaking a theological matter, and one that is open to dispute. Hnme's argnment about causality by itself pre. clndes a refutation of the possibility of miracles on scientific, i.e., naturalistic, grounds. Natural science as such, then, lacks the wherewithal to refUte the possibility of miracles, unless it borrows argnments from other �CAREY 139 sources. For example, there is simply no way of knowing on the basis of natural science alone that the world was not created by God only several thousand years ago. All scientific arguments about fossil records, geological findings, carbon dating, appeal at bottom to the principle of cause and effect, to an absolutely exceptionless regularity within the world, which natural science cannot itself validate but must instead presuppose.37 And to the nonscientific proposition that God surely would not have created the world so that it would look, on scientific inspection, to be so much older than it in fact is, the nonscientific rejoinder can be made that this proposition presupposes an understanding of the particular intentions of God that, according to the Biblical ~"~hypothesis" itsel£ is not accessible to man. All this is not to say that the endeavors of natural science yield no knowledge at all. Rather, such knowledge, consisting as it does in large measure of empirical generalizations, has an irreducibly hypothetical character to it. On the hypothesis of an exceptionless regularity within the world, on the hypothesis that there are no supernatural causes, i.e., no miracles, such and such consequences follow. And assuming that the alternative hypothesis, namely, that there are supernatural as well as natural causes, is itself not a matter of scientific knowledge but of faith, there is also no way of knowing, with certainty, that the naturalist account of the world is not the true account. This, however, is a much more modest and, I think, much more sensible claim than that we know with certainty that the naturalist account of the world is the true account.38 The discovery of nature is the event that inaugurates the emergence of philosophy, or the life of rational inquiry. Philosophy and natural science were not originally separate enterprises. In fact, they did not become separate enterprises until rather recently.39 Natural science is but the outcome of concentrated reflection on nature regarded as an original, self-producing, immanent activity that is accessible to reason and experience. Even if scientific inquiry c;umot penetrate into �140 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW the heart of nature, even if it cannot, to use the language of Spinoza, know more than two of the infinite attributes of nature, what it does know of these attributes is supposed to be sufficient to determine that they are not ultimately based on the free sponsorship of the transcendent and mysterious God. And yet, as we have seen, it does not lie within the resources of natural science to establish a claim of such broad scope. If philosophy were natural science only, it would not be able know that the discovery of nature was anything other than the invention of a fiction stemming from human pride and self-delusion, and so it would not be able to justify its conviction that its way, the way of autonomous rational inquiry, is superior to the way of simple religious piety. Nor is this problem solved by the bold move of making nature the product of an artisan, not the divine but the human artisan, i.e., the human mind in its own transcendental dimension as what constitutes nature, the human mind as transcendental subjectivity.4 For, apart from other considerations, the avowal of a necessary ignorance of what ° exists independently of the constituting activity of the human mind leaves the door open, once again, to the fundamental claims of revelation. The necessary being is not the human mind, which we know in our bones is finite, but the human mind's unknown cause. And precisely because this fundamental cause, this underlying though inscrutable necessity, is unknown, there is no way of knowing that it is not intelligent, free, and providential. By making finite human consciousness and its constitutive work the primary "known datum;' there is no way of knowing that the unknown source of this "given;' that what gives it, is not the transcendent and mysterious God-unless it turns out that the claims made about this transcendent and mysterious God, i.e., the claims of revelation, are discovered to be self-contradictory in their own terms, or in contradiction with something else that is self-evidently true, and hence are ultimately unbelievable. �CAREY 141 Now, as most of you already know, and the rest of you are soon to find out, nature as a term of distinction in Greek philosophy, is opposed not only to art, but also to convention. This distinction was known in ancient India as well. According to Lokayata, the school that insisted on worldly things having no cause external to the world but instead coming to be through solely their own nature, the Vedas, which served as the basis for the normative character of dharma, the law or sole right way of life, are only the incoherent rhapsodies of knaves.4 1 The Lokayata school refused to regard the ancestral religious tradition as authoritative. The ancestral religion was the invention of fools or impostors, more or less innocent foolishness or a deliberate lie, but in either case a falsehood. The Lokayata discovery, if it is indeed a discovery, that the things of the world come to be and are governed not through the agency of supernatural causes but rather "through their own nature" is inseparable from their rejection of the ancestral religion as having an entirely human and this worldly origin, and their refusal to place their allegiance in any other religion. Now, since one and the same Greek word (vo[!b£) is used for both law and convention, the opposing of nature to convention, as has been frequently pointed out, renders the very expression "natural law" problematic. A given law may well approximate the standard of nature but, if the <j>1JGL£-VO[J.O£ opposition is absolute, it can never attain this standard. Since, in the opposition nature vs. convention the latter 11 becomes mere convention, law too becomes something mere:' And this is supposed to hold true even of what is called "divine law;' which now, from the philosophical perspective attained by the discovery of nature, assumes the aspect of something that could not hold the unqualified allegiance of a fully rational human beingY �142 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW In the Phaedo, Socrates expresses his disappointment with the inability of natural philosophy to give a convincing causal account of the world of our experience, an inability particularly conspicuous in its paltry account of the human concern with the good and the noble, and the effect our conception of these things has on our lives. In the face of the manifest inability of natural philosophy to make any sense of the human soul and its concern for the good, Socrates did not advert to religion. Instead he undertook a philosophical inquiry into the human soul with his point of departure being A.6yoc:;, i.e., human discourse, particularly human discourse about the loftiest matters. This specific inquiry has been called political philosophy. It distinguishes itself from natural philosophy because it does not undertake an inquiry into nature directly but, rather focuses on the realm of specifically human concerns. It is a philosophical inquiry because it does not appeal to the claims of revelation, but rather subjects these claims to a rational critique. And it is political philosophy because, if the divine origin of our idea of the good has been called into question, the only to place to look for the origin of this idea, and thereby understand the idea itself, is in the human community, i.e., the political order in the full sense of the expression. It is the ambition of political philosophy to expose what it takes to be the questionable character of divine law by examining it in light of the opposition between nature and law. 43 But this enterprise presupposes the validity of the distinction between nature and law, where the former does not mean simply what holds always or for the most part. As we noted earlier, nature construed merely as typical regularity of appearance is not only compatible with the Biblical belief in miracles as divine initiatives that are exceptions to typical regularity of appearance, but is presupposed by this belief. It is, rather, the bolder conception of nature as a fully selfcontained causal order, self-grounded and admitting of no exceptions, that is required for an absolute opposition between nature and law, in �CAREY 143 light of which absolute opposition the former is seen as the truth of things and the latter as nothing better than a noble lie. And yet, as we have also seen, this bolder conception of nature cannot be validated within natural science, or natural philosophy. It therefore cannot be uncritically or, strange to say, piously imported into political philosophy, but must receive its validation there, if it is to receive it anywhere. It is in confronting the claims of revelation on the basis of what we know first hand about the human soul. and the relationship of human souls to one another under some sort of law, along with an inquiry into the meaning of revelation itself as a possible experience of the human soul, that the question of reason vs. revelation, or, more accurately, the question of philosophy vs. piety-which is the most choiceworthy way of life-gets joined in earnest. I have said next to nothing about this side of things here. Instead, I have limited myself to thinking through the meaning of natural science as a branch of philosophy emerging out of what is claimed to be the discovery of nature and attempting to account for the world in worldly terms exclusively, though prescinding from the specifically human experiences. I have tried to show that natural science is constitutionally incapable of refuting the claims of Biblical revelation. From this it would follow that, in the absence of a definitive resolution of the issues concerning the scope of the specifically human experiences, the ultimate worth and reliability of the naturalistic account of the world, the account of the world in worldly terms exclusively, is less a matter of knowledge than of faith. Notes I. "I make free men [or human beingsJ out of children by means of books and a balance:' • c. ~·)I -= , ,.. , 2. Physics, I93a4. w<; u EO'l;LV 11 cjlum<;, 1tELpao8UL uELKVUVm ... .. c, ,.., .... .., ' ' yEA.owv. cjlavEpov yap on ,;mau-ta ,;wv ov,;wv EmL noA.A.a. 1:0 1)£ OELKVVvm ,;a cjlavEpa OLa 'tWV ~cjlavwv ou �144 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW I I ~ l'.., '' (..' 6U';U[.IEVOU KpLVELV EcrtL 'tO i'lL'UU"to KUL [.111 6L'UU't0 yvwp L[.IWV. . 3. Ibid., I92 b 20. Genitive absolute construction: OU011<; 'ti'j<; ..... ' .... , """' ..... ..., , ~ <!>UOEW<; UPX11<; 'tLVO<; KUL UL'tLU<; 'tOU KLVEL09UL KUL 11PE,.,'l't./ / .c.,, .. ' [.IE LV EV qJ UJtUPXEL n:pwnu<; Ka9' UU'tO KUL !-111 KU'tU OU[.l~E11KO<;. 4. Book IO, I. 302-306. 5. Ibid., I. 329. 6. C£ Leo Strauss, "Progress and Return," in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism ed. by T. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. I989), 252; also Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, I997), 85-90. 7. Although Odysseus relates that he was shown, and therefore came to see the nature of the moly plant, he does not say that he actually ate the plant. 8. The Sanskrit word that I am translating as "speculative school of thought" is darshana, which stems from the root vdrsh, which in turn means "to see:' Darshana could be more literally translated as uperception" or point of view:~ The word "speculative" captures at least something of the sense of seeing contained in the Sanskrit. The expression "school of thought" is appended to "speculative" to express the historic reality that there were groups of thinkers adhering to similar views, as in the West with the Stoics, Epicurean, skeptics, and so forth. 9, Sankhyakarika 3. IO. G. Larson, Classical Sankhya (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas,I979), I 98: "Thus, the classical Sankhya recognized no absolute or creator God. To be sure, the gods may exist, but they too are simply products of the interaction of unconscious mulaprakriti and the 11 conscious purusha:' For further discussion see the references to "atheism" in Larson's index, especially fn. I 46. Mulaprakriti is origi- �CAREY 145 nal or primary nature, as distinct from its derivative products or states. This distinction is roughly comparable to that which Spinoza makes between natura naturans and natura naturata. See below. I I. Thomas Aquinas understandably resists regarding nature as a principle in this strong sense of the term. (In Octo Libros De Physico Auditu Sive Physicorum Aristote/is Commentaria), Liber II, Lectio I, 295: H Ponitur autem in definitione naturae principium quasi genus; et non aliquid absolutum ... ": "Now 'principle' is placed in the definition of nature as its genus, and not as something absolute ... " (English translation: Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, Yale University press, I963, 7I). The Greek allows for, though it does not mandate, this interpretation, inasmuch as Aristotle does not define <jrum<; as &p:xl] ... etc., but as 'tL<; apxl] ... etc. Thomas acknowledges another tradition of interpreting Aristotle's definition in the immediate sequel to the observation quoted above. I2. Aristotle's God, though active in relation to himself as intellect knowing itself (VO'Y]OL<; vo~crew<;), and as a consequence active on others as the object of their desire and imitation, is not an artisan (Metaphysics I 072 b I f£). He takes no interest in the cosmos. Indeed, he is apparently unaware of its existence, inasmuch as he thinks only of himself (I074b3I-34, Thomas Aquinas's elaboration to the contrary notwithstanding). And if, thinking only of himself, he is unaware of moving things, he must be unaware that he is the first mover. Being the first mover, then, does not pertain to his essence, for of his essence, at least, he is fully aware. Cf infra, note 37. I3. Physics, I98b35. I4. E.g., Wisdom of Solomon, 7:20 ( c£ I3:I!). The word occurs with some frequency in IV Maccabees. Both these works were written in Greek. They can be found in the so-called Apocrypha, which consists of books that had enjoyed some standing within the Jewish community but did not make it into the canon that was established by �146 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW the assembly of rabbis at Jarnnia toward the close of the first century A.D. I5. Romans 2:I4-I5. I6. Metaphysics, IOI5ai2. "' ' / I I I7. II Peter I:4, u ... LVU /\La ''W'U'tWV YEV'Y]00E 0ELU£ KOLVWVOL... ..h. I '!''UOEW£ ... " I8. Charvaka is another name for this school. I 9. Sarvasiddhantasangraha, 6, quoted from A Sourcebook of Indian Philosophy, ( ed S. Radhakrishnan and C. Moore, Princeton University Press, I 957), 235. 20. Sarvadarshanasangraha, quoted from A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy,.22 9. 21. Sarvasiddhantasangraha, 8. 235. 22. Sarvasiddhantasangraha, 5. 235. 23. Ibid., 235. 24. Sarvadarshanasangraha, 233. 25. C£ M. Heidegger, vom l#sen und Begriff der <j>vm£: Aristoteles' Physik B, I (l#gmarken, Frankfurt am Main, I 967), 370. (English translation byT. Sheehan in Man and World-Val. 9, No.3, Aug. I976, 268). 26. That the typical scientist is so taken aback on being asked the most fundamental questions about nature leads one to suspect that what motivates his research is less a love of truth than an infatuation with method. This suspicion is not much allayed by his few attempts to answer such questions, e.g., by proclaiming that the origin of all existence was a "big bang;' which was itself precipitated by a "fluctuation" in the "nothing" that preceded it. 27. Sarvasiddhantasangraha, 235. 28. Sankhyakarika, I 8. 29. Ibid., I9. 30. Ethics, Book 3, Prop. 9. 3 I. C£ Hans Jonas, "Spinoza and the Theory of Organism:' �CAREY 147 (Philosophical Essays, Prentice Hall) I 97 4, 206 f£ On the relation of mind to the organic body. Jonas argues that Spinoza is the only early modern philosopher who can account for why the more biologically complex organism has the more complex inwardness. 32. However otherwise different Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Freud are from one another, they all agree in regarding the mind as an essentially dynamic field of activity, as do Christians. (e.g., Matthew I2:4345; Ephesians 6:I2). 33. If nature exists of necessity, as Spinoza would like to demonstrate, then it can legitimately be called "necessary being," a formulation that the theologians had previously reserved for the transcendent God. But what exactly Spinoza gains, aside from the appearance of piety, by giving immanent nature, the world, or "the all" the name uGod" is not easy to determine. 34. Indeed, I must imagine some events without having to imagine their causes. For otherwise, since these causes would also have to be events, I would have to imagine their causes as well. And so I would be forced, in imagining any event, to imagine an indefinitely extended series of antecedent events. And this I surely do not do. 35. Kant's argument for the synthetic a priori is inseparable from his claim that we have no knowledge of things in themselves, and hence no knowledge of an underlying necessity such as Spinoza's natura naturans. C£ infra, fn. 4 I. 36. There is no intrinsic contradiction in the concept of a necessary beingjreely producing or, rather, creating other contingent, even free, beings. But this conception ultimately presupposes, for its cogency, the distinction between essence and energies that is developed in the work of the I 4th century Orthodox theologian, St. Gregory of PaJamas. (C£, e.g., The Triads 3; and One Hundred and Fifty Chapters on Topics of Natural and Theological Science Intended as a Purgefor the Barlaamite Corruption, Ch. 68 f£). It should go without saying that this distinction would hardly have been congenial to Spinoza. �148 THE ST. JOHN'S REVlEW 37. C£ Strauss, "Progress and Return;' 266. 38. And, indeed, scientists today are wont to emphasize the provisional character of science itsel£ Like many of their contemporaries they have doubts about whether there is such a thing as "the truth;' whether there is such a thing as "Truth with a capital T' Science is an ongoing activity of revision: ~~What is true today may well prove false tomorrow:' uThe more we find out, the more we know how little we know:' "No scientific account can claim to be the final account:' This becoming modesty does, however, know its limits. For there is at least one scientific account that is the final account. This scientific account is the theory of evolution. We now know, so we are told, that human life is necessarily the product of evolution. This, at least is a Truth with a capital T. Unfortunately, a satisfactory explanation as to why evolution is the scientific theory that gets to lay unique claim to apodicticity and finality does not appear to be forthcoming. 39. This fact is reflected in the somewhat anachronistic tradition of awarding Ph.D's in the sciences-one can hold a doctorate of philosophy in, say, chemistry. 40. This, of course, is the tack that Kant takes in attempting to refute Hume and establish, as a general principle, that every event in nature "presupposes something on which it follows according to a rule;' i.e., that it presupposes a cause. (Critique of Pure Reason, AI 89; c£ B 232 f£). Whatever else one might say about Kant's argument, it necessarily deprives nature, now reinterpreted as u an aggregate of appearances, so many representation of the mind" (ibid., A II 4) of any claim to be a first unconditioned principle. In its stead the unknowable thing-in-itself assumes the character of such a principle, entailing, according to Kant, an ascendancy of faith over knowledge (ibid., B xxx.). 4 I. Sarvadarshanasangraha, 230. The distinction between nature and convention in Greek speculative thought seems to have suggested �CAREY 149 itself on the basis of travels and the consequent observation of the variety of customs and laws under which different peoples live. (It can hardly be accidental that Odysseus is a traveller. C£ Odyssey 9, line I 72 f£) In the speculative thought of ancient India, a comparable distinction between nature and convention emerged, so far as one can tell, without the benefit of travels to other countries and solely as a consequence of reflecting on the possibility of a merely human origin of the only known dharma: "The Agnihotra [an obligatory rite for members of upper castes], the three Vedas, the ascetic's three staves, and smearing oneself with ashes, - Brihashpati [the founder of Lokayata, c. 600 B.C.] says that all these are but a means of livelihood for those who have no manliness or sense" (ibid.). 42. Though c£ 4 Maccabees, 5: I f£ Also, Romans 2: I 4- I 5. 43. For an illuminating appraisal of some of these issues from a philosophical perspective, see the provocative study by David Bolotin, An Approach to Aristotle's Physics (Albany: State University of New York Press, I998), esp. I52-I53, and I 54, fn. I2. �� 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2000/1 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Carey, James Ruhm von Oppen, Beate Sachs, Joe Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Phillips, Blakely Sachs, Joe David, Amirthanayagam Verdi, John Page, Carl Description An account of the resource Volume XLVI, number one of The St. John's Review. Published in 2001. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_46_No_1_2000 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2b69b2ce561c611b2fc3cefb8e8bdaec.pdf 3ac6a94fca6362b5bfa8ef769aeb6a4c PDF Text Text The St. John’s Review Volume XLVI, number two (2002) Acting Editor George Russell Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann James Carey Beate Ruhm von Oppen Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Blakely Phillips The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. .O. Back issues are available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2002 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Publishing and Printing �2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Essays and Lectures Measure, Moderation and the Mean............................................ 5 Joe Sachs Plato and the Measure of the Incommensurable Part II. The Mathematical Meaning of the Indeterminite Dyad................................................................................ ................... 25 A.P. David Moral Reform in Measure for Measure............................................63 Laurence Berns Book Reviews Eva Brann’s, The Ways of Naysaying ................................................79 Chaninah Maschler Eva Brann’s What, Then, is Time?.....................................................107 Torrance Kirby The Feasting of Socrates Peter Kalkavage’s translation of Timaeus...................................117 Eva Brann �4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 Measure, Moderation, and the Mean Joe Sachs (with particular reference to the story Odysseus tells in the Odyssey) Anyone who comes to love the writings and artworks that have survived from ancient Greece ought one day to visit Olympia. In Athens there are wonderful things to see, but also evidence everywhere of the destructive effects on buildings and statues of some of the most polluted air anywhere in the world. But, in Olympia, in the Peloponnese, where the most famous of the ancient athletic games were celebrated, one can still breathe purer air, and see glorious sights. In particular, in the museum there, at the two ends of the large main room, restored to their complete shapes, are the two pediments of a temple of Zeus built in the decade of the 460s BC. (Illustrations are at the end of the text.) The form of a pediment will be familiar to you as what sits above the appropriate sort of entrance to a temple. Picture a rectangle, wider than it is long, made of evenly spaced vertical columns; resting on top of this row of columns is a triangle, shorter than it is wide, with a series of sculpted figures across it. The statue at the center of the triangular pediment is the tallest figure and the focus of the whole composition. The eastern pediment at Olympia depicts Zeus at its center, in a monumental style that makes one think of Egypt. In fantasy, one might see this pediment as a doorway into ancient Greece, leading in from the east. But the truer doorway to things that are most characteristic of classical Greece is at the other end of the room. The western pediment depicts the defeat of the Centaurs, who are men in their heads, arms, and upright chests, but horses in their legs and horizontal lower trunks. They are attempting to carry off human �6 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW women, and one young boy, but the sculptor has captured the moment of their defeat. They are being fought by human heroes, including Theseus, but they are defeated by a look and a gesture. At the center of the pediment is Apollo, ten feet tall, looking to his right with his right arm outstretched, the hand level, the palm downward. The look in his eyes is not angry but serious, and his face is not clenched in threat but calm. The centaurs cannot have their way when faced with the power radiated by such dignity. This scene, displaying in outward figures an inner topography of the human soul, holds in it something of the spirit of classical Greece. The fact that you or I can see these seemingly invisible qualities, just by being patient and receptive in front of some shaped blocks of stone, is one of the amazing achievements that has survived from that time and place. Zeus was, as you know, the father and ruler of the Olympian gods, and even the name of the town Olympia was taken from its temple of Zeus, who was the Olympian, but somehow Apollo came to be pre-eminent among the gods imagined as living on Olympus. At Delphi, on Mount Parnassus, above the Gulf of Corinth, there was an ancient temple of Gaia, Mother Earth, which was considered the center of the earth. But people were kept away from it by the Python, an inhuman monster, until Apollo killed it. The Pythia, the priestess of the temple, then became a medium through whom people could consult Apollo, and learn his word, or oracle. The story of Pythian Apollo embodies the same meaning as that of the Apollo sculpted at Olympia, a victory on behalf of humanity, won over older and subhuman enemies. The dragons and half-humans are not wiped out, but become subject to something shining and beautiful. I think you will find some version of this insight present in almost every work you read from classical Greece, though not everyone would agree, and it may certainly at times be something hard won and dimly seen. But even tragedy, a type of poetry discovered by certain Greeks, always displays that, even in the most horrendous circumstances, there is a human dignity that we can still SACHS 7 recognize; that when it is recognized it commands respect; and that this respect allows all things to be seen in their true proportions. Above the doorway of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, we are told (Plato, Protagoras 343B) that two sayings were inscribed: Know thyself, and Nothing to excess. These may seem to be disconnected—an exhortation to self-knowledge and a platitude about not going overboard with anything—but to think them together is to find the meaning of each. Know thyself means know your true limits, the greed and ambition to which no human being should aspire and the depths to which no human being should sink. And Nothing to excess is not just practical advice; it means that the nature of anything, including human life, is revealed only when its true proportions are found—that the truth of anything is its form. The positive version of Nothing to excess is another saying— Measure is best—and the measure of a thing is its form. To take a simple example, what are the right proportions for the entrance to a temple? When I described the pediments at Olympia and asked you to picture them and the columns under them, I’ll bet you got their proportions just about right. The rectangle formed by the columns is wider than it is high. How much wider? Enough so that it will not look squashed together, but not so much that it would become stringy looking. Let your imagination squeeze and stretch it to see what goes wrong, and then notice that to get it right again you have to bring it back to a certain very definite shape. This is the golden rectangle. It has been produced spontaneously by artists, architects, and carpenters of any and every time and place. What is the ratio of its width to its height? I can tell you exactly what it is, but not in numbers. I can also tell it to you in numbers, but not exactly. It is approximately 61.8 units wide and 38.2 units high. That will get you in the ballpark and your eye will then adjust it to make the ratio exact, but it can be proven that no pair of numbers, to any finite precision, can accurately express this ratio, which is that formed by cutting a line so that the whole has to its larger part the same ratio that the larger part has to the smaller. If you have a calculator, you can check that 61.8 is to 38.2 in just �8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW about the same ratio as that of 100 to 61.8, but no matter how many decimal places you take it to, any ratio of numbers for the parts will fail to match that of the whole to the larger part. We know many things by measuring, and our usual way of measuring is with numbers, but in this case numbers are too crude an instrument by which to know something our eyes know at a glance. Taking the measure of something, then, does not necessarily require quantifying it. We are always going too far in trying to quantify things. The intelligence quotient is a precise number, and no doubt it means something, but it doesn’t capture anything worth calling intelligence. An acquaintance of mine, who grew up in Baltimore, once watched an old, uneducated cook in North Carolina make biscuits. She was writing down the recipe, and at one point asked “How much shortening did you use?” The reply was “Enough to make it short.” This example reveals both the genuine intelligence of the cook, which would not show up on any test score, and the fact that she was measuring the shortening not by its volume or weight but by its feel as she mixed it into the dough. Her hands were performing a qualitative measurement, just as the eyes of your imagination were measuring the rectangle by its shape, rather than by the lengths of its sides. You should not be too quick to agree with me about this, because if you do, you may have to give up many other things you believe. I am claiming, and this is something I learned from certain dead Greeks, that the world really has qualities in it, that they are not subjective distortions projected onto it, but the true forms of things. I know them by my senses, and I know them better that way than by any theoretical explanations of them. With the golden rectangle, the discovery of the ratio of its sides reveals something that we can never name directly—we cannot say how many times bigger one side is than the other, or than any possible fractional part of the other—but we can still recognize that ratio in two ways: in its sameness with another ratio, or, even more simply, in the distinctively shaped rectangle it produces. What is quantitatively incommensurable is qualitatively harmonious. Similarly, the experienced cook SACHS 9 knows that all batches of flour and shortening are not identical, and that they may not behave the same way at different times of the year. If you want the biscuits to turn out right, the only thing to trust is your hands. We need not go through all five senses, but one example of measurement by the ear will be helpful. Clamp a guitar string at both ends, put a bridge under it about two-fifths of the way from either end, and pluck the two parts. You will hear something interesting. But what if the string is not of uniform thickness all the way along? If you have measured the two lengths to make them exactly as two to three, you might still hear something that sounds wrong, just a little off. The interval of a fifth is produced by strings with lengths in a perfectly commensurable ratio, all other things being equal, but the lack of uniformity in real strings means that one tunes an instrument best with one’s ear. It is true that musicians nowadays sometimes use little electronic devices that read out frequencies of vibration. But if the machine malfunctions, it will do no good for the musician to tell the audience he got all the numbers right. Only for the ear is there such a thing as being in tune. Measure, proportion, and harmony are in the nature of things, and we have a direct responsiveness to them that orients us in the world. These are not the ratios of mathematics, but incarnate ratios. And the words pure and applied do not fit the distinction, because the purer instances of measure are the ones given to our senses. A tradition preserved by a twelfth century writer (Johannes Tzetzes) tells us that the inscription above the doorway of Plato’s school, the Academy, read “Let no one without geometry enter under my roof.” Does this mean that skill in mathematics was, as we would say, a prerequisite for his classes? I don’t think so. It seems to me important that the entrant is not required to have mathematics, but geometry. Much of mathematics develops from the act of counting, a fundamental and natural power without which we could not speak or think, but geometry starts in a different way, from a sensory recognition of the ordering of simple visible shapes. In Plato’s Gorgias (508a), Socrates actually tells a young man that he is without geom- �10 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW etry, but he is not criticizing Callicles for his intelligence or learning or skill, but blaming him for a failure of moral choice. The young man is greedy and in danger of having no friends, Socrates says, because he does not recognize the way geometrical equality gives all things the proportions that let them be part of larger wholes. The loss of a sense for geometry is equated with losing one’s way in the human world. An example that shows both the positive and the negative side of this is the central scene in Plato’s Meno. Meno’s “boy,” a slave who has never been taught geometry, begins to discover it in front of us. Relying at first solely on his ability to count, he twice goes wrong in trying to measure the side of the double square, but counting also shows him he is wrong. With Socrates leading the way, by drawing figures and pointing at them, the slave eventually is led to trust his eyes, and to see the square double itself, out of itself. And while Socrates asks all the questions, the slave has to do all the seeing himself, out of himself, just as he was led to his mistakes, but made them himself. This is all very elementary, but the slave has geometry in him, and he also has a little bit of courage and determination in getting it out—two qualities his master lacked when he found some unexpected difficulty in answering other questions. And this finally is the point of the scene, the reason Socrates arranges it in front of us: Meno cannot see that his “boy” is a better man than he is. We can all recognize that certain people deserve more respect than others, if we are honest, but Meno has lost that capacity. He has lost his way. He is without geometry. This way of understanding geometry may help explain an apparent inconsistency in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Near its beginning, Aristotle says something that might at first seem to be opposite to the inscription on Plato’s gates. He warns the reader not to look for the precision of mathematical demonstration in the study of ethics (1194b 19-27). Is this not equivalent to writing on the portals of this sort of philosophy, “let no one try to enter here with geometry”? If so, it is odd that Aristotle fills his exploration of ethics from the beginning with references to actions that are in pro- SACHS 11 portion, or in ratio, or in a right ratio. For instance, someone may have good fortune and a steady course through life, but be knocked out of equilibrium by some misfortune. The inability to cope with disaster is out of proportion (1100a 23, 1101a 17) with the rest of the life. Since some alteration is inevitable, and some grief would be appropriate, and no rules prescribe its amount or how it should be expressed, only a geometrical eye can judge this. The fitness of such actions might be measured with some precision, but it can never be demonstrated. All the circumstances and all the history of any action can never be known, too many considerations have to be balanced, and equally good alternative ways of handling difficulties are always possible. Aristotle, then, does believe that human actions can be chosen and recognized as right or wrong with precision, but he denies that this is the same as the precision of a mathematical demonstration. But he not only uses the language of ratio and proportion for the kind of precision appropriate to ethics, he also speaks of all actions that come from virtues of character as actions that hit the mean. This is easy to misunderstand, because readers tend to ignore the warning he gives almost as soon as he begins talking about the mean, that this sort of mean is also an extreme (1107a 6-8, 22-3). In fact, people rarely understand that this sort of mean is not quantitative at all. But taking it in a quantitative sense opens the way to identifying the mean with the mediocre, the middle of the road, or even middle-class morality, the sort of timidity that shies away from anything that might distinguish one from the crowd. But one of the things that Aristotle says hits the mean is courage, and he says plainly that there is no such thing as too much courage. Now one way to see how courage both is and is not a mean condition is to extend the mathematical language to a second dimension, and this is both accurate and helpful. There is no such thing as too much courage, but there is such a thing as too much confidence, just as there can be too little of it. Courage occupies a mean position on a scale of fearfulness and fearlessness. The sense in which courage is an extreme is on a different axis, one on which �12 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the person who has just the right amount of fear puts that attitude into action in the most excellent way. We might even liken this twodimensional scheme to the appearance of the west pediment at Olympia, on which Apollo occupies the middle position, but also towers over everyone else. Courage is like that. As I say, this is true and it helps one keep hold of Aristotle’s claim that the virtues are extremes of human character, but also stand in and aim at a mean. But for all that, this talk of measuring along two axes seems to me to be misleading in the most important respect. I can show how very simply. Just ask yourself if the power of Apollo over Centaurs and humans would be greater if he were taller. As it is, he towers over them, but the design could have been made in such a way that he dwarfed them, reduced them to puny insignificance. With a little bit of play in the imagination, I think you can see that this would destroy the sculpture’s effect. The designer of the pediment (who may have been someone named Alkamenes) wasn’t aiming at making Apollo as big as possible, but at making him extend the human stature just a little. The Centaurs are sub-human monsters; a gigantic Apollo would also be monstrous. The sculptor has not only placed Apollo in the middle of the horizontal array; he has also hit a mean along the vertical axis. All the power of the ensemble depends on getting the figures in a right relation to one another. As with the golden rectangle (and recall that the pediment originally sat on top of one), it is not a matter simply of adjusting Apollo’s height, but of forming a single design. Apollo’s height is a precise mean between a ridiculous shortness and a monstrous tallness, but that mean is also an extreme in the sense that it is unsurpassably right. But the way in which it is unsurpassably right is not quantitative. It is unsurpassably right in the design to which it belongs. It fits, and nothing else would. Liddell and Scott, the authors of the standard dictionary of ancient Greek, will tell you that aretê, the word for virtue, comes from the name of Ares, the god of war, but another school of thought derives it from a humble verb that means to fit together (arariskein), or be fitting—it may be related to a similar humble verb, from wood- SACHS 13 working (harmozein), from which we get our word harmony. Courage too, as Aristotle or any thoughtful person would explain it, comes not from the bloodthirstiness of the war god, but from recognizing what one’s circumstances call for and carrying it into action. Only when the circumstances are extreme, as they are for Patroclus or Hector, does courage call for the extreme risk, or sacrifice, of life, or perhaps, in the case of Achilles, for the sacrifice of revenge. At the end of the Iliad, the usual ways of confronting an enemy are no longer fitting, and Achilles recognizes that. The recognition that Hector’s body belongs to his father and to his city has nothing to do with anything quantitative. It is not arrived at by adjusting any sort of dial up from too little or down from too much. But it is a measured response to the situation that Achilles faces. It is geometrical equality that Achilles restores, by letting the dead man be given an appropriate funeral. It is dignity that he measures. Priam, the miserable wreck of an old man at Achilles’s feet, dominates his action in exactly the way Apollo dominates the Centaurs. In both cases, anger takes up a subordinate position in the design of the human soul. It finds its right proportion to the whole. On a list of the various meanings of the word logos preserved from Aristotle’s school by an ancient scholar (Theon of Smyrna), one of those meanings was the ratio of one who gives respect to the one who is respected. By looking at Apollo in his glory, or at Priam in his misery, we can begin to take our own measure. This kind of qualitative measurement is appropriately represented by ratios, because a ratio is not a quantity. A ratio limits a quantity. It is a revealing fact that we all have trouble remembering what Euclid means by greater ratio—that it is not the span of the interval between two magnitudes but the size of the first in relation to the second that he is referring to. A length, or an area, or a volume, or for that matter a weight is measured by its size or amount, but a ratio is something on a different order of things. We measure length by cutting it up and counting the pieces, but ratios do not admit that kind of treatment. Fractions do. Fractions are quantities but ratios are not. The nature of quantity is that of material. There �14 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW can always be more of it or less, arranged this way or that. And this way of looking at quantity helps one see that ratios belong to the realm not of material but of form. In the Odyssey, Odysseus tells a story that goes on for four long books. About two-thirds of the way through it he tries to stop and go to bed, but his hosts will not let him. He claims the story is taking too long to tell, and there is too much more of it, but they are spellbound and persuade him to go on. The king who speaks for them tells Odysseus that there is a morphê upon his words (XI, 367), meaning a shapeliness or gracefulness. This is one of the words that comes later to be used for “form” in an important philosophic sense. Odysseus need not measure his words by time or number, the king is telling him, because his hearers measure them by beauty and depth. A form does not merely surround its content with a shape. It transforms the material and makes it be what it is, through and through. And just as Alkinous praises Odysseus for the form of his story, Aristotle too, in his Poetics (Chap. 8, 1451a), praises Homer for knowing where to start and end an epic poem to make it be one story goverened by one action. What is the form that governs the story Odysseus tells the Phaiakians? Neither they nor we ever take that story to be a simple report of the events that Odysseus witnessed and took part in since the time he left Troy. It is a story formed or transformed by art. But if all stories that reshape events were lies, fiction would simply mean falsehood. Alkinous distinguishes Odysseus from the multitude of liars the dark earth breeds. His criterion is not easy to translate, but it is understandable to us because we too have heard Odysseus tell his story, and know exactly what he means. Lattimore makes Alkinous say that the liars make up stories from which no one could learn anything (XI, 366). The more usual translation has it that the lying stories are made up out of things no one could see, and this, in turn, either in the sense that all the human witnesses are dead, or in a deeper sense. Both translations are possible, and both capture something of what Alkinous is talking about. Odysseus is trying to get something out of the Phaiakians, but he is also letting them learn SACHS 15 from his experience, and they count that a fair exchange. Things that are literally false, contrary to fact, are redeemed from falsehood if they capture truth that goes beyond the merely factual. No one can go see if the story was accurate, but no sensible person would try to check it in that way, because its proper subject is something that cannot be seen. The story puts in front of the eyes of our imaginations things that are invisible. What is Odysseus’s story about? It is, first of all, full of fabulous beings, gods and monsters and people who live in strange ways. A question that is repeatedly asked, not with formulaic phrasing but with constant changes in its wording, is whether the characters that are about to be encountered are human, that is, dwelling on the earth and eaters of bread (VI, 8; IX, 89, 191). And even among those who are not immortal gods and monsters, some dwell under the earth and drink blood, some dwell in mountain caves and are cannibals, and some eat the lotus fruit and dwell in their own psyches. But these non-humans are not only a background against which the human form is displayed, they are constant temptations to the humans themselves. Some of the companions of Odysseus are seduced by the lotus into the oblivion of ignorance, but Odysseus himself is later seduced by the Sirens, toward the oblivion produced by the love of knowledge. On either side there is a loss of connectedness to the human community. And Odysseus’s story begins among the Kikones, where his men get drunk and reckless with success, and then, when their luck turns, lose six of their companions out of each of their twelve ships; his story ends among the cattle of Helios, where the men who are left, less than fifty of them on their one remaining ship, get hungry and reckless in misfortune, and lose their lives. In both overconfidence and despair their hungers become unmeasured by judgement. And again Odysseus too experiences the same dangers, in his different way. His hunger for recognition, when he has saved himself and his men from the Cyclops, results in a foolhardy judgement which brings him Poseidon’s curse, and turns victory into needless defeat; and this is followed by another foolhardy judgement, that he �16 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW could stay awake for ten straight days with the bag of winds, and arrive home the single-handed savior of his men. His hunger for glory is as deadly to his judgement as his companions’ hungers are to theirs. This break-down of judgement is again a loss of the connectedness of human community, since disproportionate hunger of any kind, whether from extreme self-indulgence or extreme need, brings isolation. After the fiasco with the bag of winds, Odysseus twice shows himself to us in isolation on top of mountains (X, 97 and 148), and this image surrounds his explicit comparison of a monstrous Laistrygonian to a mountain peak (X, 113), and echoes his earlier description of the Cyclops (IX, 187-92). Here is what Odysseus says when he narrates his first sight of the cave of Polyphemus: “Here a monster of a man bedded down, who now was herding his flocks alone and afar, for he did not mingle with others, but stayed away by himself, knowing no law, for he was formed as a wondrous monster, not like a man, an eater of bread, but like a wooded peak of the high mountains which stands out to view alone, apart from others.” In his outsmarting of the Cyclops, Odysseus displays the power that lets a puny human master a gigantic brute, but in his glorying Odysseus outsmarts himself, and ends up no better than a Cyclops. Finally, Odysseus is measured against the gods. This is most apparent in his verbal jousting with Athena when he awakens on Ithaca in Book XIII. She uses superhuman knowledge and magic to deceive and test and tease him, while he holds his own with his merely human skills, to her delight. “That’s my boy,” she says in effect, and he replies, in effect, “So where have you been for so long.” But this alliance of man and goddess as friendly rivals is not the one that is his true test. It is Kalypso who offers him the ultimate choice, to be her lover forever, while neither of them grows old, on an island that grows everything to delight the senses and requires no work. He chooses to go back into the sea, to work, to fight, to take chances, and ultimately to die. He does not talk about any of this in the story he tells the Phaiakians, though he had told SACHS 17 the king and queen the bare outline of it the day before. We know the story of Kalypso’s island from Homer’s telling of it, before we know how to understand it. It is Odysseus who puts it in context. From the time, early in Book X, when he comes down from the mountain on Circe’s island, the rest of Odysseus’s story is about his losing battle to win back the trust of his companions. “I am in no way like the gods,” he has said to Alkinous, “but count me equal to whomever you know among humans who bears the heaviest load of woe.” (VII, 208-212) But unlike another man who might say that, Odysseus had a choice, and chose human troubles. What he lost, with his companions, was more worthy of choice to him, than what he could gain from Kalypso’s gift. We make much of Achilles’s choice, to live a short and glorious life instead of a long and ordinary one, and pay less attention to Odysseus’s choice, to live not at ease forever but for a long but bounded time, amid troubles that will eventually come to an end. You probably know that the first word of the Iliad is wrath; of the Odyssey the first word is man. The shaping of the Iliad rises from the flare-up of Achilles’s wrath, to come to completion when that wrath itself finds its limit, not just in duration but in submission to a higher good; the wrathful, warlike side of human life finds its form and proportion within a larger whole. The Odyssey is formed in a different way. It starts in three places (Olympus, Ogygia, and Ithaca). It backs up, and proceeds for a while on parallel tracks, as we hear a story told and watch the interaction of the teller and hearers, and finally begins moving forward in its second half. But through and through, the form that shapes the Odyssey is the form of the human being, as it shows us a man travelling up to all the limits of what it is to be human, coming to know them, and choosing to remain within them. A participle in the fifth line of the poem (arnumenos), as it is usually translated, credits Odysseus for saving his life, but it has a richer meaning: he earned or achieved his life, proved worthy of it by learning that it was worthy of his choice. The Phaiakians understand his story, and honor his choice by making one in its image: they choose to risk their easy life by taking on �18 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW his troubles as their own, and their journey to Ithaca is their last carefree voyage. The first thing we hear about the Phaiakians is that they live far away from men who earn their bread (VI, 8), but the human form becomes visible to them in Odysseus, and draws them out of their isolation. In the west pediment at Olympia, human dignity is made visible in the figure of Apollo. In the toils and troubles of Odysseus at sea, human worth becomes apparent against a background of goddesses and monsters and bad choices. The beauty of the Phaiakians’ action is set against the perversion of the human image in the young suitors who have taken over Ithaca. The suitors are worse than the Centaurs at Olympia, who are simply appetites that have not yet come under control. The suitors have no respect for any man or woman (XXII. 414-15), and so they cannot be reformed. What they cannot recognize, they cannot take as formative. Their image, in their feasting, reflects that of the human pigs on Circe’s island; in their obliviousness to someone else’s home, it reflects that of the lotus eaters; and in their reasoning that Telemachus is about to become an obstacle to their pleasure and so, of course, should be killed, they are no different from the cannibal Cyclops. Odysseus knows what to do when immortality is offered to him, because he has learned to respect the claims of human need, and wants to redeem his loss of his companions, for which he bears not all, but enough, of the blame. And he will have to use the same standard to decide what to do about the suitors. But in Ithaca and abroad, in the story that surrounds that of Odysseus, there is a gallery of portraits of simple human dignity. They work on us to convey the power we respect in old people whose experience has brought them understanding. One of them is Nestor, who responds to strangers first by feeding them and only afterward asking whether they are pirates. (III. 69-74) Pre-eminent among these figures is Eumaeus, the swineherd, a victim of pirates; born the son of a king (XV 412), he was kidnapped and sold into . slavery, but came to accept his lot as the lowliest of servants with no bitterness (XIV 140-147). He balances the picture of life on Ithaca: . SACHS 19 as the suitors have turned a palace into a pig-sty, Eumaeus, with his courtesy and shrewd judgement, has turned a pig-sty into a place of gracious hospitality. Homer refers to him as the godlike swineherd (XIV 401, 413), and as the swineherd, first in the ranks of men . (XVII. 184). But surrounding and woven through all these portraits of age and wisdom is the un-regarded figure of Mentor. Odysseus had left him in charge in Ithaca (II. 225-7), but his power to rule rested on nothing but respect. With the invasion of the suitors, the foundation of civilized life on Ithaca collapsed, and in the resulting chaos we hardly notice Mentor, since he cannot fight, and barely raises his voice. He is glorified in the last line of the poem, when Athena, in a poetic equivalent of the sculpted figure of Apollo at Olympia, has put an end to the violent strife of people who are all alike (XXIV 543), making herself recognizable in the voice and liv. ing form of Mentor. These last words of the whole poem confirm our sense that its first word, man, is what it intends to reveal to us, and the final embodiment of that revelation is in a radiant presentation of a character so humble the poet had to compel us to notice him at all, a character whose dignity lives only in the medium of our respect, while that dignity, in turn, is the only foundation for shared human life. Homer makes us err, in overlooking Mentor, and come to ourselves in recognizing him, so that, in a small way, we mimic Odysseus’s journey. But if we are to take the human measure from Mentor, that must mean that he displays human excellence, and that would be a very strange claim to make. The poet Homer can play in a serious way by putting the kingly soul of Eumaeus in a position in which he has only pigs to rule over, and he can leave us with the vision of a goddess who makes a humble man resplendent, but neither of these figures seems to display any maximum of human possibility. Instead, what we seem to see in them is the last shred of dignity that cannot be taken away from any human being by any sort of mistreatment from others, but can only be lost by one’s own act. When �20 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Odysseus comes out of the sea alone on the island of the Phaiakians, he burrows under a pile of leaves. Here is the way Homer describes this action: “As when someone hides away a glowing ember in a black ash heap at the end of the earth, with no countrymen anywhere near, no others at all, saving the seed of fire in a place where there is no other source from which he could start a fire, so did Odysseus cover himself up with leaves.” (V 488-91) , Odysseus almost lost himself on his journey. And the thing that nearly smothered the last spark of humanity in him was his drive to excel. We are told in the third line of the poem that many were the people whose cities he saw and whose intellects he knew, and for Odysseus every new experience was a test. Seeing and knowing were never for their own sake for him. He was always taking the measure of any new places and their inhabitants, and that, for him, came to be for its own sake, continually to prove himself more than the equal of any kind of skill or strength or strategem, and worthy of respect from anything that exists that can pay respect. He wanted to go beyond anywhere others had been, to find every limit and surpass it. This fits a conventional understanding of excellence, but it makes no sense. It aims at nothing but beyond everything, so that the task is infinite and formless. To achieve excellence in this way is to measure oneself against what is measureless. Only a being of infinite capacity could be genuinely successful. One image of human finitude in the Odyssey is our need to sleep. The journey from Aeolia to Ithaca is long and hard, but achievable, but also just barely longer than anyone could stay awake for. With a dangerous cargo like the bag of winds, a sensible captain will have to admit his own limits to himself, and take someone else into his confidence, but Odysseus does not permit himself such weakness. That stubbornness costs him more than nine years of trouble, and eventually costs every one of his companions his life. When we see Odysseus give way to sleep again, the meaning is exactly the opposite of the former occasion. His sleep brings to an end his efforts to persuade his SACHS 21 comrades, and they eat forbidden meat and die; they decide that they are no heroes, and cannot hold out indefinitely against hunger. Afterward, Odysseus never ceases to defend them. But it is usually not his companions themselves that he refers to, but the common lot of human beings that he discovered by paying attention to them. No less than six times he lectures people about the cursed belly, and the things its need can drive people to (VII. 215-21; XV . 343-5; XVII. 286-9, 473-4; XVIII. 53-4; XIX. 71-4). The man who once despised weakness in himself is now the fierce defender of those whose strength fails them. His rejection of the offer of immortality is in part a gesture of solidarity with his companions, and his disguise as a beggar on Ithaca in some way displays the truth. In front of the Phaiakians, Odysseus could have told his story to present himself as the hero of Troy, the most important man in the world, but he chooses instead to make his loss and his need central. He tells one of the suitors “Nothing feebler than a human being does the earth sustain, of all the things that breathe and crawl on the earth” (XVIII, 130-1), using the same adjective he chose when telling Kalypso “I know very well that thoughtful Penelope is feebler than you in both form and stature” (V 215-17). He has learned , to see what is fragile in us and in need of protection as having a higher claim on his effort than any extraordinary achievements that might extend human glory. But the radiant dignity conferred on Mentor at the poem’s end, and glowing from within Eumaeus in its midst, is not the whole of the human image either. There is also heroic action that is not ambitious for glory but called forth in defence of what is dignified but weak. In Aristotle’s ethics the word that names human dignity is spoudê, seriousness, the quality that is apparent in certain exceptional people who know what to take seriously. But in the Odyssey the focus is on aidôs, respect, the quality present in all of us that enables us to recognize dignity. Respect can take the place of force, and can bind together a community, establishing the conditions of life under which the things that have seriousness and dignity can be given their due. The actions that embody respect constitute what �22 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Aristotle calls distributive justice, the paying of what is due not merely in the quantitative medium of money but by reference always to the qualitative medium of honor. In a just community, according to Aristotle, there will never be simple equality, but rather proportional equality, actions and titles and gestures that make evident what different people deserve. And this is what Socrates called geometrical equality, since it requires an act of seeing rather than one of calculating. In the Odyssey, our seeing is put to work most vividly beyond the world in which we live and make choices, envisioning the Cyclops, the passage between Scylla and Charybdis, or Odysseus lashed to the mast while the Sirens sing, but as in the west pediment at Olympia, these figures depicted as outwardly visible display the shape of the invisible human soul. The soul that Homer lets us recognize as unsurpassably right in its ordering is the one that we see in the hero in rags, in his feeble old father in armor (XXIV 513-25), . in the boy who calls an assembly of adults, in the woman who neutralizes the strength of 108 men (XVI. 245-51) and stops time itself for four years by unweaving every night what she wove by day (II. 94-110). It is the human balance in which strength has reason to give way to weakness, and weakness has resources to find strength. It is the human mean that can live only within a community. The best human life is a topic that demands philosophic reflection, but such reflection would not be possible if one could not, in the first place, simply see its form. NOTE: The central importance in the Odyssey of the respectful attitude aidôs that makes human communities possible is something I first learned by reading Mary Hannah Jones’s senior essay, “A First Reading of the Odyssey,” included in the collection of St. John’s College Prize Papers, 1977-78. SACHS 23 �24 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 25 Plato and the Measure of the Incommensurable Part II. Plato’s New Measure: The Mathematical Meaning of the Indeterminate Dyad Amirthanayagam David I shall argue that the controversial developments—some would say the reversals—in Plato’s later metaphysical outlook were in fact an inspired response to some truly epochal developments in the mathematics of his day; in particular, to certain seminal advances in the theory of the irrational. Following on my reading of the geometry lesson at Theaetetus 147, and of its significance for that dialogue and for the Sophist and the Politicus, I can now shed light on one of the most obscure notions associated with Plato, a thing known to Aristotle as the “indeterminate dyad.” The discovery and description of this remarkable object—remarkable, all right, yet thoroughly nonmystical and mathematically legitimate—can be seen as the motive force behind some of the arguments and constructs in the late dialogue Philebus. In interpreting the ancient testimony, my reconstruction demonstrates that the mathematical meaning of the late Platonic metaphysics was either not transmitted to, or simply lost on, the successors of Plato and their critic Aristotle. But where the philosophers strayed, the mathematicians found a fruitful path: the conclusion to the work started by Theaetetus and Plato finds a home of concision and elegance in the mathematics of Euclid’s Book X. A historian of ancient philosophy may have to distinguish in future between the academics who inherited Plato’s arguments, and the mathematicians who understood them. �26 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Perhaps the best evidence for a revision, radical or not, in Plato’s thought comes from Aristotle’s intellectual biography in Metaphysics A. He there refers to a kaí flsteron, an “even afterwards” in Plato’s career (987b1). The passage is explicit that there was a before and an after in Plato’s thinking which was not apparently defined by the death of Socrates. What is more, the change was apparently of some considerable moment; the whole force of the expression is in the kaí; Plato is said to have accepted the premise of universal flux espoused by Cratylus and the Heracliteans, even afterwards. The theory of sensation we have discussed in the Theaetetus is an example of his new approach to an old premise, an approach based on a new mathematics of measurement. At one time during the geometry lesson in the Meno, Socrates counsels the slave boy, who is trying to find the line from which a square the double of a given square is generated, “if you do not care to count it out, just point out what line it comes from (e£ m± boúlei ¡rivmeîn, ¡llà deîxon ¡pò poía$, 84a).” This is the vintage Socratic irony, a playful but possibly sinister half-telling: there is in fact no straightforward way to count out such a line with the same unit measures that count off the side of the given square. In a passage that means to inspire confidence in our ability to learn, Socrates hints at a shadowy impediment that lurks, even as the slave boy triumphs. This problem of incommensurability was the bane of measurement science—metrhtik≠, that science which assigns number to continuous magnitude—perhaps onwards from the time of Pythagoras. Measurement prò$ ållhla, or mutual measurement, the reciprocal subtraction (¡nvufaíresi$) of two magnitudes, came to an end or limit (péra$) at the common measure of these magnitudes; but if the magnitudes were incommensurable, the process of subtracting the less from the greater, and then the remainder from the less, would continue indefinitely (i.e., it was unlimited, åpeiron). Such everyday magnitudes as the diagonals of squares with countable sides were årrhton, inexpressible, or DAVID 27 ålogon, irrational, in terms of those sides, an embarrassment to any serious measurement science. The in-betweenness of irrational lengths with respect to rational (countable) ones—in the Meno, Socrates takes pains to show by a narrowing process that the required length, the side of an eightfoot square, lies somewhere in between two and three feet (83ce)—may have been the clue to a new approach. Plato’s Stranger proposes a new branch of measurement science in the Politicus (283d ff.); alongside measurement prò$ ållhla, there is now to be measurement prò$ t±n toû metríou génesin, measurement toward the generation of the mean. I have suggested that Theaetetus’ seemingly humble classification of roots (Theaetetus 147c ff.) was the ultimate inspiration for this formulation; his novel use of the mean proportional allows number and magnitude (the phenomena of arithmetic and geometry) to be subsumed successfully under a revitalised and heuristic measurement science. “’Squaring’ is the finding of the mean (› tetragwnismò$ mésh$ eflresi$, De Anima 413a20),” and he who defines it this way, says Aristotle, is showing the cause of the fact in his definition. To square a given rectangle, one has to find the mean proportional between the lengths of its sides. Theaetetus distinguishes between two kinds of length as sides of squares: a mêko$ is the length of a side of a square number (4, 9, 16, etc.), the mean proportional (or geometric mean) between the unit and a square number; a dúnami$ is the side of a square equal to a rectangular number (2, 3, 5, 6, etc.)—i.e., the geometric mean between the unit and a rectangular number—which is incommensurable with the unit in length (m≠kei) but commensurable with it in square (dunámei). Taken by itself, this classification is hardly more than a new way of naming the phenomena of measurement science. Even at this stage, however, the roots of non-square numbers, formerly irrational and intractable, have become more expressible (@htá); they are at least commensurable in square. A third category can now be envisioned—incommensurability in length and in square— so that where we had a polar division of opposites (rational-irra- �28 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW tional), now we have an enumeration of the phenomena: rational, expressible, irrational. But the true mathematical utility of this re-classification lies in the lucid quality of the geometric mean. We recall that for any interval, this mean can be approximated in length by interpolating successive pairs of arithmetic and harmonic means within the given extremes. Since in a rational interval, like that between the unit and a non-square number, the interpolated means are also rational, and since they define an evanescent sequence of rational intervals around the same geometric mean, the incommensurable roots of non-square numbers can now be systematically approximated with numbers of their own. Each of these lengths, which we nowadays call √2, √3, √5, etc., is approximated as a geometric mean by one or more series, each unique and infinite, of arithmetic and harmonic means, which give better and better rational over- and under-estimates (respectively) of each incommensurable length. Though the geometric mean is never reached, each successive pair of interpolations reduces the interval containing it by more than half, so that each of the approximating extremes approaches closer than any given difference to the mean (by Euclid’s X.1). Hence the process is unlimited in its degree of accuracy. The uniqueness of each of these “dyadic series,” corresponding to each of the incommensurable roots, is the key to their achievement. Numbers may now be introduced, in a mathematically useful and rigorous way, to describe the lengths of these roots. Measurement science can thereby fulfil its mission, once paralysed in these cases, to number the greater and the less. Irrational roots are no longer vaguely “in between”: each dyad of interpolated means defines all rational lengths, whole or fractional, than which a particular incommensurable root is greater, and all than which it is less. Since the “dyadic interval” can be made to shrink indefinitely, these incommensurable lengths have been uniquely measured in terms of a given unit, as uniquely as any commensurable length. A rational length is measured by one number, a “one many,” a single collection of so- and so-many units (and fractional parts). DAVID 29 These lengths are therefore measured both absolutely and relatively in terms of the unit length; one can answer the question, “How many is it?” with respect to them. An irrational but expressible length, on the other hand, is measured by a series of pairs of numbers, a unique but “unlimited” or “indeterminate” dyad (¡óristo$ dúa$). Such lengths are only relatively measured in terms of the unit; for them, one cannot answer the question “How many is it?” with a definite number, but one can always answer the question, “Is it greater or less than this many?” There are now two ways in which number can be applied to continuous magnitude—with a normal ¡rivmó$ measured by the unit, or an indeterminate dyad of such ¡rivmoí—so that both the diagonal and the side of a square can be “counted off ” in terms of the same unit length. The original significance of the unit and the indeterminate dyad can now be recognised in the context of the new branch of measurement science: the former, already a principle and product of the existing branch, measurement prò$ ållhla—for the unit is the measure of all commensurable magnitudes, and the ultimate result of the reciprocal subtraction of commensurable quantities— is a measure of all rational means (including the roots of square numbers). The latter is a way of measuring all the expressible geometric means (the roots of rectangular numbers); it is a principle and product unique to the new branch, measurement toward the generation of the mean, for paired interpolation represents a way to “generate” an expressible geometric mean numerically, and the resulting indeterminate dyad of greater and lesser values is a precise and exhaustive way to locate an expressible length within the scale of the rational continuum. The unit and the indeterminate dyad, the respective measures of rational and expressible means, are therefore rightly conceived as the two proper principles of that science which approaches measurement through the construction of means. * * * * * * �30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW In the Philebus (23c ff.), Socrates proposes a four-part division of all beings. The first two segments cover the limited and the unlimited, the once all-embracing Pythagorean pair of opposites. The third division encompasses those beings produced by the mixture of the polar principles; this mixed category represents the distinctive late Platonic innovation in ontological thinking, outlined also in the Sophist (see 252e). A fourth division is enumerated to cover the cause of the mixing in the category of mixed beings. At first glance, the mathematical subtext of this classification seems fairly straightforward. The unlimited stands for continuous magnitude, that which admits of being greater or less (24e); the limited stands for number and measure (25a-b). The mixed class stands, as could be expected, for continuous phenomena that admit of measurement or a scale: Socrates mentions music, weather, the seasons, and “all beautiful things (Øsa kalà pánta, 26a-b).” The demiurge of the Timaeus, who constructs a cosmic musical scale out of elements he has mixed (35b ff.), could be seen as a mythical archetype of the fourth kind of being, the cause of mixing. The mixer is also a measurer. Certain peculiarities in Plato’s presentation suggest, however, that it is motivated by the developments in ancient measurement theory that I have described. First of all, the distinction made between the limited and the unlimited is virtually analytic. This would not be necessary for a distinction between number and magnitude, because of the phenomenon of commensurability. But the class of the more and the less, the pair which characterises the unlimited, is said to disallow the existence of definite quantity; if it were to allow quantity (posón) and the mean (tò métrion) to be generated in the seat of its domain (‰drˆ ™ggenésvai), the moreand-less themselves (a dual subject in Plato’s Greek) would be made to wander from the place where they properly exist (24c-d). The class of the unlimited therefore stands for the greater-and-less qua greater and less, those magnitudes which refuse numerical measurement of any kind, like the radically incommensurable lengths DAVID 31 (commensurable neither in length nor in square). The class of the limited, on the other hand, is said to cover only those things which admit of everything opposite to the more-and-less (toútwn dè tà ™nantía pánta decómena): prôton mèn tò ªson kaì £sóthta, metà dè tò ªson tò diplásion kaì pân Øtiper ∂n prò$ ¡rivmòn ¡rivmò$ ˚ métron ˜ prò$ métron... (25a-b) first the equal and equality, and after the equal the double and everything whatever which is a number in relation to a number or a measure to a measure. The limited is therefore the class of commensurable magnitude. Is the distinction between limited and unlimited then a descriptive one based on that between number and magnitude, or really an analytic one between two kinds of magnitude, the commensurable and the incommensurable? The mixed class is also described as the class (£déa) of the equal and the double (25d); this means it must be meant to include within it the whole class of the limited or commensurable. One could have expected this if it corresponds to a class of scalable magnitudes. But Socrates goes on to add this curious category to its domain: ...kaì ›pósh paúei prò$ ållhla t¡nantía diafórw$ ®conta, súmmetra dè kaì súmfwna ™nveîsa ¡rivmòn ¡pergázetai (25d-e) also so much of a class as stops things which are opposites, differently disposed to one another, and fashions them into things commensurable and harmonious by putting in number. �32 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW This function appears to be unique to the mixed kind of being. Since only incommensurable things can be made commensurable, the unlimited did indeed signify the incommensurable, as was surmised; and the class mixed from the limited and the unlimited appears to include a new species not found in either apart, which makes incommensurable magnitudes commensurable by “putting in” or “inserting” (™ntívhmi) number. With somewhat uncharacteristic acuity, Protarchus understands Socrates to mean that certain constructions (or “generations,” genései$) follow from the mixing of the Pythagorean opposites (25e). (This interchange seems to be a single Platonic exposition split between two speakers. The author better remembers his dramatic premises when, within less than a Stephanus page, he has Protarchus suddenly express his unsureness about what Socrates could have meant by the members of the third class.) The two ways of measuring magnitude in terms of a single unit length, by means of a number or an indeterminate dyad of numbers, correspond to the two classes which make up Socrates’ third category. In particular, the second way of measuring corresponds to that construction described above which is unique to the mixed category. Both take up magnitudes that were formerly irreconcilable, subsumed by an opposition of greater to less—i.e., incommensurables belonging to the category of the unlimited—and make them concordant and commensurable by “inserting number.” But neither of them does this in such a way as thereby to reduce these magnitudes to the class of the limited. Rather, certain lengths turn up in the measurement of magnitude, incommensurable as such but commensurable in square, that call forth a peculiar application of number, one which inserts greater and lesser values in such a way that they become more and more equal. This use of numbers comes to light only in measurement science, and hence only in the mixed category of beings; it does not suggest itself in the operations of pure arithmetic, the science of the class of the limited (governing numerable, discrete quanta and their formal equivalents, like commensurable lengths). An indeterminate dyad is a numerical description of DAVID 33 a peculiar kind of length, neither irrational nor rational, but belonging to a third analytic class called “expressible.” The mathematical subtext of Socrates’ proposal therefore runs as follows: the distinction between unlimited, limited, and mixed is, after all, a descriptive one based on that between magnitude, number, and measured magnitude. But when Socrates attempts to bring unity to each category, drawing together into one (e£$ ‰n, 25a, 25d, etc.) the beings subsumed by each, he employs a threepart analytic distinction that applies properly to magnitude alone. That is to say, he brings unity to each of the three realms—number, magnitude, and measured magnitude—by describing each of them in terms of the particular kind of length, the particular kind of one-dimensional magnitude, which uniquely characterises it. Hence the class of the unlimited is not just the class of the greaterand-less, but the class which positively rejects numerical description, like that of the radically incommensurable lengths. (The analogy is strict, for recall that this class is said to reject from its own rightful seat both definite quantity (posón) and the mean (tò métrion); on my reconstruction, this means it rejects the only two ways of counting lengths, either with a single number, or with an indeterminate dyad of numbers that approximate a geometric mean.) The class of the limited, likewise, is not just the class of numerable things, things which can be expressed as ratios of a number to a number, but also the class of certain kinds of magnitude, those which can be expressed as ratios of a measure to a measure, for commensurable lengths share all the properties of numbers. Hence the distinction between magnitude and number (unlimited and limited) can be reduced to a distinction between two kinds of line. And finally, the mixed class, or the class of the scale, though it includes within it the class of the limited, comes to be characterised by a use of numbers and a kind of magnitude which are each unique to it. These are the indeterminate dyad and the lengths which it measures, once incommensurable but now made “expressible” by the insertion of number. The expressible �34 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW roots form a third analytic possibility within the field of onedimensional extension, alongside rational and irrational lines. The reductionist spirit of Socrates’ analysis is in the best traditions of ancient mathematics. To reduce one problem to another is of course heuristic of a solution, but the process can also be useful in definitions and classifications. An example has been given in Aristotle’s reduction of the problem of squaring to that of finding a mean proportional line. One effect of Euclid’s proposition II.14, which contains a solution to Aristotle’s reduced problem, is in turn to reduce a comparison in magnitude between any rectilinear figures to a comparison between squares, and hence to a comparison in one dimension, between square roots. A later and particularly virtuosic example is to be found in Apollonius’ use of the three kinds of application of area upon lines, the parabolic, hyperbolic, and elliptic, to both name and define the three kinds of conic section. In Plato’s case, the distinctions between his ontological realms of the unlimited, limited, and mixed—two of which, as opposites, had had a long-standing currency in metaphysical thinking—have been reduced to the distinctions between the three kinds of line studied in the new measurement science: irrational lines that are incommensurable both in length and in square; rational lines that are commensurable both in length and in square; and the expressible lines that are incommensurable in length, but commensurable in square. This analysis is also in the spirit of the “enumerative” method Socrates had earlier set out (16c-17a). One is to seek out the form (£déa) which lends unity to a field of phenomena, and then seek out those things measured by this hypothetical unit-form (i.e., those phenomena which are “numbers” if the original form is taken as a unit). The method intends to be self-correcting, for one is enjoined in turn to analyse the original unit (tò kat ¡rcà$ ‰n, 16d) in the same way that one has analysed the enumerated phenomena, to see “how many” it might actually be. A converse procedure is equally espoused in the case of a science like grammar (18a-d): when the datum seems unlimited or continuous, as does the phenomenon of DAVID 35 human vocalisation, one is first to discover the numbers into which it naturally divides, which govern pluralities such as those marked out by the distinction between vowels and consonants, before one proceeds to analyse these further into their units. There may be an analogy here with modern analyses in terms of “sets,” which also presume that things need to be sorted before they can be counted or related. Euclid’s definition of ratio (V requires a relation of .3) kind between the compared terms. Even the infinite field of number itself is nowadays divided in such a way that unitary types may be distinguished (“Reals” over “Rationals” and “Irrationals”) while individual members remain both infinite and infinitely instantiatable. An “enumerative theory of forms” would seem to reflect the ontological and epistemological implications of the interdependence of sorting, on the one hand, and counting or measuring on the other. The new Socratic method is developed as an explicit reaction to the Parmenidean or Pythagorean type of thinker—but also, perhaps, to the early Plato—who analyses everything in terms of opposed principles like the one and the many or the limited and the unlimited, and fails to articulate the crucial phenomena that are ordered, like numbers, in between such opposites. Hasty and simplistic analysis in terms of opposites is said to characterise arguments that are made eristically, while the enumerative method, the method that discovers the numbers of things and their ordered relations, characterises the truly dialectical approach (17a). Socrates had earlier made it clear (14d-15c) that the familiar paradoxes of the one and the many were no longer his concern. Any lazy riddler could prove that an individual like Protarchus, or a thing made up of parts, was at the same time one and many. It was the possibility of formal unity, in the face of the sensible births and deaths of numberless individuals, the unity that is asserted of things in discourse—whether of “man” or of “ox” or of the beautiful or the good—that was of vital philosophical interest. Did any such units exist? How might they persist as individuals? And how is it that they partake of the infinite multiplicity of things that come into being? The genuineness of these perplexities calls forth �36 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW his enumerative approach, a philosophical pathway that Socrates says he had ever loved, but which had often deserted him in the past (16b). The method is hard, but the results can apparently be astonishing; all the achievements of the arts (técnai) are said to have been discovered on this road (16c). The implications of this method, shot through as it is with the influence of the burgeoning measurement science, are staggering for the “classical” Plato. Consider that we are here hypothesizing the existence of forms as measures, enumerating phenomena in terms of a posited unit-form, and then examining the posited unit, presumably against the phenomena themselves, to check for its possible plurality. The method itself is therefore mixed, in such a way as to cancel Plato’s earlier formulations. Neither is this the unhypothetical reasoning from forms to forms, whatever that may have meant in The Republic, nor is it a reasoning from unquestioned hypotheses, in the manner of synthetic geometry. The once eternal forms, the objects and immutable guarantors of knowledge, have become provisional and heuristic. God is said to have made all beings out of the one and the many with the limited and the unlimited as innate possessions (16c). This would tend to insure that all phenomena will be inherently numerable, and hence to guarantee their susceptibility to an enumerative method; we shall find the unifying form, for it is in there (eflr≠sein gàr ™noûsan, 16d). It is as though the pairs of opposed ontological elements, once the principles of the eristic disputations, have now been “re-packaged” in the premises, made the condition for the possibility of an enumerable reality. Inasmuch as it was Aristotle’s understanding (Metaphysics M.4, 1078b12) that the theory of forms was invented in the first place to account for our sense of dependable knowledge in the face of a Heraclitean flux—and note that the premise of a reality in flux is still accepted at Philebus 43a—it seems that this theory has now been modified to make sense not so much of our ability to know as of our ability to count. And this change of purpose is sparked in turn by a renewed confidence in this sovereign ability, in light of Theaetetus’ successful attack on DAVID 37 the irrational. Number had at last been restored to some of her Pythagorean glory, as a measure of the things that are, that they are, and the things that are not, that they are not, and what is more, of the things in between. The victory here was sweet indeed, for the irrational square roots were recovered from the domain of flux and incommensurability on the very terms by which this domain is distinguished. The indeterminate dyad is both a measurement and a process of measurement: interpolating means between means involves a measurer and a thing measured which are continually changing, just as in the Heraclitean or Protagorean contentions; yet this process of itself yields a unique measure of the fixed mean proportional between the interpolated means, and makes expressible and commensurable the once irrational root of a rectangular number. Indeed, this process of measuring or counting in an indeterminate dyad has proved to be revelatory of form, in the sense that it creates the class of the expressible and defines the mixed category of being. On the one hand, things need to be sorted before they can be counted, and hence the knowledge of form has primacy over measurement, and the ability to count depends upon the ability to know. But it would seem in this case that the act of measurement can itself be disclosive of form, and hence that knowing can depend on counting. There appears therefore to be a dialectical relationship between sorting and counting, which is reflected in a self-correcting, enumerative theory of forms. This methodology of the Philebus can be seen as reincorporating certain aspects of the Pythagorean, in the sense that once again, knowledge has become coordinated with measurement, and to know something is in some sense to comprehend its number. Confidence in the grounds of an enumerative approach to the sensible world—a confidence that may once have deserted Socrates in the face of an irrational diameter, leading him, with Meno’s honest slave, to the abyss of irony—can allow that significant guarantees of veracity will come from the method itself. There are, for example, different ways to “count” or measure a phenomenon, �38 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW each of them legitimate, based on the premises and aims of the investigator, as the several alternate divisions of the sophist and the statesman make clear. One measure of the truth of a hypothesis, that such-and-such a form is a genuine unit, must, under this method, be the economy and scope of the enumeration it affords, as a unit in fact. A criterion for a successful articulation, a guarantor that a dialectical enumeration corresponds to a real one in the world, must therefore be the elegance of that articulation, in terms of the economy of means and breadth of cover which problemsolving mathematicians have always striven for in the concrete practice of their art. Indeed, it is an informed sense of respect for developments and concrete formulations in the arts that seems to move the older Plato. In the spheres of grammar and music, for example, although it appears that an abstract analysis in terms of opposites, in the manner of the sofoí, may to some extent be applied in the interpretation of phenomena, by itself such abstract analysis simply does not make you much of a useful theorist (17b-c). An investigation into the numbers and kinds of sounds, on the other hand, or an enumeration of the different scales and modes and the vagaries of rhythm—these, it seems, can truly render you wiser than the common run, in music and in grammar. Behind this sensitivity of Plato’s to the enumerative and the concrete aspects of the arts, as against the approach through dogmatic first principles, may rest his experience of the dramatic changes in the mathematics of his day. A distinction like that between the rational and the irrational, which must have seemed as basic to the science as that between odd and even numbers—an eternal, immutable opposition, seemingly a part and principle of the order of things—was made obsolete by the emergence into history of a new formulation through the mind of a single, brilliant practitioner. Recall that Theaetetus’ reforms began very humbly on the level of classification and definition: he makes the distinction between square and non-square the basic one for number, beyond the distinctions between, say, odd and even or prime and compos- DAVID 39 ite. But of itself this suggests a new way to approach the measurement of lengths, as geometric means, and this further yields, or reveals, a third, formally distinct category of magnitude called expressible. Experiencing this revolutionary development, as witness or participant, must lead a thinker away from a view of tà mavhmatiká as eternal, innate verities that can be investigated and learned as though by recollection, towards a view of mathematics that must acknowledge the importance and ingenuity of the problem-solver in situ, together with the power of classifications, definitions and measurements to reveal, or to obscure, the fundamental nature of their objects. As the traditional theory of forms and the doctrine of mávhsi$ ¡námnhsi$ can be seen as responding to the ontology and epistemology of the earlier geometry, so can a selfcorrecting, enumerative theory of forms be seen as a response to the ontological and epistemological implications of the new mathematics and a dynamic measurement science. Insofar as other arts aspire to the mathematical, the new philosophical outlook must also apply to them; although, to be fair, the provisional, enumerative approach would have long since guided the formulations of practitioners in music and grammar, without a felt need for a mathematical paradigm or a philosopher’s blessing. Perhaps one should credit Plato only with waking up to the new realities of science and art around him, much in the spirit of later revolutions in philosophy. One need not qualify, however, one’s estimate of the implications of this change of view for Plato’s political thought; they are as great as the differences between the Republic and the Laws. In this vein, while Plato’s guardians had learnt their lessons and then interpreted the world, so that nature and politics alike would have been for them a kind of applied mathematics, Plato’s statesman is of an altogether different mould of mathematician. He is a problem solver, in amongst it like a navigator or a physician, who must be able to adapt his laws to suit changing conditions, or improve upon his formulations to serve the present (see Politicus 295c ff., 300c). It is of course notorious that the guardians’ inability to solve a problem—the numbering of love, and �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 40 its irrational quantities—leads inexorably to the degeneration of their regime. * * * * * * In Metaphysics N, Aristotle introduces his redaction and criticism of the Platonist (or Academic) metaphysics with this statement: “All thinkers make the principles opposites (pánte$ dè poioûsi tà$ ¡rcà$ ™nantía$, 1087a30).” There appear to have been various schools of thought among Academic ontologists, all of whom posited the unit as a first principle or “element,” but each of whom disagreed as to the nature of the opposite principle, whether it was the “greater-and-less” or the “unequal” or “plurality”. Aristotle makes short shrift of all these formulations, as they treat affections and attributes and relative terms as substances (1088a16). In N.2, he mentions a group who posit the indeterminate dyad as the opposed element, as a way of getting around some difficulties in the other versions; but it is still a relative principle, and in addition, all these formulations fall to Aristotle’s argument that eternal things simply cannot be composed of elements (1088b28-35). Aristotle then feels, before he adumbrates his own approach to ontology, that he must explain why these thinkers ever came up with formulations so narrow and forced, constrained as they are by the dogma of opposed principles (1088b35 ff.). His answer is that they had framed the problem of ontological multiplicity in an oldfashioned way (¡rcaikô$, 1089a1-2), for they were still arguing in response to certain paradoxes of Parmenides. The implications of this reconstruction of recent intellectual history are decisive both for our sense of Aristotle’s access to Plato, and for our knowledge of Academic thought and its relation to Plato. All the Academics, and thus Plato as well, are said to reason about existence in terms of an opposed pair of first principles—always the unit and something else; they do this under the direct influence of Parmenides, perhaps as part of a tradition of arguing against certain eristic dogmas of his, such as the one which Aristotle quotes: DAVID 41 o∞ gàr m≠pote toûto dam˜, e–nai m± ™ónta For this may never be enforced, that things which are not, are. These thinkers are said to have felt that the possibility of multiplicity in the world would be threatened unless Parmenides were refuted, and some other thing than unity or being were allowed to exist. This was the origin of the “relative” principles that stood opposite the unit. The unit and the indeterminate dyad, on this scheme of Aristotle’s, are but one alternative among several pairs of first principles proposed by different Academic philosophers. The first thing to note is that the Philebus itself is Plato’s direct and unambiguous criticism of the ontological reasoning based on two opposed principles, in favour of a technical, empirical, enumerative approach. From the perspective of philosophical method, the dialogue can hardly be said to have any other point. Plato conceived of his enumerative method as a more illuminating and more useful way of articulating phenomena, which comes to yield significant new categories in the analysis of being (e.g., the mixed one and the cause of mixing). No further clue seems to be necessary for the conclusion: Aristotle, somehow or another, has entirely missed the point of Plato’s late formulations, by classing them with the type that Plato himself characterises as eristic rather than dialectical, and from which he most particularly wants to distinguish his own. The next point, however, is that there must actually have been a vigorous tradition of thought which both preceded Plato and outlasted him in his own Academy, characterised by the use of opposites as first principles. To believe so much is the only way to attach any seriousness to Aristotle’s redaction. This tradition originates with Parmenides, and must once have included Plato in its ranks, again if one is to pay any respect to Aristotle’s judgement. But Plato came to argue against such thinkers not only in the Philebus, but also in the Sophist, where they are called “the friends of the forms (o‹ tôn e£dôn fíloi, 248a).” These were the lat- �42 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW ter-day champions of eternal, immutable, unmixing forms, the kind of weary theoretical construct that is often now taught as Platonism. When the differences seem so clear, the question must become: How could Plato’s new “mixed” ontology have come to be confused with the old-fashioned approach through polar principles? Recall that on my reading of the Philebus, there are for Plato three ontological realms apart from the agent of cause. The first is the realm of the limit, the realm of arithmetic, whose principle is the unit. The second is the realm of the unlimited; its principle, analytically opposed to the unit, is the dual greater-and-less, the principle of irrational flux. The third realm is that of the mixed beings, which I have interpreted as the realm of measurable things. Its principles are two, and reflect the two ways that magnitudes may be numbered or made commensurable, absolutely in terms of the unit or relatively (but uniquely) by an indeterminate dyad. The thing to note is that the unit appears as a principle twice in this scheme, opposed in two different ways to two different things. The distinction between the unit and the greater-and-less is strictly analytic, and belongs squarely in the Parmenidean tradition; whereas the distinction between the unit and the indeterminate dyad is merely descriptive, serving to recognise ways of applying numbers inside the sphere of measurement that happen not to arise in arithmetic. The unit and the dyad are therefore not opposites; they are simply different. If a thinker in the Parmenidean tradition, or a historian of the Parmenidean tradition, were to interpret Plato’s scheme in light of their own practices, or to force it into a Parmenidean mould to flatter a historical premise, the conflation of the two distinctions would be an inevitable result. If the Philebus could not be consulted—if it were ågrafo$ in the sense “unpublished”—no recourse could be had to the original reasoning; but even if there were such recourse, Plato’s three realms of number, magnitude, and measure, and the important differences between the distinctions unit/greater-and-less and unit/indeterminate dyad, could only be understood in light of DAVID 43 an underlying mathematical paradigm, as I have argued. Such a thinker or such a historian would not be likely to know or to care about the analytic possibilities in one dimension. (This is as much as to say, he would not know what was meant by the indeterminate dyad.) He will look for the polar principles in any ontological scheme; at best he will see that the indeterminate dyad must connote something different from the greater-and-less, as the principle chosen to stand opposite the unit. But he will never envision a scheme that encompasses both oppositions. The question next to ask is whether it was his Academic sources, or whether it was Aristotle himself who did not understand the mathematical meaning of the indeterminate dyad. There is intriguing evidence in Metaphysics M and N for the latter interpretation. It would seem that his sources were in the dark about this too; but whatever one concludes about the Academy, there is evidence that Aristotle had Plato’s accounts at hand either to quote or to paraphrase, and that he could not make sense of them. In N.1 (1087b7 ff.), Aristotle mentions a group of thinkers who attempt to generate the numbers, o‹ ¡rivmoí, from the “unequal dyad of the great and small,” taken as a material principle in relation to the formal “one,” and someone else who would generate them from the principle of plurality. (He probably intends, respectively, the followers of Plato and Speusippus.) The generation of numbers does not seem to have been a concern of Plato’s, however; the “problem” of multiplicity, or of how things can be both one and many, which when posed by Parmenides might have led his successors to theorise in the abstract about the generating of numbers, seems to be regarded in the Philebus (14c-15a, 16c-17a) as merely a staple of the eristic paradoxes, now subsumed within the premises of Socrates’ concrete enumerative approach. Which is to say, it appears that Plato is no longer so interested in number theory as he is in simply counting. I am therefore inclined to think that neither the above-mentioned group nor the ‘someone else’ represents Plato’s line of argument, or Plato’s understanding of the unequal dyad. Aristotle bears this out by going on immediately to mention �44 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW an individual who speaks of the one and the unequal dyad as ontological elements (1087b9), thereby distinguishing him from the group who had used them (afterwards, I presume) as formal and material elements in the generation of numbers. Aristotle’s complaint about this individual is that he does not make the distinction that the unequal dyad of great and small is one thing in formula (lóg¨), but not in number (¡rivmõ). Why would not Plato have made this distinction? The unequal dyad is not one thing in formula alone: the successive pairs of interpolated numbers relate uniquely to one object as well, the side of the square that is their single geometric mean. Further, since it consists of successively more equal sides of a single rectangular number, the dyad can quite emphatically and strikingly be said to be of one number, with a rationale that Aristotle might have appreciated if he had been more familiar with the construction. On this model of progressively “equalised” rectangular numbers, we have a transparent motivation for the original formulation of terms like “unequal,” “indeterminate dyad,” “greater-and-lesser,” and “exceeding and exceeded,” which find their way into the theories of Plato’s followers. In addition—and this point would seem to be decisive for the interpretation—we should expect to find them opposed in this context to a concept of the unit which is associated with the square or “equal”. On no other grounds but those of the new measurement science, as I have described them here, would such an association be expected. Sure enough, the unit in these theories is described as the equal (1087b5, 1092b1), in such a way as to mystify not only Aristotle but also modern interpreters of these passages. Neither Aristotle nor his Academic sources seem to connect these various expressions with geometrical representations of number; the theories on the generation of numbers betray no influence of Theaetetus’ square/oblong distinction, nor of the geometrical interpretation of number that is settled convention by the time of Euclid. The Academics seem to have posited “ideal” numbers which were generated individually in succession (two, three, four, as DAVID 45 Aristotle says in M.7 1081a23, and so without distinction as to square or oblong) from the unit and the indeterminate dyad. Aristotle takes some pains to make sense of this theory: if the units (monads) of ideal numbers are all the same and addible, then they are not ideal at all, but normal mathematical numbers (cf. 1081a19); but if the monads of each ideal number are distinct and inaddible, they must be generated before each of their respective numbers can be generated, as a point of logic (1081a26 ff.). This is true no matter how these monads are generated; but Aristotle once more quotes “he who first said it” (› prôto$ e£pµn, 1081a24)— again distinguishing him from those who later used such phrases as the “unequal dyad”—to allude to a possible mechanism for this generation of inaddible monads (¡súmblhtoi monáde$): they arise out of unequals, once these are equalised (™x ¡níswn (£sasvéntwn gàr ™génonto)). To begin with, Aristotle cannot rightly make attribution to anyone of a theory on the generation of inaddible monads. As he says, no one actually spoke that way (1081a36). Aristotle, perhaps himself in reaction against the eristic movement, constructs these arguments to save his opponents from the obvious fallacy of ideal numbers composed of normal, identical, addible monads; yet the alternative, unstated by them, but which he says follows reasonably from their own premises, turns out to be impossible as well, if truth be told (1081b1). There is therefore no reason to suppose that Plato thought or said that the generation of inaddible monads, or any monads, was connected with his notion of the unequal. On the contrary; Plato seems to have anticipated Aristotle’s notion of the unit as a measure, both in the intuitions of the enumerative method and in the specifically mathematical context. At 57d-e, the distinction is made in the Philebus between the units of the arithmetic of the many, which change as different things are counted, and those of the arithmetic of the philosophisers, which are always identical. It would of course have been an easy (but pointless) solution to the problem of the irrational to say that incommensurables are simply measured by different unit lengths than commensurables. �46 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW The enumeration of Theaetetus and Plato, on the other hand, is predicated on the assumption of identical units. While some lengths still remain incommensurable on these terms, all the formerly irrational square roots become expressible through an indeterminate dyad, and the achievement of this articulation would be lost without the assumption. What can be attributed to Plato, however, is that his notion of the unequal involved a process of equalizing it. In neither place in M where Aristotle mentions this idea (as above, and at 1083b24) can he make anything of it, nor does it seem to have any intuitive connection to the Academic number-generation theories he covers there. The only conclusion, I suggest, is that Aristotle refers to this conception of the unequal merely because he knows it to have been true of Plato’s thought. The “Platonists” speak of the unequal as a generative principle, Aristotle might have reasoned, and who knows what they mean, as to how it generates; Plato himself also spoke of the unequal, and the only action he attributed to it was “being equalized”; perhaps this was somehow the “generating action,” as obscure as that seems; one ought therefore to mention what the old man said, in fairness to them. In N, Aristotle for the first time mentions a number-generation theory which did, perhaps, try to interpret the process; it first declares that there is no generation of odd numbers at all, and that the even numbers are generated out of the great and small when these are equalised. Aristotle’s criticism of the logic of this account verges on the sarcastic: faneròn Øti o∞ toû vewrêsai ‰neken poioûsi t±n génesin tôn ¡rivmôn. (“Clearly, it is not on account of philosophical theorizing that they produce their generation of the numbers.” 1091a29) Neither Aristotle, for whom the notion seemed fatuously self-contradictory, nor these latter theorists, for whom it was received dogma, could have known the original mathematical context, for neither could interpret or properly apply the notion that the unequal as an elemental principle involved a process of being equalized. We can now restore the context, in the process of “equalizing” an unequal, oblong number with an indeterminate dyad of more and more DAVID 47 equal rational factors. (It is particularly striking that these latter Academics seemed to know that the notion “unequal-when-it-isequalized” served in such a way as to divide all numbers, but they tried, with dismal consequence, to apply it to the familiar, venerable distinction between odd and even; they must have been unaware of the division of numbers by square and oblong, which supplanted the earlier distinction in the course of Theaetetus’ study of irrational roots, and where alone the notion of the “equalized unequal” has any use or coherence.) “Those who say the unequal is some one thing, making the indeterminate dyad from great and small, say things that are far indeed from being likely or possible,” in Aristotle’s view (M.1, 1088a15). He complains that to adopt such ideas is really to adopt his lowly Category of the “relative” as a substantial, unitary first principle. Something is great or small only in relation to something else. Unlike the superior Categories of quality and quantity, which have more substance because they involve absolute change, whether by alteration or increase, there is no such change proper to the Category of the relative. While a compared term may remain substantially the same, it becomes greater or less merely by quantitative change in the other term. Aristotle is therefore at a loss as to why such metaphysical honour should be paid to concepts that are inherently relative. Plato could have replied: “Consider the nature of measurement toward the generation of the mean.” In this process, the relative terms do not depend simply on each other, but both are related to an unchanging third thing, a single geometric mean. Furthermore, the pairs of relative terms are uniquely related to their proper mean, the root of a particular oblong number. And because the greater and lesser lengths approach closer than any given difference to the unchanging length of the root, their status in relation to this length, qua members of an infinite succession of approximating pairs, poses a heady puzzle for any common-sense idea of their ontological difference from, or identity with, this single length. There is therefore every reason to see the indeterminate dyad of great and small, a self- �48 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW correcting binary approximation of a single geometric mean, as a unitary and substantial thing in its proper mathematical context. But if the context was lost, and one had access only to the words in its name, then Aristotle’s objections might seem judicious. That Aristotle knew about the geometry of means is clear enough, but he must not have been familiar with the interpolation of means in the peculiar configuration of the indeterminate dyad, where means become extremes, which in turn beget means, which then in turn become extremes, while each pair of harmonic and arithmetic means serves as the extremes to the geometric mean in the middle. The notion of relativity embodied in this configuration, involving a process of equalising, and motion towards a fixed object, is more subtle and peculiar than that involved in a simple comparison, or even a static analysis expressed in terms of a mean and extremes. I claim it is this peculiar conception of the relative that Plato raised to the level of a principle, to stand in tandem with the absolute measure connoted by the unit. While the Academic metaphysicians may appear to have used these very same principles, right down to the letter of their formulation, it is clear that neither they nor Aristotle grasped their proper function. They have nothing to do with accounting for multiplicity in the universe, or with the generation of numbers. They have everything to do with the measurement of numbers. After Theaetetus, numbers are figured as square or rectangular; they can be compared not only in quantity, but in size, by the length of their square roots, just as after Euclid’s II.14, any rectilinear figures can be compared by the sides of their equivalent squares. While all numbers have either absolutely or relatively measurable rootlengths, not all lengths have countable squares. This is one of the odd new ways that arithmetic and geometry, number and magnitude, become interlinked after Theaetetus’ happy reformulation. It is therefore in this context, the context of measurement, that Plato is likely to have distinguished the absolute from the relative, being-in-itself from relative being. Aristotle alludes to just such a distinction, in a passage which once again exemplifies his peculiar DAVID 49 mire: he wants to review the Academic theories on the generation of multiplicity based on certain contrary principles, including principles first conceived by Plato, but conceived in a context where in some cases they weren’t even contraries, and where they had had nothing to do with generating either multiplicity or numbers; he knows the language of Plato’s own articulation of these principles, but doesn’t have the mathematics to interpret the words. In this case, he may even foist his own innovations in usage back on to Plato’s original phrases, just to make sense of them. At 1089b16, Aristotle once again invokes “he who says these things,” claiming this time that this person had also proved for himself (prosapef≠nato) that that which was potentially a “this” and substance (tò dunámei tóde kaì o∞sía) was not “existent in itself ” (πn kav afltó); it was the “relative” (tò pró$ ti). What the expression “potentially a ’this’ and substance” may have meant for Plato is a difficult thing to determine. In particular, Aristotle seems to take dunámei, with obvious anachronism, in his own characteristic sense of “potentially”; he had just now used the word this way when introducing part of his own familiar solution to ontological analysis, that we must hypothesize in each case what a thing is potentially (¡nágkh mèn oun...flpoveînai tò dunámei πn flkást¨, 1089b15-16). Perhaps Aristotle is here weaving his own terminology into the Platonic materials? But his next comment is a scholium, on Plato’s appropriation of the term “relative,” that it is just as if he had said “quality” (¸sper e£ eªpe tò poión); and there was never a scholium without a text. So what could the Greek text “tò dunámei tóde kaì o∞sía” have meant to Plato? Recall Knorr’s observation that dúnami$ and dunámei mean “square” and “in square” throughout Greek mathematical literature. (The only exception is the very passage in the Theaetetus [148a] where the eponymous hero applies the term dúnami$, for the first time, to a square root.) Thus in Plato’s context, the same words may well have signified “that which has particularity and existence in square”—i.e., that which is countable (because it is commensurable) only in square (dunámei), like �50 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the expressible as against the rational lines. It is these very magnitudes which one could expect to find distinguished as relative in their being, insofar as their being depends on their measure; the rational lengths, on the other hand, have the self-subsistent being of definite quantity, in length and in square, while the irrational lines, which cannot be made commensurable in either length or square, are captive to the realm of flux and non-being. If Plato equated “that which has being” with “that which can be counted”—and his enumerative method suggests a move in this direction—then it is entirely and specifically appropriate that that which has being in square be allowed only a relative existence. It has no autonomous number, but only a relative count. Even the phrase pró$ ti may have had a specific connotation for Plato, which is lost in the anachronistic aura of the Categories; for such beings are measured by a process that is inherently pró$ ti, “towards something,” measurement toward the generation of the mean. Plato’s distinction would have been between that which exists or is measured on its own terms (tò πn kav afltó)—the equal, the square, and rational lengths—and that which exists or is measured toward something else (tò πn pró$ ti), the unequal being equalized, the rectangle approaching the square, and the indeterminate dyad approximating the mean. It seems clear that any such significance in these phrases could never have been allowed to emerge through the schemata of Aristotle’s redaction. He explains (1089b4 ff.) that in response to the diversion caused by Parmenides, the philosophers posited the relative and the unequal as the types of opposed principle which, when mated with being and the unit, generated a manifold reality. He points out, however, that neither of these posited principles is in fact the contrary (™nantíon) or the negation (¡pófasi$) of being and unity; each is rather another single nature among the things that exist (mía fusi$ tôn øntwn). This is also the point of his critical scholium on Plato’s use of the phrase pró$ ti: the Category “relative” is no more a legitimate candidate than the Category “quality” for that contrary and negation of being and the unit which DAVID 51 the Academics were supposed to be seeking; each is simply “some one” of the beings (‰n ti tôn øntwn, 1089b20). He goes on to complain that if Plato had meant to explain how things in general are many, he shouldn’t have confined his investigation to things that lie in the same Category (whether this be “substance” or “quality” or “quantity,” let alone the insubstantial “relative”). The sense of this reading ranges from the misguided to the wilfully obtuse. In the first instance, we cannot fault Plato for failing either to prophesy or to apply the revolutionary insights into ontology expressed in Aristotle’s theory of the Categories. Nor can we fault him for not being interested any longer, as indeed he wasn’t, in the problem of how things are many. Still less can we fault him for giving up the reasoning by opposites. He would of course have agreed that his conception of the relative, in the configuration of the indeterminate dyad, is in no sense the opposite of the unit and its measure, but simply a different way of measuring, based also on the unit, that applies to certain types of being (i.e., certain two-dimensional numbers and one-dimensional magnitudes— oblongs and their roots). But the full picture of Aristotle’s plight as a redactor emerges when one throws in the fact that Plato’s complete formulation did in fact include a genuine opposition as well, between the unit and the greater-and-less qua greater and less. One then has a recipe for the peculiar quandary of Metaphysics M and N towards Platonic thought, based in part on unwitting conflations, but in part also on flagrant, self-serving anachronisms, and characterised by a haplessness in the face of Plato’s own expressions, when read in light of their borrowed use in the irrelevant theories of the Academy. A question remains: where did Aristotle get those “texts” of Plato, which he seems to treat as quoted material? Although the distinction between absolute and relative being may be consistent with the Philebus and with other ontological discussions in the later Plato, the specific phrases which Aristotle comments on, such as tò dunámei tóde kaì o∞sía, do not seem to occur in the dialogues. Where, then, did Plato draw this mathematical distinction, and to �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 52 what did he apply it? Was it perhaps in a Lecture on The Good—a lecture which seemed to promise moral philosophy, but delivered mathematics—a lecture which nobody understood? * * * * * * The mathematical development of ancient measurement science will prove much easier to trace than its philosophical obfuscation at the hands of Academics and Peripatetics. As forbidding as the structure of Euclid’s Elements X seems to be, I believe its logic is profoundly simple, following directly in the spirit of Plato’s enumerative method, and upon Theaetetus’ geometrical interpretation of number. After Theaetetus’ first efforts had rendered all the square roots countable, he next sought to extend his classificatory net even further into the uncharted regions of the irrational. He could use his already successful methods as a paradigm: since exploring numbers in terms of the means between them had yielded the class of expressible lines, he was led to explore the possibility of means between the expressible lengths themselves, and the possibility of irrational means. While in general such means could not be “counted off,” since the expressible lengths, treated as extremes, had not the fixed values necessary for a computation of means, the mean lengths could still be constructed and named with respect to rational lengths; just as at the time of the Meno, the root length of the double square could not as yet be counted, but it could be constructed within the unit square and was named “diameter” (or the “through-measure”) by the professors (Meno 85b). Orders of irrationals could thus be defined in terms of means, though they could not be made commensurable. Just such an assignment of orders is credited to Theaetetus by Pappus, in his commentary on Elements X, on the authority of Eudemus’ history of mathematics (now lost): ...it was...Theaetetus...who divided the more generally known irrational lines according to the different means, DAVID 53 assigning the medial line to geometry, the binomial to arithmetic, and the apotome to harmony, as is stated by Eudemus, the Peripatetic.32 The passage does not suggest that Theaetetus invented the three lines and their names, but only that he first saw the essential parallelism between the structure of their relations and those of the familiar means. The medial simply is the geometric mean between two expressible lengths. That is why it is called méso$, the mean proportional; the name “medial” serves only to distinguish it in English. The binomial is a sum of two expressible lengths, and so can be associated with the arithmetic mean, which is half the sum of two rational lengths; but the apotome is merely a difference of expressible lengths, and the connection with the harmonic mean is less obvious. This also comes clear, however, as one recalls the fundamental feature of pairs of arithmetic and harmonic means which makes possible the measurement by an indeterminate dyad: if one applies a rectangle contained by rational extremes to the length of their arithmetic mean, the height of the new rectangle turns out to be the length of their harmonic mean. Euclid’s X.112-14 illustrate a significantly parallel property of binomials and apotomes: if one were to apply the same rational rectangle to a length that was known to be a binomial, the height would turn out to be an apotome; further, and curiously enough, the expressible terms of such a binomial and an apotome would be commensurable with each other, and in the same ratio. If Theaetetus was responsible for these propositions, he might well have been led to view the binomial and apotome as “irrational means” between rational extremes, or as irrational factors of an oblong number, counterparts to the rational arithmetic and harmonic means. It is clear, however, that Euclid’s presentation is not designed as a theory of means. The bulk of his 115 propositions in Book X are concerned with enumerating and constructing twelve different kinds of binomial and apotome, making with the medial thirteen types of irrational line; the full list is given by Euclid after Prop. �54 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 111, before the proofs that establish the analogy between the binomials and apotomes, and the arithmetic and harmonic means. The rationale for this enumeration becomes more apparent if one considers David Fowler’s handy grouping of the propositions: X1-18: general properties of expressible lines and rectangles, X19-26: medial lines and rectangles, X27-35: constructions underlying binomials and apotomes, X36-41, 42-7, 48-53, 54-9, 60-5, 66-70, & 71-2: blocks of propositions dealing with each of the six types of additive irrational lines. They are described in X3641 and also, in a different geometrical configuration, in the Second Definitions following X47, X73-8, 79-84, 85-90, 91-6, 97-102, 103-7, & 108-10: blocks of propositions, parallel to the previous, dealing with each of the six types of subtractive irrational lines. They are described in X73-8 and also, in a different geometrical configuration, in the Third Definitions following X84, X111-14: the relations between binomials and apotomes, X115: medials of medials... As Fowler himself observes, the propositions seem to represent an exploration of the “simplest operations of adding, subtracting, and squaring pairs of expressibles.” Before Theaetetus classified them in relation to the different rational means, the binomial and apotome may have first been distinguished and defined as part of an investigation of the “arithmetic” of expressible lengths. An investigator might have said, if we are to understand the expressibles the way we understand numbers—and indeed, numbers are the very paradigms of our understanding—then we must comprehend their arithmetic; what might the manipulations of arithmetic look like when applied DAVID 55 to expressible lines? Whereas the prospect of such an investigation might have daunted the most optimistic of researchers, with its seeming openendedness and unlimited number of possible cases, Euclid was able, by manipulating squares and rectangles, to organize the infinite additions and subtractions of expressible lengths into six types each. Thus Euclid accomplished the first ever rigorous ordering of radically incommensurable lengths, as the sums and differences of expressible ones. One cannot measure these sums and differences as such, and so one cannot “count off ” the irrational lines that are produced; but one can number their types, and enumerate their orders. While the fundamental early propositions of Book X are generally credited to Theaetetus, and the propositions about mean proportionals (“medials”) seem to suit his historical and mathematical character, the enumeration of the binomials and apotomes must belong to Euclid. Pappus says that Euclid, following Theaetetus, “determined...many orders of the irrationals; and brought to light, finally, whatever of finitude (or definiteness) is to be found in them.” This should naturally refer to his ordering of possible binomials and apotomes, and the enumeration of six corresponding types. Though they do not depend on the proofs involved in Euclid’s enumeration, Theaetetus’ propositions, about the relations between binomials and apotomes, are then placed by Euclid at the end of Book X, so that they can be expressed in terms of that enumeration, and take on a new authority: each pair belongs to one of six sets of ordered pairs of binomials and apotomes whose terms turn out to be commensurable and in the same ratio; each pair consists of corresponding members of one of a finite number of possible combinations of additive and subtractive expressible lengths. It is possible, then, to trace the genesis of Book X in this way: Theaetetus first extended the insights of measurement toward the generation of the mean by using the three means involved in that science as heuristic paradigms with which to interpret irrational magnitudes. Just as an expressible length is a geometric mean �56 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW between rational extremes, a medial length is a mean proportional between expressible extremes; and just as arithmetic and harmonic means are pairs of commensurable rational factors of the rectangle contained by the extremes of their interval, binomials and apotomes are pairs of irrational factors of the same rectangle. In his investigation of binomials and apotomes, Euclid discovered their classification, and thereby produced an ordering of irrationals in terms of possible types of sum and difference—an arithmetic of expressible lines. This in turn advanced the classificatory scope of Theaetetus’ propositions on the relations between binomials and apotomes, when they were placed after Euclid’s work, at the end of Book X. While Theaetetus could likely have proved that a rational area applied to a binomial produces an apotome as breadth, and that the terms of these irrational factors are commensurable and in the same ratio, Euclid could now add, as he does in the enunciations of Propositions 112 and 113, that such a binomial and an apotome belong to the same order. David Fowler approaches the book from a very different angle, as part of his reconstruction of the ancient mathematics of ¡nvufaíresi$. He proposes an anthyphairetic theory of ratio, where ratios between quantities are described by counting the number of mutual subtractions which can occur between them: one counts the number of times the lesser subtracts from the greater, then the number of times the remainder can be taken away from the lesser, then the remainder of that transaction from the former remainder, and so on; the list of numbers thus produced gives a unique description of the particular ratio. He finds evidence for the historical existence of this approach in several quarters, including a direct allusion in Aristotle’s Topics to a definition of same ratio as same antanairesis ; and he sees the peculiar implications of this ratio theory as providing the most economical of many proposed rationales for the total sequence and layout of Euclid’s Book II. The most surprising fact he uncovers is a remarkable periodicity that arises in the anthyphairetic description of ratios of the form √m:√n—that is, ratios of expressible lines. DAVID 57 The achievement of Fowler’s work is to have rediscovered, and in some measure to have resurrected in our day, the other branch of measurement science, measurement prò$ ållhla. The periodic repetition of the terms in the otherwise infinite mutual subtraction of expressible quantities would have been the great discovery of this science; as Fowler observes: Those ratios that can be now completely understood and described in finite terms by the arithmoi include the ratios of the sides of commensurable squares, that is the ratios of expressible lines √m:√n... Note how fitly this parallels the development I have described in the science of measurement toward the generation of the mean: those lengths which can now be uniquely measured in terms of the ¡rivmoí include these same expressible lines, the sides of commensurable squares. As far as the rationale for Euclid’s Book X is concerned, however, Fowler’s reconstruction of the mathematics of anthyphairesis shows only why the relations between expressible lines would have seemed a thing worth investigating. We gain no insight into the specific form of the book as we have it, into its method and structure in the classification of the irrationals; these are better explained as an integral outgrowth of the new science proposed in Plato’s Politicus, the science of measurement toward the generation of the mean. This is not just because Theaetetus is said to have classified the irrationals in terms of the different means. Consider that the entire investigative strategy of Book X, including the work I have ascribed to Euclid, is to manipulate squares and rectangles, a manipulation in two dimensions, in such a way as to distinguish and to enumerate the forms of the associated lines. This approach was born with the science of measurement toward the mean, on one fateful day. As he lies dying off-stage, the story is told of how the young �58 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Theaetetus, Theodorus’ student, on the day of Socrates’ appearance in court, divided all numbers between the square and the oblong, and distinguished two kinds of line as the sides of squares equal to each kind of number. The “square side” of an oblong number is the geometric mean between the sides of the oblong. The names Theaetetus chose for these two lengths, mêko$ and dúnami$, did not survive, for the implications of a classification by sides of squares made the distinction itself obsolete: both kinds of length would now be called @htá, expressible. But the technique applied in his classification was to direct the exploration of lines to its crowning achievement, in the enumerations of Euclid’s Book X. We ought, however late, to acknowledge the dramatist who saw the significance of such a day for history, saw it in a way that must combine the personal and the universal, the historical and the mathematical. Innovations in mathematics must have moved that man in a way that made even innovation in religion seem a distant charge, a memory of youthful import. We must come to recognise the changes in this chronicler of the human argument, as he took his bearings anew, and found new patterns, enumerative structures, emerging in a discourse that strains to keep pace—paradigms of order no longer laid up in heaven, yet resonant, perhaps, with a piece of divinity. His myth of the globe’s reversal (Politicus 268d-274e) encompasses a deteriorating world, but also a return, through the numbering of its classes and kinds, to the elegance of god’s tenure. Let him stand absolved at last of the mystifications of his followers: Plato’s own measures, his own mysteries, must finally furnish our count. DAVID 59 2. Wilbur R. Knorr and Miles F. Burnyeat, “Methodology, Philology, and Philosophy,” Isis, 1979, 70:565-70 3. Miles Burnyeat, “The Philosophical Sense of Theaetetus’ Mathematics,” Isis, 1978, 69:489-513, on pg. 513, pg. 513 4. Knorr, Evolution, pg. 192 5. Ibid., pg. 192 6. Ibid., pg. 69 ff. 7. Ibid., pg. 96 (In full: “(a) The proofs are demonstrably valid. (b) The treatment by special cases and the stopping at 17 are necessitated by the methods of proof employed. (c) The proofs will be understood to apply to an infinite number of cases. (d) No use may be made of the dichotomy of square and oblong numbers in Theodorus’ studies, either in the demonstrations or in the choice of cases to be treated. (e) Theodorus’ proofs utilize the special relations of the lines in the construction of the dynameis. The geometrical methods of construction are of the type characteristic of metrical geometry as developed in Elements II and are closely associated with a certain early style of arithmetic theory. (f) But the arithmetic methods by which Theaetetus could prove the two general theorems, on the incommensurability of lines associated with non-square and non-cubic integers, were not available to Theodorus.” 8. Malcolm Brown, “Theaetetus: Knowledge as Continued Learning,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1969, 7:359-79, on pgs. 3678 9. Knorr, Evolution, pg. 158 10. This proof is given by Knorr, Evolution, pg. 184 11. Ibid., pg. 159 12. see Euclid’s Elements X Def. 3 NOTES: 1. Wilbur R. Knorr, Evolution of the Euclidean Elements (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1975), pgs. 65-9 13. see Plato’s Politicus, 278b-e 14. see Euclid, The Elements, 3 vols., Vol. 3, ed. Sir Thomas Heath (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1947), pg. 3 15. see Euclid II.14 and VI.13 �60 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 16. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 371 ff. 17. Proclus, In Platonis Timaeum Commentaria, 3 vols., Vol. 2, ed. Ernst Diehl (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903-6), pgs. 173-4 18. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 371 19. see David H. Fowler, The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pg. 14 ff. 20. see Plato’s Timaeus 36a for this usage 21. The reading of B and T; editors usually read to )to 22. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pgs. 376-7 23. Ibid., pg. 377 24. see Theaetetus, 185c 25. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 374 26. quoted in Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 373, note 38 27. Euclid, X.1 28. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 379 29. Julia Annas, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Books M and N, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, pg. 195 30. Ibid. 31. Knorr, Evolution, pgs. 65-9 32. tr. W.Thomson and G.Junge, in Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 301 33. Fowler, Mathematics, pgs. 169-70 34. Ibid., pg. 192 35. tr. Thomson and Junge, in Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 301 36. Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 17 ff., and see Aristotle, Topics 158b 37. Ibid., pg. 192 38. see Ibid., pgs. 190-1 DAVID 61 �62 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 63 Moral Reform in Measure for Measure Laurence Berns (St. John’s College, Annapolis) To what extent are the principles of classical political philosophy and the American polity reconcilable? The Declaration of Independence did not mean, Lincoln tells us, that all men are equal in all respects. The Declaration, however, presupposes that the difference between man and man is never as great as the difference between man and beast, on the one hand, and man and God, on the other. This “equality” by superiority to beasts and inferiority to the divine sets limits both to human servitude and to human sovereignty.1 These principles issue in the rule of prudence that just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed. This equality, as Locke put it, “in respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion one over another” is not incompatible with the classical principle of fundamental inequalities in capacities to govern. As a matter of fact the institution of free elections (the Declaration’s “Right to Representation”) introducing a principle of merit into the system is predicated on the existence of such inequalities of ability, and the capacities of electors roughly to discern them. (This does not, of course, mean that the judgment of the electors is always correct, but that it is sufficiently deliberate and well-informed to avoid disasters that would unhinge the very frame of government.) The classical position on democracy has been put, I believe, with great clarity by Thomas Aquinas quoting St. Augustine: If the people have a sense of moderation and responsibility and are most careful guardians of the common weal, it is their right to enact a law allowing such a people to choose their own magistrates for the government Delivered at the Convention of the American Political Science Association, September 1993, The Washington Hilton Hotel, Washington, D.C. �64 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW of the commonwealth. But if, as time goes on, the same people become so corrupt as to sell their votes and entrust the government to scoundrels and criminals, then the right of appointing their public officials is rightly forfeit to such a people, and the choice devolves to a few good men. [S.T., I-II, Q. 97, A. 1.] I have no problem with this statement in principle, despite the questionable practicality of its remedy for corruption. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “If any form of government is capable of making a nation happy, ours I think bids fair now for producing that effect. But, after all, much depends on the people to be governed. We have been guarding against an evil that old States are most liable to, excess of power in the rulers; but our present danger seems to be defect of obedience in the subjects. There is hope, however, from the enlightened state of this age and country, we may guard effectually against that evil as well as the rest.” [Lett. to Ch. Carroll, 5/29/1789] What most threatens the required state of enlightenment today, it seems to me is not any paucity of economic resources devoted to education, but rather the reigning generally accepted opinions about what constitutes enlightenment. The AugustineThomas statement suggests, at the very least, that there is a natural connection between the will to preserve free institutions and the sense that those living in accordance with them are worthy of them. How can a corrupt people be reformed? This, of course, is the problem set for its protagonists by Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Some distinctions between Duke Vincentio’s situation and ours must be made. He has a single city and its environs to reform, we have a huge and highly diversified nation. Our laws derive their constitutional authority from the very people needing reform, his do not. His polity is monarchical, ours is not. Our polity contains a diversity of religious sects, his does not. Religious authority and moral authority, if not united, form a well-functioning team in his regime, in ours ... they do and they don’t. Obviously we are not likely to find immediately applicable recipes from a study of BERNS 65 Measure for Measure. We are obliged to put things in constitutional terms: “the abuse of the first Amendment”; the tendency of lawyers and judges to ape intellectual fashions, sanctioning licentiousness with shallow-pate notions like freedom of expression, bargain-basement moral autonomy.2 We can, as teachers, try to change the intellectual fashions. The only way I know how to do that is to try to rise beyond the realm of intellectual fashion altogether, by trying to understand the Duke’s problem as much as possible, as my better, William Shakespeare, understood it. Vienna, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, is ruled by a Duke, who “above all other strifes contended especially to know himself,... a gentleman of all temperance.” Like those two political defectives, Prospero and Socrates, he has no taste whatsoever for the theatrical pomposity endemic to political life. His apolitical temperament has caused him wrongly (“t’was my fault”) to allow Vienna’s strict and biting laws to become toothless and contemptible; licentiousness thrives, and “Liberty plucks Justice by the nose.” His keen sense of justice prevents him from punishing in his own name evil deeds bred by his own permissiveness. But purification there must be. He appoints a Lord Angelo (soon to prove a Fallen Angelo), a man of “stricture and firm abstinence”, who “scarce confesses that his blood flows” to stand in for himself, that is (unlike American executives) to “enforce or qualify the laws.” But first something should be said about why someone like puritanical Angelo was needed. The Vienna presented at first in the play seems to consist primarily of nunneries, monasteries and whorehouses, with almost nothing in between: the only family man presented is the absurd comic figure Elbow; austere celibacy, on the one hand, and saucy profligacy, on the other, again almost nothing in between. As sexuality is debased, celibacy, for some, gains in attractiveness. Something seems to be radically wrong with the way most Viennese think, feel and behave in regard to their sexuality. Immediately fol- �66 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW lowing Angelo’s appointment the Duke pretends that affairs of state require his hasty removal to foreign parts; Angelo is on his own. Political scientists (Bloom and Jaffa) quite properly refer to Machiavelli’s The Prince, chapter VII, as the locus classicus for the Duke’s mode of procedure with Angelo.3 Cesare Borgia on taking over Romagna found that because it had been very badly governed it was full of robberies, quarrels and insolence. To reduce it to peace and obedience he appointed a very cruel man, Remirro de Orco, as his deputy with full powers. Remirro soon reduced it to peace and unity. The reform being accomplished, in order to deflect the hatred it had generated from himself Cesare had the cruel Remirro placed one morning in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces, a piece of wood and a bloody knife beside him. The ferocity of the spectacle left the people both satisfied and stupified. Bacon speaks of this way of proceeding both in his Wisdom of the Ancients [III], and his Essays [XIII], but both seem to have been published after this play was first presented. One is tempted to go along with our scientific fashions and play at being “more hard-nosed than Thou,” but the differences between Shakespeare and Machiavelli at least deserve listing. The Duke does not kill Angelo, though he had full warrant to do so; unlike Cesare with Remirro, the Duke is not interested merely in using Angelo, but also as with everyone else, including himself, making him better, reforming him; above all, since he is not omniscient, he is interested in understanding Angelo: “Hence shall we see, /If power change purpose, what our seemers be.” It is not simply because he courts popularity, that he doesn’t institute the reform himself, it is rather because he is not the right man for the job, and it would not be, or at least not seem, just for him to do so. There is another work of Machiavelli’s that bears close comparison with Measure for Measure, that is Mandragola4; the Duke seems to combine characteristics of both Ligurio and Frate Timoteo, but here again the differences should prove instructive. The Duke does not leave Vienna, he goes underground in the guise of a “holy friar” both to observe and invisibly to correct the course of his reform. Angelo evidently goes to work immediately: BERNS 67 the houses of prostitution are put down, and a young gentleman named Claudio is sentenced to death for fornication; for the woman he is engaged to marry (the marriage delayed by dowry problems), Juliet, is big with child. Angelo rejects the urgings of his second in command and his Provost that here the punishment is way out of proportion to the crime. Claudio has a high-spirited sister, Isabella, who has entered the austere order of St. Clare -“When you have vow’d, you must not speak with men /But in the presence of the prioress; /Then, if you speak, you must not show your face; /Or if you show your face, you must not speak”- as a novice. She wishes for an even “more strict restraint.” We are, I suppose, to imagine her quite beautiful; her moral beauty at least engages the affections of the play’s two main protagonists. She is urged by the dissolute gentleman Lucio to plead with Angelo for her brother’s life. Despite her choosing to renounce family life, her’s is the only powerful display of family feeling in the play. While hearing her plea the transforming event of the play takes place, Angelo finds himself possessed by an overwhelming passion, which, both to himself and to her, he calls love for Isabella. He, on second interview, proposes that she yield her body to him for one night in exchange for her brother’s life. The critique of Angelo would seem to be a critique of Puritanism in general. Licentious Lucio thinks Angelo “a man whose blood /Is very snow-broth; one who never feels /The wanton stings and motions of the sense...” This is surely wrong. The Duke had made a similar, but more penetrating, observation: “Lord Angelo is precise; /Stands at a guard with Envy; scarce confesses /That his blood flows...” If he must guard against envy, he feels the desires whose indulgences he must not be envious of. With old Escalus, before he has fallen, Angelo admits that he too has had the desires that lead to the actions he is punishing with death, acting upon them makes the difference. He is too good, at least too strict and too proud to consort with the dissolute; he proves to be not good enough to be celibate. He wants to be associated with the highly virtuous, is attracted by Isabella’s purity; he wants to pre- �68 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW serve the image of his gravity; and he wants the joys of what he calls love: your brother shall not die “Isabel, if you give me love.” He seems to be altogether confused about the difference between “yielding up thy body” and “give me love.”5 It was Isabella’s moving persuasiveness that led him to give more attention to the erotic side of his soul than he could handle: “Go to your bosom, /Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know /That’s like my brother’s fault. If it confess /A natural guiltiness, such as his....” He replies to himself: “She speaks, and ’tis such sense /That my sense breeds with it.” [2.2.137 ff.] He did warn the Duke: “Let there be some more test made of my metal, /Before so noble and so great a figure /Be stamp’d upon it.” The Duke knows that: “He doth with holy abstinence subdue /That in himself which he spurs on his power /To qualify in others.” [4.2.79] The immoderate Puritan allows the bitterness from his own frustrated desires with perhaps a touch of envy to spur him on to punish those who will not abstain. The fear of falling into temptation increases the severity. The intensity of purifying zeal seems to be directly proportional to the difficulty one has in keeping one’s own illicit desires under control. The judgment is warped in the direction of severity by what one feels is required to frighten oneself into abstinence. Isabella’s loveliness and what he sees when he follows her advice and looks into his own soul push him over the edge. And now I give my sensual race the rein: Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite; Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes That banish what they sue for. [2.4.159 ff.] On reflection it might not seem so strange that modesty should provoke desire. Any competent political scientist can figure out why Angelo never intends to fulfill his side of the bargain. Isabella can find no “charity in sin.” “More than our brother is our chastity.” The Duke disguised as Friar Lodowick prepares Claudio for death with a ser- BERNS 69 mon crammed with Stoic commonplaces on the worthlessness of life. From here on the Duke uses the holy privileges associated with his disguise to inform himself of everyone else’s secrets. He overhears Isabella’s account to Claudio of Angelo’s proposal. In another remarkable scene Claudio begins by sharing Isabella’s righteous, honorable and Christian indignation at the impossibility of Angelo’s plan. But he has been brought to face the fear of death in a very feeling way. Death is a fearful thing. ...to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bath in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison’d in the viewless winds And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world: or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling, -’tis too horrible. The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death. [3.1.115 ff.] Claudio’s speech is a beautiful illustration of that “very illusion of the imagination” beautifully described by Adam Smith: the way a man or woman’s sympathetic imagination attributes to the dead what he or she would feel being alive, if he or she were housed in the dead person’s body. And thus “the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and ... the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive.” The Duke certainly does not explain anything like this to Claudio or to anyone else in this play, �70 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW but I don’t think he would disagree with the way Smith closes this chapter. “And from thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness, but the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which, while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society.” [The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.1.13] Bloom quite properly refers to Lucretius [III. 417 ff.] in his discussion of this passage, but Smith, it seems to me, is more balanced, even more “classical”. Claudio goes on to plead: Sweet sister, let me live. What sin you do to save a brother’s life, Nature dispenses with the deed so far That it becomes a virtue. [3.1.132 ff.] This is not the first time Nature has been invoked to oppose chastity law. The licentious but eloquent Lucio puts it in a way that comes close to generally accepted opinion among our intellectuals. Your brother and his lover have embrac’d; As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time That from the seedness the bare fallow brings To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry. [1.4.40 ff.] The licentious have their say in this play. But Shakespeare has quite naturally, but not altogether explicitly, built Nature’s answer to promiscuity into their very speech: it is full of the imagery and fear of venereal disease. The Duke seems to have come to the realization that Nature in human society requires law for its fulfillment.6 Isabella is moved by Claudio’s speech, but in exactly the opposite direction. “O, you beast. . . faithless coward...dishonest wretch,” she replies. Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? Is’t not a kind of incest, to take life [i.e., to be born BERNS 71 again] From thine own sister’s shame? ...Take my defiance, Die, perish! [3.1.135 ff.] This is not the first time sexual imagery enters Isabella’s speech in moments of great passion. Answering Angelo she is primarily thinking of stripping herself for whipping: Th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies, And strip myself to death as to a bed That longing have been sick for, ere I’d yield My body up to shame. [2.4.101 ff.] The Duke’s first task is to avert the great impending injustice brought on by his scheme, but he does it in a way that also seems to be perfectly calculated to bring Isabella to face her sexuality, and human sexuality in general, more temperately. His reform will turn out to be a comprehensive reform; all the representative characters, Pompey, Lucio, Claudio, Angelo and Isabella are in different ways reformed. The Duke uses the religious authority he has assumed to engage Isabella in a plot that will right all wrongs. Angelo, it turns out, had been engaged to marry a lady, Mariana. When her brother carrying her dowry was wrecked at sea, Angelo “pretending in her disoveries of dishonour” called off the marriage. This wronged lady, the “forenamed maid” has unreasonably been driven by his unkindnesses to a more violent and unruly love for Angelo. She still regards him as her “husband.” Isabella is to agree to Angelo’s terms, arrange for a short meeting in a very dark place; Mariana is to be substituted for Isabella. If the encounter is acknowledged afterwards, it may compel him “to her recompense.” By this, the Duke argues, “is your brother saved, your honour untainted, the poor Mariana advantaged, and the corrupt deputy scaled.” The Duke as friar will frame and make Mariana fit for the attempt. The fact that this seems to pose no special difficulty suggests that Mariana may indeed be as right as one can be to mate with Angelo. But it is too �72 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW easy these days to berate Puritanism, Mariana may just see some nobility in Angelo’s austerity, a nobility that manifests itself to us as well even in his guilty self-condemnations. It can hardly escape Isabella’s later reflection that what takes place between Angelo and Mariana is in many respects parallel to what took place between Claudio and Juliet. But this conjunction is sanctioned by a holy man, who declares that “the doubleness of the benefit defends the deceit from reproof.” Isabella is happy to go along. Even the pleasure of revenge on Angelo seems to be sanctioned by this holy man. Isabella’s imagination is invited with no impiety to receive scenes of her enemy coupled with his affianced lover, thinking he is violating herself. If her soul is puritanical, it will have to become Puritanism with a certain sense of humor.7 The Duke’s plan for deceiving Angelo succeeds, but Angelo sends no reprieve for Claudio. On the contrary, he advances the time for his beheading. He has no interest in preserving the life of a man privy to his crime, and who, if he has the least grain of honor, would be bound to think of little else than revenge. The Duke, again using his assumed religious authority, attempts to get the Provost of the prison to substitute the head of a convicted murderer, Barnardine, for Claudio’s, to fool the wicked Angelo again. The Duke had invoked “the vow of my order.” The “gentle Provost” is the only one who refuses to bow to religious authority, “Pardon me, good father, it is against my oath.” When the Duke, without fully revealing himself, is forced to prove he is acting not only by religious authority but by the authority of the Duke himself, the Provost goes along. He who refused to subordinate political authority to religious authority for his “care and secrecy” will be rewarded by the Duke with “worthier place.” But Barnardine has been drinking and is not prepared for death today. He simply will not consent to die today. This is an amazing prison. They all agree that to take him in this condition is damnable. Luckily, the captive pirate, Ragozine, who resembles Claudio, has died that morning: the perfect head to substitute for Claudio’s. Besides provision of some fine comedy, the prison scenes are essential for understanding BERNS 73 the Duke’s basic strategy of reform. Pompey the procurer now put out of work becomes the prison’s executioner’s assistant. The servant of false love, venereal disease and the unlawful begetting of life quite easily becomes the true servant of its lawful taking. Pompey’s coarseness is re-formed to serve the rule of law. The taking and the begetting of life have been connected before. Angelo declares: Ha? Fie, these filthy vices! It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stolen A man already made [a murderer], as to remit Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image In stamps that are forbid. ’Tis all as easy Falsely to take away a life true made, As to put mettle [metal] in restrained means To make a false one. [2.4.42 ff.] As Jaffa put it, “Fornication, as a kind of false coinage of citizens, becomes more than a private action.”8 The regulation of coinage, society’s circulating medium, is usually a rather unquestioned prerogative of sovereignty. The penalties for counterfeiting have never been light. To “coin heaven’s image” joins biblical sanctity of begetting to the need for sovereign political regulation of that private behavior which is the source of life for society as a whole.9 (The coining image occurs at least three more times in the play, in speeches by the Duke [1.1.35-36], Isabella [2.4.128-29] and Angelo [1.1.48-50].) Threats of death color the whole atmosphere of the play. Fear of death in potential malefactors seems to be indispensable for the restoration and maintenance of law-abidingness. But absolutely no one ever gets killed in this prison. It is the genius of this Duke to be able to employ the fear without ever having to follow through with the act. The ploy would never work, if it became generally known. The great final act and scene of the play pulls all strands together, the return of the Duke and resumption of his authority in a grand public ceremony, where the Duke “like power divine” reveals all hidden iniquities and resolves all difficulties with perfect justice. �74 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW This justice, both legal and natural justice, is primarily justice in marriage. For the chaste sexuality of marriage, the raising and nourishing of families under the law, is the solution for the sexual corruption of Vienna.10 The dissolute gentleman, Lucio, is forced to marry the prostitute who is the mother of his child. Angelo, who sought Isabella, who was too good for him, is ordered to marry and love the less scrupulous Mariana. But the Duke knows that the institution of marriage, upon which the health of his polity depends, will not be on a firm foundation unless it shines forth at the paradigmatic center of society. He too must marry, and marry well. The high-minded Duke asks the high-minded Isabella to be his wife. How that works out, we never learn. As part of the apocalypse the Duke staged for his triumphal return, Isabella was made to believe that her brother had indeed been executed. It may be that the Duke wanted her to weigh the events leading to that result more carefully, or merely, as he said, “to keep her ignorant of her good,/To make her heavenly comforts of despair/When it is least expected.” He might be made to pay for those hours of despair. These reservations aside, it seems to be a near perfect marriage. If it should be that the Duke comes short of perfection by contemplative leniency and Isabella by spirited severity, it would be by the blending of their virtues and the mitigating of their defects in their shared lives or in their offspring that Vienna could hope to receive its perfect Lord. NOTES: 1. Cf. H.V. Jaffa, The Conditions of Freedom: Essays in Political Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 152-53; G. Anastaplo, St. Louis University Law Journal (Spring, 1965), 390. 2. G. Anastaplo, “Censorship”, The Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, 1986 printing, Volume 15, pp. 634-641; The Amendments to the Constitution: a Commentary, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 52-56: R.A. Licht, “Respect is not a Right”, Crisis, Vol. 11, No. 7, July-August, 1993, pp. 41-47; “Communal BERNS 75 Democracy, Modernity, and the Jewish Political Tradition”, Jewish Political Studies Review, 5:1-2 (Spring, 1993). 3. A. Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 330; H.V Jaffa, “Chastity as a Political Principle: Measure for . Measure”, Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds. J. Alvis and T.G. West (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000), pp. 211-12. 4. The most reliable and literal translation known to me is by M. Flaumenhaft (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1981). 5. Cf. W. Shakespeare, Sonnets, Nos. 129 and 116. 6. L. Berns, “Gratitude, Nature and Piety in King Lear”, Interpretation, Vol. 3/1 (Autumn, 1972), Sections V and IX; “Rational Animal-Political Animal: Nature and Convention in Human Speech and Politics”, Essays in Honor of Jacob Klein (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1976), pp. 29-35, esp. section III; [uncorrected version in The Review of Politics, Vol. 40, No. 2 (April, 1978), pp. 231-54.] 7. L. Berns, “Transcendence and Equivocation: Some Political, Theological and Philosophic Themes in Shakespeare”, Shakespeare as Political Thinker, cited n. 3, pp. 402-4. 8. “Chastity as a Political Principle: Measure for Measure”, citation n. 3, p. 221. 9. The locus classicus for the relation between private and public, polity and family is Aeschylus’s trilogy Oresteia. The trilogy begins with a world where family feeling, the spirit of revenge and cycles of blood feuding dominate and characterize political and social life. Agamemnon, the triumphant leader of the Trojan expedition, is killed on his return to Argos from Troy by his wife Clytaemestra for the sake of “my child’s Justice”, that is , to avenge the death of their daughter sacrificed to propitiate the gods holding up the expedition to Troy. The ruling deities are the Old Goddesses, the Daughters of Night, the “ingrown, vengeful Furies.” In the second play, Orestes, Agamemnon’s and Clytaemestra’s son, following the charge of Apollo’s oracle, avenges his father’s death by killing his mother. The Furies, “the bloodhounds of my mother’s hate,” pursue him. The third play, The Eumenides, the well-meaning ones, celebrates the founding of the Court of the Areiopagus at Athens. Orestes seeks sanctuary at Delphi. The Pythian oracle is overwhelmed by the pursuing Furies. Apollo himself inter- �76 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW venes and stills the Furies long enough for Hermes to guide Orestes to Athens for a final resolution of his case. At Athens Pallas Athene takes charge. She who was not born of woman (born from the head of Zeus), a most man-like female, almost a mean between male and female, turns the trial over to an open court of Athenian citizens. The Furies argue against, Apollo argues for Orestes; gods as advocates, before human beings as judges and jury. The jury of twelve human beings is given the authority to decide. The sovereignty of hitherto untamable family feeling is brought under the supervening authority of the polis, the political community. Although they have the authority, the human beings by themselves are incapable of deciding between conflicting rights of mother and father. The jury splits evenly. The deciding vote is given to the goddess Athene. Divine help is required for settling such questions. She decides for Orestes. It seems that reasonable procedures for settling and dispensing with problems may sometimes be more important than assurance that the solutions are correct. These questions are no longer to be dealt with violently behind closed doors but deliberately before public and open spectacles of law court, assembly and theater. The Furies are unwilling to accept these dispensations of the younger gods. By a combination of threats and persuasion Athene cajoles the Furies to integrate their authority over family feeling and the household into the service of the greater good of the political community. They shall “win first fruits in offerings for children and the marriage rite.” The Furies finally agree and are transformed into Eumenides. The feelings they preside over which are capable of tearing the political community apart cannot be extinguished: they are to be redirected against the despotically minded consumed by “a terrible love of high renown” and external enemies; they will bolster the mutual love of fellow citizens. “This is a cure for much that is wrong among mortals.” Cf. M. Flaumenhaft, “Seeing Justice Done: Aeschylus’ Oresteia”, Interpretation, Vol. 17/1, (Fall, 1989), pp. 69-109, reprinted in The Civic Spectacle: Essays on Drama and Community, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), Chapter 1; and David K. Nichols, “Aeschylus’ Oresteia and the Origins of Political Life”, Interpretation, Vol. 9/1, (August, 1980), pp. 83-91. 10. L. Berns, “Gratitude, Nature and Piety in King Lear”, citation n. 6, p. 50: “... love and passion ... need to be controlled by law and authority. Being conceived outside the ’order of law’, Edmund was banished from the family circle. He is not altogether ’unnaturally’ devoid of family feeling.” BERNS 77 �78 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 79 A Review of Eva Brann’s The Ways of Naysaying Chaninah Maschler “The first impetus” for this study,1 Eva Brann tells us in her Preface, was the desire to deepen her understanding of the two “capacities of our inwardness” that had been the themes of two of her previous books, The World of the Imagination and What, Then, is Time? “As the imagination ...makes present what is not before us by reason of nonexistence or withdrawal, so memory ...holds what is not with us by reason of having gone by....Therefore... to understand something of imagination, memory, and time, we must mount an inquiry into what it means to say that something is not what it claims to be or is not there or is nonexistent or is affected by Nonbeing. And that is what I am after in Ways of Naysaying” (pp. xiif, my italics).2 Addressing, I presume, readers of the first two volumes of her trilogy, Brann explains that and why there will be less reliance on introspection and more reliance on logic and language in the present volume: ”We could, it is thinkable, be aware of our internal images...without having language for them....But whether we could know about negation—that we are capable of it and how— without speech is doubtful to me. Hence within my scheme, no, not, non- are deeper than imagination and time, in the sense that the former underlie the latter and are revealed in their analysis” (p. xiii). Earlier in this paragraph, and in more detail later, when summarizing Freud’s essay “On denial” in her Chapter One, she allows that there is a pre-linguistic “nay-saying of instinct and gesture.” Since this paragraph is rather condensed, and much hangs by it, let me try to say in my own words what I believe it to hold: Doing no, for instance, spitting out or pushing away or averting the gaze, occurs (ontogenetically and, according to Freud, also phylogenetically) before speech. And a sort of prereflective reacting to heard Eva Brann’s The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing. Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Chaninah Maschler is tutor emeritus at St. John’s College. �80 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW “no,” or even the uttering of the syllable “no” (as mere substitute for the gesture of rejection) may well be a phase of children’s intellectual history. Further, having images and reacting to them, or to having had them, can occur without the one who reacts being aware that what he or she is reacting to is an image. But to peg an image as an image, which means, to take it as a likeness of its original, that requires, according to Brann, the thought “This is and is not that.” Therefore there can be no sizing up of a mirror image, memory image, dream image, perceptual presentation as “merely” an image until after negation has entered upon the mental scene. Now knowing about negativity, which is different from prereflectively reacting in a rejecting or separating manner, that could not occur sans speech. While images are, therefore, existentially “prior to” (earlier than) speech, in involving recognized negativity they show themselves conceptually “posterior to” speech.3 Brann seems to be employing some version of the Aristotelian contrast between “first to us” and “first in nature.” This is how I construe her claims that, while imagining and recollecting are more manifest, negativity lies “deeper” than do these “capacities of our inwardness”; and that, furthermore, whatever is condition for the possibility of negativity lies more deeply still. Her book as a whole will argue that the Platonic discovery that Being “holds” Nonbeing may well be the ultimate answer to the question “was die Welt im Innersten zusammen halt” (“what it is that most intimately holds the world together,” Goethe, Faust Pt. 1, li 383). The Introduction of Brann’s book is given over to etymology. It draws attention to the fact that in English, German, French, Latin, and Greek (the languages in which the Western philosophic tradition is expressed), most of the basic words for naysaying—no, not,non-,nothing, and negativity—start with a nasal sound. Jesperson, and before him Darwin, remarked on this fact and entertained the thought that, conceivably, our signs for negation are transitional between naturally expressive gesture and conventionally learned word. The n-word would then MASCHLER 81 have originated as a substitute for the snort of aversion or refusal and in the course of linguistic and cultural history have proliferated into a multiplicity, the last but not least of which would be the abstract general negation word “not” we use for contradiction. In Chapter One, Brann, like many of us today, seems to share Darwin’s impulse to give direction to speculation about human archai by studying child development. Accordingly, the title of her book’s first official chapter—“Chapter One, Aboriginal Naysaying: Willfull No”—refers initially to “the primordial ‘no’ to everything” of the toddler (p. 9), but eventually to other respondings (Goethe’s Mephistopheles serving, seriocomically, as paradigm) that reject, disobey, or spit out what is given. Thus some of the discussion of nihilism in Chapter Six looks as though it were continuous with Chapter One’s analysis of childish “no.” The toddler rejects the breast, the command or prohibition, the saying “so it is” of the grown-up; the nihilist turns down shared traditions, institutions, and even intersubjectively acknowledged matter of fact. I loved the affectionate and knowing description of “the terrible twos” in this chapter. I share Brann’s admiration for Freud’s astonishingly potent brief essay on negation, which she summarizes, pretty much in Freud’s own words, on pp. 10-12. But it looks to me as though Freud’s quasi-Nietzschean “genealogy” of the intellectual function of judgment out of the interplay of biologically “primary impulses” has, when Brann is through with it, become tinted with Augustinian surmises of original sin. In evidence I cite the fact that it is rather late in the chapter (footnote 28, p. 22) that the “healthy naysaying” of resistance to temptation and of rebellion against tyranny are mentioned; also, that the emphasis on self-awareness’ emerging from deeds and words of “arbitrary willfullness” (cf. p. 18) does not seem to be balanced by reflections on the child’s need to exercise, so as to perfect, skill at matching expectation with outcome, and vice versa. What I have in mind is well-explained by Jerome Kagan. In brief, Kagan holds that much of what we �82 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW observe in the not quite two-year-old is made intelligible if we view it as due to the emergence of “three related competencies”: ability to notice that some happening or action is at odds with what is right and regular; absorption by the idea of standards as standards, both those set by others and those set by oneself; awareness of one’s own and the world’s ability or inability to meet standards. I am confident that Brann would agree that these competencies involve the child’s increasingly better memory: Isn’t much of the toddler’s “testing” of the world, commandeering of adults, and “first Adam”-like rage at the world’s or the grown-ups’ not coming through connected with practicing the ability to match outcome with forecast and plan, remembrance with presentation? It is my impression that Brann writes more nearly in this spirit in What, Then, is Time? (See p. 165). The chief questions asked and answered in Chapter Two, where the not of logic is taken up, are as follows: 1.What is negation? 2.Where is the sentence negated? 3.Is the positive prior to the negative? 4. How is negation related to falsity?7 Following Aristotle, Brann assigns negating (the act) and negation (the act’s sentential consequence) to the genus of opposition. An admirable overview of types of opposition, as described and classified by Aristotle, is provided, while opposition in general is recognized to be indefinable.8 Plainly, the idea of not is clarified when, through insertion into its genus, it is made evident that not must be discriminated from fellow-contenders for naysaying primacy, for example, speaking linguistically, the particles non- or un- or a- and, speaking semantically (?), the polar relations of contrariety and privation. The not of contradiction is declared the winner, on Aristotle’s authority (p. 27). But, Brann hastens to add, contradiction, which is “sheer, unintermediated opposition” (studied as such under the heading of question 4), belongs to thinking and speaking, not to things. We seem, perhaps contrary to expectation, to have ferreted out something like an answer to the question of what negation consists in. A summing up of the interim upshot of the inquiry into the MASCHLER 83 nature of not is provided on p. 29f. and concludes with the sentence: “Negation arises from the human desire and ability to make distinctions; it is (most likely) grounded in the oppositions and polarities that belong to beings....” Where in the declarative negative sentence is the particle that accomplishes negation located? is the second question. What motivates the question? One could imagine a linguist who is trying to learn an exotic language asking it. He would, I suppose, have tried to obtain a corpus of utterances sufficiently rich to hold instances of all the elementary affirmative sentence patterns of that language (supposing this possible); next, he’d have consulted with a native informant as to how one would, in his language, “say the opposite(s)” of these. Assume the native informant is a speaker of English and the linguist’s native tongue is some non-Indo-European language, say Chinese or Hebrew. If I understand Brann correctly, she believes that the Chinese linguist would somehow find out that all the elementary affirmative sentence patterns of spoken English are reducible to the triadic pattern S is P How could he have found this out? The best I can . come up with is that, in learning English, he relies on the same logical truth on which he relied when he acquired his mother tongue—that whatever is said is interpretable as making some comment on a declared or otherwise manifest topic: The topic is named by one part of the sentence; the sentence attaches the comment to the name; and in so doing comments on, that is, predicates the sentence’s predicate of, the thing or things in the world that is or are the sentence’s topic.12 The question now becomes how and why this insight into the logically dyadic T-C structure of simple 13 affirmative sentences issues in the triadic S is P structure. The reason for my selecting a Chinese-speaking linguist was, of course, that (as Brann reports in the long and important footnote 22 on p. 64), Chinese sentences do not require a copula to accomplish the job of commenting. Hebrew doesn’t either: Joseph holech “merely juxtaposes” what is, strictly speaking, a participial (thus adjectival) form of the verb to the proper name �84 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW “Joseph” to say what in English would be said by the sentence Joseph is walking. But nothing stands in the way of a Hebrewspeaking linguist’s learning that in English sentences an “is” must be inserted between “Joseph” and “walking” for the predicating job to be accomplished. What all this fussing is about is the issue how logical and grammatical distinctions differ and mesh. Brann’s fourfold answer to the question where the negation particle is located in a sentence proceeds, not on the linguist’s basis of studying a corpus of English negative sentences, nor on the logician’s basis of reflecting on the negating jobs that would have to be accomplishable if the tasks of describing and reasoning rightly are to be carried out. Rather, she works with the S is P pattern of “traditional” logic and negates, first the “is” or copula, next the “P” or predicate, third the sentence “S is P” as a whole, and finally, although not whole-heartedly, even the “S” or subject. Having done this, she points out the jobs done by the patterns which thus emerge.14 Why does she proceed in this manner? She is, usually, not at all friendly to mere algebraic patterning. More important, she knows that Frege, whose “deep critique of the classical view [of negation]” was taken up appreciatively in the concluding section of the treatment of question 1 (pp. 30-32), endorses something like what I tried to say through my fable of the Chinese or Hebrew-speaking linguist, that what chiefly matters is the irreducible logical contrast between naming and predicating and their complementarity,15 whereas the presence or absence of some form of the verb “to be” is a linguistic accident. On first reading I thought that her manner of proceeding in Chapter Two is due to her not being as convinced as was Frege of the need for a principled distinction between logic, as a normative science, and psychology and linguistics as empirical sciences which acknowledge logical norms in practice (as we all do when we think), but which do not study them.16 Brann reports and up to a point explains that Frege distinguishes T-C structures qua what he calls Gedanken (“thoughts”) from “assertions” (what Kant called “judg- MASCHLER 85 ments”). And she appreciates that “thoughts,” including negations, are for Frege objective and atemporal whereas he regards “assertions” as acts of a speaker or thinker who at some time or other asserts an assertable or its contradictry. She even quotes a sentence of Frege’s which brings this contrast to bear on the issue of negation.17 But she refuses to let go of inquiry into what it is in human beings and the world that leads to nay-saying.18 On second reading I found an outright answer to my question, why Brann distances herself not only from Frege but also from Plato and the Aristotle of On Interpretation, in footnote 22 (p. 64). She writes: “I accept...[‘S is P’] as the fundamental sentence form because people whose thought is congenial to me19 have built on it structures that are of great interest, and because I have corroborated by introspection that it is my most basic declarative mode of internal speech, closer to thinking than the bipartite sentence consisting of a subject and a predicative verb.”20 Postponing till her penultimate chapter, Chapter Six, inquiry into what she calls the “greatest question,” namely, whether Something or Nothing is ultimate, the issue in section 3 of the present chapter is whether “in human speaking denial is always derivative and in human speech negation is always secondary” (p. 36). Boethius, ancient authors in the Aristotelian tradition, and modern cognitive science are reported to endorse the opinion that the affirmative is prior to the negative, as at first blush it would seem to be, since any negating particle is an “addendum.” Bosanquet and Bradley are described as having answered the question in a more nuanced way: “Negation is not as such a denial of affirmative judgment; it does not presuppose a particular affirmative judgment to be denied. But it does presuppose some general affirmation, namely, that of a world having a positive content judged to be real....The positive judgment itself cannot take place before the distinction between a mere idea and a fact of reality is recognized. ‘And with this distinction the idea of negation is given’ ” (p. 40).21 Still, the over-all conclusion of the inquiry in section 3 is that negation is “secondary.” �86 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW More minute examination of Bosanquet’s and Bradley’s remarks on negation might have yielded a scheme for differentiating the diverse senses of the prior/posterior relation; causal priority might have become differentiated from conceptual priority; priority in dignity or rank from temporal priority.22 But as it stands, section 3 seems to favor a temporal sense of prior/posterior. This bothers me because I am inclined to believe that logicians qua logicians have no business asking about temporal priority and that conceptually the positive comes or rather is on the scene along with the negative. Thus neither is prior to either.23 As an illustration, consider the following: At the beginning of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle defines argument or deduction (syllogismos) as follows: “A deduction is a discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so.” I believe that anyone who grasps the type of necessity here spoken of grasps along with it the impossibility of the contradictory. Upon reflection I recognize that I base this apparently psychological observation on the conceptual (i.e. logical) truth that must-bes are the contradictories of cannot bes and cannot be apart from them. Indeed, it dawns on me that my seemingly psychological claim may be nothing but the conceptual truth itelf in another form of words. The treatment of question 4 (how negation is related to falsity) shows a respect for Wittgenstein that was, I believe, absent from Brann’s previous writings.24 His Tractatus is praised both for asking and for answering the following questions: (1)“How do Truth and Falsity come to be obverses” (i.e. opposites)? (2)“How is negation related to them and to truth-values?” (3)“Why are propositions bipolar?” (4)Can we justify the logic textbooks’ assumption “that each proposition has only one negative?”(p. 47).25 The two paragraphs immediately preceding the enunciation of these questions seem to report the answers that Brann found in Wittgenstein. I quote them in full: “It all begins with a discrimination exercised by us over a logical space wherein things are seated within their place in their proper relation configurations, a discrimination of the otherness of what MASCHLER 87 is false. So prototruth26 is in the world of fact. Now comes a proposition. In its negative and positive sense it is like a solid body that restricts all movement into a certain place; in its positive sense it has an empty place where the object can fit in (Tractatus 4.463). These [comparisons ]are pictures of the ... inherent bipolarity of every proposition. It shows negation from the beginning related to the negated proposition, for it is that hole which the negating proposition is blocking (Tractatus 4.0641). So to understand a proposition is to see the logical space (Tractatus 3.4) and to discriminate what the facts would have to be like to make a proposition...[i.e. a logical picture] true or false.” “Truth, then, or falsity, is the consonance or correlation of a propositional picture with reality (Tractatus 2.21), where reality (Wirklichkeit) is the existence or non-existence of facts (Tractatus 2; 2.06)—a non-existent fact being one that is pushed out of the world picture by the fact that exists. In this correspondence is truth in the primary sense, and it comes in the duality true-false because of the way logical space divides and we discriminate the facts. In the sense of propositions lies the polarity positive-negative, the latter of which is expressed in the sign not- when the facts fail to correspond to p. Truth values, T and F, are secondary to and derived from negation: ’The sense of a truth function of p is a function of the sense of p’ (Tractatus 5.2341). Thus T and F are not properties of propositions (Tractatus 6.111) any more than are positive and negative. The truth values of the truth tables capture the relations of T and F to p and not-p more than they define the latter.” Section 4 concludes with the following remarkable observations: (1)The examination of the Tractatus has revealed that for Wittgenstein and other moderns “truth comes from the world, and negation is in propositions. For traditional philosophers it is just the other way around: Negation is in the world of appearances and in the beings of the intellect, and truth is in the propositions” (p. 48). (2)What Aristotle says about the true and the false in Metaphysics Bk. IV 1011b25 and Bk VI, 1027b19ff tends to show , �88 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW that Heidegger was quite right when, in his Logic, he denied that the Aristotelian texts hold a “correspondence theory of truth” (p. 48). (3)Aristotle speaks “for a world very different from the one in which the propositional calculus of Russell and Wittgenstein is at home. For Aristotle negation (I mean negation in an objective form, contrariety interpreted as Nonbeing and its effects) is in the world and falsity (I mean the not always unintentional failure of speech to reveal being is in statements....Whether negation is in the world or in speech is one of the numerous but interrelated marks by which a classical world...is distinguished from a modern world. For a world that has negation built in responds to receptive thought since it reveals its own distinctions, while a solidly positive one demands constructive reason since oppositions need to be made” (p. 49). As the just-reported grand conclusions of section 4 of Chapter 2 tend to confirm, negation became thematic for Brann by virtue of her interest in the psychological and ontological topics that were mentioned in the opening paragraph of this review; whereas logicians—from Aristotle through the Stoic logicians and Frege, Peirce, Russell, Quine—attend to negation chiefly because of how it affects what is and what is not a valid pattern of argument. Patterns of reasoning or deduction rather than patterns of judgment or of propositions may well be their primary concern.27 This difference between herself and the logicians might also explain the otherwise rather puzzling remark, on p. 25, that “by and large the negations of logic28 take place in symbols and are found in books. They are not so much naysayings as naywritings.” For the purposes of reasoning the idea of contradiction, that is, of an opposition which is not only exclusive but also exhaustive, is indispensable: Illiterate Athenians have no trouble grasping the sense of arguments by contraposition such as, “If virtue were teachable, there’d be teachers of virtue, yet there are none. Therefore, virtue is not teacheable.” And I surmise that the pattern of Euclid’s reductios (which likewise involve the stark negativity of contradiction) was first discovered as a debating gambit and passed on by teachers of rhetoric. I say this MASCHLER 89 partly because it seems to me that even Euclid’s Elements still retain a viva voce dialogic rhetorical mode. “When we refer to a nonexistent object, what are we thinking of and what are we talking about?” (p. 76). Chapter Three begins by pointing out that this is a distinctively modern question,29 different from the ancient one taken up in Plato’s Sophist, how nonbeing can be, to which Chapter Four will be devoted. Four types of non-existents are mentioned for purposes of illustration—“members of extinct species [dodos, for instance]...deceased human beings [for example, Socrates]...artifacts no longer extant,30 but also all the entities that never did exist in the ordinary sensible sense, such as unicorns” (p. 79). Roughly speaking, four types of answers are sketched in Chapter Three: Bertrand Russell’s “theory of definite description,” Alexius Meinong’s “theory of objects [and objectives],” the recent version of Meinong worked out by Terence Parsons in his 1980 book Nonexistent Objects (New Haven: Yale University Press), and any one of a number of theories according to which “pretense and make-believe are the chief explanatory principles,...[not of the behavior of nonexistent objects], but [of] how they manage to come on the scene to begin with, [and] what we cognitively do to cooperate in fiction making” (p. 99). From the way these theories are elaborated it becomes apparent that, although —as the two earlier volumes of Brann’s trilogy argued—our ability to think and speak truly or falsely of bygone things is testimony to the powers of the human imagination, in that the feat of “re-calling” depends on or consists in the imagination’s having succeeded at making temporally absent things present, it is the “saving” of fictional entities that chiefly matters for the purposes of the present book’s Chapter Three. Before she turns to a fairly detailed examination of Russell’s treatment of proper names and definite descriptions, Brann lets us know that “the theory that is the winner in the world of logic [namely, Russell’s], will turn out to be something of loser in the world of fiction” (p. 76). Russell’s theory, as she tells us Parson too �90 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW observed, pays too high a price for its clarity: “The theory commits us to treating the sentences of fiction as false, while most of us think they have at least a sort of truth, and some of us even believe that they often have more truth than mere fact does” (p. 86). Meinong, contrarywise, “comes near to saving the phenomena of that intentional experience of central interest to this trilogy...the experience of imagining (p. 91). Russell’s excision of nonexistents from reality31 is false to the power that some non-existent beings and places have, moving us “as models and attractors,” and “outliving us by millennia, and in a word impinging on us as if existence were home to them as well [as to ourselves?]” (p. 102). Instead of recapitulating what Brann says about the technical aspects of Russell’s theory of description and Meinongian rival theories, I want to dwell a little on Brann’s question how we are to account for the fact that the Natasha, Pierre, and Andrey of Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the Hari Kumar and Ronald Merrick of Scott’s Raj Quintet32 have become our companions. A familiar answer begins by reminding us of our unabating curiosity about our fellow human beings, whether met in the flesh or encountered vicariously through what our friends, our children, our journalists report and our television news programs show. “But the characters who people novels are immensely more memorable than the Tom or Dick or Harry that our neighbors tell us about.” Well, that does somewhat depend on what a particular neighbor is capable of telling us about a particular Tom (or Jane for that matter), not to mention the particular Tom or Jane spoken about. But to the extent that it is true, may it not in large part be the result of novelistic characters’ (at least those that dwell in novels of substance) becoming so much better known to us than any persons not our “real life” intimates?33 Novelists are much better at noticing things than most of us are, and better at imparting what they’ve noticed too. Also, our acquaintance with novelistic characters is a shared acquaintance, shared with other make-believe characters in the novel, with the novel’s author, and with fellow-readers of the novel. It is hardly news that sharing (comparing notes and impress- MASCHLER 91 sions) is immensely pleasurable, greatly contributes to a feeling of solidarity, and is constitutive of our sense of reality. Add to what’s been said our relish for just about all human skills or powers, our own as readers and the novel-making skills of the author. Most important, count in the special joys of play and makebelieve: Aren’t we well launched on the beginnings of some sort of answer to the question “Why and how do fictional characters become real to us?” Brann does not think so. At least, she rejects the idea that what we relish, in ourselves and novelists, is the exercise of the human power of make-believe: “Being absorbed into a fiction, living in its landscapes and with its people, is not well described as a form of pretense—not on the reader’s or viewer’s part and so much less on the poet’s or painter’s part....Children, to be sure, play ’Let’s pretend,’ but that is usually when the game requires that roles be assigned , and I’d bet that the mover of the pretense doen’t often assign, say, the submissive role to herself; in participating in a novel, on the other hand, we may well surrender ourselves to the experiences of the underdog ”(p. 99f).34 I wonder whether childish “dramatic play” (as the child psychologists call it) and make-believe of every sort is here conceived of in all its richness. Think of the infinite variety of solitary and collaborative pretending and letting be we catch our children at! Sure, sometimes there is one kid in charge (“I’ll be mommy and you’ll be baby”) but by no means always. Two games of make-believe I remember watching were: spreading out newspapers on the floor to be islands and going island-finding, island-hopping, and islandworking; arranging marbles in rows and letting them be children at school. Neither of these games called for leadership. Older children would sometimes join the younger ones at play, humbly grateful and gratified to be allowed “in” on the game. Improvisational theatre has some of these qualities, I believe, though I cannot be sure since I have never participated, either as actor or as audience.35 I went on like this because I want to make concrete that there might be ways of “taking fiction seriously” and trying to understand why and how �92 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW make-believe matters that don’t proceed by way of ontology but by way of psychology. The British pediatrician and child psychologist D.W Winnicott may have something to teach us here.36 And as for . grown-ups making believe, I have begun to read Kendall L. Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe, On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Part Four of this book tries to show why it is all right to do without fictional entities. I should, however, also mention that in Austria, at the University of Graz, much is currently being written about the logic and ontology of fictional objects. A reader of an earlier version of this review advised me that I need to report where I stand on the issue of the being and non-being of fictional characters. I am undecided, because I have insufficiently considered (to give just one example) whether my belief that one can be as mistaken in one’s “reading” of a fictional character as one can in one’s “reading” of a violin sonata does or does not have ontological implications. My laziness about ontology may have something to do with the fact that I lean toward believing that it is more illuminating to ask questions about how imagined persons and places are and are not like historical individuals and geographic regions, or how what one learns about good and evil from living hooks on to what one learns about them from literature, than it is to delve into ontology. The rest of Chapter Three is devoted to reflections on lies and lying37 and to Anselm’s so-called ontological proof of the impossibility of God’s non-existence.38 The setting out of Anselm’s argument is very pretty! Chapter Four: When we begin to read Chapter Four’s first paragraph, we are already in possession of the guidepost furnished in the Preface (p. xiv): “Here [in section 2] comes on the scene the Non of philosophy (my italics), a prefix signifying not the brusquely rejecting denial of fact in words but the more forgiving opposition of two elements in the same world. The thought of Nonbeing comes among us as the unbidden effect of Parmenides’ injunction against it, and Plato will domesticate that same Nonbeing, bringing MASCHLER 93 it into philosophy as the relational principle of diversity, the Other.” But to reach section 2 we must traverse section 1. It begins: “Parmenides learned from the goddess who dwells in the house of truth that ’Being is’ and that he must not embark on the way of Nonbeing. As far as I know, Nonbeing had not established itself in anyone’s thought—at least in the West—before Parmenides’ deity warned him off this path of inquiry; nor has it ever vacated its place in thought since. Her [i.e. the goddess’s] repeated prohibitions and injunctions against this Unthinkable and Unsayable seem to have done for this philosophical offense what inveighings against sin have so often accomplished in the moral sphere—they have launched it on its career as a well-formulated and ever attractive presence” (p. 123). Among the titillating suggestions of Brann’s commentary on Parmenides’ poem there is this, that this “heroic epic” (in dactylic hexameter) is “unmistakably [intended as?] a rival to Homer’s Odyssey,” so that “the ancient difference between philosophy and poetry” of which the Republic speaks (607b)39 first comes on the world scene when the journeying of young Parmenides displaces that of middle-aged Odysseus. I find myself incapable of paraphrasing what Brann says about Parmenides. Here are some more quotations: “We often use phrases like ‘sing a song,’ where the object is the action of the verb made into a thing accomplished. Parmenides sometimes does something symmetrical with the verb ‘to be’ at the front end of a sentence. He turns the verbal sense into a subject. But I don’t think that Being or its negation is thereby established as a thing....On the contrary, mere verbal ‘Is’ remains the truest kind of showing forth, and the nounlike forms merely display the inability, or rather unwillingness, of the goddess’s speech to get outside the meaning of that little word which courses through human speech surrounded by subject and predicate. Parmenides’ poem is a rebuff before the fact to those who will claim that Indo-European languages are indefeasibly subject-and-predicate-ridden. For this is what Parmenides is bidden [by his goddess] to convey: the sheer Isness of which we always get hold �94 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW when we think beyond multiplicity....The common declarative tripartite sentence...is an implicit expression of three distinctions: between the thinker and the thought (since some thinking person is having and uttering a thought); between the thought and what it is about (since the sentence states a thought-proposition about an object); and between the object and its properties (since the sentence predicates a property of its subject). At the very beginning, before these elements have ever been formally established, the goddess wants to prevent them from being distinguished....My main purpose in this section has been to enter just enough intothe meaning of ‘Is’ to make sense of the ’Is not’ that trails it as its unwelcome but unshakable doppelganger” (p. 130ff.). “The next step in the ancient story of Nonbeing is...the reversal of its outlaw status and its integration into the community of Beings. It is taken in Athens, the city of reconciliations” (p. 138). What follows the exquisite paragraph whose two opening sentences were just quoted40 is a fresh setting out of reflections on Plato’s dialogue the Sophist.41 I describe a few of these. Seasoned readers of Platonic dialogues agree in noticing that the conversation in the Sophist begins with the question whether corresponding to the three names or titles “sophist”, “statesman”, “philosopher” there are three beings or three types of being. Given the fact that there is a dialogue called Sophist and also one called Statesman, the non-being of a dialogue called Philosopher is a glaring fact. Some Plato commentators have argued that the Philebus is the “missing” dialogue. But Brann believes that there are indications in the Sophist that Plato means us to understand that “sophists and philosophers are identical,” though differing in three respects: First, the dialectical skill which is shared by sophists and philosophers is, in the philosopher, accompanied by a kind of professional ethics. Dialectic is, for him, a sacred trust. For the sophist it is a moneymaking techne, for sale to the highest bidder. Second, unlike the traveling sophist, who is detached from civic loyalties, “the philosopher never forgets his human circumstances” (p. 139). Third, the MASCHLER 95 philosopher is “that rare sophist who acknowledges Nonbeing without taking cover in it” (p. 139). To catch the “vulgar” sophist, the philosopher-sophist—in this dialogue represented by an unnamed stranger-guest from Parmenides’ city, Elea—must somehow show that contrary to what Parmenides’ goddess taught him, Nonbeing is. But it is not only to catch the sophist; nor just to defend the possibility of false speech, negative speech, and error. Rather, to save philosophy itself (to save speech itself?), Nonbeing must be allowed to be! (Sophist 260A). The stranger therefore, Theseus-like, or again, Athena-like, bestows citizenship on Nonbeing by declaring it a form among the koinonia of forms (p.141). It is the diversifying relational principle or form Otherness, not to medamoos on, absolute nothing. “It is its ...[being identified] as the Other that saves it from the utter inability—which Parmenides does indeed assert—to become sayable....Nonbeing both bonds and negates among beings, but its negation is not annihilation” (p. 142). The chapter’s last paragraph makes the transition to Hegel: “In Nonbeing naysaying has found its enabling principle in the realm of Being. Now comes a view of speech and thought [namely, Hegel’s] as themselves having inherent negativity. As Nonbeing was a source of ontic diversity, so this [Hegelian] negativity will be the source of mental motion” (p. 144, my italics). Concerning Chapter Five I merely report that it employs the trinity Spirit, Understanding, Reason to display and classify the kinds of negativity encountered in Hegel’s Phenomenology, Kant’s First Critique, and Hegel’s Logic. Devotees of Hegel will find much to admire here. The chapter concludes with a paragraph announcing that, though the earlier chapter concerning Parmenides and Plato and the present one concerning Hegel conspire to reaffirm that Being is prior to Nothing, this is not as yet fully established: Therefore Chapter Six42 jousts with the “greatest question”—which is ultimate, Something or Nothing? Most winning, witty, and sometimes even wise of all the sections of Ways of Naysaying are the concluding pages of this chap- �96 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW ter, Chapter Six, about Nothing, offered under the seemingly bleak heading, “Nothing as Inescapable End: Death” (pp. 188-198)! However much of the time I was rather lost in this chapter. The reason, I imagine, is that Brann’s question, whether Something or Nothing is ultimate, never jelled into being a question for me. Yet as best I understand the chapter, the various items it gathers together—“modern nominalism” (p. 170), Epicureanism and the void (p. 171ff), the “blithe nihilism” of some of the Buddhist schools (p. 173), the political “nihilism” of the mid-nineteenth century Russian revolutionaries portrayed in Turgeniev’s novel Fathers and Sons (p. 179), and Heidegger’s teachings concerning the nihilating nihil (das nichtende Nichts, p. 184ff) —are thought to deserve to stand side by side because they all affirm, albeit in different ways, that Nothing is more C primordial, more really real, than Something. This is the sense in which they are all of them “nihilisms.”43 Another thing that they may have in common is an ontology in which will is prior to understanding. It is possible that my failure to understand the chapter and its leading question is due to incomprehension of Heidegger: I tend to become so overwhelmed with irritation at his preachy incantational tone, his haughtiness, his tricks of inverting grounds and their consequents, his abuse of the scholarly riches deposited in etymological dictionaries, that I become incapable of paying attention to what he says. Conclusion: (1)Is all human “opposing” (in will, word, or deed) reactive to, thus parasitic on, a “posing”? (2)Might negating responses constitute evidence for the being of Nonbeing, Nonexistents, or even of Nothing? (3)Supposing there are Nonexistents and Nonbeings, by what powers of the soul do we encounter them? In her final chapter, Brann recapitulates the affirmative answers she earlier gave to questions (1) and (2). But she now expands on what was said about Nonbeing in her pivotal Chapter Four: “Besides the nonexistents that respond to our sense of what is missing...there are also declines and falls from existence, right in the MASCHLER 97 world around us, that we experience as a sort of nonexistence. Take, for example, the reflection of a willow tree that appears in a pond. Take the numerous things and people in the world without that are not what they appear to be....This last group, fallen existences [my italics], particularly raises the question whether it is our way of experience or the nature of things that provides the not or non here” (p. 215). As the past participle “fallen” which I underlined just now goes to show, Brann is introducing a principle of hierarchy into the realm of being. “Nonbeing as otherness is the universal relativity....But there is also ...a vertical Nonbeing....This Nonbeing...has in it something of absolute inferiority, of defective or deficient Being” (p. 216). Brann has brought us back to the central books of Plato’s Republic, I mean, books VI and VII, with their image of the sun, diagram of the unequally divided line, and story of the prisoners confined to life in a cave.44 It is in this context that she reaffirms the answer to question (3) that’s been with us since her book’s opening sentence: It’s neither sensing nor thinking that give us access to nonbeings and nonexistents but imagination and memory.45 Obviously, then, this review cannot have done justice to the book it tried to summarize and (in some measure) appraise, since that book is one third of a three thirds whole. I hope, however, to have conveyed something of its extraordinary scope, writing style, intellectual daring and imagination. NOTES: 1. The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing ( New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) 2. Cf. What, Then, Is Time?, p. 165:“...we are able to have and interpret images, to live consciously in the phases of time, and to think and speak negatively. My guess is that these three capacities are really triune, three-in-one. They may be the root of our humanity, and perhaps the subject of another book.” �98 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3. See also World of the Imagination, pp. 405 and 783, where Brann expresses her agreement with Freud and Wittgenstein that one can “speak of what is not, but not depict it.” 4. His self-identification, from Faust pt. 1, lines 1336-8, is quoted on p. 14: “I am a part of the force that constantly wills evil and constantly effects good....I am the spirit that constantly denies.” Omitted from the quotation, though surely Nietzscheans would hold that they are, if not the, an arche of “nihilism,” are the lines: “und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entste- ht/ Ist wert das es zugrunde geht;/Drum besser ware es dass nichts enstunde...” (“and rightly so, because everything that originates deserves to perish. Wherefore it would have been better if nothing had originated.”) 5. Brann’s use of the Freud essay is filtered through Rene Spitz’s The First Year of Life and No and Yes. I have not read these books. Therefore I cannot tell whether her complaint that Freud’s speculations— about what it was that first prompted the human race’s invention of a “symbol” for negation— fail to include reflection on not as accomplishing “denial of truth or untruth” is also Spitz’s. “Psychoanalytic theory does not tell whence comes mature negation and possible truth telling; these may not have a naturalistic genesis” is the concluding sentence of her account of Freud. What a non-naturalistic account of origins might consist in is not explained. 6. The Second Year: The Emergence of Selfawareness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). 7. This list slights her treatment of double negation, of the logical paradoxes that are generated when negation and self-reference are allowed to combine, of the stretching of the concept of number through the introduction of negative numbers and zero, and of Kant’s discovery or invention of “directed quantities” (vectors) in the pre-critical essay “An Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Numbers into Philosophy.” Since these topics are listed in the well-prepared index, I omit page references. 8. Cf. Metaphysics ix, 1048b1-10 9. The quoted sentence ends with the bracketed remark “...of which the first, the opposition of oppositions, is surely that of thinking itself to its object.” This claim makes me uneasy, given the remark, on p. xiii of the Preface, that “the mysteries and conuncrums of intention—denotation and reference, MASCHLER 99 sense and meaning...are happily not within the task of this book.” In my estimation, Frege’s insistence on the need for a Sinn/Bedeutung contrast and late Russell’s attempt to dispense with it must be discussed by anyone who investigates thinking and speaking and their “objects.” Observe also that conversational exchange is given no role in the account. A quick way of making this manifest is that, throughout the book, saying “no” is classified or explained in terms of exercising the will, although it surely figures when answering what linguists indeed peg as “yes/no questions.” 10. My hunch is that Anscombe’s remarks about “internal” and “external” negation in her Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (see in Anscombe pp. 31, 34, 35, 46, 47, 51), and her question (p. 53) “...Is the property of being true or false, which belongs to the truth-functions, the very sam property as the property of being true or false that belongs to the propositions whose internal structure does not interest us?” is what first prompted Brann to make the question about the “location” of the negation particle thematic. 11. If we are both looking at the ocean and you say “Majestic!” my guess that it is the ocean that is said to be majestic is pretty safe. That’s how I mean “otherwise manifest.” 12. For the somewhat ampler statement of this Fregean type of analysis of “simple” sentences which is the source of my remarks, see pp.132f, Anscombe and Geach, Three Philosophers: Aristotle, Aquinas, Frege. Please observe that although English, which has pretty nearly dropped the use of case endings, tends to place the name of the topic early in the sentence,classical Greek and other languages that use case endings to express syntactic structure may, for rhetorical purposes, place it late in the sentence. Note also that nothing prevents a simple sentence’s having a “complex” topic, for instance the ordered triple {Athena, Athens, this olive tree}, which is, on one analysis, the topic of the sentence “Athena gave Athens this olive tree.” When the topic is so identified, the predicate is “—gave—to—” When the item that would, in Greek, be in the nominative case is singled out as the name of the sentence’s topic, the predicate would be “—gave Athens this olive tree.” What chiefly matters, from a Fregean logical point of view, is the contrast between proper names (e.g. “Theaetetus”) and concept words (e.g “flies” or “sits”) as in the sentences “Theaetetus flies” and “Theaetetus sits.” A person who is unaware that the word “give” is trivalent and the word “fly” or “sit” is monovalent hasn’t got the hang of the semantics of these concept words. �100 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW MASCHLER 101 Cf footnote 11 below. See further Anthony Kenny’s Penguin volume about Wittgenstein, pp. 121f. question (p. 63) “Is Being at the true center of every sentence even if it is obscured by a predicative verb?” 13. How “simple” is to be understood in this context is, of course, much in 14. In the spirit of Kantian “architectonic,” these ways of negating a sentence are later (p. 95) brought to bear on lying, so as to yield a classificatory scheme for lies. 21. I note that there’s a large dose of such “idealist” thinking in Freud’s essay on negation: “the performance of the function of judgement is not made possible until the creation of the symbol of negation has endowed thinking with a first measure of freedom from the consequences of repression and, with it, from the compulsion of the pleasure principle.” 15. In the “dream theory” of Theaetetus 202 the mistake is to suppose that 22. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics Bk V, Ch.ll. sentences consist of nothing but names; earlier, at 190, it looks as though sentences are being spoken of as consisting of nothing but predicate words. For explicit correction of such “homogenizing” treatment of the constituents of sentences, see Sophist 262. 23. Peter Geach’s essay “The Law of Exclude Middle” (p. 79, Logic need of saying. 16. Does “doing logic”/“doing empirical science” exhaust the genus “investigation”? Brann would certainly question this bipartition. 17. “Perhaps the act of negating, which maintains a questionable existence as the polar opposite of [affirmative] judging, is a chimerical construction, formed by a fusing of the act of judging with the negation.” (p. 128 of Geach and Black’s Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford: Blackwell, 1952). 18. In footnote 54, on p. 69, Brann calls on Anscombe to testify that, as Brann puts it, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, in “rejecting inquiry into the way world, pictured fact, language, and thought are related” and “pretending that epistemology has nothing to do with the foundations of logic and the theory of meaning,” made claims that are “fantastically untrue” (Anscombe, Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, (London: Hutchinson University Library, p. 28). 19. For example, and especially, Kant and Hegel. 20. This sentence continues, after a colon, as follows:”The briefest way to put the reason why is that thinking speech brings its objects to a standstill even as it goes about discerning them through their properties. The declarative is expresses at once that transfixing done by thought and the expansion with which the object of thought responds.” The just cited explication of Brann’s “introspective” report is tantamount to an affirmative answer to the Matters, Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) contains a nice exposition of this thesis. Geach, like Brann herself (e.g., p. 28), exploits Wittgenstein’s metaphor of “logical space” and the notion of boundary for this purpose. Note, by the way, that it would be a mistake to assimilate Wittgenstein’s logical space to Brann’s psychic space, as she describes it on the opening pages of her Preface. Studying Brann’s, Wittgenstein’s, and the cognitive scientist Gilles Fauconnier’s uses of metaphors of space would be a delicate but worthwhile undertaking. 24. See, e.g., What, Then Is Time?, p. 112ff. In other sections of Ways of Naysaying Wittgenstein continues to be treated as the or a bad guy: He would, as Brann reads him,want to prevent her and fellow philosophers from investigating whether there is “some one truth behind [the] many appearances” of, in this instance, negativity (p. xiv and note 11 on p. xvii). In the chapter on nihilism, Brann approvingly reports that Stanley Rosen has “shown” that “‘Wittgenstein and his progeny are nihilists because they cannot distinguish speech from silence.’” After the brief quote from Rosen, she goes on to say: “For [according to Wittgenstein] it makes no difference what we say. It makes no difference because if, as the later Wittgenstein says...speech becomes meaningful only in a context of gamelike rules and conventions and as a ‘form of life,’ then we can never get beyond these and never receive a sensible answer when we query a conventional usage or conventionalism itself ” (p. 183). 25. I was helped by Anscombe’s version of this last question, which runs as follows: What right do logicians have to define “not” by telling us that “not p” is “the proposition that is true when p is false and false when p is true”? The phrase “the so- and- so” is, after all, legitimate only when there is a soand-so and there is only one such. �102 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 26. Does this word (or its German equivalent), occur in Wittgenstein’s text? 27. It is a striking fact that only Aristotle’s treatment of “immediate inference” is taken up (footnote 7, p. 61) and “syllogizing” omitted. Note also that in Chapter Three, when dealing with Russell’s account of Definite Description, nothing is said about the need, in mathematical reasoning, for the principle of “substitutivity of identicals” or the “principle of existential generalization.” See Ausonio Marras’ Introduction to his anthology, Intentionaliy, Mind, and Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972) for some brief remarks about the latter two. When all is said and done, Brann does not seem to be really interested in formal logic. This is how I account for her not catching the slip in claiming that “In symbolic logic we do not enter the propositions as we did in section 2, but take them as primitive, symbolized by p or q, etc.” (p. 43; cf p. 212). She certainly knows that Frege’s treatment of quantification (analysis of the sense and use of such little words as “all”, “some”, “one,” which is needed for doing predicate calculus) is what is usually singled out as the true “advance” beyond premodern logic; Stoic logic, though “pre-modern,” had already dealt with the definitions of the logical constants of propositional logic and with its basic argument patterns. I look as though I’m being a pedant about the history of logic. But that’s really not what I care about. Rather, ever since the days that I heard the World War II German soldiers who were entering Amsterdam, Holland, sing “Denn wir alle lieben nur ein Madelein, Annemarie” I have wondered, “Should I feel sorry for that girl, Annemarie, burdened with being loved by this whole troop of men? Or are there as many Annemarie’s as there are men in this troop, and each of the girls gets one of the singing men? For a fine essay on this topic, see Peter Geach’s “History of a Fallacy” in Logic Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972). 28. I believe this means the not of contradiction. 29. I am not sure how “modern” is meant here: post-Occamist, that is postrealist (in the scholastic sense of that word)? I ask for clarification of the adjective because I am not certain what, exactly, the systemic import of the observation is. See footnote 23 on pp. 111ff. See also the remark about the “inherent nihilism of an absolute nominalism” in her commentary on Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man” and the continuation of this thought in her interpretation of “The Course of a Particular,” p. 170. FootnoteA 3 on p. 199 MASCHLER 103 claims that “nominalism is one of the philosophical positions adopted by those for whom disillusionment is a warrant of truth” and concludes with a remark about the “fanatically honest.” These are, says Brann, the folk who “take pride in shivering in the metaphysical cold.” The quoted passages sound—what shall I call it?— dismissive to me. I wish there had been something more nearly like an explanation of what the nominalism/realism issue is and why Brann favors the realists. Cf pp. 4-6 of W Stace, The .T. Philosophy of Hegel (New York: Dover, 1955)? 30. Artifacts no longer in use, like sliderules, or tools for living about which we learn through literary remains but examplars of which have not been encountered by archaeologists? I try more nearly to specify the question because I am confused whether the general question of how we can speak or think truly or falsely of kinds that are“bygones” is being raised or rather the question how bygone individuals can be referred to? Cf Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations ¶79 about the many senses of “Moses did not exist.” See also G.E.M. Anscombe and P Geach, Three Philosophers .T. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973) pp. 135f about the importance of Frege’s reviving the scholastic contrast between singular and universal propositions. “Traditional” logic rides roughshod over the distinction. Geach’s essay “Perils of Pauline” in Logic Matters is refreshingly lucid and unstuffy on the subject of names and descriptioons (and much else besides). 31. Cf. p. 100: ”What Russell says he means, flatly and irremediably, and therefore he must be flatly and irremediably wrong: It cannot be the case that what is said about and within fictions is false—unless one maintains that logically accurate speech has no correspondence with humanly normal speech. For we say both that it is true and that it is true to life that Natasha Rostov marries Pierre Bezuhov, and we want to keep on saying just that.” 32. See the splendid appreciation of the Raj Quintet in Brann’s contribution to the anthology Poets, Princes, and Private Citizens edited by Joseph M. Knippenberg and Peter Augustine Lawler (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). 33. The special pleasure we take in our own children is not solely due to their being ours; it has much to do with our knowing them better than most other people’s children. 34. I worry a little about the rhetorical effects of using the words “pretend” and “pretense” in lieu of “make believe.” But let that pass. �104 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 35. The novelist Jorge Luis Borges writes somewhere, “[The actor] on stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person.” I acknowledge, however, that novels differ from stage plays, involve (in addition to the things mentioned) some special a deux intimacy between the reader and the book. 36. See for example Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock Publications, 1971 and perhaps also some of the essays about Winnicottt included in the collection edited by Grolnick and Barkin, Between Reality and Fantasy (New York: Jason Arons, 1978). I particularly recommend Rosemary Dinnage’s “A Bit of Light.” 37. As best I recall, Brann does not, when treating of “the lie in the soul” (p. 94), worry about what Freud called repression. 38. I was puzzled that Brann did not reserve space in her book to discuss the important topic of children’s and grown-ups’ often being uncertain whether this or that “really happened” and whether this or that named individual (Satan, Cerberus) or species of entities (witches) “really exists” or not. Helping children sort out the dreamt from what’s in the public world of the awake is among our parental responsibilities. Thus “...does not exist” seems to me to hold as important a story as is that about the being of non-beings. 39. Cf Epinomis 990 on that mere farmer’s almanac, Hesiod’s Works and Days?. Parmenides reputedly was the first to propose that the moon shines by the sun’s reflected light and that the earth is a sphere; also, that the evening and morning stars are one and the same. I therefore keep hoping for a reading of his poem that will show that its episteme/doxa contrast has astronomical meaning. But no such reading is endorsed by Brann. 40. These sentences allude, of course, to Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. This well illustrates the dramatizing vividness of Brann’s ontological discourse. 41. Cf The World of the Imagination p. 389ff. and Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (English version, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), p. 82 and A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 114f. 42. Corresponding to the afternoon of the day on which Man was created, male and female, in God’s image? Yes, of course I am joking in playing with the numbers. But I am not just joking: The chapters in Genesis that tell in MASCHLER 105 detail how man became man (chapters 2, 3, 4) hold a plethora of negation words, whereas the opening chapter lacks all negativity. 43. If there is an explicitly stated definition of the word “nihilism” in Chapter Six, I need to have it pointed out to me. 44. Cf. Eva Brann, “The Music of the Republic,” St. John’s Review, volume xxxix, numbers 1 and 2. Se especially pp. 75,6. 45. Cf. the discussion of “opinion” on pp. 38ff of “The Music of the Republic.” �106 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 107 The Potent Nonentity: A review of Eva Brann’s What, Then, is Time? Torrance Kirby Time, Augustine claims, is so ordinary as to be impossibly difficult (Conf. XI.14). This is the paradoxical theme to which Eva Brann returns often (one is tempted to say “time and again”) in her remarkable, recently published volume What, Then, is Time? Time, the “potent nonentity,” proves to be as elusive a quarry as the Sophist himself. The inquiry begins with a high sense of wonder peculiarly fitting in this of all philosophical quests. The inner experience of time and its foundation or ultimate ground, constitute the heart of this investigation. Brann employs an extended, highly elaborated aporetic approach to the search for a definition. So numerous and complex are the poriai encountered that this Protean beast is not pinned down with a definition until well into the closing chapter of the book. The investigation as a whole is composed in the form of a diptych with one larger panel devoted to the study of various selected texts or “presentations” by philosophers who, in Brann’s estimation, “have written most deeply and most engagingly about time.” A second smaller panel contains the author’s own “reflections” on the matter. She is careful to point out, “study and thought, though not of necessity incompatible, are by no means the same” (159). This book is worthy of the most careful reading with both ends in view. The predominance of the prolegomena in this investigation is consistent with the spirit of much contemporary, postmodern inquiry. Brann’s approach is underscored by the splendidly postrevolutionary claim that her purpose is “not to change the world but to interpret it!” Viewed in another light, however, the methodology of this book is resonant with the very best ancient authors, Eva Brann. What, Then, is Time? Lanham, MD. Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Torrance Kirby is an assistant professor at McGill University. �108 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW and its hermeneutical approach reminiscent of Aristotelian science. The first part of the book, a study of earlier philosophical “presentations” of time, constitutes a “history” such as one finds at the outset of many of Aristotle’s treatises. Brann’s study of the attempts of her predecessors to define time is thus by no means any ordinary history. Her extensive review of the preeminent contributions to the hermeneutics of time clarifies wonderfully the question concerning time and enables the reader to make the great ascent from mere study to thought. In the “reflections” of the second part, Brann proceeds intrepidly to face the question “what, then, is time?” head on. Discussion of the “lisping” efforts of predecessors (Metaph. A.1) in this chase turns out to be a daunting task. The relevant texts range “from the hard to the hellishly hard,” as Brann puts it. As in an Aristotelian “history,” the texts are selected with a view to clarification of certain key facets of the problem of definition. Four crucial theories about the nature of time are addressed through the study of four pairs of philosophers. The originality of Brann’s approach is striking. The unexpected pairings - Plato and Einstein, Aristotle and Kant, Plotinus and Heidegger, Augustine and Husserl - prove to be both inspired and illuminating. An important element of Brann’s purpose in this approach is to demonstrate that the larger questions about the nature of time are themselves by no means “time-bound.” By pairing the authors in this way Brann ensures that the problem of definition predominates over less important considerations. The first approach to the theory of time, as exemplified by the arguments of Plato’s Timaeus and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, proposes that time is “external,” namely that time refers to external motions of which it is the measure, as in the case of a clock’s measurement of the diurnal rotation of the sun. (The consideration of time as the “externality” of history and its movements is mercifully ruled outside of the present inquiry.) In the cosmos of Timaeus, time is the very intelligibility or “numbering” of the external motion of the visible heaven. As Brann puts it, this identification of time with phenomenal motion continues to “bedevil” the dis- KIRBY 109 course of physics. Einstein displays little interest in the essential nature of time, but is absorbed rather by the question of quantifying time owing to complications arising from the implication of temporality in locomotion. After the fashion of the hunt for the wily Sophist in the Platonic dialogue of that name, the consequence of this initial “presentation” of a definition of time is to introduce a dichotomous division - namely between time in the world and time in the soul - which is of considerable use to Brann in advancing her own quest for an acceptable formulation. The boundaries have been narrowed considerably by the exclusion of merely “external” time as a fallacy. Before proceeding to the presentations of internal time, Brann examines a pair who propose highly speculative accounts of the generation of time out of space. Hegel’s dialectical exposition of the genesis of time out of space is put forward by Brann as possibly the most profound of all treatments of “external” time. For Hegel, time from its first genesis as a pure Becoming, behaves like incipient spirit (Geist): “Time is the Concept itself that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition. For this reason Spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time just as long as it has not grasped its pure Concept, that is, has not annulled Time” (Phenomenology ¶ 801). Through a discussion of Bergson’s mission to suppress “extensive space” in favour of “intensive time” Brann effects a transition to the second principal stem, viz. internal time or “time in the soul,” which is the general focus of the remaining three pairs of texts in the series of presentations. With her examination of the theories of Aristotle and Kant, Brann arrives at the second crucial stem of the dichotomous division of time into the categories “external” and “internal.” Although for Aristotle motion is properly the “substrate” of time, while conversely for Kant time is itself the ground of motion, both philosophers are “driven” to relate the notion of time to a “psychic counting.” As Aristotle says, “time is the number of motion” where motion is understood as disclosing continuous magnitude. The “truth” of time resides in the numbering or counting soul that meas- �110 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW ures the before and after of this magnitude. Time, according to this presentation, is no longer viewed as an independent, “substantive” reality or but is rather reduced to the status of an accident or predicate which exists “for thought.” For Brann, Kant’s treatment of time displays a deep affinity with Aristotle’s on this more general level. The internal sense of time, however, represents much more in the Kantian metaphysics than ever dreamed of by Aristotle. For Kant this psychic counting is perhaps the most intimate characteristic of humanity. Indeed Brann shows that Kant’s treatment of time is most accessible when the Critique of Pure Reason is viewed as “a new founding of human nature whose centre is time” (55). Appearances may be removed from time but not the reverse, which reveals that time, for Kant, is prior in the order of knowing; the apprehension of change is understood to depend upon the a priori intuition of time. In one of numerous penetrating aperçus scattered throughout the discussion, Brann draws attention to Kant’s nonetheless restricted view of our ability to know ourselves as temporal beings by reminding us of his low opinion of music. This, in turn, is contrasted with Leibniz’s opposing exaltation of the unconscious counting of the soul in music as “a pleasure given to us by God so that we may know of him; in music soul is revealed to itself and God to it” (Principles of Nature and Grace ¶ 14). In the subsequent paired “presentations” of Plotinus and Heidegger, the inquiry proceeds to consider the “ground” of temporality—that is, of some higher, possibly transcendent source of this inner sense of time. Thus the dichotomous division of the “hunt” advances to a new level of precision. For both Plotinus and Heidegger, as Brann shows, time constitutes the “deepest condition” for humanity. Plotinus identifies time with specifically “human” being in its manifestations of a peculiarly ecstatic nature, by the human’s attempt to escape the element of its temporal fallenness. The Soul’s very “appetite for things to come” (Enneads III. 7.4, 34) keeps her in her fallen state. Temporal being strives for salvation, viz. the overcoming of temporal “dispersion,” through union with the eternal hypostasis above. Happiness, understood as KIRBY 111 “the flight of the alone to the Alone,” is thus altogether outside time, for it is no mere mood or emotion, but rather a fundamental possibility for the soul, that of an undispersed present even beyond being (Enneads I. 5.7, 15). Time is made explicable through eternity, its original ground. Although radically distinct from Plotinus with respect to virtually the entire substantive content of his thought, Martin Heidegger at least shares with Plotinus the supposition that temporality is the key to understanding human existence. As a being whose essence is its existence, this ultimate ground is for Heidegger not the transcendent eternity of the Plotinian Primal Hypostasis, but rather the temporality of human being itself, Dasein. The discussion stemming from this remarkable dialectical pairing of Heidegger and Plotinus is particularly illuminating. In chapter four Brann arrives at her final pairing of Augustine and Husserl with the observation that no two philosophers are both further apart and closer together. Through an examination of their discourse on time as a temporal “stretching” of the soul (distensio, as Augustine puts it), the argument—for it is indeed an argument— acquires a distinctly sharper dialectical edge. The coincidence of identity and difference in their thinking about time is uncannily appropriate to their strongly dialectical approaches to the quest to define time. According to Brann, while Augustine sifts through the phenomena in search of existence and while Husserl neutralizes existence in order to find the phenomena, both look within themselves for the phases of time, that is to say, for past, present, and future. For both philosophers, Brann argues, the problem of “internal” time is not to be referred to a higher ontological ground for resolution, as is the case with Plotinus, for example, but rather time is to be understood as arising out of and discerned within the soul or consciousness. Brann’s argument on this point is open to some dispute, at least with reference to Augustine if not to Husserl. Perhaps the device of pairing the presentations has led to a downplaying of Augustine’s affinity with Plotinus. It is common among contemporary existential readings of Augustine to de-emphasise his dependence upon Neoplatonic metaphysics. He begins his presen- �112 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW tation on time with the “in principio” of Genesis 1, the revelation of the divine creative activity understood as totally beyond the temporal, narrative realm of human existence. In making his transition in Confessions from Book X on memory to Book XI on time, Augustine shifts gears as it were from looking within at the phenomena of consciousness to looking above at the higher ground of the life of the soul, ab interiora ad superiora. The Creator, who is altogether above the flux of becoming, is understood nevertheless by Augustine to be present, knowing, and active within the temporal realm. While temporal human existence, dispersed or “distended” as it is through phases of past, present, and future, is to be contrasted absolutely with the undivided existence of “the One,” Augustine finds nonetheless within the soul as imago dei a positive image of the activity of God in creation. The enigma of the human experience of time is thus referred by Augustine to the exemplar of the Trinity for resolution. In the psychological image of the Trinity— memoria, intellectus, et voluntas—Augustine finds a model for his reflection upon the experience of time as at once continuous and without extension. He points to the chanting of a psalm as a potent revelation concerning time. He reflects upon the recitation of a song that he knows, Ambrose’s hymn Deus Creator Omnium. The song is stored in memory, an already completed whole which the soul intends to sing. Before singing, the soul’s expectation possesses the complete song. As the soul sings, the relation of expectation to memory shifts syllable by syllable until the entirety of expectation has finally become a memory of the song as completed, as having been sung. Memory, presence, and expectation are united in the song. Through the singing of praise, itself a mode of confession, Augustine begins to see how the timeless and the temporal become one. Through song the soul is enabled to think the divine object in the image, and this, Plotinus certainly would regard as the most extreme absurdity. Thus, by “collecting” ourselves, we can escape from our temporal constitution into God’s “standing Now,” as Brann puts it, into eternity. KIRBY 113 Brann concludes the part devoted to presentations of time with an extensive and complex analysis of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological treatment of internal time-consciousness. The text of Husserl’s Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins we owe, Brann tells us, to Edith Stein’s supererogatory editing of various manuscripts and notations. By way of a background sketch, Brann offers a helpful introduction to Phenomenology itself and looks at the influence of Augustine, William James, and Franz Brentano on Husserl’s reflections upon time. Husserl is particularly engaged with the problem of integrating the phases of time. Brann claims that he in fact “solves the problem of relating the present, the moment of primary perception to its immediate retentional past and protentional future by giving a model for the orderly sinking away of perceptions and their intertwining with present consciousness” (160). With Husserl, the presentations have in a certain sense come around full circle. Husserl brings his account of time to completion by reconstituting “external” time in the form of an absolute temporal flux which transcends the temporal phenomena of internal time-consciousness and which is, moreover, the underlying principle which sustains human subjectivity. As Brann concludes, Husserl’s ultimate temporal flux is “a very nearly inarticulable final fact” (156). In the Second Part of the book, titled “Reflections,” Brann purports to finally face the question “What, then, is time?” (The claim that the “Presentations” are a mere exercise in “study” and that only now, in the final pages is she going to roll up her sleeves and get down to the serious business of “thought” seems not entirely ingenuous. Already a good deal of hard thinking has gone into both the pairing itself and the ordering of the pairs, all of which serves to advance the quest for a definition.) The reflections proceed with a consideration of certain formal similarities between time and the faculty of imagination - here, once again, is the Sophist and the wedding of Being and Nonbeing. Brann shows that images present a relatively constant picture, viz. Being and Nonbeing in fusion, while time, on the other hand, is a flux of �114 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW “Being as passing over into Nothing and Nothing as passing over into Being” (Hegel, Phil. of Nature ¶ 259). Time and imagination are thus connected with one another through the way Being is related to Nonbeing in both temporal process of becoming and in images. As might well be expected, Brann offers a fascinating comparison of these concepts by building upon her previous exploration of the faculty of imagination.2 There follows Brann’s own interpretation of the phases of time together with their appropriate faculties: past and memory, future and expectation, present and perception. Throughout, she draws upon the foregoing presentations of time by the philosophers which provide both the categories and a vocabulary which enable Brann to penetrate the question deeply and swiftly. This section of the book is a wonderful demonstration of the dictum of Bernard of Chartres who claimed to be able to see things far off by virtue of “standing on the shoulders of giants.” In an interesting and frequently amusing section Brann proceeds to analyse various “time pathologies” as forms of “phase-fixation.” Here we have an opportunity to reflect on aspects of time’s “brutal tyranny,” e.g. the contemporary idolatry of novelty, a fixation on the “just now,” the trivialising of the past in nostalgia or the future obsession of the IT phenomenon. Brann even reviews cures for these time-induced pathologies such as that offered by Nietzsche in his teaching on the Eternal Recurrence of the Identical. Brann counters this frantic cycle of reincarnation with another, much more attractive option, namely the concept of Aevum, as manifest in the sempiternity of the angels in heaven or, alternatively, in the fictional temporality of the novel. All of this is delightful. Brann recommends the cultivation of “aeveternity” as at least “a partial relief for our temporal ills.” In the last chapter of the book Brann moves closer to the final struggle with the definition of time by way of a via negativa. Here time is finally unveiled as the potent, indeed tyrannical, non-entity. The revealing is apophatic. Time is not external motion, nor is it an abstraction from process. It is not a power or force, nor a “fungible substance” (i.e. time is not even money!). Time is certainly not a KIRBY 115 mere linguistic usage. As Brann succinctly puts this point, “Language can guide thought but it cannot constrain it.” (Brann notes in passing how neatly the distinctions of philosophical inquiry concerning time seem to turn up in the problems of linguistics.) Time is not Dasein. Whereas Heidegger regards human finitude as ultimately expressed in the fact our mortality, that our existence is “destined” to end, Brann counters optimistically that human finitude is better sought in the fact that we begin, “we do not temporalize ourselves; we are born temporal.” Time is no determinate being; it is not perceived by the senses, it is without external effects, and elusive to insight. Time is therefore a non-entity. Though apparently nothing, time’s “not-being” is nonetheless very powerful (although, be it noted, not “a power”). “What, then, is time?” Here the argument finally shifts from marked apophasis to a more kataphatic note. The affirmative definition comes in nine-fold form (a touch which no doubt would have pleased Pythagoras). It is not this reviewer’s intent, however, to spill the beans. In order to reap the full benefit of Brann’s final, dramatic unmasking of Time—to be altogether “present” as it were at the capture of this elusive beast— readers are well advised to follow the leader of the hunt herself along the trail through all its intricate twists and turns. And who indeed are the intended participants in this quest? Brann recommends her book to anyone who longs to learn about time by pursuing the quest described above, to aficionados, to students who seek to come to grips with some of the primary texts on time, and finally to teachers who might be on the look-out for some tips on selections for a syllabus on the interpretation of time. This is an unusually difficult book whose author challenges the reader to “take note” and whose rewards are proportionate to the investment of careful, punctuated attention. NOTE: �116 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 1. See Eva Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991). 117 The Feasting of Socrates Eva Brann Before reviewing Peter Kalkavage’s Focus Press translation of the Timaeus for the St. John’s community, I must, in all fairness, confess my partiality. He, Eric Salem, and myself were the cotranslators of Plato’s Phaedo and his Sophist for the same publisher. Together, over several years, we worked out some principles of translation which are discernible in this Timaeus version. In fact, I think the three of us would welcome with some glee the notion of a St. John’s school of translation. For we wanted to be working very much with the spirit of the Program and a possible use by our students in mind. We thought that translations of Plato should render word for word, even particle for particle, with the greatest exactitude, what the Greek said, avoiding all interpretative paraphrase, craven omissions, and latter-day terminology. But we also stipulated that they should catch the idiomatic expressiveness and the changing moods of the original. These principles are clearly at work in this rendering of the Timaeus. We learned as well, however, that each dialogue is a unique universe of discourse, the artful representation of an inquiry with its own approaches, terms, settings, and above all its own participants, each of whom is in a mood specific to this never-to-be-repeated, yet ever-to-be-continued conversation. Thus it follows that the Timaeus made its own particular demands on the translator. It is, after all, less a dialogue than a short tale of antiquity by Critias followed by an account of the cosmos by Timaeus—a long one. The familiar voice of Socrates falls almost silent as these speeches are made to be a feast for his enjoyment—or, perhaps, amusement. Timaeus’s cosmology is full of the sort of technical matter Socrates does not scruple to spoof in the Republic—the very dialogue which establishes the sort of ideal city that his companions agree to bring to moving life for him by giving it its historical and cosmological setting. Peter Kalkavage, Plato’s Timaeus. Newburyport, MA: The Focus Philosophical Library (2001). �118 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Timaean cosmology involves not only the moving spheres and circles that bear the astronomical bodies and the geometric elements from which they are constituted, but also the musical “harmonies” (scales) that ensoul the heavens. Three beautifully clear appendices provide the reader—and this edition is meant for the “adventuresome beginner”—with the fairly elementary knowledge needed to enjoy this heavenly entertainment. It should be said, though, that the cosmological astronomy of the Timaeus together with its sober mathematical exposition in Ptolemy’s Almagest was the serious science that stood behind the New Astronomy of the dawn of modernity. (There is a story—I cannot vouch for its truth—that in the early days of the St. John’s Program books of astronomy and physics were to be found in the library ranged under “Music,” courtesy of the Timaeus.) The dialogue is so full of Greek science that there is a danger of regarding it as a source of antiquarian problems. But, the translator observes in his Preface, that is the very danger, the one of reducing the cosmos to a collection of mummified facts and recondite puzzles, to which the Egyptian priests are said to fall prey. So less is more by way of learned exegesis, and the well-illustrated appendices give just enough to make the dialogue intelligible to an amateur. Since I’ve started at the back, let me say that here too you will find an English to Greek glossary. The entries tell not only how a Greek word is translated and, if more than one translation has to be used, why that is necessary, it also gives the root or central meaning and others that flow from it. In sum, the entries are a pretty interesting lesson in philosophic Greek. To go to the front end of the book, there is, besides the Preface, the Introductory Essay. The Timaeus, the only Platonic dialogue known in medieval times and in all epochs the most influential one among those philosophers to whom the constitution of the cosmos was of central interest, is also, in Peter Kalkavage’s words, “the strangest of Plato’s dialogues. It is so strange that one wonders whether anything can be taken seriously . . . . [It] is strange not only to us but also in itself.” The Introduction is intended to illuminate BRANN 119 that strangeness without dispelling it. The odd but necessary question is pursued: What is the Timaeus about? Socrates is all dressed up (kekosmenos) and in a strange mood. He gives a truncated, philosophy-free version of his Republic and asks to be told about this stripped-down political blueprint mobilized to go to war. The resulting verbal feast prepared for him among the three eminent men who are present (one mysterious fourth is absent) has an oddly skewed relation to the truth and the love of wisdom that are Socrates’ normal preoccupation, for it is presented as a “likely story,” and a story of likenesses, the way of being that is so dubious for Socrates. The festivity begins with Critias’s retelling of an antiquarian tale about archaic Athens as told by the Egyptian priests to the visiting lawgiver of Athens, Solon. We hear that this old Athens, ancient even to the ancients, once defeated a huge and sinister island empire called Atlantis.* Critias thus presents a pseudo-historical Athens as the embodiment of a “pale image” of the Republic. There is plenty to puzzle about in this beginning. For this city Timaeus supplies the cosmic setting; we are invited to wonder how fitting it is. A divine craftsman appears out of nowhere and makes the cosmos, the well-ordered beautiful world, in the image of an original model. Hence the cosmos has two wonderful features. It is a copy and thus, while imperfect in its being, capable of being in turn a model, as it indeed is in the dialogue. And second, it is intelligible, interpretable, not only as an intentionally made work of art, but as en-, or rather, circum-souled. For whereas the human animal has its soul within, the cosmos is encompassed by bands of soul matter. All these wonderful and significant doings can be read in the dialogue, but the Introduction brings out their thought-provoking strangeness and their relevance to our humanity. Thus after the cosmic construction there is a harsher “Second Founding.” It has an elusive “wandering cause,” the “source of power as opposed to goodness”—an intra-cosmic, semi-intractable cause called “necessity” acting in a scarcely intelligible theater of �120 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW operation, space. Within it arise body and the human animal: “The making of man for Timaeus is a pious desecration,” says the Introduction. It is delegated by the Craftsman-father to his starsons. This part of the Timaeus, the coming-to-be of organic life within the cosmos, is so weird that our undergraduates aren’t even asked to read it, yet Peter Kalkavage shows how to begin to make humanly applicable sense of it. Finally he returns to the question: “Why is the greatest philosophical work on the cosmos framed by politics?” An answer is suggested: The frame signals Plato’s reflection on what happens when the Socratic search for truth is replaced by a Timaean will to order. But this shift to the constructive will might well stand for the revolution that initiated our modernity. The means to this new age are also adumbrated in this miraculous dialogue; in his final assessment of the Timaeus Peter Kalkavage says that “the likely story presents the paradigm of what it would mean to use mathematical structures to make flux intelligible—at least as intelligible as possible.” Twenty-one centuries later the calculus will perfect these structures, and so the science by which we live and which Plato has prefigured will really take off. Read this introduction to get a sense of what it means for a work to be great, to see deep into things and far into time. But better yet, read the splendid translation framed by the valuable apparatus. It is trustworthy; it sticks close to the text, word for word. But it is also readable—not translaterese but good, lively, and flexibly intoned English, since faithfulness in translation includes preserving something of the literary quality of the original. This dialogue in particular is, for all the wild exuberance of its philosophical imagination, written in fresh, plain Greek, though plain terms are often put to novel uses.—Would you expect to find Being, Becoming, Same, Other, ordinary words with a gloss of high philosophy, in a cosmological context? Perhaps the best example is the divine Craftsman. As the translator points out in the glossary, the Greek word, which has passed into English as “demiurge,” merely BRANN 121 means a skilled worker available for orders from the public, so it was just right to preserve that sense with the plain English word. To help with background knowledge, there are lots of footnotes right on the page. Here’s my recommendation, then: We have all these wonderful alumni seminars around the country. Why not devote one here and there to a reading of the Timaeus?—And perhaps some participants might take advantage of Peter Kalkavage’s translation (which is, incidentally, purposely inexpensive). I’d love to come and help, and so, I imagine, would he. *I can’t resist a footnote. In our own last century, there have been droves of people, many of them now active, who have fallen into Plato’s antiquarian trap and gone in search of this lost continent. The description of the island, which enormous geometrically planned public works have transformed into something formidably awful, is set out in the dialogue Critias. Its Speer-like architecture (Speer was Hitler’s architect) appealed to the Nazis, whose mythmakers represented Atlantis as an early Nordic utopia, to be rediscovered by state-sponsored archaeologists. These people had at least got it right with respect to the scariness of the drawn-and-quartered, brass-walled locale. Most modern representations, be they in books, songs, or movies (of which Disney’s “Atlantis” is the latest) are governed by the mistaken notion that Atlantis was meant to be a lost place of marvels and beauties, a sort of mid-ocean Shangri-la. It’s actually a totalitarian topography, the triumph of the will over nature. � 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2002/2 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Russell, George Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Carey, James Ruhm von Oppen, Beate Sachs, Joe Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Phillips, Blakely Sachs, Joe David, Amirthanayagam Berns, Lawrence Maschler, Chaninah Kirby, Torrance Description An account of the resource Volume XLVI, number two of The St. John's Review. Published in 2002. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_46_No_2 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/648a384f74750f5f040b84095b2f559b.pdf ac6e2972316eda180bb32da8dd4d3983 PDF Text Text The St. John’s Review Volume XLVI, number three (2002) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann James Carey Beate Ruhm von Oppen Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Justin Castle The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P Box 2800, .O. Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2002 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Essays and Lectures Wholes and Parts in Human Character......................... 5 Joe Sachs Addition and Subtraction Without End in Oresme’s Quaestiones super Geometriam Euclidis...................... 29 George Anastaplo In Memoriam: Leo Raditsa Toast to the Senior Class, May 12, 2000.....................59 Leo Raditsa The Collapse at Athens and the Trial of Socrates.........61 Leo Raditsa Poem Ovid, Banished..........................................................83 Leonard Cochran, O.P. Review Philosophy Revived Stewart Umphrey’s Complexity and Analysis..............85 Eva Brann �4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 Wholes and Parts in Human Character Joe Sachs Who are you? What are you? I’m not asking for your name or occupation, but rather for what you’re made of, or what you amount to. And I’m not intending to be impolite or impertinent, but to include myself in the question, to turn the attention of all of us upon the philosophic question that touches us most closely. Thomas Aquinas is not hesitant about answering it (Summa Theol. I-II, Q. 1, art.1, resp.): “Man differs from irrational animals in this, that he is master of his actions. Wherefore those actions alone are properly called human of which man is master. Now man is master of his actions through his reason and will.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet articulates the same thought in praising Horatio, and formulates the contrasting state (Act 3, scene 2, 64-75): “Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, /And could of men distinguish, her election / Hath sealed thee for herself...Give me that man / That is not passion’s slave and I will wear him / In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, / As I do thee.” So you amount to either a master or a slave, depending on whether reason or passion has the upper hand in your makeup. But is this contrast well-founded? David Hume doesn’t think so. “Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life,” he writes,” than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates.” But Hume argues that reason has no Joe Sachs is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This lecture was delivered to the Seattle University Philosophy Club on May 17, 2002, and to the January Freshmen at St. John’s College in Annapolis on June 5, 2002. �6 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW power to oppose passion or produce action, and concludes that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. 2, Part 3, sect. 3). This deliberate paradox may be more palatable when we note that Hume is only adding force and vivacity to an earlier formulation of Thomas Hobbes, who had written that “the Thoughts are to the Desires, as Scouts and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired” (Leviathan, Part 1, Chap. 8). Hobbes and Hume agree that reason is merely instrumental to our primary mode of access to our own good, which can only be irrational. Now the weakness of reason may be granted by those who would not go along with demoting it to a subordinate role in us. Immanuel Kant reflects that “if...happiness were the real end of nature in the case of a being having reason and will, then nature would have hit upon a very poor arrangement in having the reason of the creature carry out this purpose...And in fact, we find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment” (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Hackett, p. 8; Academy p. 395). Kant sides with reason, but as our guide to becoming worthy of a happiness which can never be realized in the empirical world. We are radically divided beings, in his view, and can never have it both ways. But an older sort of wisdom is articulated in Plato’s Republic (esp. 439D-442B), according to which the human soul is not a duality of reason and passion, but has three parts, with the middle part giving it the possibility of wholeness. As described in the Republic, this middle part is what is irrationally spirited in us, just as in a spirited horse, but capable of obeying reason, so as to be able to follow its leader like a dog. There is nothing spiritual in this sort of spirit, but there is something that can have dignity, since it appears not only in pep rallies that arouse school spirit, but also as what we call the indomitable human spirit which can rise above any adver- SACHS 7 sity. The republic, that is, the regime or constitution, that Plato’s Republic is about is the internal human commonwealth in which reason rules and directs the passions by joining with, and giving honor to, our spirited side. Only that third part of us is capable of loving the good and being loyal to it, and the constitution to which it submits is not the despotic one of mastery, but the political rule of persuasion. About fifty years ago, C. S. Lewis wrote a book about education called The Abolition of Man. His claim there is that all the ancient human traditions have addressed in some form the middle part of the human being, while the prevailing thinking of the enlightened twentieth century has lost touch with it altogether. If we fear all the attachments of our spiritedness as divisive or sentimental, as obstacles to progress, then we may proclaim our rationality, while in fact we come to be ruled by the lowest common denominators among our appetites, if not by mere caprice. Those progressive educators who fail to understand this may like to call themselves intellectuals, Lewis says (p. 35), but “It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.” If reason is universal and the passions are generic, then it is the spirited, honor-loving element in our make-up that most of all makes each of us what we are, and a disdain for it, with a consequent neglect of its nurture, leads to the dis-education that Lewis calls the abolition of man. Now these provisional sketches of the ways reason and passion may stand toward one another in us may serve as background to an exploration of Aristotle’s thinking about the same topic. When I came to spend an extended time in close contact with the Nicomachean Ethics, I found a number of things that surprised me. After many earlier readings of the book, I would have said confidently that Aristotle believes the healthy human soul to be under the command and control of reason, and that something in us that is neither wholly ration- �8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW al nor wholly irrational makes that possible. As in so many other ways, that is, I thought that Aristotle had followed a path marked out by Plato, making it determinate in his own way. Now I am not so sure of that interpretation. Some distinct and memorable passages in the Ethics seem to paint that portrait of what a human being is, but others that are more difficult, more entangled, and more central to Aristotle’s inquiry seem to tell a different story. I hope to make both accounts clearer to myself, and to invite all of you to take part in assessing them, both as readings of a text and as reflections of the subject we all have an interest in knowing best. Now, anyone who has ever taken Plato’s Republic seriously, and hasn’t been frightened off by its lack of currently popular jargon and currently prevalent opinions, knows that the three-part soul offers a powerful way of analyzing human life. Socrates is challenged in Book 2 to refute the claim that ethical virtue provides a second-best life, a social compromise made among ourselves by the weak, who play it safe to achieve a mediocre and watered-down version of happiness. This argument of Glaucon (358E-359B) is in no way inferior to similar ones made two thousand years later by the social contract theorists, beginning with Thomas Hobbes. But by the end of Book 4, not even halfway through the dialogue, Glaucon admits that his argument has been exposed as ridiculous, and needs no refutation (445A). What has made ethical virtue go from seeming indefensible to seeming unassailable as a thing desirable for its own sake is nothing more than the hypothesis of the three-part soul. With that hypothesis, the examination of the pursuit of happiness shifts from the conflict among human beings to the conflicts within each one of us. That permits Socrates to conclude that virtue consists in “ruling and organizing oneself and becoming a friend to oneself, and harmonizing those things, of which there are three, just like the three notes of a musical chord” (443D). But Aristotle is not comfortable with partitioning the soul at all. In Book 3, Chapter 9 of On the Soul, he says one can SACHS 9 distinguish as many parts of the soul as one wishes, and easily find parts farther apart than the three in the Republic; and even those three, he says, cannot be wholly separated, since desire is present in all three of them. In the Ethics he is willing to adopt the popular way of speaking of a rational and an irrational part, but even there he cautions that these may be no more distinct than are the convex and concave sides of the same circle (1102a26-32). Aristotle’s own investigation of the soul focuses on ways of being-at-work, and on the potencies for them, rather than on parts, but the purposes of an inquiry into ethics do not require that degree of precision. Why, then, if the division of the soul in any manner is merely imprecise or figurative, does Aristotle prefer to accept a two-part rather than a three-part division? Or, what amounts to the same question, why does spiritedness play so small a role in the Nicomachean Ethics? It is an explicit topic in two places, and briefly in both: in one of them it is treated as an attitude that resembles courage but is not the genuine virtue (1116b23-1117a9), and in the other it is described as a particular kind of lack of restraint, an oversensitivity to insults that is less harmful than a lack of restraint in one’s desires (1149a24-b3). Desires are governed by pleasure and pain, while spiritedness is governed by honor and shame. Now over the course of the ten books of the Ethics, the topic of pleasure re-emerges more than once; as the inquiry deepens, pleasure itself is seen in new lights, and transforms itself through the growth of human character. By contrast, the topic of shame is set aside early on (Bk. 4, Ch. 9), as something appropriate only to immature and undeveloped states of character. This is one of the clearest signs that Aristotle does not consider ethics to be concerned at all with social pressures, or the imposition of social norms, but to depend upon rising above motives of that sort. He calls it absurd to credit an adult with decent motives if he refrains from certain kinds of acts only out of shame (1128b26-28). �10 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Honor too, the positive opposite of shame, is left behind early in Aristotle’s study of ethics, but it is dealt with a little more extensively, and in fact we can observe the very moment when it drops out of the developing account of human character. Very early, in the fifth chapter of the whole work, Aristotle dismisses the honor that is the highest aim of political life as too superficial a thing to be a plausible candidate for the ultimate human good (1095b22-30). Honor shifts with those who give it; one really wants honor from those worthy to give it, and only for things in oneself that are worthy of receiving it, so the true standards that make honor worth pursuing are some sort of virtue or excellence, and the wisdom to recognize it. A little later in the inquiry, though, honor turns up again as entangled with one of the virtues, and the account of that virtue repeats the dialectical motion of Aristotle’s earlier analysis of honor, this time as a lived development within a human being. That virtue is a complicated one to understand, just because of its complex relation to honor. Aristotle calls it greatness of soul. Our times, in which so many people have attempted to deny the existence both of souls and of any form of greatness, offer us no clear equivalent of Aristotle’s phrase. The old Oxford translation called it pride, which might capture the greatness of soul Homer portrays in Achilles; some translations have called it high-mindedness, which might capture, or rather caricature, the greatness of soul Plato makes visible in Socrates. The worst translation of the phrase, magnanimity, simply plugs in Latin equivalents of each of its parts, and gets a result that has a totally different meaning in English, in which generosity is the primary element. Brother Robert Smith once suggested Charles de Gaulle as the twentieth century’s pre-eminent great-souled man, and generosity was no part of the reason. Outside the Ethics, Aristotle mentions both Achilles and Socrates as great-souled, the former because he tolerates no insults, the latter because he is above caring about good or bad fortune (Posterior Analytics 97b14- SACHS 11 26). These may seem too different to be one virtue, but Aristotle sees what they share as a correct sense of one’s own worth, when this is in fact great. It is not a mere feeling of self-esteem, but something that has to be earned. But Achilles appears to have earned it by deeds on the battlefield that subdued other people, while Socrates earned it through talking and thinking that conquered nothing outside himself. The former demands honor as a thing more precious than life, while the latter disdains to claim any honor at all, and keeps insisting that his only distinction is knowing that he doesn’t know anything. These examples are no more puzzling than Aristotle’s account of the virtue. He says first that the great-souled man is concerned with great things (1123a34), and then quickly decides that those great things are great honors (1123 b2021), but it takes him only a little bit of argument to conclude that for such a person, if he is genuinely worthy of what he claims for himself, “even honor is a small thing” (1124a19). Putting together the examples with the argument: (a) the great-souled man is obviously a lover of honor like Achilles, and (b) by being great-souled through and through, Achilles must become a disdainer of honor like Socrates. The argument that runs from 1123b26 to 1124a19 is one of the pivotal passages of the Nicomachean Ethics, the place in which honor stakes its maximum claim, and earns it by rising above itself. Greatness of soul is puzzling to us not because it belongs to an obsolete aristocratic culture but because it is inconsistent in itself. Aristotle takes it seriously not by way of stooping to an audience of Athenian gentlemen but because it is something serious for any serious human being at any time or place. It is one effective first stage toward the full development of human character. We might make this clearer by considering two of the pre-philosophical thoughts about virtue that form part of the background of Aristotle’s inquiry into ethics. �12 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW One of those common opinions is a widespread acceptance that four virtues are the cardinal ones, namely wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle gives justice and wisdom each a book to itself, and courage and temperance together about half a book. By this crude test of length of discussion, greatness of soul gains the fifth place, as either the fifth cardinal virtue, or the ambiguous virtue that almost, but not quite, belongs among the primary elements of human character. Another piece of popular lore that Aristotle alludes to (1095b17-19) may help us understand what gives greatness of soul both a high rank and a secondary position; it is an old Pythagorean parable of the three kinds of life. The parable likens the ways of life to the three kinds of people who go to the Olympic games. The greatest number go to buy and sell things; a smaller number go to compete. The third group, and by this account the smallest number, go simply to watch. Aristotle calls the corresponding lives those devoted to enjoyment, to politics, and to contemplative thought. Their aims are bodily pleasure, external honors, and knowing. Now it is clear that these three lives stand behind the Republic, in which Plato’s Socrates seeks to blend their three aims into one soul, understood as an interior polity or commonwealth. But Aristotle’s approach seems different. Even the bodily desires are treated in the Ethics as capable of being educated and redirected, to gain a deeper satisfaction than they find in their crudest form. This is not a matter of moderating them, of making compromises with them, or of reason’s holding them in check by means of its spirited ally; according to Aristotle, the temperate person has no harmful desires (1119a11-15; 1146a11-12). Similarly, I think, the person whom Aristotle considers worthy to be called greatsouled has no craving for honor. He has, instead, internalized his standard of worthiness. The brief argument I referred to a moment ago, in which honor must abandon its claims, is Aristotle’s way of showing the honor-loving person that his SACHS 13 true satisfaction lies nowhere but in well-grounded selfrespect. I believe that Aristotle has here discovered what has come to be called a sense of honor, a meaning that the Greek word for honor never had. Aristotle does not dwell on this discovery, but pushes it one more step, into the realization that even an internal tribunal of honor is an inappropriate standard by comparison with the virtues to which it looks. One of the most interesting things about Aristotle’s treatment of greatness of soul is that it generates a new series of lives that replaces the three in the Pythagorean parable. It is the first place in the Ethics in which Aristotle finds the virtue he is discussing to be a center around which all the virtues must be arrayed. Greatness of soul is not so much one virtue as one way toward the wholeness of character. Aristotle asks, for each of the virtues one-by-one, whether it would not be completely ridiculous for anyone who lacked it to have any claim to greatness of soul (1123b33-34). To someone wrapped up in the craving for honor, Aristotle asks, in effect, “Do you just want to have it or do you want to deserve it?” It is strange but true that anyone who really wants honor is bound to say that he doesn’t just want honor, since any other answer would lose him what honor he had. Imagine a politician saying, “Vote for me because I love winning elections.” A serious person, who seriously craves honor, cannot help concluding that honor is not the most serious thing. Now I’m not suggesting that Aristotle thinks that all one needs to do to transform someone consumed with a drive to be honored is to ask him a couple of questions. As I mentioned before, the questions and their answers seem to reflect a lived process of discovery and development. There is an exact analogy in the life of enjoyment. When Aristotle has made his first provisional definition of happiness as activity in accordance with virtue (1098a16-17), he observes that this has the properties sought by the life of enjoyment more fully and genuinely than does the indulgence of bodily pleasures (1099a7-21). The difference is that those who pursue the �14 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW crudest enjoyments are always chasing after pleasure as a thing external to themselves, while those who live the virtues have pleasures that are internal and durable and always present. Aristotle calls the latter the pleasures that are natural, because they are pleasant in themselves, just by being themselves. He later analyzes the cruder pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex as attempts to magnify the natural pleasure inherent in good bodily condition by violent departures from it and restorations of it (Bk. 7, Ch. 14). This sort of thing, which bar owners encourage by offering free salty snacks to make people drink more beer, can’t really fool any grownup for long, and can only continue to appeal, as Aristotle says, to those who have found no other sources of pleasure (1154b56). Such people are not worthy challengers to the title of happiness, entitled to the pretentious name of hedonists; they are merely failures as pleasure seekers, failures by no standard but their own. The analogy in the case of greatness of soul is evident in the contrast between chasing after externally bestowed honor and settling into a life that is inherently honorable. It is not such a stretch to say that Achilles can achieve his aim only by becoming more like Socrates. The 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, §212) believed that Socrates had pulled off a brilliant piece of one-upmanship, making himself appear superior to the aristocrats who thought they had a monopoly on superiority. But in Aristotle’s view this was no transformation of values, but a natural dialectic that leads the honor seeker beyond the random honors that can be won to the life of natural and selfsustained honor that accompanies the virtues from within. This explains why Aristotle leads the discussion of greatness of soul to the need for a life that demands the whole of virtue. The honor seeker goes in search of an isolated prize, and if he perseveres, and keeps his eyes open, he finds instead a life. The next prize or the next victory accomplishes nothing more durable than would the next beer. As the latter might be the SACHS 15 perpetually renewed object of the deluded pleasure seeker, the former perpetually enslaves the competitive athlete or politician who has not learned that he can honor himself. So, finally, we can see why Aristotle doesn’t build good character on the spirited part of the soul. Good character is achieved only when spiritedness subsides, and is built not by harnessing spriritedness but by overcoming it, in letting it find its truer and deeper satisfaction. Greatness of soul is a way of life not in the sense of being, for some people, the primary aim to which all virtues are subordinated, but in the sense that it finds its end in making those virtues themselves primary. Aristotle gives greatness of soul not a static portrait, but a dynamic impulse toward its aim. But how does he do this? The appeal he makes is, oddly, neither to reason nor to spiritedness. There would be nothing unreasonable, and certainly nothing self-contradictory, about saying one wants honors more than one wants to be worthy of them, and there must be something deflating to an aroused spiritedness in accepting a giving up of competition. Defeated politicians and retired athletes talk as though being unable to keep winning things is like death to them. What Aristotle is addressing is a whole human being who is driven to achieve great honor; his question brings such a person face-to-face with his own judgment of what makes one honor greater than another. Greatness of soul is the first and lowest portrait in the Nicomachean Ethics of a complete way of life that replaces the untenable claims of the life of bodily enjoyment. It is not the last or the only portrait of such a life. The craving for honor is not a necessary precondition of the development of good character, but only one human road that gets there in the end, for anyone who is serious enough about achieving satisfaction in life. Aristotle’s tactic in leading the honor-lover to virtue is no different at bottom from his means of exploding the claims of bodily enjoyment, and it is evident in the first sentence of Book 1: “It has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.” His tactic is not a nego- �16 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW tiation for turf among separate parts of a soul, each of which wants its separate good, but a constant recurring to the question, asked of the whole human being, What end is being sought in each good object? What makes one pleasure more satisfying than another? What makes one honor greater than another? Whatever in us responded to these visible goods by pursuing them remains sovereign in judging them. The task is to free it from enslavement to the familiar and habitual, and to lift its gaze to the widest view of its possible choices. Now if this conclusion sounds plausible to you, that’s remarkable. It implies, first of all, that Aristotle believes that the well-ordered human soul is ruled by desires and not by reason, and second, that he regards habits not as the source of good character but as obstructions to it. These are not standard readings of the Nicomachean Ethics, and that’s putting it mildly. But we’ve arrived at them honestly and we’re stuck with them; we have no honorable course other than to follow where they lead us. I mentioned some time ago that there are some passages in which Aristotle seems to say that reason needs to rule us. They begin very early, with his first conclusion that the minimal condition of a satisfying human life is to put to work that in us which has reason and listens to reason (1098a3-5); and they continue very late, into his final description of the happiest life, with assertions that the intellect is the best part of us, is the part that naturally rules and leads us, and is even what a human being is most of all (1177a13-15; 1178a6-7). But in between these passages, one of the things Aristotle has done is spell out what he means by intellect, and it is not a synonym for reason. Moreover, in discussing a number of the virtues, he has stated what power in us has the ultimate say in judging what is right, and it is not reason. And most conclusively, although almost everything else he says in the Ethics is dependent on the dialectical process of inquiry that leads to it, he has along the way formulated unequivocally and cate- SACHS 17 gorically what constitutes a human being as a source of action, and again it is not reason. The most straightforward way one might imagine that reason should rule us is to think each of our actions should be deduced from some principle. Aristotle does talk this way at one point, but the only complete example he gives belongs to a vice rather than to a virtue: one ought to taste every sweet thing; this thing in front of me is sweet; and one more act of gluttony takes place with apodeictic necessity (1147a29-31). But one point that Aristotle makes here is that even though the major premise is a universal proposition and the conclusion is an action, the minor premise is something particular, and all such things are governed by sense-perception (1147a26). In two places Aristotle says that there can be no rules for right action (1113a31-33; 1137b29-32), and in two other places he says that the judgment or decision that determines all matters of action is in the perceiving (1109b23; 1126b3-4). But what sort of perceiving is this? My dog might have better eyesight than I do without being able to see what’s best to do in any situation. While the dog might associate past experiences with present perceptions, the human power of perception is infused with an intelligence and an imagination that lets us grasp particular things as instances of universals. Aristotle’s word for this (epagoge) is nearly always mistranslated as induction, which suggests imposing some general formulation on the thing in front of me, but he means something more direct, by which I see the thing in the first place as a thing and an example of a kind. The power in us that operates in and through our perceiving to behold the universal directly is called nous, or intellect. The intellect thus supplies the starting points of all universal reasoning (Bk. 6, Ch. 6), which are at the opposite extreme from the particulars (1142a23-27), but at the same time grasps those very particulars (1143a35-b5). Practical reasoning about action, like universal reasoning about the way things are, cannot begin �18 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW unless and until something in us that is not reason provides starting points to reason about. In both cases this is the intellect, the power that beholds the ultimate invariable thinkable things in contemplation but also the ultimate changeable particulars in perceiving. Jacob Klein once compared thinking to walking: taking steps is like reasoning, but having something to step off from is like intellect. Reason is ruled by intellect. Now it might sound as though I’m quibbling. When you hear the claim that reason is the proper guide and ruler of our lives, you probably understand reason to mean the whole power by which we dispassionately recognize what is evident, whether directly or through any number of steps. The important thing is that we should be led by something that is impartial or, we may wish to say, objective. But that isn’t good enough. What’s needed is to see things in relation to us and our ends. Aristotle says that for knowledge to accomplish its work well, it has to guide it by discerning the mean in relation to us (1106b5-9), which is a mean in the sense that it does not overshoot or fall short of our natural ends. That’s what there are no rules for. That’s what has to be perceived. That’s the practical work of intellect. One of the most persistent themes of the Nicomachean Ethics is that achieving any aim in life depends upon seeing straight, seeing things the way they are. But at least five times (1099a22-24; 1113a25-33; 1166a12-13; 1170a14-16; 1176b24-26), Aristotle tells us that it is only someone of good character who is capable of seeing straight. The way most people see things, he says, is distorted by the false appearance of things that promise pleasure (1113a33-b1), and he notes that overly spirited people are too quick to perceive things as insulting when they aren’t (1149a25-34). It is obvious that fear has the same effect, since he says the coward is afraid of everything (1116a2-3). In fact, one way to see what Aristotle means by virtue of character is to imagine all the ways we might be so mastered by some kind of feeling that we have no capacity to see things for what they are. The SACHS 19 virtues of character are the stable conditions that free us, not from those feelings, but from being unable to make choices about them. A courageous person can distinguish what is worth being afraid of, and still has the option to act for an end beyond it. A temperate person can eat, drink, and be merry when he chooses to and not every time an opportunity for indulgence is present. A great-souled person can avenge an insult when his good sense and courage lead him to, and not as a reflex reaction. Some translators call these states of character moral virtues, but that misses the point. They are practical virtues; without them action is impossible. Intellect is not stronger or sharper in a person of good character, but only in such a person is it free to operate. This is a negative sort of dependence. Good character clears away the bad habits that obstruct the sight of the intellect. But there is also a positive dependence. A person of good character is not someone who is neutral about pleasant or frightening or insulting things—thinking itself moves nothing, Aristotle says (1139a35-36). Good character combines intellect that is clear-sighted with desires and aversions that are good, in the sense that they are rightly proportioned to the end of one’s own happiness. Free choice of action depends not on objectivity or independence from our inclinations but on the presence and participation of all our desires. Aristotle says that for a choice to be good, one’s desire must be right (1139a3031), but the rightness of desire is entirely analogous to the clarity of intellect. Right desire is unobstructed desire. Aristotle does not understand our desires to be a disorderly mob that needs to be ruled, but the natural components of a life in which they all must have full scope to act. Once we have taken responsibility for our own lives, we can develop what Aristotle calls active conditions of the soul, and it is these active conditions that make up character. Formation of an active condition (hexis) begins with isolated choices (1103b14-23), such as refraining from a harmful pleasure or enduring a frightening situation. Sticking by these choices �20 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW requires effort, because they go against the grain of the masses of bad habits that have already become ingrained in all of us before we have any power of choice. All deliberate and positive habituation, from parental training, the laws of the community, or the effort of self-discipline, is for the sake of cancelling out the blind and passive earliest habituation that no one intends, that comes just from the reflexive slackening of the tension of uncomfortable feelings. The active condition is fully formed when no more effort of self-restraint is needed. Knowing how we want to be in life and action is not enough (1105b2-3), but being that way is still up to us (1114b21-23). Each of the virtues of character is an active condition in relation to some of our feelings and impulses; Aristotle’s claim is that for each of these active conditions there is an unimpeded way of being-at-work, and that happiness is the being-at-work of them all (1153b9-11). When cleared, by habit, from the distortions of bad habits, our habit-free desires constitute ourselves as we are by nature; if these natural desires are thwarted our lives are stunted. Aristotle’s picture of the healthy human soul is not a three-part hierarchy but an equal partnership of everything in us. The center of the Nicomachean Ethics, early in Bk. 6 (1139 b4-5), is Aristotle’s unequivocal definition of a human being as the source of action in the act of choice, that can be equally well described as intellect fused with desire or desire fused with intellect (orektikos nous or orexis dianoetike). Neither side can have the upper hand. The dictates of reason as master are as misguided as the caprices or addictions of an overmastering passion. Even a state of compromise, in which our rational and irrational sides each give up a little of what they want to get a little, misses the mark. What Aristotle is talking about is a genuine whole, in which the parts are not externally connected but internally infused with one another. Thinking and deliberating must come to be present within our desires, if they are to be directed toward their true ends, rather than toward immediate delusions. But it is equally true SACHS 21 that intellect would be useless if it were objective or neutral, and it has to be led by desire to see things as ends, in relation to ourselves. The formation of the component parts of character is not a process of reasoning, not a discipline of the passions, and not a combination of the two; it is a gradual and mutual development of thinking and desire as enlightened by one another, each led by its partnership with the other to its own end. Now if this non-hierarchical picture of the soul strikes you as un-Aristotelian, your uneasiness is understandable and deserves a response. Aristotle seems always to be talking about rankings of things as higher and lower, and we saw earlier that he refers to the intellect as the best part of ourselves. And in the Politics, he says that whatever is composed of a number of things and becomes one has a ruling part and a ruled part (1254a28-32), and he gives the very example we are exploring; he says explicitly that intellect rules desire (1254 b5-7). But he is careful to say that this is not the rule of a master or a monarch, but political rule. He explains soon afterward that by political rule he means rule over equals (1255b20), and he later adds that political rule requires an alternation or sharing of ruling and being ruled (1277b7-16). This is a working-out of his understanding that the political community is not merely an alliance for the sake of promoting exchange and preventing injury, but is a genuine whole. All the more so, one might suppose, is the human soul not just a bundle of capacities and desires, but a unity. It is in Bk. 7, Ch. 17, of the Metaphysics that Aristotle distinguishes anything that is truly whole and truly one from a mere heap (1041b11-12). His example of a genuine whole is a syllable. To see what he means, take the first syllable of the word metaphysics, and try to sound it out by parts. You will hum, and then make an exclamation that might sound either dismissive or interrogative, and then make an explosion of breath. No matter how fast you make these noises in sequence, they will not make the simple syllable met-. It is not �22 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW a sum of parts but can only come into being as a whole. You cannot pronounce it at all unless you make an m sound that is already shaped by the following e, and sound the other letters similarly, not as isolated bits of noise but with the whole syllable present in each of them. When you try to remove the part from the whole it becomes something different; it is not at all like plucking one marble off the heap. Something is whole most of all, Aristotle says, when its constituent parts are distinct only potentially (1023b32-34), and in the Politics he gives the famous example that a human being removed from political community is not human at all, but either a beast or a god (1253a26-29). It follows that dispassionate reason is not the human thinking power at all, and unintelligent desires are not human desires. Remember that Aristotle cautioned us, when we first separated a rational and an irrational part of ourselves, that we might be trying to separate the convex from the concave side of the same curve. We saw earlier how the positing of external honor as the greatest of goods led back into the soul, and into Aristotle’s first depiction of the virtues of character as composing one whole life. There are four more occasions in the Ethics in which Aristotle leads some partiality in the soul back to a wholeness of character. The second type of person who needs to be so led is also focused outward, but on the good of other people (1130a3-5). Aristotle does not have a word of criticism for such a person, and even calls him the best human being. He merely points out that his aim requires the presence of all the virtues, and goes back to discussing those virtues. But when the examination of all the virtues is said and done, it is not this life that is called best, but an entirely different one. Like the assertion that honor is the greatest of external goods, that is made in Bk. 4 (1123b2021) and quietly replaced in Bk. 9 (1169b8-10), the claim that the person devoted to doing justice to others is the best human being is also refuted just by being unable to withstand five books of further inquiry. SACHS 23 I find it enormously instructive that Aristotle permits justice to stake the same claim to being the highest good that honor does, and makes it fail. It is not in the long and detailed discussion of justice as one particular virtue among many that this occurs, but in a brief preface on justice as a way of life. Aristotle mentions one celebrated ancient political leader (Bias) in this connection, but a clearer example for us might be a Roman, Cato the Younger. Plutarch says of him (Lives, Modern Library, p. 920) that he was inspired and possessed by a devotion to every virtue, but especially to that “steady and inflexible justice that is not to be wrought upon by favor or compassion.” He exemplifies the immersion in political life that is governed not by honor but by duty. I mention this only because it helps one see that Aristotle’s ethics of character has nothing to do with impersonal duty. Aristotle is constantly speaking of what one ought to do, but for him this imperative always arises only from within, from the need to fulfill and put to work all our own powers to achieve happiness. I noted earlier that the Aristotelian virues of character are not moral virtues but practical virtues. I am suggesting that morality is a misunderstanding of Aristotle’s characterbased ethics. Morality, in the sense of doing right by others, follows from the practice of the virtues in the same way pleasure does, but doesn’t work as its end. Why should you not be a thief? Because that is your duty to other people, or because to be one would distort your own life and make you fail to gain your own happiness? Or put it the other way around. Would you rather have a neighbor who grimly and dutifully refrains from your property even though he might covet it, or one who has found a life in which your property is of no interest to him? The third life Aristotle describes is that of practical judgment (1144b30-1145a6). This is usually translated as prudence or practical wisdom. It is the virtue of intellect that is a precondition of every virtue of character, but it in turn cannot come into being without the presence of all the virtues of �24 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW character, which permit it to discern its ends. This mutual dependence is the clearest evidence that the intellect is not uppermost in practical life, but there are certainly people who seek not to rule others nor to serve others, but to be the guiding intelligence behind political life. William O’Grady used to say that whenever he read Machiavelli’s Prince, he always wondered whether that book was more like housebuilding or flute-playing; that question is Aristotle’s way of distinguishing activities with external ends from those whose ends are in themselves. Themistocles, an Athenian general described by both Herodotus and Thucydides, was a great conniver who seemed happiest when he had successfully manipulated everyone on every side of a conflict; he found political maneuvering an end in itself. But Aristotle says at the end of the Ethics that there has been no one up to his time who had all the requirements of the political art (1181b12-13). As with honor and duty, his purpose seems to be to show those who aim at superior practical know-how as their highest end that the only role of the practical intellect in a successful life is a more modest one, on an equal footing with all our desires. Now the progressive overcoming of the claims of greatness of soul, justice, and practical judgment to be the pre-eminent virtue seems to exhaust all the motives for which one might call the political life the highest life. Aristotle does not collect them in this way, but he concludes in general that political life is unleisured and always aims in part at a happiness that is beyond itself (1177b12-15). He contrasts it to a contemplative life, which he argues at length is the best and happiest human life (Bk. 10, Chs. 7-8). This produces the greatest controversies among readers of the Ethics, since it seems so odd that any philosopher would devote 98% of a long and lovingly worked-out inquiry to an examination of the practical life, only to turn his back on it at the culmination of the work. Without entering into any such controversy here, I think we are in a position to see the general lines of a solution. There is no contemplative life for anyone who has SACHS 25 not achieved a good character, not only because his desires would get in his way if they were not set right, but also because human nature itself is one of the unvarying things that the contemplative intellect needs to understand; in that odd way, even in its non-practical employment the intellect needs a respect for and partnership with our irrational desires, since they are among its teachers. A human being is intellect and desire, inseparably intertwined. But also, I have so far skipped the fourth of Aristotle’s five depictions of the whole life of virtue. Between the three versions of political lives and the contemplative life there is an ambiguous middle life. The life of friendship in the full sense also appears to involve the practice of all the virtues of character (1157a18-19, 29-31). But Aristotle does not say that friendship requires the prior presence of those virtues, but that friendship itself, in its proper sense, is present to the extent that the friends possess the virtues (1156b8-9; 1157a30-31). He seems to mean that the friendship deepens as the characters of the friends do. As with greatness of soul, the picture seems dynamic rather than static, but not because friendship is an inadequate motive. Like contemplative wisdom, friendship seems to be a final and all-inclusive end for the whole of life; and Aristotle says it would be absurd to imagine the happiest life as one devoid of friends who are loved for their own sake (1169b16-28; 1156b9-11). Friendship directly supersedes greatness of soul, since Aristotle concludes that it is not honor but friends that are the greatest of external goods (1123b20-21; 1159a25-26; 1169b8-10). But it is also precisely friendship that supersedes justice as the highest aim and bond of political life, since Aristotle says that where there is justice there is still a need for friendship, but where there is friendship, justice is not necessary (1155a22-28). Even the life devoted to the exercise of the practical intellect seems to find its highest fulfillment in friendship, since Aristotle says that one can contemplate his own active life best in the actions of his friends (1169b30- �26 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 1170a4). Everything a human being seeks in political life is found only in friendship. The relation of friendship to the contemplative life might seem to be that of second best to best, and Aristotle says just that (1178a5-9), but this is not a case in which the lower is left behind in the achievement of the higher. As we have noted, the claims of friendship within happiness are themselves final and indispensable, and a contemplative human being does not cease to be a human being. And in a certain sense, friendship has a claim to be not only of equal rank with the pure life of intellect, but even superior to it. Aristotle argues near the end of Bk. 9 that the highest life, spent in the being-at-work of our highest powers, is deficient if it is not expanded through being shared with friends (1170b7-19). The motion throughout the Nicomachean Ethics is toward the greatest wholeness of the life of everything in us, and this can be achieved neither by a friendless life of contemplation nor by any practical life shared between friends that excludes the enjoyment of knowing. Aristotle says early on that the truth deserves higher honor than do one’s friends, but he does not say that either of them ever cease to be loved for their own sake (1096a16-17); in one of the most powerful indications of the destination of the whole work, he speaks of the truth and his friends together in the dual number, a resource the ancient Greek language had for naming things that are more than one but inseparable. So should reason, or our whole thinking power, rule the soul? Clearly Aristotle doesn’t think so. Thinking guides desire, but desire guides intellect, and intellect guides thinking. Under the guidance of thinking, desire can find itself directed beyond bodily pleasures and political honors to an end in friendship. Under the guidance of desire, intellect can see the best choices before it in all their particularity. And we are, first and foremost, choosing beings—not rational animals, not political animals, though we are those things too. Choice cannot be full and unimpeded if anything in us is held SACHS 27 back or held down or has not become fully aware of its nature. Ultimately, for us, even contemplation is a choice, in which the activity chosen and the whole desiring being that chooses it are equally necessary and equally sovereign. �28 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 29 Addition and Subtraction without End in Oresme’s Quaestiones super Geometriam Euclidis George Anastaplo This essay is an explication of the first two questions of Nicole Oresme’s Quaestiones super Geometriam Euclidis, a work the Parisian master is thought to have composed around 1350 in conjunction with his teaching in the Faculty of Arts.1 In these questions, offered as commentary on Campanus’s edition of the Elements of Euclid, Oresme presented a formal understanding of infinite diminution and augmentation of magnitude that far exceeded what is to be found in the writing of either Campanus or Euclid.2 In what follows, I first consider Oresme’s approach to infinite diminution, its context and mechanics. I next examine his presentation of infinite augmentation and reconstruct the understanding in which it was founded. As a conclusion, I offer some reflections about the form of Oresme’s work and speculate about the implication it might have for his notion of mathematics. * Oresme began his Quaestiones in a peculiar way: Concerning the book of Euclid it is first asked about the dictum of Campanus in which he laid down that magnitude decreases without limit.3 It is sought first whether magnitude decreases without limit according to proportional parts.4 George Anastaplo is an architect practicing in Cambridge MA. The author writes: “Research in Oresme’s mathematics was supported by the National Science Foundation. Michael S. Mahoney read an earlier version of this essay. I appreciate the insight of his comments.” �30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW To a modern reader, this initial question is unexpected. On the surface, it would seem more appropriate to begin a work on the geometry of Euclid by addressing the geometer himself instead of his commentator. In its context, however, Oresme’s question makes a credible starting point. The propositions of the first Book of Euclid’s Elements are prefaced by definitions, postulates and common notions. In Campanus’s edition the last common notion and the first proposition are separated by the following editor’s note: Moreover it must be recognized that beyond these common conceptions of the mind, or common opinions, Euclid has passed over many others which are incomprehensible in number, of which this is one: If two equal quantities are compared to some third of the same kind they will both be at the same time alike greater than that third, or alike less, or both equal to it. Another is this. As much as some quantity is to some other of the same kind, so much [can] some third be to some fourth of the same kind. This is universally true in continuous quantities. Either the antecedents will be greater than the consequents or less. For magnitude decreases without limit; in numbers this is not so. But if the first is the submultiple of the second, there will be some third alike the submultiple of some fourth, since number increases without bound just as magnitude decreases without bound.5 Of his two additional common notions, Campanus was content simply to assert the veracity of only the first. The second he sought to make credible. In a ratio, the antecedent term ANASTAPLO 31 will be either greater than, equal to, or less than the consequent term. Campanus apparently thought that in the case of equal antecedents and consequents, the existence of a fourth term, bearing to some third term the relation determined by an original pair, should be obvious. With regard to the cases of unequal antecedents and consequents, however, he was less sure. For these he introduced comparisons calculated to quiet whatever doubts might arise. Thus, the possibility of unlimited augmentation in number was called upon to persuade one of the existence of a fourth term when the consequent was superior to the antecedent, just as the possibility of unlimited diminution in magnitude was offered as an aid to the acceptance of its existence in the inverse case. The possibility of unlimited augmentation in number is clear to anyone with the ability to count. The possibility of unlimited diminution in magnitude, in contrast, is less obvious. On first consideration, it is unclear how Campanus might have envisaged a magnitude to decrease without limit or what he intended to be removed from it to make it shrink so small. Indeed, it is not immediately apparent that this kind of decrease is possible at all. Oresme’s first question finds its basis in this quandary. To be sure, Oresme focused the doubt into a specific query worded in carefully chosen terms. Nevertheless, from the response that is made to the question, the concern just sketched is clearly the one Oresme intended to address. In this and other examples of treatises written in the sic et non style of the disputation, the author’s teaching is cast in the form of a dialogue between a student and his master. Typically, the student is assumed to possess both a ready capacity for argument and the youthful courage to speak authoritatively in words not fully understood about matters only partly appreciated. Here both of the virtues of the student are manifest: There are not an unlimited number of parts in a continuous [magnitude], therefore neither is there �32 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW an unlimited number of parts of the same ratio. The antecedent is obvious, since otherwise [the magnitude] would be without limit. The consequent is obvious, since any proportional part is a part of the same quantity as any other [proportional part of that magnitude], therefore the parts of the same [magnitude] are of the same ratio and of the same quantity. (1. 9-14) Apparently unaware of what proportional parts are, but certain of the impossibility of the limitless subtraction of one finite quantity from another, the student confidently asserts that a proportional part is a constitutive part, that is, a part which, with an integral number of equal counterparts, makes up the whole. Interpreting the words “ratio” and “proportional” as referring to the number of parts into which the whole is divided and thus as denoting the size of each part with respect to the whole (and not with respect to some other part), the objector puts his conviction to work and argues that since in the same whole parts in the same ratio are always equal to one another, the question should be answered in the negative. Just as the student in this genre tends to have a prescribed attitude and level of ability, the master has a predetermined role as well. He is cast as the guardian of a comprehensive understanding who is responsible for the introduction of his charge into the aggregate possession of scholarship. Because of his learning, the master’s arguments never have the singlemindedness of those the student is apt to make. Nor are they the same in focus. Where the student, because he is a schoolboy, is concerned to make a judgment based on his immediate perception and assessment of things, the master, because he is a pedagogue, aims at conveying an entire approach to conceiving the matter on which the question touches and then, only derivatively, turns to the question itself. The reply the master makes here divides into three parts. In the first he cites the authority of Campanus. Looked at in ANASTAPLO 33 one way, all the master’s efforts are directed toward showing why a man called “perspicacissimus” might have said “magnitude decreases without limit.” Thus, in the second part he works to present the background considerations in terms of which Campanus’s dictum must be seen and then demonstrates its truth. Having reconciled infinite diminution with reason, the master finally returns to the student’s objection and inspects it in terms of the understanding he has just established. In what follows, only the major features of the master’s exposition have been sketched. Discussion of corollary conclusions, replies to objections and the like has been omitted in the interest of brevity. Two groups of statements provide the background to the demonstration of Campanus’s dictum. One enumerates things “that must be noted,” the other those that “must be supposed.” First among the former is that: Parts are called proportional with respect to a continuous proportion; and that such a proportion is a likeness of ratio, as is said in the commentary to the ninth definition of the fifth [book] where it is said that a [proportion] is held between at least two ratios; and for this reason Euclid said that the minimum number of terms in which [a proportion] is found is three and the maximum number cannot be given, since it goes on without limit. (9. 20-26) Only Definition nine of Book five is cited in this passage, nothing else. What must be noted first is not the definition of “proportional part,” “ratio” or “likeness of ratio,” but simply the fact that proportional parts, whatever they might turn out to be, have to be understood in terms of the relation which binds them together with other parts of the same proportion. Thus the note continues: From this it follows that properly, one does not speak of a proportional part, or of two propor- �34 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW tional parts, but there must be at least three [proportional parts] and there could be an infinite number. (1. 26-28) The error the student made was to confuse proportional and constitutive parts. What this means is that he mistook the kind of part which is known by the relation it bears to other parts for one which is known by the relation it bears to the whole. Once the character of the student’s error is recognized, the intent of the statement just presented is clear. Its goal is to spur the replacement of one notion of part with another, and it works to do so by focusing attention on what is distinctive about this second kind of part.6 Since every constitutive part is an integral portion of the whole of which it is a part, the presence of one implies the presence of the others. For such parts division is singular, and once it is accomplished for one it is, in effect, accomplished for all. With the acceptance of the alternative notion of part as proportional part, however, it becomes apparent that division will have to be conceived differently. Just how, the second and third notes lay down: Second, it is answered that division according to such proportional parts occurs in as many ways as there are continuously proportional [parts] and there are as many of these as there are ratios, which are without limit….Third, it is said that a line and any continuum can be divided up into such parts. A line can be divided up in two ways because it has two ends and such parts can start from either one. A surface can be divided up in an unlimited number of ways and the same [is true] of a body. (2. 1-10) Seated in some quantity as the result of division, proportional parts may establish the relation of any ratio. And how does the seating division take place? It takes place successively; part by part, it radiates outward from one extremity of the ANASTAPLO 35 quantity to be divided toward the opposite one. Unlike the immediate and total division that yields constitutive parts, this division is a process, not an event. Because of these things to be noted, the consideration of the question has been shifted into the realm of continuously proportional parts and successive division. The statements of things to be supposed progress further into this realm and posit peculiarities of its determination later used in the proof of Campanus’s comment. Rather than work through each of them in isolation, however, these statements will be viewed in terms of their function in the demonstration. This is the assertion to be proved: The first conclusion is that, if some part is removed from a quantity and from the remainder the same part is removed and from the second remainder the same part is again [removed] and so on without limit, the quantity through this manner of endless subtraction will be exactly consumed, neither more nor less. (2. 23-26) It is important to be clear about the situation just described. Let a be the total quantity. In the first division, some part of a is removed to leave b. In the second, the same part of b is removed to yield c that was formerly removed from a to yield b, and so on for d, e, and the rest. The results of such division can be schematized in this way: a = whole b = first remainder = a – a (part removed) c = second remainder = b – b (part removed) d = third remainder = c – c (part removed) (where “part removed” is conceived as a fractional multiplier) What is to be proved is that the excesses taken away at each stage to leave the remainders will eventually exhaust the quantity. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 36 The proof itself runs as follows: The whole assumed at the start and the first remainder and the second and the third and the rest are continually proportional (as can be proved by arguing from a transformed ratio). Therefore there is in this case, some ratio and as much again and so on without limit. Thus it follows from the second supposition that the ratio of the whole to the remainder increases without limit since it is composed with itself. And one term, that is the whole, is imagined not to change; therefore, according to the first supposition, the remainder is diminished without limit. And therefore the whole of the quantity is precisely consumed. (2. 26-34) In the divided magnitude the relation of the whole to the first remainder is reiterated in the relations of each remainder to the one that follows it. In terms of the quantities a, b, c, d and so on, this conclusion can be written as: a : b = b : c = c : d… The second supposition asserts that: If to any ratio another [equal to it] is added and then another and so on without limit, that ratio will be augmented without limit and this applies to all quantities.7 (2. 17-19) ANASTAPLO 37 In the divided magnitude, the ratio of the whole to each remainder is the sum of the whole to the first remainder taken as many times as division must be made to produce that remainder. For example, since a : b = b : c = c : d (a : b) + (a : b) + (a : b) = a : d a3 : b3 = a : d (1) (2) The consideration of this kind of expression provides the basis for the crucial inference in the demonstration of Campanus’s dictum. In such expressions, a, the whole quantity, plays two roles: it is both the basis of the first term of one ratio (ratio 1) and the first term simply of the other ratio (ratio 2). Now the calculation of ratio 1 through a continued addition of a ratio with itself is exactly the calculation which provides the situation of the second supposition, and so what is posited there can be inferred here, namely, that the series of ratios a : b, a2 : b2, a3 : b3… displays a limitless augmentation of ratio. But, consider the role of the ratios of this series in expressions like the one above. There they are used to “measure” the quantity of ratios like ratio 2, which express the relation of the whole magnitude to some remainder. Because of this, it can now be inferred of the series of which ratio 2 is a member, that the succession of ratios in it too displays limitless augmentation. Let us stop at this point and take stock of the argument. So far, a process of division has been established in a quantity and the tendency of ratios of the whole to a succession of remainders has been described. Now it is left to describe the tendency that the remainders themselves reveal as division is continued indefinitely. And to do this, the first supposition is employed. It is a bridge between considerations of relation and those of quantity: And if some ratio be augmented without limit, the first term remaining unchanged, the second will be �38 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW diminished without limit. This is clear since the ratio can be increased without limit in two ways, either through the limitless augmentation of the first term or the limitless diminution of the second term. (2. 11-16) Of the two cases, it is clear which obtains here. In the series of ratios established through the division, the whole is the unchanged first term and the succession of remainders are the changing second term. The conclusion is obvious: the remainders are diminished without limit. But the remainders are called the remainders because they are left behind after the excesses have been removed. And, if they are diminished without limit as division is continued, it can only be that the excesses, when taken without limit, exhaust the magnitude being divided. Is it possible for the excesses to consume more than the whole through such division? No. At each stage of division only part of what remains is removed. Therefore the statement is proved.8 The statement just proved differs subtly from what was asked originally, and necessarily so. In the opening question and in Campanus’s comment the remainders of division and their progressive diminution stood at the focus of concern. In this statement, however, concern has been redirected toward the whole magnitude and its eventual consumption. To show the tendency of a series of magnitudes requires that the members of the series be successively compared with an invariant quantity of the same kind. In the case of continued division, the single possible standard of comparison is the magnitude assumed at the start of division, since it is the only invariant quantity to which the remainders themselves might be related by means of the defining proportion or any of its modifications. When the remainders of division are considered in isolation, as they were in Campanus’s note and in the original question, a proof of their tendency is not even to be hoped for because the single standard against which they might be measured has been excluded from view. The results ANASTAPLO 39 of division had to be restated to include the continued presence of the whole magnitude before a proof could be offered.9 In this shift of focus from continuous diminution to eventual exhaustion can be seen a shift in conceiving the process of continued division. When continued division is viewed as continuous diminution, the results of division make up a series of magnitudes known only in relation to each other. Viewed as eventual exhaustion, on the other hand, what before was considered a process of constant subtraction ending in either an infinitesimal particle or none at all, can now be seen as an extended effort of addition which produces a known sum. The parts which before were simply thrown away, the excesses, can now be seen to fill in the divided magnitude. Because the unending process has been placed within a known context and because its tendency can be stated in terms of an already established result, its inherent lack of definition has been tamed and it gains an intelligibility, albeit an indirect one, it did not formerly possess. * If the Quaestiones is recognized as a dialogue between master and student, it is only natural to expect ideas introduced in the first question to be explored further in the one that follows. In the second question the counterpart to the first is taken up. As a consequence, it is asked whether an addition can be made to a magnitude according to proportional parts [applied] without limit. (3. 33-34) To one who has just learned the lesson of the previous question, the possibility of what is entertained here seems slight. Thus the student maintains: If [such an addition] could [be made] it would follow that a magnitude would be augmentable without limit….The consequence follows [from the antecedent], for from the fact that addition hap- �40 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW pens without limit, the magnitude will be augmented without limit, since it is added on to through the addition. (4. 1-7) Diminution without limit was conceived as the achievement of a finite sum through an endless addition of excesses. But that demonstration was only possible because the addition, although endless, always took place within a predetermined boundary and could be shown never to leave it. In this case, however, because the parts are added first on to the extremity of the magnitude and then on to each other, they successively establish and reestablish the boundary of their sum. And, since the parts are to be applied without limit, it seems obvious that the magnitude will not have a fixed extremity. In the first question the master responded to the student by fabricating an alternate understanding of part and division. In this question, he responds by sketching the mechanics of endless addition as they might appear from an alternate point of view: It is argued the opposite way that whatever can be removed from some magnitude can be added to another. But subtraction from some magnitude can take place according to [proportional] parts without limit, in this way therefore, it can be proved that [a magnitude] is augmentable without limit. (4. 8-11) The student views the parts to be added only in relation to one another and so is at a loss to infer the boundary they might approach in sum. The master counters this perception of addition with another. In some cases, the addition to one magnitude by proportional parts can be seen in terms of the exhaustion by proportional parts of some other magnitude. By presenting addition in this way, the master suggests the existence of a boundary that might be established independently of the process of addition and thus also suggests that the ANASTAPLO 41 process itself might be seen as the eventual exhaustion of a predetermined quantity. The qualification in what was just said was “in some cases.” The different cases of addition according to proportional parts are distinguished according to the ratio in which addition is made: For the sake of the question it must be noted first what the ratio of equality is and it is [the ratio] between equals. Another [kind of ratio] is the ratio of greater inequality which is the ratio of the greater to the lesser, such as four to two. Another [kind] is of lesser inequality which is of the lesser to the greater, such as two to four…And it follows from this, that addition to a quantity can take place in three ways. (4. 19-25) When the addition is made without limit by parts applied in a ratio of either equality or greater inequality, the resultant “whole” will be unbounded, as is clear. When addition is made with parts applied in a ratio of lesser inequality, the claim is made that the “whole will never be unbounded.” The reason offered to support this conclusion is simple, and unfortunately, almost totally obscure: This is because the whole will have a fixed and definite ratio to the [magnitude] assumed at the start, that is, to that [magnitude] to which addition is made. (4. 30-31) It is the task in what follows to reconstruct the understanding that lies behind this statement. The question’s “first conclusion” provides a point of departure: The first conclusion is that if a quantity of one foot be assumed and addition be made to it without end according to the subduplicate ratio, so that first one half of a foot is added to it, then a �42 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW fourth, then an eighth, and so on without limit, doubling the subduplicate, the whole will be exactly twice the [magnitude] assumed at the start. This is clear since if from some [magnitude] parts are taken away according to this order, exactly double of what is removed first will be removed ultimately from the whole, as is clear from the first, that is, the preceding question. Therefore the same argument applies if the parts are added [to a magnitude]. (5. 9-15) In this example of continued addition can be seen the fulfillment of the master’s earlier suggestion. The parts added to one magnitude are understood as parts subtracted from another. It is as if the two magnitudes were butted up against one another and the process of addition reclaimed the latter magnitude into the whole. In this case, to determine the size of the magnitude to be exhausted in the course of unlimited addition is easily done. The fact that the subduplicate series composed on a unit basis exhausts the unit was presented as a corollary to the demonstration of the previous question. What would be the result if addition were made according to the subtriplicate ratio? What magnitude could such parts be considered to exhaust? To answer these questions it is necessary to backtrack and to reconsider continued division. When division is made according to proportional parts, the excess at each stage of division is less than the previous remainder by a factor of the ratio that governs how division is made. For example, when two-thirds of a unit magnitude is Chart 1 removed in division, and then two-thirds of the first remainder is removed and so on, the excess at each stage is two-thirds of the previous remainder (see ANASTAPLO 43 chart 1). Because of this, given any excess and the ratio of division it is an easy thing to calculate the size of the previous remainder. A more complex relation exists between successive excesses. Each excess falls short of the one that precedes it by an amount equal to the preceding excess diminished by a factor of the governing ratio. Consider chart 1 again. There, the second excess, 2/9, falls short of the first excess, 2/3, by 4/9, and 4/9 is 2/3 taken 2/3 times. When addition is made according to proportional parts in a ratio of lesser inequality, the addend at each stage of addition is less than the previous addend by a factor of the ratio that governs how addition is made. Thus, when addition is made in the subtriplicate ratio, the second addend is onethird of the whole and each subsequent Chart 2 addend is one-third of the one it follows (see chart 2). The difference between successive addends may also be expressed in another way. It can be said that each falls short of the one that precedes it by an amount equal to the preceding addend diminished by some ratio and that this ratio is the same for every pair of consecutive addends in the series. Consider chart 2 again. In the subtriplicate series, the second addend, 1/3, falls short of the given magnitude by 2/3, an amount which can be understood as that magnitude taken 2/3 times. Similarly, the third addend, 1/9, falls short of 1/3 by 2/3, which can be understood as 1/3 taken 2/3 times. And the same is true for the rest. Now the groundwork has been laid for the crucial insight. From the descriptions above, it is clear that the addends in one series bear to one another the same relation that the excesses bear among themselves in another series. In these examples, the addends of addition made in a subtriplicate ratio successively fall short of each other to precisely the same �44 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW degree that each excess of division made in the two-thirds ratio is deficient of the one it follows. Because of this, the addends of a process of addition performed according to one ratio can be understood as the excesses left behind by division performed according to another. The whole these terms eventually exhaust can be calculated as the “remainder” of the stage previous to the removal of the first “excess.” And, as should be evident, that whole will also be the sum that the addends eventually approach. Consider chart 3. There, the addends in the subtriplicate series are expressed as the excesses of division according to a ratio of Chart 3 two-thirds. The first excess is 1, the first addend, and so the previous remainder, which must when diminished in a ratio of two-thirds yield 1, is 3/2. Therefore, since it has already been proved that the excesses of division according to proportional parts exhaust the divided whole, the sum of the subtriplicate series when taken without limit is three-halves the magnitude chosen to be the first addend. The trace of this understanding can be seen in the first conclusion, in the justification given for the quantity declared the sum in the subduplicate series (p. 36). There, the crucial turn of argument was provided by the observation of the relation between the first excess and the whole that the series of excesses ultimately exhausts. The one was presented as calculable because the other was already known. A more explicit manifestation of the same understanding can be seen in the second conclusion: The second conclusion is that if some quantity, such as a foot be assumed, and then a third as ANASTAPLO 45 much is added, and afterwards a third of the addition and so on without limit, the whole will be exactly a foot and a half [long]. That is, it will be in the ratio of the sesquialtern to the magnitude assumed at the start. And with regard to this, the following rule should be recognized, that we ought to see by how much the second part falls short of the first and the third of the second and so on with respect to the others, and to call that [quantity] by its denomination and the ratio of the aggregate whole to the magnitude assumed [at the start] will be as the ratio of the denominator to the numerator. For example, in the case proposed, the second part which is one-third the first falls short of the first by two-thirds, therefore the ratio of the whole to the first part or to the [magnitude] assumed [at the start] is three to two and this is the sesquialtern. (5. 16-26) The use of “rules” to encapsulate a method of calculation or a criterion for judgment is a commonplace in medieval academic texts. Unlike other rules presented by other authors, this one is not derived in the text itself. But, because of what has already been said about addition without end, the function of its procedures can be readily unpacked. When seeking the sum of a series of proportional parts, the student is instructed “to see by how much the second falls short of the first and the third of the second…and to call that quantity by its denomination.” The amount that each term falls short of the one preceding it is to be isolated and expressed in terms of the preceding one. In the example given, that of the subtriplicate series, 1/3, the second addend falls short of 1, the first, by 2/3 which is called “two thirds [of the preceding term].” The third falls short of the second by 2/9 which is again “two-thirds” and so on.10 In this step, the student, in effect, deduces from the series of addends what the governing ratio would be were the �46 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW addends considered as excesses. The analogy between this procedure and the one laid out above for the same purpose is obvious. There, the governing ratio was discovered as the fractional multiplier used to diminish the first of two consecutive addends to yield the amount by which the second fell short of it. Here, the same ratio is discovered as the relation of the amount of difference in the first terms, a method which, though distinct from the former, is functionally equivalent to it. Once this ratio has been distilled, it is put to use in the calculation of the eventual sum of the series: “and the ratio of the aggregate whole to the magnitude assumed [at the start] will be as the ratio of the denominator to the numerator.” The ratio denominating the difference between consecutive addends is expressed as a fraction, inverted and taken in this form as the ratio between the whole that is finally achieved and the first addend.11 As was shown above, in any process of division, each excess falls short of the previous remainder by a factor of the governing ratio. Or, to state the same situation another way, each excess is to the remainder previous to it as the numerator of the governing ratio is to its denominator. Thus, to calculate the aggregate sum of addends, which, on the analogy of division, is the remainder previous to the first excess (addend), requires that a quantity be found which will have to the first addend the ratio of the denominator of the governing ratio to its numerator. The exposition just completed was taken up to explicate the following statement: If, in turn, [addition] is made according to a ratio of lesser inequality, [the whole] will never be unbounded although the addition be made without limit. This is because the whole will have a fixed and definite ratio to the [magnitude] assumed at the start, that is, to that [magnitude] to which the addition is made. (4. 28-30) ANASTAPLO 47 The meaning of this passage should now be clear. In every series of addends built up according to a ratio of lesser inequality, each term is some part of the term which precedes it. Because of this, every series of such addends (and only the addends of such series) can be interpreted as a series of excesses and the ratio governing the corresponding division can be deduced. Inverted, this newly discovered governing ratio becomes transformed into the “fixed and definite ratio” between some magnitude and the first addend. And the route to proving that this magnitude is the eventual sum of the addends is readily indicated by the shift in perception which allows the successive augmentation of the original magnitude to be considered as the eventual exhaustion of this new one. * The questions of treatises written in the sic et non style of the disputation each present a lesson in which a student is taught by a master. In these lessons, the master is responsible for the education of his student and strives to introduce him into the orthodox understanding of the discipline being studied. In part, orthodoxy is a mode of perception. An aspect of what it means to be educated in a tradition is to have adopted the established outlook on the world and to appreciate why it is to be preferred above any other. Orthodoxy is also a mode of communication. It is expected of educated people that they be able to speak with precision and accuracy, in terms acceptable to other educated people, about the matter at hand. In the first two questions of the Quaestiones, Oresme has presented the master’s effort to inculcate the orthodoxy of the infinite in his student. Within this orthodoxy, infinite processes are never seen in isolation but are always viewed in terms of a preestablished whole. The vocabulary in which the orthodoxy is couched is the language of proportion. Ratio and the relation of ratios form the means of describing the processes posited and of demonstrating their eventual results. �48 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Within philosophy, ethics, and theology, understanding makes up a whole and until it has been fully grasped, each aspect of it remains provisional. In the case of the student’s appreciation of the infinite, this characteristic is clearly visible. As a beginner in mathematics, the student has only the crudest grasp of ratio and proportion, the means the master employs for denomination and proof. As a consequence, he must accept the basis of the proof of the first question in the form of a supposition and the teaching of the second question as a rule. The student’s knowledge is contingent and will continue to be so until the sophistication of his understanding matches that of his master’s. Oresme’s willingness to present a mathematical subject in a treatise written sic et non, his willingness to explore a mathematical subject dialectically rather than deductively, gives some insight into his notion of mathematical understanding. To Oresme, mathematical understanding seems to have been of the same kind as the understanding of the traditional disciplines of disputation. It was not a special sort of knowing to be differentiated from all others. Notes 1 Nicole Oresme, Quaestiones super Geometriam Euclidis, edited by H. L. L. Busard (Leiden, 1961), p. x. See also A. Maier, An der Grenze von Scholastik und Naturwissenschaft (Rome, 1952), pp. 270, 345. Busard’s text has been reviewed and extensively emended by J. E. Murdoch in Scripta Mathematica 27:1 (1964), pp. 6791. An emended version of the Busard text of questions 10-15 appears with translation, notes and introduction as Appendix 1 of M. Clagett, Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities and Motions (Madison, 1969), pp. 521-575. My translation of the questions under study appears as an appendix. 2 Two editions of Campanus’s redaction of the Elements have been used in preparation of this essay. They are E. Ratdolt’s Praeclissimus liber elementorum Euclidis (Venice, 1482), hereafter called Ratdolt; and J. Lefevre’s Euclidis megarensis geometricorum elementorum ANASTAPLO 49 libri XV. Campani Galli transalpini in eosdem commentariorum libri XV, etc. (Paris, 1516), hereafter called Lefevre. Previous study of this portion of the Quaestiones is confined to Murdoch, pp. 68-70 and Clagett, pp. 130-31; 508-10. Clagett also considered infinite progressions and their sums in other works of Oresme and his contemporaries, see pp. 495-508. An old chestnut on this latter subject, cited by greater scholars than I, is H. Wieleitner’s “Zur Geschichte der unendlichen Reihen in christlichen Mittelalten,” Bibliotheca Mathematica, 3 Folge, 14 (1913-14): 150-68. See esp., 150-54. 3 The Latin adjective infinitus is the composition of in + finio and so has a primary sense, when used with respect to quantity, of “boundless” or “immense.” The English cognate “infinite” possesses positive overtones as descriptive of a quality that is something in its own right; in it the privative has lost much of its immediate connotative impact. Because of this, every attempt has been made to avoid its use as the translation of its Latin ancestor. Only in those cases in which avoidance would have made a complete farce of the fluency of translation (almost all of these being uses of the adverbial form) has “infinite” been deemed acceptable. 4 Busard, p. 1, lines 5-8. All subsequent textual references are by page and line numbers and are included in the body of the essay. The word proportio has been translated “ratio,” while the word proportionalitas has been translated as “proportion.” As is clear, proportionale has been translated as “proportional.” 5 Ratdolt, 2v. See also Lefevre, 4r. 6 Note that the Euclidean definitions of part and ratio (Elements, Book 5, Definitions 1 and 3) do not focus on this aspect. Because of this, they were passed over in preference for Definition 9. 7 Because this is a supposition, the effort has not been made to substantiate it. Nevertheless, it is credible. On the assumption that a is greater than b, the ratio a : b added to itself results in a greater ratio, a2 : b2. And with continued addition of the same ratio, it continues to increase. Thus a : b taken three times is a3 : b3, four times a4 : b4, and so on. The same ratio added to itself without limit would seem, in this way, to produce a ratio inassignably large. �50 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 8 For those who might have found the foregoing demonstration unsettling, the following derivation of an equivalent statement is offered as a tranquilizer. For any geometric series a + ab + ab2 + … + abn-1 = Sn, Sn = a ( (1-bn) / (1-b) ) as can be confirmed by division. If with respect to a unit magnitude a is the first part removed, the “first excess,” and b the first portion left behind, “the first remainder,” then the sum of the excesses will be a ( ( 1-bn) / (1-b) ) where n + 1 is the number of divisions made. Since |b| < 1, lim bn = 0 and the sum of the excesses n→ ° ° after division has been continued without bound will be a (1 / (1-b ) ) = 1, that is, the continued removal of excesses will exhaust the magnitude. Note that in this derivation, as in the one presented in Oresme’s text, the sum of the excesses is only calculable because the remainder bn can be evaluated as zero as division is made without limit. The crucial difference between the approach used here and the one of the text is found in the difference between the ways used to evaluate the remainders. 9 A comparison with the modern derivation, while not particularly helpful in this context, is at least interesting. The modern analyst employs two modes of mathematical description in the course of his exposition. First he describes the process of continued division according to proportional parts with a geometric series. Then, using a completely different apparatus, one formulated without regard for this particular series, examines his description for the symptoms of convergence. This latter mode of description, the interval language which supports the limit concept, allows the analyst to make the type of comparison mentioned in the body of the essay. It is a means which may be used willfully to erect standards of comparison. With it, the analyst can import his own fixed quantities into a mathematical context. 10 Murdoch, p. 69. Although Murdoch interprets this part of the passage correctly, he goes on to add that “though Oresme does offer a proof of his summation of [a] series [of excesses], he gives no inkling of one when it comes to his rule” (p. 70). 11 Apparently Oresme wrote ratios in the bilevel form used today as the fractional notation, see E. Grant, “Part I of Nicole Oresme’s Algorismus proportionum,” Isis, 56 (1965): 328-29. ANASTAPLO 51 Appendix Question 1 Concerning the book of Euclid it is first asked about the dictum of Campanus in which he laid down that a magnitude decreases without limit. It is sought first whether a magnitude decreases without limit according to proportional parts. And it is first argued that it does not. There are not an unlimited number of parts in a continuous [magnitude], therefore neither is there an unlimited number of parts of the same ratio. The antecedent is obvious, since otherwise [the magnitude] would be without limit. The consequent is obvious, since any proportional part is a part of the same quantity as any other [proportional part of that magnitude], therefore the parts of the same [magnitude] are of the same ratio and of the same quantity. According to Campanus in the commentary [the matter] appears in the opposite way. For the sake of the question it must be noted: first, what is meant by proportional parts or parts of the same ratio; second, in how many ways such parts can be imagined; third, how something can be divided up into such parts; fourth, suppositions and conclusions. First, it must be noted that parts are called proportional with respect to a continuous proportion; and that such proportion is a likeness of ratio, as is said in the commentary to the ninth definition of the fifth [book], where it is said that a [proportion] is held between at least two ratios; and for this reason Euclid said that the minimum number of terms in which [a proportion] is found is three and the maximum number cannot be given, since it goes on without limit. From this it follows that properly, one does not speak of a proportional part or of two proportional parts, but that there should be at least three [proportional parts], and there could be an infinite number. And [such parts] are called continuously proportional when as the first is related to the second, so is the second to the third and so with the rest if more are assumed. Second, it is answered that division according to such proportional parts occurs in as many ways as there are continuously proportional [parts] and there are as many of these as there are ratios, which are without limit. For example, it could be that the first is twice the second and the second twice the third and so on, just as it is commonly said of continued division; and it could be that the first �52 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW is three times the second and the second three times the third and so on. Third, it is said that a line and any continuum whatever can be divided up into such parts. A line can be divided up in two ways because it has two ends and such parts can start from either one. A surface can be divided up in an unlimited number of ways and the same [is true] of a body. Fourth, the first supposition is laid down as the following: that if some ratio becomes augmented without limit, the first term remaining unchanged, the second term will become diminished without limit. This is clear since the ratio between two [terms] can be increased without limit in two ways, either through the limitless augmentation of the first term or the limitless diminution of the second term. The second supposition is that if to any ratio another [equal to it] is added and then another and so on without limit, that ratio will be augmented without limit and this applies to all quantities. The third supposition is this, that addition can be made according to proportional parts to any quantity and from the same quantity diminution can occur according to proportional parts. The first conclusion is therefore that, if some part is removed from a quantity and from the first remainder the same part is removed and from the second remainder the same part is again [removed] and so on without limit, the quantity, through this manner of endless subtraction, will be exactly consumed, neither more or less [than the whole of it will be removed]. This can be proved thus: The whole assumed at the start and the first remainder and the second and the third and the rest are continuously proportional (as can be proved by arguing from a transformed ratio), therefore there is, in this case, some ratio and as much again and so on without limit. Thus it follows from the second supposition that the ratio of the whole to the remainder increases without limit since it is composed with itself. And one term, that is the whole, is imagined not to change, therefore, according to the first supposition, the remainder is diminished without limit. And therefore the whole of the quantity is precisely consumed. From this the corollary follows that if from some [magnitude] a foot long half a foot is removed and then half the remaining quantity and then half of the next remainder and so on without limit, precisely a foot will be taken away from it. ANASTAPLO 53 The second corollary is that, if from some [magnitude a foot long] one thousandth part of one foot is removed and then a thousandth part of the remainder of that foot and so on without limit, exactly one foot will be subtracted from it. But this is doubted: Since exactly half a foot, half of the remainder of that foot and so on without limit make up one foot, let this whole be a. Similarly, according to the second corollary, a thousandth part of a foot and a thousandth part of the remainder and so on without limit make up one foot, let it be b. Thus it appears that a and b are equal, but it is proved that they are not: Since the first part of a is greater than the first part of b and the second part of a is greater than the second part of b and so on without limit, the whole of a is thus greater than the whole of b. And this is supported [in this way]: If Socrates is moved over a during an hour and Plato over b, and if they divide the hour according to proportional parts and correspondingly move over a and b, then in the first proportional part [of the hour] Socrates will be moved faster than Plato and similarly in the second and those beyond. Therefore, Socrates will move through more space than Plato, and therefore a is a greater space than b. In reply to this argument the antecedent is denied, namely, that the first part of a is greater than the first part of b and so on, for the reason that, although the first part of a is greater than the first part of b and the second part of a is greater than the second part of b, nevertheless [when the parts are taken] without limit, eventually one [part of a] is arrived at which will not be more than its counterpart [in b], but less. From this the response to the question is clear, that any continuum can have proportional parts without limit. In imagination and likewise in reality, the first can be separated from the others by a process of corruption, and then the second, and so on without limit. In reply to the arguments advanced in opposition I deny the consequence, namely, that any part would be of the same quantity as any other and for a proof of it I say that although some proportional part may be a part of the same quantity as others, nevertheless it is not the same in quantity as them since it is of the same ratio. They are not equal for then it would follow that all would be equal among one another. �54 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Question 2 As a consequence it is asked whether an addition to a magnitude can take place through proportional parts [applied] without limit. First it is argued that it cannot. If it could, it would follow that a magnitude would be actually augmentable without limit. This consequence is contrary to what Aristotle said in the third [book] of the Physics and to what Campanus said in the first [book] of this [work], where he laid down the difference between magnitude and number, namely, that number increases without limit and does not decrease and that for magnitude the opposite is true. But, the consequence follows [from the antecedent], for, from the fact that the addition happens without limit, the magnitude will be augmented without limit, since it is added on to through the addition. It is argued the opposite way that whatever can be removed from some magnitude can be added to another. But subtraction from some magnitude can take place according to such parts without limit, in this way, therefore, it can be proved that [a magnitude] is augmentable without limit. An example may be offered of a right triangle and an acute angle, or of two right angles. Let there be a line on top of another which makes two right angles which are a and b. Then a line, c, turns toward one extremity, d. It is now argued thus: as much as angle b decreases through this motion, so much angle a increases. It is clear that whatever is removed from angle b is added to angle a. But angle b decreases doubly, threefold, fourfold and so on without limit, therefore angle a increases without limit. For the sake of the question, it must be noted first what the ratio of equality is and it is [the ratio] between equals. Another [kind of ratio] is the ratio of greater inequality which is [the ratio] of the greater to the lesser, such as, four to two. And another [kind] is of lesser inequality which is of the lesser to the greater, such as two to four. And these names differ according to the relation of position and supposition as is clear in what has been said. And it follows from this that addition to a quantity can take place in three ways. Second, it must be noted that if addition be made according to proportional parts [applied] without limit in either a ratio of equality or [one] of greater inequality, the whole will be without limit. If, in turn, it is made according to a ratio of lesser inequality, [the whole] will never be unbounded although the addition be made ANASTAPLO 55 without limit. This is because the whole will have a fixed and definite ratio to the [magnitude] assumed at the start, that is, to that [magnitude] to which the addition is made, as will be explained later. Finally, it must be noted that each [magnitude which is] less than another, but bears a fixed ratio to the other, is called in relation [to the other] either the fraction or fractions of it or the part or parts [of it]. And this is clear in the definitions of the seventh [book] of Euclid. And the lesser is named by the two numbers, of which one is called the numerator and the other, the denominator, as is clear in the same [text]. For example, one is less than two and so it is called with respect to two one half, and with respect to three one third, and so on. And two is called with respect to three twice one third, and with respect to five twice one fifth. And they ought to be written in this way, the two is called the numerator and the five is called the denominator. The first conclusion is that if a quantity of one foot be assumed and addition be made to it without end according to the subduplicate ratio, so that first one half of a foot is added to it, then a fourth, then an eighth and so on without limit, doubling the subduplicate, the whole will be exactly twice the [magnitude] assumed at the start. This is clear since if from some [quantity] parts are taken away according to this order, exactly double of what is removed first will be removed [ultimately] from the whole, as is clear from the first, that is, the preceding question. Therefore the same argument applies if the parts are added [to a magnitude]. The second conclusion is that if some quantity, such as a foot be assumed, and then a third as much is added, and afterwards a third of the addition, and so on without limit, the whole will be exactly a foot and a half [long]. That is, it will be in the ratio of the sesquialtern to the magnitude assumed at the start. And with regard to this, the following rule should be recognized, that we ought to see by how much the second part falls short of the first and the third of the second and so on with respect to the others and to call that [quantity] by its denomination and the ratio of the aggregate whole to the magnitude assumed [at the start] will be as the ratio of the denominator to the numerator. For example, in the case proposed, the second part which is one third of the first falls short of the first by two thirds, therefore the ratio of the whole to the first part or to �56 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the [magnitude] assumed [at the start] is as three to two, and this is the sesquialtern. The third conclusion is this, that it is possible that an addition be made to some quantity according to unproportional ratios of lesser inequality and the whole will be unlimited [in magnitude], notwithstanding. But if this be done proportionally, the whole will be bounded as has been said. For example, let the quantity assumed be of one foot, to which half of a foot is added in the first proportional part of the hour, then a third in the next, then a fourth, then a fifth and so on without limit according to a succession of numbers. I say that the whole will be without limit, which is proved in this way. There exist in this case an unlimited number of which any one will be greater than one half, therefore the whole will be without bound. The antecedent of this argument is clear since a third and a fourth are more than a half and similarly [the terms] from a fifth to an eighth are greater than a half and so too are [those] from an eighth to a sixteenth and so on without limit. In response to the arguments raised in opposition: “it follows magnitude” and so on, it can be stated that a magnitude will be augmented without limit. One sense of “without limit” can be with reference to the act of augmenting and in this sense it can be conceded that such an actuality can come about in an unlimited number of ways, as long as [the augmentation] is continued. But this is an improper sense [of “without limit”] and it follows rightly from the question that another sense is proper. Because [to say] that it will be augmented doubly, quadruply and so on without limit is false and does not follow from the question. In response to the other argument, namely, when it was argued about the angle that “it will be augmented as much” etc. I say that there is a need for a distinction here since “as much” and “so much” can denote an arithmetical ratio which extends to the extent of the quantity of the excesses; in such a case, I concede the major premise [that a will be augmented by as much as b is diminished] and deny the minor since the supposed solution does not occur [namely, that neither a nor b suffers change without limit]. Alternately [“as much” and “so much”] can denote a geometrical ratio and in this case, I deny the major since a will not be augmented in such a ratio as b is diminished, but it is required that a will be augmented by as much as b is diminished. And it can be argued in this way concerning any other quantity or quality and this is clear since when ANASTAPLO 57 the angle b is diminished doubly, the angle a is not augmented doubly, rather it is said to be augmented doubly when c turns all the way down to d and that will be when b is fully diminished and corrupted. And thus the response to the question is clear, so ends the question. �58 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59 In Memoriam Leo Raditsa (1936-2001) Toast to the Senior Class May 12, 2000 Leo Raditsa To say farewell, I would like to tell you: You are teaching me—a much harder thing than teaching you. It started the day I walked into a classroom thirty-five years ago at NYU. For a long time I fought it. Coming across takes two. To accept is harder than giving. And unless there is movement in both directions, little confidence lives. For a teacher, ceasing to hang on to his knowledge takes years. You give me a lot also in the things you don’t say, in your obvious tact, in your experience in putting up with things you cannot do much about. I mean your savvy, your readiness to put up with imperfection in your work and your teachers, and, above all in your readiness to go on—I always fear I might stop. Most of all, your sense of humor, which amounts to saying you are really there and not living in distraction, shows me something I do not readily see. I only began to understand this undoing in me, that I was beginning to lose my fear of students, when memories of my teachers crowded upon me: actual faces and voices. I grew astonished at the number of very great teachers I had had. I had had little sense these paintings lived in me. They came to life in me when I let go of what these teachers had given me. Dealing with you slowly brought me to move on my own. So Leo Raditsa, tutor at St. John’s College since 1973, was editor of The St. John’s Review from 1978 to 1982. His essay, “The Collapse of Democracy at Athens and the Trial of Socrates,” is printed below. �60 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW as I toast you in a minute, in my heart I will also toast my teachers, and the ragged world I now realize they knew I would live in. In this way the present lives the past’s strength. For you, too, what you give your teachers may be the more important way you learn from them, for this giving means you are strengthening your wings. So I toast these beginnings in you which may not be yet obvious to you, and maybe not to us. Your capacity to understand you are students impresses me, your savvy and sense of solidarity with your peers, your readiness to converse with each other, the prerequisites for independence, and your readiness to respect your teachers, and yet your ability to size them up, to live with their defects, to be truly, not defensively, critical of them. In short your willingness to make the best of it. You also teach me a sense of measure—something that cannot be learned in books. I mean proportion where all living beauty hides…. I wish you fortitude and endurance in these beginnings, and also the courage to change your minds, and above all the courage to listen to your inner voice, for nobody can really make those choices except yourself. When you feel fright before those choices, when you wake up and wonder whether you have an education, it is a sign that your education has taken hold: You are on your own. Without standing being lost, there is little chance of beginning. I wish you also the courage of going through the eye of the needle—not all the time but sometimes—of daring to be true to your feelings, I wish you the capacity to take risks and to take disappointment. More importantly, I have learned from you that the only virtues you can learn are the ones you see before your eyes, not the ones you read of in books. They cannot be read alone. You help me read the book of life. I raise a toast to you from us your teachers, to your future, and to teaching as a two-way street, something you teach me. 61 The Collapse of Democracy at Athens and the Trial of Socrates Leo Raditsa Thucydides did not finish his account of the “intense movement” (so he named it) among the Greek peoples that he judged to be the greatest event of history including the Trojan War. The incompleteness of Thucydides’ account suggests it never ended—and perhaps there is some truth in that. For the kind of war—and in his opening paragraph he carefully defines it—Thucydides describes, without specific political aims and which proceeds by revolution, is difficult to end. One can terminate hostilities, but to make peace: that is another, much more difficult matter. The crisis which we call the Peloponnesian War did, however, come to some sort of end and it is about that end and what came after it, especially the trial of Socrates, that I am going to talk to you tonight. The period runs roughly from 410 to 399, the year of Socrates’ trial. The historical question I wish to face is what the relation is of the trial of Socrates to the collapse of democracy which occurred at Athens with the slow ending of the war. To put it simply, why was Socrates prosecuted in 399 instead of some time earlier, for instance, in 423 when Aristophanes had The Clouds produced? Xenophon, who begins his narrative about where Thucydides leaves off, does not mention the trial of Socrates, although he does mention Socrates’ attempt when he was in Prytany to prevent the illegal trial of the generals who had commanded at Arginusae in 406. Diodorus Siculus mentions the trial, but only in passing, the way he mentions the death of Sophocles in 406. I think ancient historians did not include the trial of Socrates in their compositions because they understood history to deal with the public life of a city, of its This lecture was delivered at the Annapolis Campus on February 18, 1977. �62 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW officers and of its citizens in public assembly and in battle. They did not conceive history to include the relation of private to public life, something which was the subject of much of Socrates’ activity. Although Socrates was charged with a public crime— graphe, not a dike, which referred to a civil suit, as Socrates reminded Euthyphro at the start of his conversation with him—he was charged as a private citizen, not as an office holder. There was another and deeper reason for not including the trial of Socrates in the ancient accounts of the period. In contrast to Plato—and in this he is profounder than Plato— Xenophon admits that he does not understand how it could have happened that Socrates was tried and condemned. That is, Socrates made him question the world his eyes saw, and this involuntary questioning is Xenophon’s greatest tribute to Socrates. But this questioning did not extend to history. For Xenophon, history bore some relation to tragedy. But public men and cities suffered tragedy. To include the trial of Socrates in his composition Xenophon would have had to conceive of the tragedy of a private man. He could not—like most Athenians. Think on it a second. All the Athenian tragedies are about public individuals, kings and princes, when they are not about Gods. There is something radically wrong with the way we read tragedies, as if they were about the lives of private individuals. The private individuals, the individuals who hold no office, appear in comedies. There they trip over their fantasies, which they take for actions, grow embarrassed at themselves, at the greatness they feel trapped in their insides but which betrays them when they open their mouths. There they grow haughty with their magnificent and outrageous gods. It is a measure of what happened at Athens that a generation after he had been subject to a comedy, Socrates became protagonist of an event that the best of his contemporaries knew they could not understand.1 For it was the tragedy of a private man. Even now we cannot easily inte- RADITSA 63 grate the trial of Socrates into the history of Athens and of the other Greeks, just as historians of the Roman empire hardly ever include the trial of Jesus in their accounts of that period. The Collapse of Democracy at Athens The last years of the war [and following years], the period from 411 to 401, represent the precipitation of that crisis in leadership which we call the Peloponnesian War. It is the period of the war in which the war became more and more something that happened to Athens and something that Athens did to herself. It is also the period in which Sparta took to the sea and in which Persia became increasingly deeply involved.2 The events of 411, the formation of the oligarchic government of the Four Hundred and then of the Five Thousand, which represented a reaction to the Sicilian disaster, not only shook Athens’ domestic political confidence. They isolated Athens in the Greek world. The oligarchic revolutions in other allied cities which had accompanied the changes at Athens in 411 had not served, as the oligarchs at Athens had expected, to make settlement with the Lacedaimonians possible, but had instead contributed to bringing these cities under Lacedaimonian sway. Everywhere there was instability, and the cities lived on the brink of civil war. At Athens itself the situation was tense—the democracy had passed strict laws encouraging the punishment of those who had been involved in the oligarchic movement of 411. There were many exiles. The division which had occurred with the coming of the oligarchs in 411 had not been overcome. In an important sense Athens in 410 was no longer one city but two. This meant nobody knew what might happen next. With the weakening of the predominance of Athens and her instability, other Greek cities grew more aggressive in their views. For the first time during the Peloponnesian War, Greek leaders, especially the Spartans, reckoned with public opinion outside of their cities. For instance, Pausanias, one of the kings of Sparta, is said to have intervened in the Athenian �64 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW civil war at the end of the period of the Thirty because he feared the consequences to the reputation of Sparta if the slaughters of the Thirty continued. In the first part of this period, the six years leading up to the destruction of almost the entire Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in September 405, the war was largely at sea for both sides. The sea war of these six years took place mainly in the Hellespont and in the Bosporus, and along the adjoining coasts of Thrace and Asia Minor with its three major islands, Lesbos, Chios and Samos. It was through these straits that many of the Athenian grain ships sailed. When she challenged Athens in this area, Sparta was aiming at her life lines, but not, in the beginning, at least, for total victory. For after several of the major battles she attempted to negotiate with Athens. For the first time in the war Athens was on the defensive in a way she had never been when Sparta had wasted Attica in the first years of the war. For her part Sparta appeared to be without a coherent policy in this period. Her most noble commander drowned at the battle of Arginusae; Callicratidas tried to keep free of Persian entanglements; but Lysander, the Spartan commander who was to bring the war to an end, had no scruples about taking all the money he could from Persia for building the fleet and paying its crews. The main events of this period were the return of Alcibiades to Athens in 407; the victory of the Athenian fleet at Arginusae in 406 and the unlawful trial and execution of the generals of the fleet which followed upon it; Lysander’s destruction of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in the fall of 405; and the collapse of Athens in the period 405-401, especially after the siege and surrender, in the fifteen months which run from [April] 404 to [May] 403, when the Thirty were in power. Of these events the collapse of Athens or the time of the Thirty, as it is usually called, was the most devastating. The experience of Athens during this period left an indelible RADITSA 65 impression on the whole ancient world. People thought of it with the same horror as the men of Colonus looked upon the face of Oedipus. Sallust’s Caesar, written during the death agony of the Roman Republic, in the face of the procriptions of the young Octavian, recalls the horrors of the years of the Thirty at Athens with a vividness which makes one imagine Sallust had lived through the time. The Thirty, who were led by two of his closest relatives, and Socrates’ trial—these were the two central experiences of Plato’s life. Somehow no matter what she did Athens always wounded herself. This is the terrible sense of this last decade and earlier—for it really started at Melos in 416. When the Athenian people illegally condemned commanders they suspected to be innocent after the great victory at Arginusae in 406, they hurt themselves. As Socrates later pointed out, when they violated their own laws they discredited themselves, destroyed their public life and made themselves incapable of recognizing and standing up to their real enemies. In Socrates’ presence Athenians knew they were doing this to themselves. This is the meaning of Alcibiades’ wonderful and terrifying remark that Socrates was the only man in Athens who made him feel ashamed. In Socrates’ presence he could not fool himself—he knew that what he did somehow betrayed what he was. Alcibiades meant that Socrates made him feel alive. Socrates gave men something like the feeling you sometimes get from infants when they make you wonder how you have become what you are. Alcibiades’ return to Athens in 407, with his appearance before the council and the assembly and his election to position of Commander in Chief, made a deep impression on Athens. They saw him now almost like an outcast, like Oedipus, forced to live beyond the protection of the laws, his life always in danger, in Sparta and Persia. Here was the man who in his life, almost in his person, summed up most of the destructive and constructive actions of the years since 415: the castration of the Hermae and the parody of the mysteries �66 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW (from which he was exonerated), the expedition against Syracuse, the Spartan fortification of Decelea in Attica, and the involvement of Persia in the war—and constructively and more recently, the prevention of civil war during the oligarchic crisis in 411 and the re-establishment of Athenian control of the Propontis and the Bosporus in 410. When Alcibiades sailed into the Piraeus he waited cautiously, without disembarking, for his friends and relatives to escort him up to the city. To many, both rich and poor, democrats and oligarchs, he seemed like the one individual capable at the same time of overcoming the division which remained within the city and of prosecuting the war with intelligence. But something like six months later he was either not reelected or removed from his command because a subordinate—against his express orders—engaged Lysander and lost fifteen Athenian ships. He went into exile on his estate in the Chersonese. The great expectations had come to nothing— the crisis continued. Almost a year apart, the two great naval disasters at Arginusae and Aegospotami were in a sense both self-inflicted. I call Arginusae a disaster even though it was an Athenian victory, because its repercussions at home did much to discredit the unstable democracy. When Athens learned that the Spartan commander Callicratidas had encircled the Athenian commander Conon at Mytilene she sent out a hastily-gathered fleet of 110 ships which she manned with free men and slaves (who were later awarded their freedom). Immediately after the Athenian victory a storm suddenly rose which prevented the Athenian commanders from picking up the several thousand dead and survivors floating in the rammed and waterlogged ships that had not sunk. At Athens, the news of the losses blunted the joy of victory. Following a little after the news, the Apaturia, a festival which drew together families to acknowledge births and marriages, made the grief worse. RADITSA 67 The matter came up in the council and the assembly. Under the influence of their politicians the people seemed unable to accept that some things are not under human control, that a storm occurs in “divine necessity,” as one speaker put it. Their politicians dominated them by nourishing their yearning to make someone responsible for everything. Theramenes, an important and able politician who had been a subordinate commander at Arginusae, accused his superiors of neglect. There was debate both in council and assembly, and the six generals who had dared to come back to Athens defended themselves ably and with witnesses, even though they had not yet been formally accused. At the point when it appeared the generals would win some kind of release the assembly was adjourned. In a subsequent assembly it was proposed to vote on the guilt of the generals as a group and to count their previous testimony as a trial—all highly illegal. A brave speaker in the assembly attempted to stop the proceedings on the grounds of unconstitutionality (the graphe paranomon); but the people, turning into a mob, threatened him. This was the first, crucial attempt to resort to the graphe paranomon since it had been restored after the Four Hundred had abolished it in 411.3 It failed. But the grounds of the illegality had been clearly stated in the assembly. The crowd also intimidated all of the council except Socrates when it sought to keep the motion for sentencing from the assembly. The generals were condemned as a group and immediately executed. Sometime later the people regretted their action, as they had been warned they would in the assembly. They turned upon their leaders and prosecuted them, depriving one of them of fire and water. But it was too late. All along they had known what they were doing was wrong, but they could not stop it. Against the speaker who had opposed them they had shouted that it was unthinkable that the people should not be allowed to do whatever they desired. �68 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW After Arginusae the tension in many of the cities increased. Returned as acting Commander of the Spartan fleet, Lysander, with headquarters at Ephesus, supported the so-called oligarchs in a bloody seizure of power at Miletus. Four hundred of the wealthy and prominent citizens of Miletus were executed in the market place. For his predecessor Callikratidas’s attempt to lead the Greek cities with words, Lysander substituted terror, for which party labels were mere pretexts. In Karia, a city allied to Athens was wiped out. Sailing from Samos, the Athenian fleet found no support among the Greek cities. Except for Mitylene, all Asia turned away from Athens. When news came that Lysander was retaking Lampsacus on the Hellespont almost the entire Athenian fleet, one hundred and eighty ships, sailed to Aegospotami, a barren stretch of beach just fifteen stades (a stade is 600 feet) across the water from Lampsacus. Despite Alcibiades’ warning—from his estate on the Chersonese he watched the whole disaster take shape before his helpless eyes—the Athenian commanders remained in their exposed position and offered battle to the Spartans for four days. On the fifth day Lysander surprised the Athenians after they had disembarked and destroyed or captured more or less their whole fleet. It was the Fall of 405. At Athens they prepared for siege: all the harbors except one were filled up, walls were repaired and guards put on them. The city sought a hasty and incomplete unity in the restoration of full citizen rights to those who had been partially deprived in the previous troubles. But they did not recall the exiles. At Aegospotami in assembly with the allies of Sparta, Lysander executed one of the Athenian commanders, because he had been the first to break the international law of the Greek cities. He had hurled the captured crews of two ships of Sparta’s allies from a precipice, and in the assembly at Athens he had supported a motion to cut off the thumbs of RADITSA 69 all prisoners of war and make them incapable of ever rowing again. Lysander also showed himself as the undoer of Athenian outrages: at Melos, Torone, Scione and Aigina he restored the remaining original inhabitants. From Chalcedon and Byzantium on the Bosporus and elsewhere, Lysander set the Athenian garrison loose on the condition that they sail nowhere else but to Athens. He wanted to burden Athens with as many mouths as possible. Everywhere the Greek cities turned to Sparta. But at Samos, the other port of the Athenian fleet, the democracy held, and again knew itself in the slaughter of prominent citizens. For the first time since before the Persian wars, Athens was cut off from the sea, closed in upon herself—Athens, whom almost ten years before, Peisthetaerus in the Birds had called “the city of the lovely triremes.” Throughout the whole winter and until April of the following year, 404, Athens and the democracy resisted—and people starved. There was an early attempt at negotiation in which Athens offered to accept Sparta’s leadership in alliance, a situation that would have allowed her considerable independence. But at Sparta the Ephors insisted on tearing down part of the walls. In response the people at Athens forbade any motions concerning peace. Men grew convinced that any terms with Sparta meant the fate of Melos. In this tense and dangerous situation Theramenes managed to persuade the assembly to let him find out from Lysander whether the Spartans wanted to destroy the long walls to reduce Athens to slavery, or simply as a guarantee of their good conduct. Theramenes remained with Lysander who was besieging Samos until with the worsening situation at Athens the assembly granted him power to negotiate. The new terms which the Lacedaimonians and their allies offered were much harsher than the previous demands of the Ephors: Athens was to have the same friends and enemies as Sparta. (In our terms this meant Athens lost the capacity for an independent foreign policy.) She was to tear down the long �70 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW walls. Her fleet was not to number more than twelve ships. The exiles were to return. When Theramenes returned to the starving city with these terms, men crowded around him in fear—but in the assembly there was still some resistance to surrender. In acting as go-between between the Athenian democrats who desired to resist to the end and the probably undecided Spartans Theramenes had saved his native city from total destruction—or rather from destroying itself. To the intoxicating sound of flutes, Lysander had sections of the long walls torn down. The Spartans and the returning Athenian exiles, according to Xenophon, imagined that that day meant the beginning of freedom for the Greeks. It was April 404. In the following month the Athenian assembly, in the presence of Lysander, voted to give thirty men the power to revise the laws and reform the constitution. The Thirty promised to make the city clean and honorable and to impel the citizens to justice and excellence. Plato, then twenty-four years old, and many others, perhaps even Lysias (a speech writer, son of Cephalus and brother of Polemarchus, who appear in the first book of the Republic), believed in them at first. The commission delayed the reform of the laws, but appointed magistrates and council, and started to rule. Before the council and with public balloting, they tried and killed notorious sycophants, individuals who had used the threat of prosecution for extortionary purposes. Although illegal, these killings won wide consent among the citizens, because men felt they were justified. Soon, however, Critias, a close relative of Plato and an interlocutor of Socrates, asked Lysander for a Spartan governor and garrison to support him in dealing with unruly and subversive elements. With Spartan troops behind them, the Thirty now began to kill all individuals who might oppose them, and whose property would furnish the money necessary for the support of the Spartan garrison. RADITSA 71 At these outrages many went into exile, including Anytos (who later instigated the prosecution of Socrates) and Thrasybulus, who was to lead the democrats. Megara and Thebes teemed with Athenian exiles despite Sparta’s order forbidding any Greek city to receive them. (By January 403, when the Thirty left Athens for Eleusis, where they had exterminated the population, perhaps as much as half of the male population had left Attica.) Among the Thirty themselves the outrages also produced opposition. Theramenes, who knew the distinction between a moderate oligarchy and terror, told Critias that they were now much worse than the sycophants of the democracy who had extorted money, but not killed for it. Critias answered, brutally, that changes of constitution required killing: “How do you think thirty can rule over many without terror?” Critias now disarmed all the population except three thousand of the more wealthy. All except these three thousand could be arrested and executed without trial. As Socrates later pointed out in his own trial, Critias sought to dominate by involving as many as possible in his outrages. Under the swords of the Spartan garrison he compelled the Three Thousand to condemn the inhabitants of Eleusis to death. When he could no longer tolerate the free-spokenness of Theramenes, he made the council his accomplice in his death. Sometime during the early winter of 404, Thrasybulus, with about seventy followers, took the border fortress of Phyle which overlooked the whole Attic plain to Athens. The Thirty immediately responded, but were repulsed in a minor skirmish. This minor setback shattered their confidence and showed that their cowardice matched their brutality. Sometime after this Thrasybulus, now with something like seven hundred badly armed followers, took the section of the Piraeus called Munychia. There in pitched battle the men of the Piraeus, as they now came to be called, managed to defeat the Thirty and the Three Thousand. Critias, first cousin to Plato’s mother, and Charmides, his uncle, were �72 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW both killed. Mindful that the enemy dead were citizens, the men of the Piraeus did not strip their bodies. They sought instead to use their victory to shake the by now largely forced loyalty of many of the Three Thousand (especially those who had not committed crimes) to the Thirty. Shortly after the battle the Three Thousand removed the Thirty from office and elected twelve to rule. The Thirty and their followers fled to Eleusis. It was January, 403. At this point Athens was no longer a living city but three factions, one in the city, one in the Piraeus, and one in Eleusis. From Eleusis the Thirty sent men whom they fancied ambassadors to Lysander, saying there had been a revolt of the mob at Athens and requesting his help. Intent on surrounding the democrats at the Piraeus, Lysander managed the appointment of his brother as naval commander and authorization for himself to hire mercenaries. But Pausanias, one of the kings of Sparta, alarmed at the thought that Lysander might turn Athens into his private possession, convinced the Ephors and the Spartan assembly—ostensibly to help Lysander, but actually to prevent the destruction of the men of the Piraeus. Pausanias’s expedition, with the Spartan army, amounted almost to a reopening of the war. In fact, Thebes and Corinth refused to join, because they said Athens had not violated any of her treaty agreements. With Spartan authority to come to a settlement, Pausanias managed to negotiate an agreement in which both the oligarchs of the city and the democrats of the Piraeus agreed not to fight each other. At Pausanias’s insistence they also agreed to return property expropriated under the Thirty to its owners. The constitution of the democracy was restored. It was probably August 403, fifteen months after the assembly had first elected the Thirty. For the next two years Athens lived in fear of renewed attempts to undo the democracy. In 401, upon rumors that the Thirty at Eleusis were hiring mercenaries, the whole city took arms and went out to meet them. During the ensuing negotiations the men of the city killed the commanders from RADITSA 73 Eleusis and managed a reconciliation with their followers, with the help of their relatives and friends in Athens. Either at this time or two years earlier, in August 403, when Pausanias negotiated the reconciliation, every individual in Athens swore not to bear grudges for anything in the past. This meant nobody could prosecute for offenses under the Thirty, probably including the expropriation of property which Pausanias had sought to undo. The agreement to forget did not cover the Thirty, “the twelve” who had committed their “executions,” and several other categories. It was contractual and could only be enforced upon appeal from individuals in court. (Andocides, for instance, appeals to it in his speech “On the Mysteries” in 399, the year of the trial of Socrates.)4 Athens After The Thirty and the Trial of Socrates The atmosphere in Athens after the Thirty was somewhat unreal. It had become a city that feared disturbances and feared itself. It also remained in an important sense two cities. When you spoke at Athens during this time you always addressed two audiences, the men of the city and the men of the Piraeus. In these years Lysias spoke directly to a deep sense of unease and complicity with terrifying events which must have prevailed among the majority of Athenians. For the heroes of Phyle and Piraeus had been few. Lysias understood the deep struggle for self-respect Athenians waged during this time. “The Thirty killed my brother,” he says, “they even made it hard to bury him—I will not forget.” “Then, under the Thirty, you were afraid,” he tells the judges, “but now there is nothing stopping you from voting the way you desire, now there are no excuses.” Lysias attacked Theramenes, not distinguishing him in any way from Critias. Theramenes had betrayed the trust the people had shown him and brought the city down in starvation. Everything that had occurred in the assembly which voted authority to the Thirty in the spring of 404 had been �74 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW arranged beforehand, secretly, between Lysander and Theramenes. The vote had not been freely taken. If the Thirty had not killed Theramenes the democracy would have had to—a remark that, in its inverted way, pays a deep compliment to Theramenes. In all the violence the only obvious palpable tie that remained between the factions was the gods; to them the city now made appeal. Of the Thirty, Lysias said, “they wanted us to participate in their shame instead of the gods, to substitute complicity with them for our common relation to the gods.” He also described the Thirty as men who believed their power to be firmer than the vengeance of the gods—something quite like the Melians had said to the Athenians. When the men of the Piraeus addressed the Three Thousand after their defeat in January 403, they spoke first of their common gods. Immediately after Pausanias had succeeded in bringing peace between the factions, Thrasybulus went up to sacrifice on the Acropolis: he meant to reaffirm that Athens belonged to Athena, who lived on the Acropolis. Perhaps Euthyphro exemplifies this newfound, somewhat showy piety of Athens after the Thirty. It is full of unquestioning assurance—and yet at a loss for words. With this piety there was a forced and unconvincing blustering patriotism. Andocides did not blush to compare the Athens of the year of Socrates’ trial with the Athens of the Persian wars. Anytos showed the brittle, touchy confidence of these years when he takes “personal” (as we would say) offense at Socrates’ observation (in the Meno) that the sons of the pillars of the community had not turned out so well. People yearned for conviction, but were incapable of it. Socrates came from another world—the world of Athens and the Greeks before the Peloponnesian War. At its outbreak in 431 he was about 40, and already famous throughout at least the Greek world. Men came from as far as Cyrene to listen to him.5 This is the Athens of the fifty years between the Persian and the Peloponnesian War, the Athens that neither RADITSA 75 feared itself or others. It was a city that did not fear the unexpected. A city in which important things besides crime happened on the streets. In fact, to that street life and its casual encounters, to how one can live on the streets, Socrates is one of our greatest witnesses. I think his refusal to wear sandals speaks of his feel for that life and of his insistence on its importance. Another witness to that street life is Herodotus, whose book, like the Odyssey, is also a book of manners. Although—or perhaps because—careful and cautious, Herodotus is confident and respectful of his readers’ intelligence, of their capacity to think. Socrates has the same respect for the intelligence of the people he encounters. He could tolerate the movement of other peoples’ minds (when they did actually move) and he knew that movement to be as unexpected as truth. That is why he preferred to talk, to listen as well as to speak, rather than to write or teach. Unlike Herodotus, Socrates did not travel—as he remarks, he never left town. Even when everybody went to a festival, he remained behind with the cripples and beggars in the deserted silent city. Herodotus instead went everywhere with the same ease that Socrates stayed home. Both give an example of the best kind of courage, the unassuming kind, the kind that does not have to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. The Athenians of that time were used to living in a world that strengthened them, in a world where the throbbing glow of the sky was palpable, in a world that knew nuance, that could see the shape of the human body because it knew it to be more than the sum of its parts. Pericles says Athens was largely free of the jealousy of the lives of others which contributed so much to the later hatred of Socrates. In the presence of Herodotus and Socrates one feels one’s pretensions like a kind of awkwardness that one could drop. The only man who breathed this confidence during the Peloponnesian War besides Socrates was Aristophanes. �76 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Aristophanes knew, in the way he appears to know everything, that in this time you could only breathe it in laughter, his kind of laughter which serves for reverence and respect. Alcibiades knew this confidence lives, but it always eluded his grasp although he traveled the world to seek it—when he knew perfectly well (but only Socrates could make him admit it) you could only find it at home. This kind of unassuming confidence cannot be experienced without remembering Aeschylus, a man with strength enough to have compassion for a god. Significantly, during the time of the war it is only Aristophanes who could approach Prometheus with something equivalent, but at the same time entirely different from, the pitiless tenderness of Aeschylus. Most of the spectators and judges at Socrates’ trial knew nothing of this world of Athens before the Peloponnesian war except what they saw before them in Socrates. Plato was born ca. 429, Xenophon, who was not at the trial, perhaps in 435. Meletos, Socrates’ official accuser, was perhaps Plato’s age, certainly not much older; “a youthful defender of the youth,” Socrates calls him. Ashamed at appearing in Court—for the first time in his life, he emphasizes—Socrates at his trial felt the weight of seventy years of living and the dignity they demand. He says he did not prepare a speech because it was not something for a man of his age to do—especially since his whole way of life with its love of justice speaks for him—in his defense. Plato knew, of course, that Socrates came from another world; in fact one major part of his work was remembering and recreating a world he had never entirely known, but which he knew to be destroyed. Remember that Plato lost Socrates just after the experience of the Thirty had forced him to acknowledge the dishonor of his family—perhaps not of his parents, but of the brothers of one of his parents and of another close relative. His repudiation of their acts is RADITSA 77 strong, and it awakens admiration. For Plato, the trial of Socrates was a terrible as the time of the Thirty. Plato’s love for Socrates is for a dead man; everything he writes is about a man who has disappeared. Unlike Aristophanes, Plato never had to face Socrates with any of his writings. His writings were meant to substitute for Socrates, to replace him, to keep him alive once he was dead. This is the hardest illusion to deal with when you read Plato, the illusion that you are inside Socrates, that you are hearing his voice. It is also the drama of reading Plato, who is an artist, a different kind of artist than the poets, for he thought he was not an artist. With Xenophon it was different. He stayed outside of Socrates. In Xenophon you can hear how Socrates’ voice sounded to somebody who did not entirely understand Socrates but who knew he did not understand him, who knew he was out of his depth but had the courage to stay there—that is rare. “I cannot forgive him, I cannot forget him, the memories keep overwhelming me,” Xenophon says somewhere with wonder. But unlike Plato, he never forgot they were memories. Socrates was charged with impiety. The specific charge, which is preserved with slight variations by Xenophon and Diogenes Laertius, was that he did not worship the gods that the city worshipped and that he introduced new gods. The second charge is that he destroyed the youth. There are other examples of charges of asebeia [impiety] with other charges attached to them. For instance, Aspasia was charged with asebeia and letting Pericles meet free women in her house. There is a text of Aristotle that associates asebeia with disrespect for parents and corrupting the youth. In any case it is clear that corruption of the youth was a prosecutable offense.6 Plato’s stress on corruption of the youth accords with Anytus’s own views. In the only direct quotation from his speech we have, Anytus told the judges he had not expected Socrates to appear in court, but once he had, they had no �78 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW choice but to condemn him. Otherwise, he would ruin their sons. In this Anytus agreed with the Thirty, who had actually attempted to order Socrates not to speak to the young, Anytus’s argument to the fathers to protect their sons is the strongest kind of appeal. As Socrates points out in his questioning of Meletus, it makes him responsible for all the troubled youths in the city. How lucky they would be if I am the only one who ruins them, Socrates remarks. There is plenty of evidence of disturbed relations in Athens between fathers and sons during the Peloponnesian War. The son of Pericles in Xenophon speaks matter-of-factly of Athens as a place where sons held their fathers in contempt. You remember the struggle between Pheidippides and Strepsiades in the Clouds, where there is little question of the father holding the respect of his son. In the Birds there is a scene between a youth who desires to murder his father and Pisthetaerus, where Pisthetaerus manages to show him, by conversation not unlike those of Socrates in Xenophon, that he belongs on the Thracian front. Aristophanes means to show here—and it is probably meant as a compliment to Socrates—that the youth can be talked out of these wild fancies if there is anyone around who knows how to take the time to talk to him. (Incidentally, in our world, where we do not call things by their proper names, the would-be fatherkillers pass for revolutionaries.) There is in Xenophon also a remarkable conversation of Socrates with his son who is deeply angry with his mother. In all this we should keep in mind that disrespect for parents carried severe penalties, perhaps even death.7 These disturbed relations between fathers and sons were intensified by the war. Thucydides mentions the enthusiasm of the youth for the war at its beginning. Pheidippides would have been brought up in the country if it had not been for the war. Socrates was one of the few people in Athens willing to look these troubles in the face rather than deny them and, by RADITSA 79 denying them, wish them away. Anytus instead wanted to wish them away, in somewhat the way Iocasta tried to talk Oedipus out of what he had learned—and then committed suicide. “Because I can help,” Socrates says with something like astonishment, “I am overwhelmed by their jealous rage, as you put it, Euthyphro”—the word is phroneo, used elsewhere of the gods’ resentment of overreaching human beings. Anytus’s relation to Meletus shows something of what Anytus thought the proper relation of the elder generation should be to the younger. He put Meletus up to charging Socrates, Meletus who was just a kid in Socrates’ astonished but fearful eyes. How did he dare accuse him of impiety? Socrates asked. Did he not know what he was getting into? With a charge of impiety anything could happen. Meletus was one of those young men for whom the world is unreal, for whom, as Socrates said of others, everything is upside down. He was one of those youths who wished to be serious but did not dare to be, who wanted to be a hero but feared the risks. Anytus offered him the easy way out, the illusion of self-respect, the easy way to grow up: the role of protector of the city and of his peers. Socrates is fierce when he questions Meletus, catching all the irresponsibility of that pretended earnestness. Anytus trapped Meletus with his conceit—and to all intents and purposes ruined him. Contrast Anytus’s manipulation of Meletos with Socrates’s handling of Glaucon, Plato’s brother, as Xenophon tells it. Like Plato, Glaucon at twenty wanted more than anything else to go into politics. Uncontrollable and the despair of his family, he was making a fool of himself climbing up and speaking in public, and doing the other things you did to have a political career at Athens. Socrates cared about him because of Plato and because of Glaucon’s uncle Charmides, and because he must have had all the charm of intelligence awakening. (There is always something important to be said for young men who dare to make �80 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW fools of themselves in defiance of their family—as long as it is of their own—and not to please somebody else.) Socrates asked Glaucon some questions which incidentally show something that I do not think is apparent from Plato, that Socrates had a fairly extensive knowledge of the facts of Athenian politics. He asked how long Athens could live off the agricultural production of the Attic countryside; how much food she needed in general; what her expenses were; what were her revenues—the list reads like a catalogue of the facts Pericles had at the ready when he spoke to the Athenians. Glaucon could not answer any of these questions. At one point he answers, “But, Socrates, I can make a guess.” “No, when you know, we will talk.” Then Socrates asks him something else, “Why don’t you run your uncle’s estates?” Glaucon answers innocently, “Because I cannot persuade him to entrust them to me.” “You cannot persuade your uncle, but you think you can persuade the city!” This is pretty much the opposite of what Anytus did to Meletus. It is the kind of humiliating conversation which teaches the difference between dreams and facts, between illusion and life—without learning that distinction (and it is not something you learn in the head), you live your whole life among the shades. Politics is also a struggle to distinguish the actual from illusions, enemies from friends, war from peace, what you can do from what you cannot, and, most importantly, aggression from goodwill and life from death. In the fifteen years preceding the trial of Socrates Athens had clearly failed in that struggle, over and over again misjudging the situations. When the consequences of those misjudgments turned to disaster, it grew difficult to put up with Socrates: he reminded people of too much. Without wanting to he made Anytus feel he was a bad father, and that there might be a connection between the kind of father he was and the kind of political leader he was. More generally, he made people feel they RADITSA 81 might have been responsible for what had happened to them. Or, as he puts it to the judges, “You cannot hurt me but you will hurt yourselves putting me to death.” Nobody in public life after Pericles, and probably not even Pericles, had been able to make people feel responsible for what had happened. Socrates made them feel responsible because he came in between the relations between generations. You remember how he says, “If I went abroad and had conversations, the fathers would drive me into exile; and if I did not, the sons would.” In Athens it had taken collusion between generations, between Meletus and Anytus to prosecute him. For it is the relations between generations which determine whether cities live or die or merely survive. People had gone through disaster; they had seen their fathers and brothers and children and friends killed. They had taken that, but they could not take the dim but unmistakable sense they had in the presence of Socrates that these disasters were of their own doing, that these disasters had to do with how they thought and talked and what they were. When Socrates told them they took better care of their slaves than their friends, of their bodies than their lives, he reminded them, quite unwittingly, of that. Because he knew his own smallness Socrates struck other men as grand, boastful, even arrogant. Because he took his own measure, he appeared to tower over other men who had trouble telling themselves from gods. And this was intolerable, especially after the events of the last ten years had held up their smallness to them. A generation before they had laughed at him and respected him—now in the narrowness of defeat, possessed by memories they could not face, they killed him—because they feared themselves in him. Notes 1 For the relation of The Clouds to Socrates, Bruno Snell, “Das frühste Zeugnis über Sokrates,” Philologus 97 (1948): 125-34; Wolfgang Schmid, “Das Sokratesbild der Wolken,” Philologus 99 �82 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW (1948): 209-28; T. Gelzer, “Aristophanes und sein Sokrates,” Museum Helveticum 13 (1956): 65-93. 2 On the sources for this period, S. Accame, “Le fonti di Diodoro per la guerra Deceleica,” Rendiconti della R. Accademia dei Lincei (Classe di scienze morali, sotriche e filologiche) 14 (sixth series), 1938, 347-451; “Trasibulo e i nuovi frammenti delle Elleniche di Ossirinco,” Rivista di filologia classica 28 (1950): 30-49. 3 J. Hatzfeld, “Socrate au procès des Arginuses,” Revue des Etudes Anciennes 42 (1940): 165. 83 Ovid, Banished Publius Ovidius Naso relegatus non exsul. The Decree of Banishment He envies the ocean, its coming and going, 4 its vast itinerary and easy arrogance. 5 Certain days he leans toward it, reaches For the character of this agreement, Ugo Enrico Paoli, Studi sul processo Attico, Padua, 1938, 121-142, especially 122; also, Studi di diritto Attico, Florence, 1930. Burnet, Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates and Crito, (Oxford, 1970), especially v and the commentary to the Apology. 6 For the charge, A. Menzel, Untersuchungen zum Sokrates Processe, Abhandlung der Sitzungsber. d. kais. Akd. zu Wien 145, 1901-02, especially 7-29. Also E. Derenne, Les procès d’impiété intentés aux philosophes à Athènes au Ve et au IVe siècles avant J.-C., Liége, 1930; N. Casini, “Il processo di Socrate,” Iura 8, 1957, 101-120. For the association of asebeia with disrespect for parents, Aristotle “On Virtues and Vices,” 1251a31:asebeia men he peri theous plem˜ meleia kai peri daimonas e kai peri tous katoikhomenous kai peri goneis kai peri patrida. Also see J. Lipsius (with Meier and Schoemann) Das Attische Recht und Rechtsverfahren, Leipzig, 1908, 359. For the death penalty for disrespect of parents (kakoseos goneon ˜ ˜ ˜ graphe ), Lysias, 13, 91. As with many crimes, the penalty for disre˜ spect of parents was probably not specified (for leeway in Attic legal procedure after conviction, U.E. Paoli, Processo Attico, Padua, 1938, 86-89. Recent scholars think disrespect for parents was usually punished with partial loss of citizen rights (atimia) for life, for instance, with loss of the right to hold office and speak in the assembly—but not with the loss of private rights, such as the right to hold property. L. Beauchet, Histoire du droit privé de la République Athénienne, Paris, 1897, 1, 362-371; A.R.W Harrison, The Law of . Athens, Oxford, 1968, 1, 78-81. to touch, and touching touches what it has touched. Then the poems come, torrential, unstoppable, each riding the back of the one before, their dolphin words like news from home. 7 Leonard Cochran Leonard Cochran, O.P is retired from the faculty of Providence College. He ., is a 1982 graduate from the Annapolis campus of the Graduate Institute. �84 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 85 Philosophy Revived Eva Brann Those of our alumni who had really good Republic seminars won’t have forgotten the spectacularly innocuous beginning of all philosophizing that Socrates sets out in the seventh book. He is talking to Plato’s brother Glaucon about an education not so unlike ours. Where and how does reflection begin? With arithmetic. Take the one finger on your hand that doesn’t even have an ordinary name, the fourth. It sends an odd message: It’s always a finger, but it is long in respect to the pinkie, short compared to the middle finger. The attentive soul summons calculative thought to examine whether the eye’s vision is announcing one or two things. If two, then each is other and one. And yet they are together a Twosome; is this Two itself a unity, a one? Now the soul is forced by its perplexity to inquire whatever One Itself might be. Counting and calculation is thus the “winch” to Being, and thoughtful arithmetic turns the soul around to that invisible Being. In another dialogue, the Phaedrus, quite another, an erotically ecstatic beginning of the ascent to Being will be set out. Stewart Umphrey’s book is the working out, meticulously reasoned and unflinchingly self-critical, of this humble finger problem and its relation to the second beginning in the ecstasy of love. But it is not a commentary on Platonic dialogues or on any of the writers—Hegel, Kant and a slew of moderns—that the author calls on. Though he puts to good use considerable philosophical learning, especially training in logic, it is an instrumental use. He wields the precision tools developed over two and a half millennia in the service of Socrates’ great last care in the Phaedo: that the logos, thoughtful conversation, should live and not die with him. I used to think that commenting on major texts was by and large the most respectable kind of philosophizing, since it kept one honest, in the sense of preventing the inventive kind �86 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW of originality that substitutes fascinating novelties for the same old truth. Stewart Umphrey’s book, however, proves that there is honest originality—the kind that makes straight for the origin but by a unique route. It shows an independence of mind whose distinctiveness verges on eccentricity— the kind that reaches the center by leaving the mainstream, whose perspective rouses thought by being a little askew, by shifting the world by a few degrees. Stewart Umphrey’s distinctive mode is a sort of faith-ful skepticism. His first book was in fact called Zetetic Skepticism, a title alluding to the hypothesis that searching inquiry (zetesis) can never be complete, that it is the indefeasible human condition not to be perfect in knowledge—and that this is absolutely no reason not to carry on; not despair but the energizing exercise of the intellect is the proper response. Complexity and Analysis is, among other things, a demonstration of the intellectual gymnastics that is at once a preparation for and an expression of this illusion-stripped faith. Of course, the reasons why it is best to keep inquiring are detailed along the way. The Law of Contradiction with the divisions and branchings it induces is what this author lives by—to begin with, when the differentiations of analysis are wanted (“this is not that”) and also later when distinctions in truth or falsity of statements about complex entities are to be made (“either this holds or that”). Some sections consist of very close reasoning, but the purpose is not to deconstruct polemically but to discover peacefully what is the case; it never gets irritating. At worst it is a sweaty workout, at best an illuminating high. Sometimes a long argument ends in misgivings after all; often the author, like a reasonable human being, admits to as-yetunreasoned preferences. If readers may quail a little before the logic (yet—no pain, no gain), they will be enchanted with the distinctive flavor of the style, the underhanded wit, the anomalous vocabulary, the dry logic that supports as it contains the soaring of BRANN 87 thought. Did you ever think of newsstands as an exemplification of “the truthvalueless things we make,” or use “obvelation” as the obverse of revelation, or see a rational flow chart of philosophic madness? And then there is occasional lyricism. —If you thought you knew your tutor, read the last couple of pages of his book. So far I’ve talked round about the book, but I want to give some notion of its contents. Since for Stewart Umphrey the good of philosophy is more (though not only) in the thinking than in the thought, in the doing rather than the having done, the text is practically beyond summary. Though it is full of passionate belief, it contains no thesis that won’t be denatured by being baldly stated. So I’ll be picking small samples, those that twang my logical funny bone or that speak to my philosophical preoccupations. The book has three parts: The first is about analysis and its limits, thus about ways of knowing, epistemology. The second is about complexity, about the constitution of things that are discernible in thought (here called “entities”), thus about the inside workings of beings. (I have no idea why the order of the complementary parts is reversed in the title of the book, but have perfect faith that there is an interesting reason.) The last part draws the practical, the life-affecting consequences of the theoretical insights gained; it is thus about human wholeness and what lies beyond. “Analysis” in this book is a way of trying to know some given whole by breaking it up into its constituents, be they themselves entities or something else, something central to the argument, namely “subentities,” “parts” that are not independently countable or even discernible in analytic thought, yet somehow in evidence. Analysis deals comfortably only with fairly independent countable components. Analysts are clear and precise but not always deep and comprehensive. They can capture complexity but have trouble with unity. (They know that the finger contains two ideas, but not how Two comes to be one.) Some of the darkness of our day is due �88 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW to a case of bad analysis, to “analysitis” (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”), but reflectively used it is the beginning of understanding. Stewart Umphrey reviews the tensions that arise in mathematics and the natural sciences between analytic precision and comprehensiveness; the notes provide helpful sketches of several formalizations of this dilemma, two of which our seniors study: Gödel’s incompleteness proof, showing that there is more in mathematics than proofs can reach, and the Einstein-Podolski-Rosen argument that the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle taken as a description of the physical world is incomplete. One principal aspect of what turns out to be the inherent paradox of analysis is thus the Socratic problem: If you analyze an entity into, say, two constituents, you’ve lost the one whole you were trying to understand. In the second chapter of this part, Aristotle’s metaphysics is considered as a model display of the insufficiency of analysis. This presentation not only advances the agenda of the book, it also enacts it: While showing why Aristotle has to become “transanalytic” it attempts to understand his several approaches (often made perspicuous in diagrams), and to comprehend in one understanding his notion of natural beings, of form and matter, essence and accidents, actuality and potentiality, and of divine being—unsuccessfully, of course. Anyone—all of us—who has ever wondered how these perspectives jibe will find this exposition independently illuminating. “Complexity” describes the character of all thinkable and interesting entities. (Recall the trouble Plato’s Parmenides runs into in trying to think simple unity, the One.) The types of entities are set out with respect to their constitution, from the extremes of mere pluralities or heaps to undifferentiated unities. In between are found the ones that matter: those with definite components that are nevertheless real unities and those that are real unities but with parts—subentities—not discernible in analysis. BRANN 89 Entities are now inventoried; facts, for instance, which include relations or properties that seem to require a transanalytic “ontological glue” to hold them together with the entity itself. Living individuals are particularly complex entities, and with respect to them we can’t help asking about their center or essence, what each being really is. But the familiar difficulty arises: The essence is what the individual is, but is it one and the same with or other than the individual? In the former case, knowing the essence adds nothing new to our understanding; in the latter it yields nothing true about the entity. Individuals take up or partake in space, and so space must be analyzed. Is it itself an entity, a whole? Are points its “parts”? They certainly belong to the understanding of space, but they are not its components. They are almost model subentities; space is thus a complex entity with constituents inseparable by analysis. The chapter on space is especially interesting, not just as an acute dissection of the spatial features, but because space is the field of display for the non-analytic thinking that is needed to understand the subentitive complexity which characterizes the wholes we most care about. This kind of thinking is analogical. Analysis should, at the least, give us clear and distinct components to go on with. But while clarity belongs to the content of an entity, to its own internal nature, distinctness pertains to its location, its externally delimited place in “conceptual space.” Now the discernible components of a complex entity are particularly clearly and distinctly expressed in spatial representations (such as the author draws in the Aristotle chapter and throughout the book). But such spatial images also make visible indiscernible subentitive parts, for example points (see below). Why is spatial representation so illuminating? Because we naturally analogize the mind itself to space—our spatial imagination is so close a neighbor to our intellect—and space is the most potent field there is. Moreover, being itself transan- �90 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW alytic, space is particularly apt for representing that kind of complex entity. Individuals also partake in universals through their species. And universals in turn have similar problems: How is the species a part of the universal? Is the universal genus composed of species? Then where’s the universal? So we again have Socrates’ “One-out-of, or -over, or -beyond Many” perplexity. The author proposes yet another non-analytic kind of understanding which he calls dialectical prismatics: If we think of individuals (or species) as refractions of the universal, as white light is refracted into the color spectrum, then we might, by looking through the prism backwards, so to speak, sight the unitary source. Anyone trying to squint through appearances at what is thinkable in them will recognize the experience of reverse prismatics. In the section on universals (part of the chapter on entities) we may, moreover, discover that this member of our community inclines toward “metaphysical realms of the ante rem sort,” a fancy way of saying that ideas not only exist, but exist both separately and before the world. But that’s Platonic, glory be! Next God is viewed prismatically and then negatively. Like the reverse prism, the via negativa, seeing God through what he’s not, is not analytic. The chapter on entities ends with a section called “Everything,” for wisdom—which is what philosophy is for—is the comprehensive understanding of everything: whether all things form a whole and how, and if not, why not. Extreme analysts, such as the logician Quine, eliminate whatever it is that might make wholes of parts, such as universals. They slash away whatever isn’t countable, as the ultimate comprehensive unity certainly can’t be. They wield what is here wittily called “Quine’s machete,” the crude counterpart to “Ockham’s razor,” which deftly excises only the truly unnecessary. Extreme “haplists” (from Greek haplous, “simple”), believers in a simply single being, like Parmenides (though I don’t know another), think that there BRANN 91 is one non-complex entity. Neither of their accounts is sufficiently accountable for what there is. There follow three chapters on the ways of gaining understanding that can supplement analysis. The chapter on analogy, already mentioned, contains a sensible inquiry into “likeness,” since analogy involves likeness; it is so much the more welcome because some recent estheticians have pretty much analyzed imitative resemblance away. The chapter ends with precepts for the safe use of analogies. The one I take most to heart is that philosophical analogies should be carefully framed as similes (“this is like that” rather than metaphor (“this is that”), and that some of the dead metaphors of our daily speech should be resurrected as instructive similes. (My favorite is the contrastive pair “eidos,” that which is like something seen, and “concept,” that which is like something grasped.) Dialectic is a second transanalytic way. Dialectic is a term that has lived through many meanings. The author begins with Hegelian dialectic. Again, here, apart from this book’s agenda, is a good account of the main moments of this developmental logic, whose chief feature is that all the analytic components are synthesized and reabsorbed into each other and the whole. It is complemented by a critique, an inventory of the “myths” underlying its beginning, its progression, its culmination, its very possibility for our thinking. A while ago, Stewart Umphrey, Chester Burke, and I together read our way—it took several years—through Hegel’s Science of Logic, a great dialectical experience for all of us (which Stewart kindly acknowledges); this critique revived for me our perplexities of long ago—now neatly marshaled. The author then turns to the dialectic best known here at the college: dialogue, conversation. “The soul of dialectic,” he says, “is philosophy. Only secondarily are dialecticians elenctic [refutational] wizards.” This kind of philosophical reasoning does not dwell in beginnings or completions but the in-between. It is both its own end (as a healthy activity) �92 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW and for a purpose (as the search for wisdom). He says much more, of course, but the point is that dialectic implicitly affirms the philosophic condition of incompleteness. Finally there are the ways of negation. “Is it possible to combine the metaphysical splendor of infinitistic realism [faith in vague beings] with the epistemological refinement of finitistic irrealism [unbelief in any imprecisely delimited entity]?” asks the author. “No,” he answers. “We’re caught then between two opposing views, one of which appears decidedly pinched, the other decidedly vain.” Then follows a critique of Kant’s transcendental dialectic, insofar as it means to show that our deepest philosophic desires must remain forever unmet because the dilemmas we burden ourselves with are based on an illusion—that we can know things in themselves apart from the constructions of our understanding. The author shows precisely something that is eventually divined by every student of Kant: the Critique of Pure Reason is perforce shot through with the very transcendence Kant wants to cure. It is a book far more self-refuting and thus far more suggestive than the first laborious reading reveals. Kantian naysaying having been analyzed, a praise of wonder and perplexity (carefully distinguished, of course) is mounted in a final section on intuition. Here the impersonal “one” gives way for some reason to the politically correct “she”—an object lesson in the trickiness of that business, since the attribution of intuition to women is, as it happens, quite politically incorrect. I had to grin. The third part consists of three enticing chapters, Integrity, Ecstasy and Community: how human beings become whole and how they transcend themselves as persons and also as social beings. The chapter on integrity culminates in a section about “presence of mind,” a kind of undefined summary virtue capping the qualities of “reason, choice, character,” to which are opposed “will, commitment, appetite, freedom.” I find Stewart Umphrey’s preference for unity and integrity over BRANN 93 plurality and disorder deeply agreeable; others may find it usefully provocative. In any case presence of mind is the oldest intellectual virtue known to the West: wise Athena once calls her darling Odysseus angchinoos, “present-of-mind.” The chapter on ecstasy presents a sober analysis of ways of going beyond oneself, especially in love; its conclusion presents the union of integrity (wholeness) with transcendence (going beyond) in the “sober madness of philosophy.” What is remarkable is that the careful descriptions and distinctions of these human chapters really are applications. They are the practical consequences of the preceding pure theoretical thinking when brought to bear on living experience; they trace out incompleteness as a human condition. The final chapter, on community, begins with the political, the “most authoritative,” human community. Within it we work ourselves into integrity, out of it we pass beyond ourselves. Careful consideration shows that although it is the basic ground of our well-being, it is imperfect as a community. Friendship appears to be the realization of a paradigmatic community. So an analysis of friendship is in order: “Friendship is complex. It involves a relation that is usually dyadic and always symmetrical”—so this ultimate topic is broached with the formal precision and logical perspicuity of the inveterate analyst who relishes his human reserve; I have to smile even as I’m thinking along. But the logic eventually yields to love, and, as I’ve said, the last two pages of this book speak of the most intimate of human experiences. � 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2002/3 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Carey, James Ruhm von Oppen, Beate Sachs, Joe Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Castle, Justin Sachs, Joe Anastaplo, George Raditsa, Leo Cochran, O.P., Leonard Description An account of the resource Volume XLVI, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 2002. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_46_No_3 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bb96bd74b34266bcaeac10c3dd7c1785.pdf 978cc58d894991e55808611e285ead6a PDF Text Text The St. John's Review Volume XLVII, number one (2003) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann James Carey Beate Ruhm von Oppen Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Justin Castle The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5 .00 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore. ©2003 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John's Public Relations Office and the St. John 's College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW �3 Contents Essays and Lectures Philosophy and Resurrection: The Gospel According to Spinoza ................................. 5 John Cornell What Tree is This?: In Praise of Europe's Renaissance Printers, Publishers and Philologists ......................... ... 39 Chaninah Maschler The Empires of the Sun and the West ... ....................... 83 Eva Brann Plato's Timaeus and the Will to Order......... ........ .... .. 13 7 Peter Kalkavage �4 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW �5 i Philosophy and Resurrection: The Gospel according to Spinoza John F. Cornell Many years ago, as a student in a course on philosophy, I wrote the obligatory essay on David Hume's theory of causality, laying out his famous criticism of the principle of cause and effect taken as a ground for metaphysical knowledge. I gave my draft to a typist, as was common before the days of computerized word processing. I recall my annoyance when I received back the typed version of my paper on Hume's idea of cause. The title read: "David Hume on Casual Relationships." Now I understand that the Scottish philosopher enjoyed himself in the salons of Paris as much as any foreign visitor, and that the new title had some potential as a line of research. But that was not the paper I had written; and so I had to insist that my typist correct a good hundred references to "casual connections" and the like, to express the more philosophical affair of causality. This correction of my academic essay recurred to me recently in reading the books of Spinoza. It recurred to me because this transformation of "casual" into "causal experience" seemed a perfect summary of the philosophical life as Spinoza understood it. While Hume, the skeptic, saw our minds' ideas somewhat as my typist had, with no great distinction between the casual and the causal, Spinoza made much of the difference. He taught that "casual experience," where things merely happen to us, is our lowest level of awareness. If we do not wish to live and think merely at random, we have to raise our minds above the accidents of existence that have generated our opinions and pursue the John Cornell is a tutor at the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College. This essay was delivered as a lecture in Santa Fe in October 11, 2002. �6 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW deeper reasons for things, the causal necessities inherent in Nature . We have to replace our vague notions with what Spinoza calls "adequate ideas," ideas manifesting their logical power in the comprehensive order of thought.1 The distinction between casual and causal thinking thus marks for him the two endpoints of the steep path that leads from mere opinion or collective belief to wisdom. The departure point of belief that Spinoza generally has in mind is biblical religion. He holds that the foundation of all adequate ideas is the idea of God. But he deems the stories of the Bible to reflect a natural, in-adequate opinion about deity and the divine rewards and punishments. The God whose special providence in human history is described in Scripture is a casually received notion answering to imagination. Spinozist philosophy, however, revises the idea of God, understanding God as the one Substance conceived in and through itself. He finds it necessary to revise other biblical concepts, too-the "love of God," "divine decree," "blessedness," "salvation" and "true religion." Judaism and Christianity take these ideas in an inadequate sense, whereas his philosophy assigns them their proper meaning. Now we know few details about the early thinking of Spinoza, which led to his expulsion from the Synagogue in 1656. But we might deduce that his original confrontation with orthodoxy arose from his radical redefinition of religious language to make its primary object purely philosophical. Spinoza comes to rewrite the European treaty between philosophy and faith on similar terms. He reverses the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas that the truths of religion are above human reason, and teaches that it is the philosopher who knows true blessedness. What the religious believer believes is a shadow of what the serious thinker thinks (53). This teaching entails a unique, philosophical view of the Gospel, which I shall try to explain by looking at Spinoza's understanding of the idea of resurrection. �CORNELL 7 In general, Spinoza's achievement resembles that of the navigators who sought a new route to the East Indies and incidentally discovered America. In the course of re-negotiating the relation of faith and philosophy, and arguing for the separation of church and state, Spinoza incidentally founded modern biblical criticism.2 Most scholarly explorations of the Bible today take place on the spiritual continent that he discovered. Yet what may be particularly significant for us in the 21st century, as we study his view of the New Testament, is the difference between him and present-day students of Scripture. The difference lies in this paradox of Spinoza's thought-that, as an interpreter of the Bible, he is more radical and rational than our contemporaries, but at the same time he is a more considerate and humane advocate of biblical religion. Spinoza and Present-day New Testament Scholars I should begin by clarifying this claim about Spinoza's superiority. When one walks into an urban bookstore today, one finds shelves upon shelves of books of the latest biblical research, books disputing the Old and New Testaments as creditable texts and traditions. Few of the more popular of these writers hold anything sacred except what goes by the name of "scientific history." On our topic, the rising from the dead, we might find a book-length debate entitled Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment, or a video of a lecture with the subtitle "The Greatest Hoax in History?" The blend of vulgarity and sophistication in these scholars is striking. But one should also be on the lookout for the bad conscience betrayed sometimes in their prose. For the majority of them are exreligionists who have not thought their way to any sound philosophy or even to a learned ignorance.3 As a result many of them indulge guiltily in the destruction of traditional biblical faith, while they themselves are unable to replace it with any comparably profound vision of life, a vision that might continue to bind people to community and meaningful activity.4 �8 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Spinoza, by contrast, writes the Theological-Political Treatise in the Latin of the learned, and further specifies that he only addresses philosophers. Even so, he is cautious about disclosing his boldest thoughts. While driving his stake into the heart of religious fanaticism (and this in the service of religion), he refrains from explicit criticism of the founding miracles of either Judaism or Christianity, the revelation to Moses on Mt. Sinai or Jesus' Resurrection. Publicly he respects these miracles as constitutive of particular religious faiths. In human terms, what matters about the Resurrection is not the literal fact of the event (which, as we'll see, Spinoza does not believe). What matters is what the Resurrection means spiritually and practically to people as an idea. This distinction corresponds to the general distinction he makes between the truth of the Bible as a factual account of the world and what the text's language means (91)5. For Spinoza, biblical science could establish the essential thing for faith, the meanings of scriptural texts, which converge in their moral message. But believers would be mistaken to try to establish the factual truth of, say, the miraculous events in the history of salvation (52, 85). Establishing truth always leads to questions of a philosophical sort. Spinoza would have considered our contemporaries, continually testing religious "facts" (like Creation or the Resurrection) through scientific research and debates, as rather too literal-minded-as misunderstanding the aims of both Scripture and science.6 What Spinoza thought decided the question of religion vs. philosophy was not the persuasiveness of some research but the attractiveness of a particular way of life (38). This is a point that few present-day Bible scholars understand, perhaps because they have not made such a choice and are neither full-fledged philosophers nor whole-hearted believers. For Spinoza, as I said, philosophers are committed to thinking beyond accepted beliefs to a comprehension of the whole. But most people (including philosophers in their youth) require the support that traditional belief gives their �CORNELL 9 efforts to live good lives. This distinction between the philosopher and the believer-the distinction that today's Bible scholars ignore-is important for the way it enters into Spinoza's understanding of the New Testament and makes it so exceptional. He holds that this distinction between the freedom of philosophy and the natural necessity of religion is the key to understanding Jesus. Jesus counts as a philosopher precisely because his thinking was distinct from the religion he taught (55,146,148). It is even reported by Spinoza's confidant Ehrenfried von Tschirnhaus that Spinoza held Jesus to be the "consummate philosopher." "Christum ait fuisse summum philosophum. "7 Now one might object that such a view of the founder of Christianity only shows Spinoza's bias. His enterprise is to impose a naturalistic viewpoint upon the Bible and its miracles. Of course he would project his own rationalistic mind back onto Jesus, just as he overrates Solomon's wisdom and Moses' political craft. Moreover, the objector might ask, how do the rationalized heroes of Bible history that Spinoza imagines result from his own rule of interpretation, of strictly adhering to the book? Yet Spinoza would remind his critic that he defends the rights of reason against religion on scriptural grounds. He does not just reduce miracles through a systematic naturalism. He argues that theology has made more out of miracles than the Bible intended (78-79, 85-86) . Europeans took the "miraculous," which is largely an idiom in biblical poetry, as literal truth (17, 80-4).8 Spinoza's rules for biblical interpretation only generalize this check on anachronistic practices (89). So long as scholars proceed through apt comparisons and with linguistic sensitivity, they are free to interpret the Bible rationally and speculatively (57, 78, 82, 85, 92, 94-101, 158-9, 162-3). Spinoza's rule of establishing scriptural teaching systematically from Scripture itself is a guide for historical accuracy (86, 90-2), not an excuse for literalism. He is far from underestimating the Bible's intellectual power,9 and that is all his reading of Jesus �10 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW insists upon. Spinoza discerns a bold philosophical mind behind the Gospel texts, bolder than theologians might imagine. He only conceals the full import of his view of Jesus, for he has no desire whatsoever to disturb the beliefs of ordinary believers. He would simply indicate to philosophical readers that the Gospel's historic power is no miracle to one acquainted with the power of philosophy. Today's "quest for the historical Jesus," forever entangled in religious controversy, was not only anticipated by Spinoza but also concluded by him to his own satisfaction. Jesus was a thinkera thinker with a new program, as we shall see. Jesus' New Idea of Salvation according to Spinoza Let us look more closely at the Treatise with this problem of Jesus in mind. At the foundation of the Treatise is a distinction between philosophical or causal knowledge of nature and the knowledge revealed to the prophets that they teach to everyone. Now bear in mind that the Treatise teaches that all knowledge is divine, and that prophetic knowledge may simply duplicate natural knowledge under another form (9). That leaves us to wonder what the genuinely prophetic knowledge is, that might be unexplainable in any natural terms. This question will play a subtle role in Spinoza's interpretation of Jesus-or "Christ," to use the name Spinoza chooses. Only on one point will it turn out that Christ has characteristically prophetic knowledge. I promise to come to that shortly. The greatest part of Christ's wisdom is simply natural. Spinoza teaches that God communicates to philosophical minds naturally without mediation, and that Scripture exhibits Christ's communication with God to be like that-a direct intellectual intuition, "mind to mind" (14 ). Although Spinoza never puts it so bluntly, Christ appears to be specifically a Spinozist philosopher, since he assigns Christ the indispensable credentials for philosophy according to Spinoza's other writings. Christ perceived the things revealed to him truly and adequately and he taught these things, at �CORNELL 11 least to his disciples, as eternal truths rather than as laws designed for the good of human beings (55-6). Now, in declaring Christ's knowledge to be "true and adequate," Spinoza refers us to Jesus' parables of the kingdom and to Matthew 13 in particular. Here Spinoza hit the bull's-eye. In Matthew 13, Jesus addresses to the crowd parables of "things hidden since the foundation of the world." Then, taking the disciples to private quarters, he restates the speech, but with subtle verbal omissions and substitutions. It can be argued-though we will not do so here-that this private speech of Jesus on what he calls scandal explains the essential enmity that motivates the behavior of groups and individuals.lO Spinoza's claim for Jesus' higher knowledge has good scriptural support.ll The Gospel actually shows Jesus adapting an obscure wisdom to the unschooled multitude (55). Spinoza thus discovers in Christ not a Savior sent to take away the sins of humankind-at least not in the mysterious theological sense-but a sage attempting to enlighten the mass of humanity. Similarly, Spinoza wonders about the import of certain remarks by the apostle Paul. Why does Paul regularly state in his epistles that he is adapting his language for ordinary human comprehension? Why does he say openly that it is not possible to say everything openly? Why does Paul speak of having the mind of Christ, referring ambiguously to a spirit of knowledge as well as to a more encompassing spiritual renewal? (56) Much takes place in the New Testament, in Spinoza's view, as if Jesus and some of his disciples spoke the scriptural language of redemption as an idiom to capture the imagination of the Gentile world without the world being able to realize just how ambiguous that idiom might be. Now at the heart of the Bible's mission to the Gentiles is the teaching of "true virtue." Spinoza considers the demonstration of the "divinity" of Scripture to hang upon the truth of its moral doctrine (90). But let us beware. Since all knowl- �12 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW edge is divine, the Bible's "divinity" can prove nothing about its special, supernatural source. Moreover if, as Spinoza insists, the study of the Bible only yields what its language means and not the truth of what it says, then only a philosopher can demonstrate its divinity through its true moral doctrine. For only the philosopher can compare biblical teaching to a true account of morality-like Spinoza's Ethics, which derives the social virtues from first principles (51, 58).12 The Treatise proceeds as if the divinity of Scripture were established by anyone and from Scripture alone, since Scripture has to tell us what its idea of true virtue is (90). But this procedure only tests the reader's mettle. Spinoza also teaches that how much the reader sees into the truth of the Bible, as truth, depends on how much reason there is in the reader (101). Later he turns this question of the method of discerning biblical truth into a question about the historical origin of that truth in reason. The Apostles themselves, he tells us, depended on a related method of rational deductions. He says darkly that they drew many conclusions from whatever Christ revealed to them, and that they could well have disclosed a few things but they declined to do so (146) .13 Now surely the apostles and prophets could not have relied upon pure reason for their doctrine of God. For, in teaching humanity about God's Providence, they attribute to God affections such as love and forgiveness; whereas unaided philosophical reason cannot recognize the attribution of feeling to God (166-7). Thus the teaching about God's care, which is indispensable to the moral effort of most everyone, reaches people through sacred Writ. Yet, according to Spinoza, the Bible's view of Providence is not definite. He claims that the Bible does not teach "formally" in what way precisely God cares for all those who worship him and practice good works (93). Scripture allows for both a popular idea of God's relation to humanity and a purely rational idea (163). God may be taken as the exemplar of good life because he has a just disposition (popular conception), or �CORNELL 13 because we see by means of God what is true and just (philosophical conception). God may direct human affairs by giving commandments or by letting some men discover natural laws as "eternal truths" (168, cf. 56). Now if knowledge of the way God directs the world is not the specialty of the prophets, is not the distinctive knowledge for which we can rely on them, then what is their claim to superior vision? Spinoza's answer-which he has presupposed throughout his discussion-is given in Chapter 15. The essential prophetic insight is this, that those without understanding may be saved-the salvation of the ignorant. Scripture not only teaches true virtue and obedience to all human beings, whether they are philosophers or not, but it also teaches that everyone may be saved. People without any genuine understanding, indeed people with mistaken ideas (say, about how Providence really works), if they practice charity and justice, can achieve blessedness. Now the reader of the Treatise must be aware that in Chapter 4 Spinoza defines "blessedness" as the knowledge of God. Our true salvation, our "supreme good" is philosophical knowledge, of which God is the totality (51-2). So serious is Spinoza about the philosopher's blessedness, that at one point he identifies the Holy Spirit itself as the rational spirit of truth, regardless even of how the prophets and historians of the Scriptures expressed or experienced it (95). But in Chapter 15, he redefines the Holy Spirit in a way that takes it to be clearly accessible to all, not just to philosophers or the God-filled prophets. Here he calls the Holy Spirit the peace of mind resulting from "good actions" (177). On this view everyone, even people with no learning at all, may be "saved." From page one of the Treatise Spinoza has assumed an uncompromising philosophical standpoint in looking at the Bible. Wisdom for him is the gold standard of "salvation." In Chapter 15 he presents almost as a philosophical curiosity the idea that people without wisdom can be "saved." But this curiosity happens to constitute the distinguishing feature of �14 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW biblical revelation (175-77). And such a feature of revelation must affect, in particular, Spinoza's account of Christianity, as Christianity is a teaching addressed to all humankind. Now if we turn back to Chapter 1, and to that one point on which (as I said earlier) Christ's knowledge surpassed ordinary philosophy, I believe we shall see how Spinoza implicated Christ in this business of the salvation of the ignorant: A man who can perceive by pure intuition that which is not contained in the basic principles of our cognition and cannot be deduced therefrom must needs possess a mind whose excellence far surpasses the human mind. Therefore I do not believe that anyone has attained such a degree of perfection surpassing all others, except Christ. To him God's ordinances leading men to salvation were revealed, not by words or by visions, but directly (14) Now the attribution to Christ of an intuition of what is not encompassed by human cognition surely makes Christ superhuman. So one might have thought. But there is a verbal subtlety here, which the English translations obscure. Spinoza's text does not use the term "human" as a positive description of "mind," except in this passage. Instead, it plainly states early on that "mind," meaning the thinker's experience of certitude, is divine (1 0). Hence saying that Christ has a mind "far surpass[ing] the human mind" does not place Christ above philosophers. In fact, when Spinoza first uses this expression, "far surpassing" (Ionge excellentiore),14 it is to say that all mental intuition surpasses by far our grasp of words (10). The only superiority Spinoza grants to Christ is one of degree-as this translation has it, he "attained such a degree of perfection." Spinoza goes on to specify that Christ received by direct intuition "the ordinances leading men to salvation" (14 ). This is a valuable clue to Christ's particular excellence, but the reader cannot appreciate it until he or she reads later, �CORNELL 15 in Chapter 15, that the one biblical idea above philosophy is the salvation of people who are ignorant but righteous (174). Retrospectively the implication is clear. Christ's "higher" intuition, formerly unknown to philosophy, was the insight that confirmed and expanded the prophets' teaching (cf. 224). Christ saw that all ignorant but righteous people in the world could be saved.15 The reader who discerns Spinoza's hypothesis about Christ must apply it to a rereading of the Treatise in order to realize its full implication. Spinoza claims Jesus for philosophy because he sees him as universalizing the Hebraic mission of saving the unlearned (79). He sees him as recasting biblical beliefs so that they apply to every soul independently of political context-inspiring in all people a faithful way of life that resembles the conduct of the wise (161). Spinoza hints in chapters 4, 5 and 11 that Jesus' popular teaching was a philosophical contrivance (55, 67-8, 146), and in chapter 13 that such a contrivance was not in fact unknown to the prophets (158, 169). Then in chapter 14 he derives by rational deductions a popular religion-including the indispensable but non-philosophical precepts about God's love and forgiveness-a religion that happens to correspond to the Gospel. In this religion, he says, a believer whose heart is inspired by the love of God "knows Christ according to the spirit" (167). The faithful person can "know" Christ without actually participating (like the philosopher) in Christ's knowledge. Spinoza's points all add up. Jesus reasoned out a general, interior gospel on the conviction that the ignorant could be saved. He taught what all people should do and believe in order to experience an inward blessedness like that of the philosopher (177)16. A tentative sketch of the founder of Christianity as Spinoza saw him begins to come into focus. While both the Hebrew prophets and the philosophers of late antiquity had glimpsed the possibility of improving human accord and thus the fortunes of wisdom in the world, pagan polytheism had �16 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW presented a general obstacle. For it inspired only a shallow piety in the multitude and never commanded the social virtues. But a sage like Jesus, arising amidst the people of the one righteous Lord, might abstract the great moral lessons of the prophets and broadcast them in order to pursue several great objectives (94, 224). First, to try to preserve the spirit of Israel, as Israel would find herself dispersed increasingly through the Roman Empire. Second, to expose the Empire as a mere secular authority despite its cult of divine emperors. And third, to awaken in the Gentile world a desire for spiritual blessings and a collective life more compatible with reason. The heart of the new program was the simplified creed that taught the salvation of all people. But if this general salvation was opaque to most philosophers, Spinoza saw far enough into the Gospel to recommend it from a powerfully practical viewpoint (17 6). For, properly understood, the Gospel would help foster the conditions of enlightenment, both for philosophers and for the multitudes, in this world, in generations to come.17 The difficulty for us in grasping Spinoza's account of Christianity lies not just in conceiving a Jesus with a rational program for humanity. The difficulty also lies in imagining Spinoza's approach to the New Testament. Unlike most of us, he was learned in all the great Jewish literature. He did not begin with the assumption that the Gentile Christian theologians knew best how to read Gospels and Epistles that were written by Jews in a Hebraic style (90, 100). Himself in possession of older and subtler practices of interpretation, he viewed later Christian theology as translating the Bible's extravagant poetry into dogmatic absurdities (16-21, 89). When Spinoza conceived Jesus as a sage who taught a popular salvation, he by no means thought he flouted the account of Jesus in the Gospel. Here is where a closer look at the theme of resurrection may be illuminating. A philosophical inquiry into Christianity can hardly ignore its central miracle, though, as I mentioned, the Treatise does just that.18 Yet in a �CORNELL 17 private letter we find Spinoza's view that the Resurrection is not an actual physical event, but rather a powerful idea suited to the general imagination. For him the "true" resurrection is salvation through philosophy, which is the topic of his book, the Ethics. So our next step is to become acquainted with his thinking about resurrection in these other texts. Then we can test the adequacy of that thinking by trying to read the Gospel from Spinoza's standpoint, seeing if the Gospel treats the theme of resurrection at all compatibly with his theories. The second half of this essay will therefore take up two questions. What is salvation through philosophy for Spinoza such that the believer's faith in the Resurrection could stand in for it? Can we find in the Gospel Spinoza's Christ, a philosopher who preaches the Resurrection as the means of saving the unlearned? Let us try to be open to Spinoza's boldest thoughts. Philosophical and Popular Salvation in Spinoza We saw in the Treatise that, to explain divine Providence, Spinoza distinguished a popular idea from a philosophical one. The popular mind imagines God caring for people like an attentive, invisible parent. Spinoza's Ethics spells out that this conception is a reflex of the believer's emotional needs. These may evolve into the desire to find special favor with God, to search out the divine will so as to be on the winning side. Philosophy, the Ethics explains, has a more sublime conception - an adequate idea of God. From experiences like that of intuitive certainty in mathematics,19 it envisions the divine intellect as working by necessity. God who lacks nothing desires nothing. He predetermines things without willing or aiming at them: to have purposes would betoken imperfection. Hence God does not make extrinsic objects. He expresses his infinite power into Nature-expresses it through his attributes, which are dynamic like verbs, rather than static properties like adjectives.20 God is ceaselessly entering into everything. Such is Spinoza's view, and the philosophical view �18 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW that he suspects lay behind the Hebrew scriptures (though they have come down to us in a corrupted condition).21 Spinoza denies to human sentiment the satisfactions that the God of tradition afforded, but he purports to give no small compensation. The adequate idea or the "intellectual love of God" sublimates the old feeling for divinity and raises it above deception. It needs no sanction outside itself. From blind obedience we turn to a dynamic vision of eternal truth, according to which everything moves by causal necessities-including human beings. Over against this cosmic necessity, the categories of the human moral world-praise and blame, merit and sin-appear as inadequate opinions with no power beyond our conventions (d. 49). In the universe at large the human moral perspective is a small affair, like the interests of the salamander or the fly. Philosophers in pursuit of self-understanding seek a connection with the larger Whole. They look suspiciously not upon the passions, as the moralists do, but upon the moralists' self-centered ideas about attaining the Good. Indeed the moralists' doctrine of free will is misleading. Free will describes only our ignorance of the causes that move us as we experience our own striving. Philosophers prefer to search out the unconscious causes of desire and envy. They would look upon passion without passion, and transform it into the higher pleasure of interpreting it. In the end, if their conduct surpasses the ethical standard of the city, it is because they are moved by reason's deepest necessities. Relieved of the illusory notion of the will, the philosopher is little aggravated by other people's "willfulness." Others' offenses, like everything in the world, have causes, the understanding of which robs them of their power to offend.22 What we take to be a nuisance or an evil, Spinoza says in the Ethics, arises from the fact that [we] conceive these things in a disturbed, mutilated, and confused manner: and on this account (the strong human being] �CORNELL 19 endeavors to conceive things as they are in themselves, and to remove obstacles from true knowledge.23 The so-called "problem of evil" is dispelled like vapor. It arose simply by mistaking God for a human mind and mistaking human minds for separate, free agents. The philosopher meditates on the general causes of things and declines to take the cosmos so personally. Spinoza admits the existence of freedom in one sense. Namely, freedom as the escape from ignorance that begins when one is disencumbered of the very notion of evil. A proposition in the Ethics states, "If men were born free, they would form no conception of good or evil as long as they were free." (4.48) But we are not born free, because instead of wisdom and judgment we acquire opinions about good and evil. We are conditioned and motivated by others' emotions; we are ingrained in the fear of death. We "fall" into mere nature-this is the mythical expression-we descend to an inferior psychic state where every pain and anxiety is designated an "evil." Spinoza is actually re-interpreting Genesis in a non-moral sense, as a note to this proposition spells out: Thus it is related that God prohibited free man from eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and that as soon as he ate of it, at once he began to fear death rather than to desire to live; again, when man found woman, who agreed most perfectly with his own nature, he knew that there could be nothing in nature more useful to him; but that afterwards, when he thought that the brute creation were similar to himself, he began at once to imitate their emotions and lost his freedom, which the Patriarchs under the guidance of the spirit of Christ, that is, the idea of God, afterwards recovered: on this idea alone it depends that man should be free, and that he should desire for other �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 20 men the good which he desires for himself. (cf. 5457)24 Spinoza is saying that latent in every human being is the adequate idea of God or (as he calls it here) the "spirit of Christ." Whatever our individual histories, the realization of that ideal of wisdom would be a release from fear and obsession, from passivity and the irrational imitation of others. What does this Spinozist liberation look like? Before proceeding to answer this question by further glossing Spinoza's Ethics, I should cite the crucial statement he makes in a letter about Christ's Resurrection. In a way it contains our answer. For Spinoza the Resurrection is an incontrovertibly profound symbol (cf. 83, 95). It describes for all minds the shift in a person's spiritual center of gravity from the self to the presence of God in the self. Remember: the special virtue of prophecy and religion is to teach everyone, which philosophy as philosophy fails to do. I ... conclude [Spinoza writes] that the resurrection of Christ from the dead was really spiritual, and was revealed only to the faithful in a way adapted to their thought, namely that Christ had been endowed with eternity and rose from the dead (here I understand the dead in the sense in which Christ did when he said, "Let the dead bury their dead"), and also by his life and death gave an example of extraordinary holiness, and that he raises his disciples from the dead, in so far as they follow the example of his life and death. And it would not be difficult to explain the whole teaching of the Gospel in accordance with this hypothesis. (emphasis added)25 Spinoza goes on to say (and with reason) that Paul's arguments in 1 Corinthians 15 agree with him that the Resurrection is spiritual.26 However Jesus' immediate disciples may have experienced his Resurrection, its spiritual �CORNELL 21 essence was his being "endowed with eternity." He rose from the dead in the sense of rising gloriously above the living death that people accept as human life, and the disciples truly rise from the dead when they follow Jesus' example.27 The "fact" of the Resurrection is the spiritual event effected by faith. Faith makes the faithful person active and able to fulfill a higher vocation in joy. Now to return to Spinoza's Ethics. It traces out a hereand-now "resurrection" on the plane of rational metaphysics. (Again I must reduce the argument to simple steps.) The idea of every person exists in God.28 Initially an individual has but an inkling of it. What one calls one's "self" is largely one's body's idea, one's ego we might say today, defined and affected by other people's egos,29 One's eternal essence remains impersonal and unrealized. But rational people derive from the adequate idea of God other adequate ideas about how the soul functions. They learn to transform the affects that are passions, incited in the social entanglement of inadequate ideas, into affects associated with the joy of self-understanding,30 Spinoza's is a philosophy of endeavor: the endeavor to be who one truly is, is the activity of God within.31 As individuals reinforce their true being with whatever outside them enhances it, they move by degrees toward intellection of their true natures-as if a special Providence were guiding them,32 Thus the self as an essence understood increases at the expense of the inadequate idea held by the empirical self. The individual's irreducible, original essence-at one time impersonal and unrealized-is gradually personalized and eternalized.33 In an early sketch of the Ethics, Spinoza called this arrival at self-knowledge a rebirth-echoing the Gospel of John.34 The rationally enlightened person is thus like the man born blind in that Gospel, who washes away the mud and begins to see. He can now say meaningfully, "It is 1." Or to be precise, he says, "I am," ego eimi Uohn 9:10, cf. 6:20). �22 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Resurrection as Philosophical Allegory in the Gospel of John Now let us turn to John's Gospel, to chapter 11 on the raising of Lazarus, to test the plausibility of Spinoza's conception of Christ and resurrection from the biblical side. Spinoza himself took Lazarus as a test case. According to Pierre Bayle, the French philosopher who lived in Rotterdam, Spinoza told his friends that "if he had been able to convince himself of the resurrection of Lazarus, he would have broken his system into pieces."35 Perhaps Spinoza was implying that the Gospel itself did not really try to convince him of a literal resuscitation of a dead man. For John's story of Lazarus is extremely odd and provokes a series of questions in the inquiring reader. Indeed, since the early Church Fathers the story of Lazarus has sometimes been taken as an allegory.36 For no one had found this Lazarus, the alleged friend of Jesus, in any other ancient source,37 John may well have invented him. Such invention is called midrash, the Jewish practice of elaborating tales on Biblical ideas. Spinoza assumes this practice in his general account of the Bible and recognizes the special role midrash had in generating the Gospels (21, 146-7).38 For him the Christian scriptures were characteristic products of the Hebrew genius,39 for which the notion of history never excluded fiction and poetic play. Each Gospel writer had pursued freely his own original method of teaching (147). Paul had not hesitated to lead the Christian movement, having fetched inspiration from the mere echo of Jesus' words. Spinoza's awareness of the evangelical imagination made him audacious about reinterpreting the New Testament texts; but this audacity comes out in reference to few specific passages.40 We cannot say exactly how he read John's text about Lazarus. Nor can we pretend to offer this text's "true" meaning on objective grounds. (As Spinoza knew, when it comes to the speculative reading of Scripture, there are no rigorous proofs.41) But we can develop a rough idea of how a philosopher might read this resurrection episode in John. We can try to "explain" the chapter on Lazarus as Spinoza �CORNELL 23 suggested in the letter I cited-according to the "hypothesis" that the whole Gospel takes resurrection to be a spiritual awakening rather than a literal event. Clearly John 11 teaches that resurrection follows from belief in Jesus (11:25). But reading it as a factual account of Jesus' power to revive a corpse does run into a paradox. For how would any factual proof of such power over nature be consistent with belief? Moreover, readers cannot come to believe in Jesus and the Resurrection the way the characters in the story do, for these latter are on the scene for the miracle. Perhaps we should first ask, what exactly is the miracle? The very premise of the story, the fact of Lazarus' physical death, is made ambiguous from the start. Jesus says Lazarus is not sick with the sickness one dies from.42 When Jesus later mentions Lazarus's "death," it is following a metaphorical speech about spiritual deadness. It is his disciples' dullness that takes the "death" of the living literally. Then, we note that Lazarus' sisters suggest that his "death" is a result of jesus not being there with him, the absence that the text dramatizes by having Jesus not go to Lazarus when he hears of his "illness" (11:6). The text becomes coherent if we posit (after Spinoza) that Lazarus's illness-not-unto-death is metaphysical, like the ailment we call the "human condition"-the universal affliction of the "absence of God."43 This illness would still be "for the glory of God," as Jesus says (11:4). Only the glory here would be the "awakening" that follows a person's experience of absolute loss and disillusionment. As Spinoza observed, death in the Bible is a metaphor for life lived in anxiety about all sorts of evils. Resurrection is the higher identity a person attains that overcomes this attitude (Mt 8:22, Jn 5 :25). This metaphorical reading agrees well with Psalm 82, which Jesus cites in John immediately before we hear about Lazarus. In fact, the Psalm teaches a view of Genesis something like Spinoza's. All humans are gods, children of the Most High, but all are living under the reign of mortality. �24 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW According to the psalm, the weak and needy go about in darkness, without knowledge, whereas those who should be enlightened have done little to help humankind. Is this the human situation that Jesus remedies, allegorically, in John 11? When Jesus proposes to go to Lazarus in Judaea, the disciples-most un-philosophically-declare their fear of death: they all might be killed with Jesus on the way. Jesus replies with a metaphor inspired by the psalm: they have to learn to walk in the night by the light within (11: 10; Ps. 82:5). He adds that Lazarus "sleeps," associating Lazarus with these disciples who are in the dark. Ironically, Jesus' hints are lost on the disciples who take his speech literally. For such as them, Lazarus' death and their visit to his tomb must be literal events. But if we understand Lazarus' "death" and "illness" to refer to one and the same condition, then the story takes place in a beautiful figurative sense. Jesus calls Lazarus by name out of the cave of the unconscious; he enjoins the crowd to unbind him, so that he can emerge as an individual.44 Note that not all of the disciples are left out of the language game surrounding Lazarus' uncertain "death." For Thomas the twin-the double man-responds with a double meaning of his own to Jesus' proposal to go to Judaea.45 He says "Let us go and die with him," obscuring whether he means literally to die with Jesus, or figuratively to die and be raised with Lazarus. So the chapter plays upon the ambiguity of what is literal and what is literature. Thus it unfolds on two planes simultaneously, addressing different readers in their different needs. Prominent among the needs of most readers is the need for a God (like Jesus ought to be) who does not leave human beings in the lurch. Notice, almost everyone in John's story complains about the evil of Jesus letting Lazarus die. Martha is the first. This wouldn't have happened, she says, if Jesus had been here. Mary follows suit: her accusation is the first thing out of her mouth. Finally the crowd chimes in with the complaint against Jesus-like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, �CORNELL 25 always a little late but nonetheless helpful in stating the theme. For the crowd fully generalizes the grievance against Jesus. They ask (with unintended irony), couldn't the man who opened the eyes of the blind have kept poor Lazarus from dying? Spinoza would detect in that complaint all the anxiety that people have named the problem of evil (1-2). Why did God let such and such tragedy happen? Martha, in her grief, hints at the possibility of a miracle. The Resurrection on the Last Day, she implies, is not doing much for her or her brother now! So Jesus tells her (ambiguously), I am the Resurrection and the Life who does indeed "work" right now. People need assurance of God's willing compensations for the felt evils of the world. And Jesus gives them what they ask. How the "miracle" of raising the dead works-how Jesus helps people overcome their passive devastation by the world-seems to be indicated in a curious passage. Martha goes to Mary to say the Master calls her, and Mary immediately "rises." But as far as the reader knows, Jesus may or may not have called her as Martha claims. On the textual facts alone, Mary's getting up is an effect of pure faith that she is personally called. Is this not the faith that Spinoza says lifts people out of their misery? Twice it is said that Mary "rises"-once using the same Greek word as is used for Lazarus' rising (anistemi: 11:23). The second time the crowd watches her rise up-an even plainer adumbration of the Lazarus "miracle." This superfluous vignette is not so superfluous if we see it as a genuine miniature of the Lazarus drama-a play within the play, reflecting the very power of belief that the larger story calls upon. In other words, the text is self-conscious. It points to its own concern to move people in their secret depths (11 :28) in accord with their idea of a personal God. Yet this is not the only moment when John's text affords us a higher perspective on his miracle play of Lazarus. As the people remove the stone from Lazarus' tomb, and Jesus is �26 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW about to call him forth, he makes a not too subtle aside. "Father, I thank you, that you have heard me. And I know that you always hear me, but because of the crowd (ton ochlon) who are standing by I said this, that they may believe that you sent me." Here Jesus is certainly not addressing the crowd, and not the Father who always hears and hardly needs to be addressed aloud. There must be another, self-selecting audience for these remarks. Jesus distinguishes between his speaking for the crowd, for the sake of their belief, and his speaking more frankly what he knows. Implicitly, he distinguishes between the apparent "miracle," and the eternal presence of God, the fully "awakened" state to which he calls Lazarus. But the crowd hears Jesus' prayer as expressing gratitude for filling their need. They need, he says, to believe that God sent him-sent him (no doubt} to display God's care in a more dramatic way.46 The evangelist has made Jesus rupture the realistic surface of the very story he is in, and indicate to the attentive reader that the miraculous fiction itself follows from his charitable mission to teach everyone. In sum, a reader might see in the story of the resurrection of Lazarus a spiritual allegory and-more than that-a tale of the sage instructing appropriately both the learned and the unlearned in the faith that will elevate them. If one is willing to run the risk of reading the Gospel philosophically, one may find it surprisingly consistent with Spinoza's hypothesis, that Jesus was a wise man who, in making wisdom accessible to all, was obliged to make it speak in widely different ways. Summary: Spinoza and Christianity Spinoza's account of Christianity resulted from the extraordinary combination of his Jewish learning, his passion for philosophy, and the historical crisis to which he responded. Following the civil wars and religious violence of the 16th and 17th centuries, it was apparent that Christianity in the West was in jeopardy as a civilizing force. The aftermath of the Reformation raised a fundamental question about the relation �CORNELL 27 of traditional theology to the political order. Spinoza's answer was officially to excise truth from the religious sphere-to destroy the zeal for mere "true belief," the varieties of which were tearing European states apart-but to preserve for humanity the Bible's teachings of justice and charity. This emphasis on the Bible's moral teachings, however, did not prevent him from asking why these teachings agreed with the truths of pure reason, or what pure thinking was behind biblical texts. In this Spinoza made the learned assumption that biblical language, like much poetry, contained a surrogate knowledge (21,53,95). A philosophical mind (expressing God's self-activity} might liberate from the parables and fictions of Scripture their deeper truths.47 Given this philosophic stance toward the Bible, and the dogmatic conflicts of Christianity in Spinoza's day, the paradox of the Theological Political Treatise follows. The Treatise officially separates religion from philosophy, and insists that the Bible does not teach speculative reasoning. 48 But at the same time the Treatise indicates a passage from biblical faith to wisdom. As the Scriptures occasionally associated their own teaching with wisdom, Spinoza had only to associate wisdom in turn with the Scriptures. The result was his use of a pious vocabulary to describe the philosopher's inner life, his express reverence for Solomon and Jesus the sage, and his doctrine of the salvation of the unlearned, behind which lay the idea that belief in resurrection approximated the philosopher's identification with divine mind. To readers today, these ambiguities of Spinoza are puzzling in the extreme. But by such ambiguities he left open for future philosophers the path he had traveled in his own thinking. He left open the possibility of overstepping religion with the implicit sanction of religion itself, of moving from faith to philosophy without rancor or guilt.49 The siren call of philosophy makes modern intellectual adherents of the Bible anxious. If they remain faithful to their �28 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW religion, it is often by flirting with nihilism or skepticism at the same time. Since Pascal they have argued that our choices are either to subjugate the intellect to the mystery of revelation or to wander aimlessly in a futile search after meaning (cf. 171-2). They hardly dream that the Bible itself might "save" anyone by confirming one in the life of reason. But Spinoza looked at the Bible differently. He suspected that some of its authors had faced the problems of despair and of disappointment in divine Providence (78, 222), and had wrestled with the problems of existence no less bravely than the classical schools of wisdom (5). Such biblical authors simply expressed their spiritual discoveries in inspiring and philanthropic ways. As for Jesus, he was the "consummate philosopher" because he not only knew in himself the way to blessedness, the "natural light" that the philosophers would always follow (cf. John 11:10), but also found a general path for all those who could not travel the philosophers' dangerous road. If the learned grasped the Bible's intentions, Spinoza thought, they would see that the salvation of the ignorant was in fact their own salvation, too. For the learned would no longer be lost in scholastic quarrels arising from a confusion of the Bible's pedagogy with metaphysical theory, and in compensation they would find new "meaning" both in the literary depth of the scriptural text and in the humane guidance of others. The political order was therefore not doomed. The ethics of happiness might be acquired by the multitudes and, over generations, the number of those coming to wisdom might increase. It all depended on whether wisdom presented itself wisely. It depended on the solicitude of the learned toward the learners.so Near the end of John's Gospel is an episode with Thomas the Twin, who challenges the disciples' story that the Risen Jesus came and spoke to them. He is struck in their account by Jesus' showing them his hands and his side, as if this selfdisplay carried some special meaning. Only if Thomas sees and touches these wounds, he tells his friends, will he believe. �CORNELL 29 Days later, the group (along with Thomas) is visited again in its sealed rooms. Jesus specifically addresses the skeptical disciple and invites him to touch his wounds. The text indicates no such move on Thomas' part. It thus underscores what Jesus says next, that Thomas believes because he has seen him, using the word horao-"to see"-which in John's text includes the divine act of knowing.51 Jesus adds, Thomas should recognize that others too are blessed, though they believe without "seeing."52 Now a philosophical reader, understanding "seeing" as a metaphor for knowing, may detect in Jesus' remarks about blessed belief the Spinozist idea of the salvation of those without knowledge. Such a reader might therefore entertain the ironic possibility that Jesus' rebuke of philosophy conceals some philosophy, and that what Thomas beheld with the eye of knowledge, apart from his friends, is the essential question implied in the story. Did Thomas know Jesus as the one who scorned every apparent evil and thus overcame the world? Or, to express it in the text's figurative language, did Thomas know Jesus as the one who through his very wounds attained his eternal identity? The story quietly approves some such conjecture. Yet it does not, as a story, offer certitude. Hence the Spinozist reader receives the same cautionary lesson as Thomas. He must respect the belief of believers in the literal Resurrection, as the way in which God has made manifest to them their tie with eternity.53 Acknowledgement: The author expresses his gratitude to many generous colleagues who gave valuable advice in the development of this essay: Karina Gill, Ned Walpin, Brendan Laselle, David Bolotin, Linda Wiener, Daryl Koehn, Barry Goldfarb, David Levine, Michael Golluber, Tucker Landy, Janet Dougherty, & Caleb Thompson. �30 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Notes 1 Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, translated as The Way to Wisdom by Herman De Dijn (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1996), pp. 21-25, and 115 on experientia vaga; and Ethics 2, P 40, Note 2. All Ethics citations are from the A. Boyle translation of Spinoza's Ethics and De Intellectus Emendatione, with an introduction by T. S. Gregory (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1959). 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990), p. 112. 3 Some examples of the New Testament scholars' true belief in "critical progress" and their innocence of philosophy may be found in Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research, Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans, ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), e.g. pp. 253, 270. As examples of scholars who have popularized their work, yet have vague misgivings about it, see John Dominic Crossan imagining himself having to account to Jesus for his research, in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper, 1994), p. xiv; and Marcus Borg, jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991) who feels he must "recover the vision of Jesus" for the sake of "church and culture" (p. 17), but can only serve up some lame cliches about "spirit." 4 Karl Jaspers raised similar concerns half a century ago. See his debate with Rudolf Bultmann in Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion without Myth (New York: Noonday Press, 1958), pp. 51-53. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Samuel Shirley trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998). These and all page references in the text refer to this edition (and differ in other printings). 5 6 Cf. Roy Hoover, "A Contest between Orthodoxy arid Veracity," in Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000), pp. 124-146. 7 Die Leibniz-Handschriften der Koniglichen offentlichen Bibliothek zu Hannover, ed. Eduard Bodemann, (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1966), �CORNELL 31 p. 103. The authenticity of Leibniz' note recording Spinoza's conversation is little contested today. See Xavier Tilliette, Le Christ de Ia Philosophie (Paris: Cerf, 1990), p. 72. See also Richard Mason, The God of Spinoza: a philosophical study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 212; Richard Popkin, "Spinoza and Biblical Scholarship" in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 401; Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 236, n. 4. Granted, contemporary biblical scholarship recognizes that Jesus is steeped in the Jewish wisdom tradition. See, for example, Frances Taylor Gench, Wisdom in the Christology of Matthew (New York: University Press of America, 1997), and Ben Witherington III, Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994). But it is the very rare scholar who gives us any profound idea, comparable to Spinoza's, of what Jesus' wisdom was about. See Jean Grosjean, Ironie Christique (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); Albert Nolan, Jesus before Christianity (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1992); and Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (New York: Knopf, 2001). 8 See also Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in The Correspondence of Spinoza, A. Wolf trans. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), p. 349, where Spinoza refers to the style of expression typical of oriental languages. See Letter 21, to Bylenbergh, Ibid., p, 179-80. "I take care not to impute to [Scripture] certain childish and absurd views; and this no one can do better unless he understands Philosophy well, or has Divine revelations." 9 10 See John F. Cornell, ''A Parable of Scandal: Speculations about the Wheat and Tares in Matthew 13," in Contagion, 1998, 5: 98117. Under the influence of Spinoza's suggestion about Matthew 13, Alexandre Mather on draws similar conclusions about the deeper layers of this Gospel text. See Alexandre Matheron, Christ et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza (Paris: Editions Aubier, 1971), pp. 132-134. 11 Pace Sylvain Zac, Spinoza et ['interpretation de l'ecriture (Paris: P.U.F., 1965), p. 199. �32 12 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW See also Spinoza, Ethics, 3 P 30; IV P 35-37, 46. 13 "Atque hoc eadem etiam modo Apostoli ex rebus, qual viderant, quasque audiverant, & quas denique ex revelatione habuerant, multa concludere, & elicere, eaque homines, si libitum iis esset, docere poterant." Spinoza, Opera, Gebhardt edition (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitatsbuchhandlung, 1972), III, p. 156. Compare "natura nobis dictat, non quidem verbis, sed modo Ionge excellentiore" (Gebhardt, III, p. 16) and "ejus mens praestantior necessaria, atque humana longa excellentior esse deberet" (p. 21). 14 15 Cf. Matheron, Christ et le salut, pp. 144-145. 16 Johan Colerus left us some interesting biographical details bearing on Spinoza and Christianity, as cited in the introduction to the Dover edition of Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise & A Political Treatise, R. H. M. Elwes, trans. (New York: Dover Publications, 1951). According to Colerus, Spinoza once assured his Christian landlady that her religion was a good one and that she could be "saved" in it, so long as she lived a pious and peaceable life (p. xix). See also the end of Letter 75 to Oldenburg (touching on the Gospel of John), in The Correspondence of Spinoza, A. Wolf trans. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), p. 350, and Letter 43 to Jacob Ostens, p. 259, on the salvation of the ignorant among nonChristian nations through the "spirit of Christ." Spinoza's private comportment is perfectly consistent with holding an idea of Christ the philosopher who represents wisdom and makes salvation open to all people whether they get that wisdom explicitly or implicitly. The idea that Spinoza was too fearful to speak his mind tactfully among his friends matches little in the philosopher's character. His indifference to giving his thinking the color of orthodoxy among them can be seen at the end of Letter 73 (21) to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, p. 344. 17 Cf. Matheron, Christ et le salut, pp. 54-70, 77-84, 276. The Treatise suggests, in chapter 16 (directly following the chapter on the salvation of the unlearned), that a genuine political problem, opaque from the standpoint of pure philosophy, is mitigated thanks to the prophetic mission to all ordinary people. For according to chapter 16, as less rational people enter into the social contract, �CORNELL 33 they compromise their "sovereign right" or "self-interest" (to remain irrational) far more than rational people. (180) Thus Spinoza delicately raises the question of how the prophets' teaching, promising "salvation" to people who strive for moral goodness without wisdom, helps them endure the harm they may suffer by nature under the constraints of civilized life. 18 Spinoza could not but take an interest in the subject of the soul's fate. Steven Nadler, in Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) argues that what drove the Synagogue to pronounce its ban against the young philosopher was his adamant denial of personal immortality. 19 Ethics 1, Appendix, p. 32. Spinoza makes an exception for the great non-mathematical sages of history. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1992). 20 21 Letter 73 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, p. 343. 22 Ethics, 5 P 5 - P 10. 23 Ibid., 4 P 73 Note. Ibid., 4 P 68 Note. Again, independently of Spinoza but perfectly in accord with his doctrines, I have argued that Matthew 18 teaches salvation from our "fall" into the world's scandal, and teaches it at two significant levels, one philosophic and one popular. See ''Anatomy of Scandal: Self-Dismemberment in the Gospel of Matthew and in Gogol's 'The Nose'," in Literature and Theology, 16 (2002), pp. 270-290. 24 25 Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, pp. 348-349. 26 Spinoza's reading of 1 Corinthians 15 is entirely sound. One cannot make good sense of this curious argument of Paul-"For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins." (15: 16-17)-on the notion that the Resurrection is a past, historic event. The apparent consequence of Christ's non-Resurrection, futile faith, is really the reason for the non-Resurrection! Faith has to bring about Christ's Resurrection in the faithful. �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 34 27 Spinoza avoids deciding whether the disciples all understood the Resurrection in the same way. Both in the Treatise and in his earlier response to Oldenburg (Correspondence, p. 344) Spinoza leaves open what parts of Jesus' knowledge his disciples received. According to Oldenburg's more literal reading of the Gospels, Spinoza recognizes (or "does not deny") that that the texts show the disciples receiving an apparition of the Resurrected Jesus and believing in it. In this way God accomodated to them the revelation of his mind (p. 348). Perhaps his remark near the end of the letter applies here: Spinoza holds that Paul and John know and teach spiritual meanings, albeit in a Hebraic way (p. 349). All this is relevant to the reading we propose of John 11, where the disciples do not all have the same depth of insight. 28 Ethics, 2 P 11-12, 45, and 5 P 22, P 30. 29 Ibid., 2 P 13. 30 Ibid., 4 Preface, P 15; 5 P 6. Cf. Ethics, 3 P 6, and "Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being," (chapter 5) in The Collected works of Spinoza, ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 54, 84. 31 32 Ethics, 4 P 18 Note, P 19-20, 30-35. Ibid., 5 P 20, Note, P 21-22. Regarding the distinction between personal immortality and eternity in Spinoza, see Genevieve Lloyd, Spinoza and the Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 114-117. 33 "Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being," pp. 138-140 (Chapter 22). Spinoza also develops there the distinction between human beings moved merely by their animal spirits and those reborn in spiritual knowledge, following John's Gospel and 1 Corinthians 2-3. From the discussion of the soul's re-awakening in divine union, Chapter 23 follows on the subject of its "immortality." 34 Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (Selections), Richard Popkin trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1991), p. 320. 35 �CORNELL 35 Evangile de Jean, traduit et commente par Jean-Yves Leloup (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), p. 281. It is worthy of note that the Fathers of the Church understood the political implications of allegorical reading of the Gospel, given that spiritual knowledge could not be attained by most believers. See Jean-Yves Leloup, Introduction aux 'vrais philosophes' (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), pp. 61-2. In any case, Spinoza's philosopher Christ can be loosely traced back to the early Fathers, probably by way of Erasmus, whose philosophia Christi could not have been unknown to him. Spinoza even includes Erasmus in one of the dialogues contained in his "Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being." (See note 31, above.) I say "loosely traced to the early Fathers" because the idea of "philosophy" that is applied to Jesus undergoes significant mutation from the Fathers, to Erasmus, to Spinoza; and these writers base their conceptions independently upon the New Testament. See Anne-Marie Malingrey, Etude semantique des mots de Ia famille de 'philosophia' dans Ia litterature grecque chretienne des quatre premiers siecles, 2 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1961). 36 I; 37 Add to this the fact that the ancient Gospel of Thomas (to which John's Gospel is closest in point of view) assumes that resurrection is an interior event, already accomplished by some disciples. See The Gospel of Thomas, Marvin Meyer trans. (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), and Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium, The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrections (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996) p. 188. In contemporary scholarship, see Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 81-83, and especially pp. 105-109 regarding John's "reality effects." Also see Bernard Dubourg, La Fabrication du Nouveau Testament, v. II: ];Invention de jesus (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Dubourg details the cabbalistic mechanisms that could generate Christian ideas from the language of the ancient Hebrew scriptures. 38 E.g. Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, p. 349. Incidentally, Dubourg (see previous note) makes the strongest argument, and joins a growing scholarly consensus today, that the New Testament exhibits the same literary craft (or craftiness) as the Hebrew Scriptures, only differently employed. 39 �36 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW In certain passages of the Treatise (35 ,67) its author suggests that he has figured out more than he will say. He prefers to encourage the experienced reader to re-examine the Bible with Spinoza's ideas in mind. 40 41 Letter 21 to Bylenbergh, in Correspondence, p. 172, and cf. Treatise, p. 105. Kierkegaard founds his text Sickness unto Death on the Lazarus miracle, skillfully inverting the meaning in John's text, which says that that sickness is not Lazarus'! Nonetheless, Kierkegaard's psychological teaching exhibits some striking parallels with Spinoza's teaching about overcoming anxiety and becoming oneself. "It is Christian heroism-a rarity, to be sure-to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being, alone before God" See S0ren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, Howard and Edna Hong translation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 5. 42 43 Another parallel of Spinoza's thinking with our interpretation of Lazarus: the subtitle given (by another hand) to Spinoza's "Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being" (an early sketch of his Ethics) mentions the text's purpose to cure those who are sick of mind. Daryl Koehn pointed out to me why it follows that the crowd is told to unbind Lazarus. 44 Ancient gnostic texts even suggest that Thomas is the spiritual "twin" of Jesus. See Robert M. Grant, The Secret Sayings of Jesus: The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1960), p. 65. 45 A related example of the pedagogy of the Bible occurring on two levels: Spinoza refers to instances of biblical texts that both give a poetic description of some supernatural occurrence (like "being sent" by God) and then redescribe the same occurrence in natural terms. (Treatise, pp. 19, 80) 46 47 See Spinoza, Emendation, (1st part regarding fictions and feigning) especially pp. 103-105. Also Ethics 3 P 11-13, 28-30, 4 P 1 Note, and 5 P 10 Note, P 11-14, 20. For discussion of how �CORNELL 37 Spinozist reason collaborates with the power of the imagination, see Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 217- 250. Cf. Letter 21 to Blyenbergh, in Correspondence, p. 180. Remember: Socrates could not teach wisdom to Meno or to anyone else. 48 Concerning the avoidance of scandal by the wise, cf. e.g. Romans 14:13-23, 1 Corinthians 8. 49 50 See Spinoza, Emendation, p. 27 (paragraphs 14 and 17). 51 A complete list might begin with John 1:18, 3:3, 3:11, 3:36, 6:46, and 8:38. 52 The Greek tenses at John 20:29 indicate that what divides Thomas from other disciples is not Thomas' historical opportunity to converse with the resurrected Christ. 53 Again see Letter 75, p. 348. �38 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW �39 1- What Tree Is This? In Praise of Europe's Renaissance Printers, Publishers And Philologists Chaninah Maschler Prefatory Note The aim of this essay is to praise certain lovers and makers of books-the printers and publishers and philologists of early modern Europe. That these men deserve to be remembered, that we owe them a huge debt, though not because they authored great books, I found out only because I stuck it out with the perhaps "idiot" question, What tree is this? which initially I asked about the tree that is pictured on the title page of Galileo's last great work, the Discourses on Two New Sciences. Three publishing dynasties-Elzevier, Etienne, Plantinare spoken of in the course of the first portion of the essay. At the essay's midway mark Pico della Mirandola enters the story. My discovery that Pico had a hand in diverting a scholarly friend of his, Aldo Manuzzio, from the life of pure scholarship to a publisher's life made the inclusion of Pico in my narrative plausible. A brief (largely borrowed) account of Aldo's life and work led me to a short narrative about Erasmus's work as a Bible scholar. Inclusion of Erasmus was due not only to my believing that it is with justice that Erasmus is given a place among the great re-educators of Chaninah Maschler is tutor emerita of St. John's College. This lecture was delivered at Annapolis on January 18, 2002. The lucidity of the illustrations for this lecture is due to the care and expertise of Cara Sabolcik and Tom Crouse. The Editor regrets omission of the following thank-you note from the book review of Eva Brann's The Ways of Naysaying in volume 46, number 2: "Conversation with my friends Rob Crutchfield and Priscilla Shaw substantially contributed to the writing of this review." �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 40 Europe, but also because-enigmatic though he be-he shows, in how he comments on the imprints of two of the publishing houses who served him and whom he served, that he was as aware as Bacon of the long run differences that print might make to our lives. I hope that when this year's crop of St. John's seniors drinks a toast to the American Republic, to the Republic of Letters, and to Plato's Republic, they'll call to mind that the men commemorated in the present lecture helped make our citizenship in these republics possible. ,~ [Before the art of book printing was known], the manuscripts of any single book were few in number, and to obtain the entire literature of any one science involved considerable difficulty, expense, and travelling, which only the rich could afford. It was easy for the dominant party to effect the disappearance of books that shocked its prejudices and unmasked its impostures .... Besides, only works recommended by the names of their authors were copied. All the research that could acquire importance only if allied to other research, all the isolated observations and detailed advances that serve to maintain the sciences ... and to prepare a way for further progress, all the materials amassed by time and awaiting genius, remained condemned to eternal obscurity. The conversation of scholars and the unification of their labours ... did not exist. Each man had to begin and to end a discovery himself and was obliged to fight alone against all the obstacles that nature puts in the way of our efforts .... [Contrariwise, once printing was on the scene], many copies of a book would be in circulation at the same time, information about facts and discoveries reached a wider public and also �MASCHLER 41 reached it more promptly.... Any new mistake was subject to criticism as soon as it was made.1 Condorcet, whose words in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind I quoted just now, is selectively expatiating on a passage in Bacon's New Organon (Aphorism 129), where Bacon, intending, he says, to "quicken the industry and kindle the zeal" of men of scientific talent, had claimed that the world-historical efficacy of such instruments as the directional compass, gun powder, and moveable type has been far greater than the virtu of any political or even religious leader, so that it is only right that inventors be given divine honors, while political founders and legislators are honored as mere heroes. That the voyages of discovery (thus the finding of a "new world" beyond the Mediterranean) were "made possible" by the directional compass, and that the ways of waging war (against, for instance, the natives of this recently discovered new world) were drastically altered by the use of guns-of this I was, in a dim and general sort of way, aware. But not until fairly recently did it occur to me that the way the world looks to human beings and even, perhaps, the way it is may have been transformed by printing. (Take my words as paraphrase of Bacon's "[These inventions] have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world" Aph. 129). And it was really more or less by accident that I became curious about the individuals who practiced the art of printing, I mean the businessmen, artisans, and scholars who constituted the publishing industry. As yet I know a little about just a few. They are: the the the the the Italian Aldo Manuzzio Swiss Johann Fro ben, Frenchman Henri Estienne Belgian Christopher Plantin Dutchman Louis Elzevier �- ------- --- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 42 I learned these names because I made a mistake about a certain picture that had provoked my curiosity. Here it is: fig. 1 DISCORSl E DIMOSTRAZIONI MATE MATICH E, intorno J d11e nuout fcien~e Attcnenti aUa MEC:ANICA & i MoviMENTI LocALI; tk/SjziiiiT GALILEO GALILEI LINCEO, Filofofo e .Matematico prima rio del Sereniffimo Grand Duca di T ofcana. 0•111UAfpnuliutkleelllr~~ JjgrAMit.tl"Jc~~t~iSIIiJi. IN LEIDA, Apprcll"o gli Ellevirii. x. n. c. xnvW'. The picture you're looking at comes one's way at St. John's College when, in the junior year, Galileo's Discourses on Two New Sciences are begun. Perhaps, like me, you overlooked the bottom line identifying printer and publication date and erroneously assumed that this emblem was inserted at Galileo's instance, either because your psychological "set" was to treat the author as "figure," the printer-publisher as negligible "background"; or, conceivably, because the cover of the Dover paperback version looks like this: �43 MASCHLER fig. 2 dialogues concerning TWO NEW SCIENCES TRANSLATED llY HENRY CREW AND ALFONSO DE SALV!O WITH AN !NTRODUCTIQN llY ANTONIO FAVARO fig. 3 L £ 11 CEUVRES Mathematiques DE SIMON ~TEVIN'ci<Brugcs. OufontuuctCcslco MEMOIRES MATH.IlMATIQV·BS, Efq,udltsldt:u.erdleTra-lu.ut&:Trc..Jllalbd'rincc M&UI.ICI dcNu;~~~'::.~~::-._ lAI'IfllmJIIIoAWizi,(ro.g.-J P• ALBEJlT ~IRAilD.samidou,~ A LEYDE CllorDon,vcnrllre&:Abr.lum~,lmpdlacllnord!n&lre. dci'Univerlir(, AIUI!il cl~b-o.IDIT. ~ �44 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Seeing the Stevin title page (figure 3)-with the same man, tree and motto-may, without your hearing anything further, have the immediate effect of your correcting your previous error and shifting to the idea that the emblem is the printer-publisher's rather than author's "hall mark." (Goldand silversmiths or pewter ware manufacturers were required to identify themselves on their products. Printers too were so obliged by law. By the way, the craftsmen who made the printing fonts had to be highly skilled workers in metal.) But this third picture did not come my way until long after I'd become curious about the title page of Galileo's Discourses on Two New Sciences. Since that page is obviously carefully designed-just look at the message conveyed by the relative sizes of the letters!-it was not unreasonable to imagine that the title page entire, including the picture that intrigued me, was some sort of commentary on the message of the book that it was introducing . Now when I first encountered Galileo, I had spent some years as teacher of the history of philosophy at a conventional college. Therefore my head held such facts as the following: Descartes's Meditations are spread out over six days, that is, a week sans Sabbath. His Discourse too seems to be mimicking the Divine rhythm of creation by being laid out in six parts. In his Letter to the Translator which precedes the French edition of the Principles, Descartes compares philosophy to a tree.2 Bacon's Great Instauration (renewal) too was intended to have six parts, and his College of Bensalem is called the College of Six Days. The Latin name of Bacon's "Preparation for Natural and Experimental History" is parasceve, which is, in New Testament Greek, a stand-in for the Hebrew erev shabbath (Sabbath eve). So, since I'd been taught to rank Galileo with Bacon and Descartes as fellow-founders of "modernity," men whose teaching sought to undermine the medieval heritage, it was just about inevitable that I should take the tree on the Discorsi title page to be the tree that stood in our first parents' garden, the twisting item a snake, �MASCHLER 45 the man a wise man such as Galileo, filosofo e matematicohere caught in the act of plucking a fruit from the forbidden tree, this fruit being, perhaps, one of the two "new" sciences. It did not occur to me that seeing the tree as the tree of knowledge might be a mistake! The riddle for me was not what tree this might be but rather, why does Galileo, as per the motto Non Solus (Not Alone), deny that he's alone when the picture shows him to be alone? This question was made the more vivid when I learned that the standard name for the emblem is The Solitary. Puzzling over the perhaps piddling question about the apparent discrepancy between motto and picture led to a larger question. The Renaissance greats are often described as marked by a new individualism and pride, such as is shown, for example, by Bacon, when he sends his Great Instauration into the world with a proem that begins: "Francis of Verulam reasoned thus with himself and judged it to be for the interest of the present and future generations that they should be made acquainted with his thoughts" (New Organon, p. 3). This same pride is also exemplified by Descartes when, in Part 2 of the Discourse, he stresses that towns and legal codes designed by a single "projector" are much to be preferred to those that spring up higgledy-piggledy in the course of generations, and he insinuates that he, Descartes, is such a solitary "projector." It is an individualism expressed in a somewhat different way by Montaigne, when he publishes the Essays as a book whose "matter" is himself. How, I came to ask myself, do this individualism and pride harmonize with these authors' equally notable emphasis on the collaborative and progressive character of science and invention? (Advancement of Learning, pp. 3 0-31; p. 143 of the Oxford Bacon paperback) The book of Galileo for which The Solitary serves as emblem is written in dialogue form: three charactersSalviati, Sagredo, and Simplicia-converse, in every-day Italian, about matters of physics. Salviati, who opens the conversation, is the conversation leader. He does not always �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 46 speak in his own name. Sometimes he reads aloud from a Latin book written by someone known to all the conversation partners but not identified by name. He is simply called "our author." Taking these facts into account, I construed the enigmatic emblem cum motto to mean that if there are to be "new sciences," neither the author, vicariously present to the three men conversing through his Latin book, nor the three men instructed by it, should be regarded, or regard themselves, as solitaries. (Inventing a demonstration is probably something that you do alone, in your study, but conversation, in the course of which demonstrations are appraised, doesn't happen when you're by yourself.) Something like this interpretation seemed confirmed by the printer's Address to the Reader, which begins with the sentence: Civil life being maintained through the mutual and growing3 aid of men to one another, and this end being served principally by the employment of arts and sciences, their inventors have always been held in great esteem and much revered by wise antiquity. It ends: Of these two new sciences, full of propositions that will be boundlessly increased in the course of time by ingenious theorists, the outer gates are opened in this book, wherein with many demonstrated propositions the way and path is shown to an infinitude of others, as men of understanding will easily see and acknowledge. It may be further nuanced by the opening remarks of Sagredo, who reports that he likes to hang around with artisan foremen at the Venetian shipyard because by talking to them he has frequently received information about matters of mechanics that he would not have obtained had he relied strictly on already available book learning. �MASCHLER 47 The interpretation of Non Solus just reported was conceived while I was still under the mistaken impression that Galileo was the one responsible for the emblem on the Discorsi title page. The Solitary is, however, the trademark of Louis Elzevier, the printer and publisher of the Discorsi, so I found, as more books with this device on their title page came my way-many of them, though by no means all-scientific or mathematical books. 4 So the original question now became, what did the printer-publisher-the man whose Advice to the Reader spoke of how, by employing the arts and sciences, men help one another to improve civic life-what did he have in mind in marking his merchandise with this emblem? fig. 4 Figure 4 resembles the Elzevier tree. Yet the lines below the picture cite anothVARRONIS opera quz fupcrfum. er publisher, Henri Estienne, under the date. And there J N L I B. D E .L IN G. LAT. Conictlancalofcpbi Scaligcri, r«<>are, of course, pictorial gnita 3c appcnditc .wa.. differences: This bearded sage IN Ll B R 0 S DE R B R V ST. Notz clufdcm lof.Scal.non uuca cditz. seems to be wearing a Roman or Greek toga rather than a HitJ/i1111llifotrMIII<.A DR.. T Y.RN. c,.,..,,. in tm.DI U,guutiM:c.university man's scholar's blltii.Uti•llih~t~ <.ANT. A Y G YSTJN/. /ttiiiP.YICTCJ!/1 gown; nothing twists around Clliig•tUIItsitlli&.DtrtrM.fliel. the tree, though its branches seem similarly disposed; the banner with the motto is on the right rather than on the left; and this time the motto A N N 0 M-. D. LX X II I, runs Noli Altum Sapere ExcudcbatHcnr.Stephanus. (Whether this should be read to mean Don't Seek to Know High Things or, rather, Don't Be Haughty depends on whether you take the Latin word altum adverbially or accusatively). M.. TERENTII �48 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW figs. 5, 6, 7, 8 PAI.IIIII &r«bwa.oa.J.TIITUB.Aifl•cnp.S;!d.-~ M.P. J:l: Ylllo CVW r-.IVILIDIO .. I D I & I find pictures 5 - 8 quite intriguing, particularly the ones showing a pruning hook suspended from heaven and bearing �49 MASCHLER the motto Rami ut Ego Inserrerer Defracti Sunt (Branches Have Been Broken Off So As To Let Me Be Engrafted). If the pictures leave you cold, perhaps I can persuade you to take an interest in them by showing you page 43 (notice the Arabic numeral!) from Henri Estienne's Plato edition. figs. 9,10 ]> L A T 0 N I S_ opera qua: extant omh!a_ EX NOVA JOANNIS SI!RRANiiN- Rij=t:O'kn~m:~::~:::?:~7!:-~g:.-- El,ID~M ..i!Iuutdi.llwJUI~IIiiUwwprtttUtMNTiiot. If you were to pull out your own edition of the Platonic dialogues, you would notice that the opening lines of the Crito bear the Stephanus page number 43 : the Estienne dynasty's Hellenized name is Stephanus . My picture acquaints you with the fans et origo of what you learned to call, when you were St. John's freshmen, Stephanus pagination! Here is another odd effect of encountering these Stephanus trees, especially the title page of the Bible: Though the initial interpretation of the Elzevier tree (the tree that brought us here), was mistaken; and though the Stephanus �50 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW tree is not the tree of knowledge either, nevertheless the motto Don't Seek To Know High Matters or Don't Be Proud does seem to demarcate (roughly) some such territory as Don't Grow Too Big For Your Breeches.S The reason for my being skeptical about the idea that the Stephanus tree was intended as a reminder of Genesis 3 is that some of the pictures very prominently display grafts, and all the pictures, even those which do not exhibit a pruning hook or marks of grafting, show branches that have been cut off from the tree. The world, our minds, the Bible, and other great books are simply full of all manner of trees.6 One tree is likely to conjure up another in our minds. But obviously, this need not mean that so it was intended by whoever designed the title pages. Doesn't the mind's associational play becomes tedious when there is no principle for sorting the relevant from the irrelevant ? As it turns out, there is a passage inCh. 11 of Paul's Letter to the Romans directly apposite to the Stephanus emblems that were shown. It runs as follows: If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so is the whole lump; and if the root is holy, so are the branches. But if some of the branches were broken off and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you. You will say 'Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.' That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe." The Greek uses the verb hupselophroneo, that is, "I am high minded," "I am proud," which rings rather differently than does the Latin, especially when, as on the picture, the �MASCHLER 51 Latin is taken in isolation. Notice that when the motto is Noli Altum Sapere, the "solitary" points; when the motto is Ut Ego Insererer he prays. Is the solitary intended to be St. Paul when he points and a grafted pagan when he prays? fig. 11 The pictures in figure 11 are three versions of an emblem employed by the great Antwerp publisher, Christopher Plantin. Again there is a tree and a man, but this time the man sits comfortably in the tree's shade, to the left, and holds one branch that he's cut off. Besides, unlike Elzevier's solitary, he's wearing a hat. The motto runs: Exerce Imperia Et Ramos Compesce Fluentes, that is: Exercise Authority and Trim the Flowing Branches. I tracked down the words to Virgil's Georgics, 2.370 (Loeb ed., p. 141) Milton, in Paradise Lost, 9.215f, 9.427f, 4.305, uses the same image, as does Shakespeare in the garden scene of Richard II (4.3). I earlier took the step of detaching the emblems plus mottoes from the titles and authors of the books on whose front page they appear and of attaching them, instead, to three publisher-printers-Elzevier, Stephanus, Plantin. Do the three trademarks "allude" to each other? Intentionally so? How could one tell? More generally, why would an engraver, poet, man of letters, painter, publisher want to be "reminding" the viewer or reader of another artist's artful item? On the other �52 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW hand, if there is no intentional alluding going on, why all these tree pictures? Mere habit and lack of invention? One of the surprises that came my way as I kept on the track of finding the sense and purpose of the Elzevier imprint was that bibliophiles, historians, curators of libraries, and professors of the curious subject "bibliography" have all for some hundreds of years been studying publishers' imprints. 7 Since these devices sometimes look reminiscent of heraldic coats of arms, and since coats of arms-plainly visible identifying marks that can be seen even from a distance and in the melee of battle-probably originally served warriors to make it possible for their brothers in arms to rush to their assistance, it occurred to me that the likeness between coats of arms and publishers' imprints to which the just mentioned book experts draw attention may conceivably imply that the three publishing dynasties that I have so far mentioned-in roughly chronological order, the Estiennes, the PlantinMoretus house, the Elzeviers-all used trees as their trademark, as though to proclaim to the world that they were, so to say, "in this together." Such a notion, of "us against them," is perhaps not altogether misguided, since Christopher Plantin, in preparing his magnificent polyglot Bible, relied on the scholarly philological work previously done, and published, by Robert Estienne,s and several Elzeviers, before an independent press under that name became established, seem to have worked for the House of Plantin.9 The tree motif that I've shown you was, however, not the sole Plantin publisher 's imprint. It was the first. But the far more famous and more frequent identifying mark of the House of Plantin-Moretus is not a tree; it is a drawing compass. It was under this imprint that, for example, most of the works of the Flemish engineer, bookkeeper, and mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620) were first published (the polyglot Bible of 1568-72 as well). �MASCHLER 53 fig. 12 I had become interested in Simon Stevin even before reaching the St. John's campus or reading Jacob Klein's book on the history of algebra for linguistic reasons. Having spent some of my early school years speaking Dutch (the vernacular language in which Stevin's Works were, by his express choice, originally published), I was aware that Dutch holds a double set of words for things mathematical and scientific-one employing strictly ordinary natively Dutch words and roots, the other pseudo-Latin or pseudo-Greek, as is our English mathematical and scientific vocabulary. When I found out that Simon Stevin was the one who had, single-handedly, coined the former, the scientific vocabulary employing strictly Dutch roots, I became curious about this man. His teaching style too was special (initially it was, perhaps, developed to instruct the then ruler of the northern Low Countries, William the Silent's son, Maurice of Nassau, 1567-1625). It seemed much more welcoming than, say, Vieta's, more like Galileo's. Stevin's pedagogic mode gives the impression of being shaped by the desire to give "people who have good horse sense" (to use Galileo's phrase in a letter to Kepler) an opportunity to become engaged by and to contribute to scientific endeavor even if they lack university training and, embarassed by this fact, feel excluded from discourse peppered with alien Latin and Greek jargon. To my delight, it turned out that Stevin had written a booklet called Het Burgerlyk Leven (Civic Life), which fact seemed to �54 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW confirm that, though chiefly an engineer, Stevin was far from oblivious to matters socio-political.lO Given these facts, it is not so strange that my imagination was piqued when I found that some of the books of Stevin's published by the Plantin press exhibited the banner bearing the Plantin motto Labore Et Constantia (By Dint of Work and Perseverence) as held by a man with a spade, that is, someone who works the soil, and a woman with a Jacob's staff (a Jacob's staff is a right-angled cross with a long vertical used by surveyors and anyone studying the heavens to estimate the size of angles).ll fig. 13 Since the hand holding the characteristic Plantin compass seemed to come from the heavens (clouds surround the wrist to which that hand is attached), I wondered whether the message was that all threethe mathematician-engineer, the farmer, and the student of the heavensshould live by the printer's motto: By Dint of Work and Perseverance. Of course, the motto leaves enigmatic what the goal or outcome of such a "work ethic" might be.12 Had it not been for the fact that, before joining the St. John's faculty, I had been interested in the relations of science and religion, so that I had spent time mulling over the early chapters in Genesis, I would probably not have paid much attention to the emblem with which this talk began, the Elzevier tree. But given a long-standing curiosity about whether the psychological sources of religion and science are one or many, it was inevitable that I would, eventually, encounter the Jewish mystical tradition, called Kabbalah and, �MASCHLER 55 having heard that a certain Italian nobleman, Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494 ), was the first Christian to dabble in Kabbalah, that I would try to read some of this man's books. The most famous of these, today, is called An Oration on the Dignity of Man. Pica's Oration, which is an astonishingly hope-filled celebration of human freedom, was intended to serve as an introduction to the defense of a huge tome of 900 theses which the then twenty-four year old prodigy of learning had published and to the public disputation of which, in Rome, he invited all scholars. I have not yet read Pico's Nine-Hundred Theses. [A copiously annotated translation by S.A. Farmer was brought out in 1998 under the title Syncretism in the West: Pica's 900 theses (1486).] I have, however, read Pico's Oration. It begins with a retelling of the myth told by the travelling teacher Protagoras when, in Athens, he conversed with Socrates about the question whether virtue can be taught (Protagoras 320Dff): Reverend Fathers: I have read in the records of the Arabians that Abdala the Moslem, when questioned as to what on this stage of the world ... could be seen most worthy of wonder, replied: 'There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than man.'... It seems to me I have come to understand why man is the most fortunate of creatures and consequently worthy of all admiration and what precisely is that rank which is his lot in the universal chain of being-a rank to be envied not only by brutes but even by the stars and by minds beyond this world .... God the Father, the supreme Architect, had already built this cosmic home we behold, the most sacred temple of His godhead .... But when the work was finished, the Craftsman kept wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness. Therefore, when every- �56 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW thing was done (as Moses and Timaeus bear witness), He finally took thought concerning the creation of man. But there was not among His archetypes that from which He could fashion a new offspring, nor was there in His treasure houses anything which he might bestow on His new son as an inheritance, nor was there in the seats of all the world a place where the latter might sit to contemplate the universe. All was now complete; all things had been assigned to the highest, the middle, and the lowest orders .... At last the best of artisans ordained that that creature to whom He had been able to give nothing proper to itself should have joint possession of whatever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being. He therefore took man as a creature of indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place in the middle of the world, addressed him thus: 'Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature .... Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.' ... Why do we emphasize this? To the end that after we have been born to this condition-that we can become what we �MASCHLER 57 will-.. .we may not, by abusing the most indulgent generosity of the Father, make for ourselves that freedom of choice He has given into something harmful instead of salutary. "13 The two most remarkable things in the Oration are, first, that Pico nowhere mentions original sin; and second, that (in a passage which I did not cite) he seems to regard what we would probably call science as the endeavor whereby mankind becomes ruler of the powers of wickedness. Pico never got to deliver the speech, nor was it published during his lifetime (1463-1494). But it was published soon thereafter, by his nephew, Giovanni Francesco, in a posthumous edition of his uncle's Works . Now Pico's Oration holds the line: ''As the farmer marries elm to grapevine, so the magus marries earth to heaven, that is, lower things to the qualities and virtues of higher things."14 Look again at the Elzevier tree. What's twisting around the tree is not a snake but a grapevine. The tree does not bear apples or pomegranates (the fruits which the "forbidden tree" is frequently said to have borne). It is an elm tree. But our original idea, that the solitary man standing beside the tree is whoever plays the role of Galileo-the filosofo e matematico -seems affirmed. Pico calls him a "magician," but since Pico is careful to explain that the art practiced by magi such as Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Plato (all of whom he mentions by name) "does not so much make wonders as carefully serve nature which makes them," it does not seem altogether unsafe to regard Stevin or Galileo as illustrative of Pico's idea of the magus.l5 We seem, then, to have succeeded in finding an answer to the question what the Elzevier emblem means. Pico's words become all the more interesting when one finds out that there is a long church tradition of "hexahemeral," that is, six-day literature. It goes back to the Greek church father St. Basil the Great's Hexahemeral Homilies. (Basil was Bishop of Caesarea. His birth and death years are �58 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 330-379.) St. Ambrose (340-397, Bishop of Milan), St. Bede (672-735, priest and author of an ecclesiastical history) and Grosseteste (1175-1253, Bishop of Lincoln) all imitated these homilies in their own Hexahemera. Hexahemera are, I gather from editors' notes, a series of sermons delivered over the first week of Lent. St. Ambrose, sometimes directly translating Basil's Greek into Latin, in the course of his sermons affectionately describes the beautiful and well-adapted creatures that God made. He seems to be using the opening chapters of Genesis as a topical outline for natural history. From the translator's editorial notes one learns that many of the joyous descriptive passages are culled from pagan authors while others are recognizably lines from Job, Psalms, the Prophets, or the New Testament, where the relevant natural wonder comes up. The effect isn't at all bookish. The congregation, eagerly waiting for Easter, must have felt confirmed in its faith that everything that God made is beautiful and good, that God cares for his creatures. There is no hint of a conflict between secular and sacred authorities. Indeed Basil, in his 6th Homily, concerning the sun and moon, argues for rational astronomy: "Do not then measure the moon with your eye but with your reason, which is much more accurate than the eyes for the discovery of truth" (Fathers of the Church, volume 46, p. 102). As luck would have it, St. Ambrose, while celebrating the works of the third day, touches on the tree of the Elzeviers. He writes: Who does not marvel at the fact that from the seed of the grape springs forth a vine that climbs even as high as the top of a tree? The vine fondles the tree by embracing and binding it with vine leaves and crowns it with garlands of grapes. In imitation of our life, the vine first plants deep its living roots; then, because its nature is flexible and likely to fall, it uses its tendrils like arms to hold tight whatever it seizes. By this means it raises �MASCHLER 59 itself and lifts itself on high. Similar to this vine are the members of the church. A little further on in the sermon Ambrose, by merging the Tower of the Prophet Isaiah's Song of the Vineyard with the tree just described, comes to identify the tree as the church leaders-the apostles, prophets, and doctors"-while the vine remains the Christian Congregation. Pico, I conclude from this textual evidence, is drawing on a Church tradition which is not afraid of allowing Pagan authors (Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, even Lucretius) to join the Biblical in testifying to God's hope that human beings, rightly guided, can learn how to use their freedom wisely. But he seems, somehow, to have added a "third thing" to Ambrose's two: the farmer is the one who marries tree to vine; the magus is the one who ensures the entwining of lower (say material?) and higher (say mathematical?) things. Is God the one who marries church leaders to their congregation? My guess is that according to Pico the farmer's work, which includes but does not consist of the work of matchmaking, imitates God's work as described in Genesis 1. Non Solus refers to the vine and the tree in the Mediterranean landscape; to Man and Woman; to church leaders and congregation. This same short-lived Pico, whose oration on our "perfectibility"16 became (according to the Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, p. 313 ), a popular and influential work that was often quoted and imitated, and many of whose ideas filtered into the thought of sixteenth-century thinkers, was instrumental in establishing one of Europe's most important early presses, the Aldine. Here's the story: Pico and young Aldo Manuzzio had become friends in their student days. Aldo even resided with Pico for two years. Pico arranged for Aldo to serve as tutor to Pico's two nephews. One of these nephews came to supply Aldo with funds to start up a printing press. The city of Venice was selected as locale for the printery-the same city that later figures as �60 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW locale for Galileo's Discorsi. The plan was that Aldo would retrieve, edit, print, and distribute, and thus preserve for the entire world, the whole corpus of Greek literature. The 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (volume 17, pp. 624626) contains a glowing account: At Venice Aldo gathered an army of Greek scholars and compositors round him. His trade was carried on by Greeks and Greek was the language of his household. Instructions to typesetters were given in Greek.17 The prefaces to his editions were written in Greek .... His own industry and energy were unremitting. In 1495 he issued the first volume of his Aristotle. [The whole Aristotelian corpus, in 5 volumes, was eventually brought out by Aldo.] ... Nine comedies of Aristophanes appeared in 1498. Thucydides, Sophocles, and Herodotus followed in 1502. Xenophon's Hellenica and Euripides in 1503. Demosthenes in 1504 ... .In 1513 Aldo reappeared with Plato, which he dedicated to Pope Leo XlB .... Nor was Aldo idle in regard to Latin and Italian classics.... To his fellow workers he was uniformly generous, free from jealousy and prodigal of praise. While aiming at that excellence of typography which renders his editions the treasures of the book collector, he strove at the same time to make them cheap .... When he died, bequeathing Greek literature as an inalienable possession to the world, he was a poor man."19 We, who take the availability in our bookcases of our very own volumes of Aristotle and of Plato so much for granted, owe much gratitude to Aldo! Aldo, the businessman and scholar, gathered 'round himself an international circle of men of learning who would constitute a New Academy {presumably in emulation not only �MASCHLER 61 of Plato's Academy in Athens but also to rival the one established under Medici auspices in Florence and headed by Marsilio Ficino, 1433-1499). A catalogue published by the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, commemorating an exhibition entitled "Learning from the Greeks, an Exhibition Commemorating the Five Hundredth Anniversary of the Founding of the Aldine Press," reports that, according to its rules, the Aldine New Academy's members were to meet for symposia, serve as an advisory board to the press, and assist in the editorial tasks of seeing the texts into print. While the Beinecke catalogue is scrupulous about discriminating what is known about the New Academy's rules (which included the stipulation that only Greek was to be spoken at meetings) from what is known about obedience to them, it is altogether confident that there was an Aldine circle, to which scholars of many different nationalities belonged, including an Englishman, Thomas Linacre. It was owing to this English connection that the Dutchman, Erasmus, came to visit Italy and became an intimate of Aldo's. The sequence of events appears to have been, roughly, as follows: Erasmus (1469-1536), the first European to succeed, literally, in living by his pen, keeping himself independent from churches and courts and universities and casting his lot with Europe's great printer-publishers,zo in his younger days served as tutor to an Englishman, Lord Mountjoy, while they were both studying in Paris. Lord Mountjoy invited Erasmus to England and there introduced him to Thomas More, Colet, and Linacre. Colet, who later became Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London and founder (or re-founder?) of one of England's most famous "public schools,"21 had become convinced that it was necessary, and possible, "to bring back the Christianity of the Apostles." He, though agemate to Erasmus, seems to have set Erasmus his life's task: Erasmus was to learn Greek very well so that he would be able to retrieve the original New Testament as well as the �62 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW work of the early church fathers and have them-the original authorities for a Christian life-published and spread.22 Erasmus carried out this plan. He went to Italy, partly, at least, in the hope of bettering his Greek. He met and made friends with Aldus and his circle. Eventually he brought out a New Testament in Greek and Latin (several of the early Church Fathers' Works as well). Erasmus's text of the New Testament, in the 1519 edition, was the one that Luther used for his German translation. It was also the base text for Robert Estienne's third edition of the New Testament, published in Paris in 1550, and it was the first to be published with critical apparatus. Erasmus's text underlies our King James version, and when the Elzeviers, in 1633, published their Greek Testament they proclaimed it "the received text" (textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptus). The scholars who produced the recent University of Toronto edition of Erasmus's Works, on whom I am relying for this information, write: "Thus was created the so-called textus receptus, the foundation of protestant Bible scholarship for three centuries, until the ninteenth century ushered in a new era of Biblical criticism. "23 It was, more than anything, because of such philological labors that the more learned of his contemporaries hailed Erasmus as "the prince of theologians." One of these writes to Erasmus: [You are] ... the first author in our times of the rebirth of theology, [you are the man who] called back theologians from the ... turbid waters of the scholastics to the sources of sacred letters ....As with a trumpet you have summoned the entire world to the philosophy of Christ. We do not doubt that you were born to restore theology. Therefore, fulfill your destiny and purge with your most learned hand Augustine and Hilary that we may distinguish the spurious from the genuine, as �MASCHLER 63 in previous years you did most successfully with Jerome.24 I do not know why Erasmus, when he brought out the first edition of his "purified" New Testament, called it Novum Instrumentum.25 But the coincidence that this tag should sound so much like Bacon's Novum Organum to our ears helps to make vivid that Erasmus's hopes for reform and renewal were as much vested in the recovery of access to Sacred Scripture as were Bacon's, later, in the recovery of access to nature. Both men thought of themselves as fighting idol worship! Erasmus apprenticed himself to the notorious philologist Valla (1406-1457), whose notes to the New Testament he had discovered a decade or so earlier. By quoting from Erasmus's letter to the man to whom he dedicated his edition of Valla's Notes on the New Testament, I may convey why I believe we do wrong in looking down our noses at philological labors as mere dry-as-dust scholarship, a scholarship for which only men who have the soul of someone raised by maiden aunts would have the patience. Erasmus writes: As I was hunting last summer in an ancient library.. .luck brought me a prey of no ordinary importance, Lorenzo Valla's notes on the New Testament. At once I was eager to share it with the world of scholarship, for it seemed ... ungenerous to devour the prize of my chase in solitude and silence. But I was a little put off... by the entrenched unpopularity of Valla's name .... 26 You, however... began to urge me ...not to cheat the author of the credit he deserved or to deprive countless students of such an enormous advantage .. .I am inclined to believe that the most unpleasantly hostile demonstrations ... will be made by those who stand most to profit, that is, the theologians. They will say it is intolerable presumption in �64 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW a grammarian, who has upset every department of learning, to let his impertinent pen loose on scripture itself.... Tell me what is so shocking about Valla's action in making a few annotations on the New Testament after comparing several old and good Greek manuscripts. After all, it is from Greek sources that our text undoubtedly comes; and Valla's notes had to do with internal disagreements, or a nodding translator's plainly inadequate rendering of the meaning, or things that are more intelligibly expressed in Greek, or, finally, anything that is clearly corrupt in our text. Will they maintain that Valla, the grammarian, has not the same privileges as Nicholas the theologian? .. .! do not believe that theology herself, the queen of all the sciences, will be offended if some share is claimed in her... by her humble attendant grammar; for though grammar is of less consequence in some men's eyes, no help is more indispensable than hers. She is concerned with small details, details such as have always been indispensable for greatness. Perhaps she discusses trivial questions, but these have important corollaries. If they protest that a theologian is too grand to be bound by the rules of grammar, and that the whole business of interpretation depends on the inspiration of the holy spirit, what a novel distinction is offered to theologians, who are to have the exclusive privilege of expressing themselves ungrammatically.. .It will be said that it is sinful to change anything in the Holy Scriptures .... On the contrary, the sin of corruption is greater, and the need for careful revision by scholars is greater also .... The ... discrepancies in our current texts prove clearly that they are not free from errors.27 �MASCHLER 65 If, though a Christian, you believe that serving God is something quite distinct and separate from ferreting out truth-the true and correct reading, for instance, of the verses in Romans that had been taken to teach men that their will is depraved-you may impatiently shrug off Erasmus's exegetical labors as mere fussing. If, further, you have not been advised, by secondary literature, that ever since St. Jerome and Augustine there had been opposition within the Christian church between those who held to a philological idea of Bible exegesis and those who believed in the need for an "extra" of a directly inspirational sort, scholarly Europe's adoration for Erasmus will be baffling. There is, however, a book bearing the title Erasmus, Lee and the Correction of the Vulgate: The Shaking of the Foundations (Librairie Droz, Geneva, 1992) which argues that it would not be a distortion to see the quarrel between Luther and Erasmus in terms of the fact that whereas Luther claimed that at a certain time and in a certain place he "underwent an illumination or inspiration enabling him to penetrate to the meaning of Romans 1:17 .... Erasmus undermines and rejects the need for this kind of extraordinary intervention .. .insofar as his own day is concerned" (p. 17, Coogan). As Erasmus reads Romans 5:12, the Vulgate translation of the Greek text eph' ho pantes hemarton was erroneous. The Vulgate takes the Greek words to mean "in whom all sinned" (in quo omnes peccaverunt). Augustine had supported his doctrine of original sin as an inherited depravity with this translation. Erasmus was the first in the history of Western [as opposed to Eastern) exegesis to understand [the Greek preposition] epi as having a causal sense (because all sinned). In a very lengthy annotation expanded over several editions Erasmus defended his translation and interpretation ... as referring not to original sin in the Augustinian sense of an �66 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW inherited guilt but rather to personal sins committed in free imitation of the sin of Adam. When criticized for his paraphrase, Erasmus replied that Origen, Ambrose, and Theophylact Gerome, or rather, pseudo-Jerome as well) all favor his interpretation here. The editors of the Toronto ed. of Erasmus's Paraphrase of Romans (volume 42, p. 147) add a quote from the Greek Church Father Origen in evidence: "For all who are born in this world are not only nourished by parents, but also instructed, and they are not only sons of sinners, but disciples" (PG 14;1018B-C). Given Erasmus's return to what was in the West a preAugustinian reading, more nearly in acccord with Origen, not only of Romans 5:12 but also of 6:15ff, it is not surprising that he became a hero to such as were filled with Pico's pedagogic hopes! And no wonder that some of the eighteenthcentury philosophes, for example, Pierre Bayle and Jean LeClerc, embraced him as one of their own kind! The Toronto editors of Erasmus' Paraphrase of Romans (pp. 148ff.) go so far as to say: "Like Origen and Pelagius, Erasmus interprets Paul as teaching that sin is more a matter of custom [that is, second nature] than of nature."28 Erasmus's philological labors on the New Testament made scriptural warrant for the dogma of the trinity questionable as well.29 This did not lead him to deny the doctrine.JO Rather, in accord with the Estienne motto Noli Altum Sapere, Sed Time (Don't Be Haughty, But Be Mraid), it led him to question a theology-, that is, theory-centered Christianity. In evidence I cite from a letter which he used as preface to his edition of St. Hilary of Poitier (ca.315-367): Is he who cannot disentangle according to the method of philosophy what distinguishes the father from the son or the holy spirit from both, or what the difference is between the generation of the son from the father and the procession of �MASCHLER the spirit, is he destined not to have fellowship with the father, son, and holy spirit? .... After the richest talents have applied all their energy for a long time to the investigation of [high theological questions], this at last is the final result of their effort: they realize they know nothing; and, what is more, they contribute nothing to the devout life. Thus, nowhere more does that well-known passage from Paul apply: 'Knowledge puffs up, charity builds up.' What arrogance, what contentions, what tumult, what discord ... do we see gush forth from this kind of absurd learning. Although our life is so fleeting, we neglect meanwhile those things without which no one has any hope of attaining salvation. Unless I pardon my brother's sins against me, God will not pardon my transgressions against him. Unless I have a pure heart, I shall not see God. Therefore, with all my energy I must aim, I must practice, I must strive to cleanse my soul of malice, hatred, envy, pride, avarice, and lust. You will not be damned if you should not know whether the spirit proceeding from the father and the son has a single or a double principle, but you will not escape perdition unless you see to it in the meantime that you have the fruits of the spirit, which are charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness .... Toward this end the chief concern of our study must be focused and directed .... The sum and substance of our religion is peace and concord. This can hardly remain the case unless we define as few matters as possible and leave each individual's judgment free on many questions. This is because the obscurity of most questions is great and the malady is for the most part intrinsic to our human nature... Many puzzling questions are now referred to an ecumenical coun- 67 �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 68 cil. It would be much more fitting to defer such questions to that time when we shall see God face to face without the mirror and without the mystery.31 Let me conclude by reporting what Erasmus offers in the way of commentary on the publishers' emblems and mottos on which I have threaded much of this essay. He does not, in the Adages, which are my text for this purpose, touch on the motif of the tree and, as far as I know, omits adages derived from Holy Writ altogether, mining solely pagan literature. So it was I, not Erasmus, who brought an anti-theological, Erasmian, reading of the Estienne motto and tree . He does, however, include a motto that came to figure (in 1642, thus long after Erasmus's death) on the title pages of some of the Amsterdam Elzeviers: It runs Ne Extra Oleas (Not Beyond the Olive Trees). The words were taken, says Erasmus,32 from Aristophanes's Frogs (993 ), and a scholiast is reported to have explained33 that the sense of the motto is Acknowledge Limits. Erasmus does dwell on two other printers devices-the Aldine press's anchor-cum-dolphin and the Frobens's caduceus. Fig.14 and fig. 15 Without Aldo Manuzzio-the Venetian printer set up m business through the good offices of Count Pico della Mirandola, see p. 55 above-and without Christopher Proben-the Basel printer from whose presses most of �MASCHLER 69 Erasmus's writings issued-such a life as that of Erasmus, independent scholar and man of letters, would have been impossible. Erasmus was well aware that his own freedom and his service of mankind depended on these printer-publishers. The longest commentary on a proverb (14 pages) is devoted to the Aldo motto, Festina Lente (Make Haste Slowly).34 Erasmus tracks the saying to Suetonius's "Life of Augustus" and remarks: It does not surprise me that this proverb was a favorite with two Roman emperors, and they by far the most worthy of praise, Octavius Augustus and Titus Vespianus ... .It is easy to see that this saying pleased Titus Vespianus, from the evidence of ancient coinage. Aldus Manutius showed me a silver coin of old and obviously Roman workmanship, which he said had been given him by Peter Bembo, a young Venetian nobleman, who was foremost in scholarship and a great delver into ancient literature. It was stamped as follows: on one side there was the effigy of Titus Vespianus with an inscription, on the other an anchor, with a dolphin wound round the middle of it as if round a pole. This means nothing else than the saying of Augustus Caesar, Hasten Slowly, or so the books on hieroglyphics tell us. That ["hieroglyphics"] is the word for the enigmatic carvings which were so much used in early times, especially among the Egyptian soothsayers and priests, who thought it wrong to exhibit the mysteries of wisdom to the vulgar in open writing, as we do; but they �70 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW expressed what they thought worthy to be known by various symbols, things, or animals, so that not everyone could readily interpret them. But if anyone deeply studied the qualities of each object, and the special nature and power of each creature, he would at length, by comparing and guessing what they symbolized, understand the meaning of the riddle .... The anchor, because it delays, slows down, and stops the ship, means slowness; the dolphin represents speed .. ..This kind of writing... not only has great dignity but gives no little pleasure .... What symbol is better suited to express the ardent and dauntless activity of the mind than the dolphin? .... So this saying, Make Haste Slowly, appears to have originated in the mysteries of the most antique philosophy, from thence to be taken up by the two most admirable of Roman emperors .... Now it has come down to Aldus Manutius of Rome [Aldo was born in Rome] as the third heir in succession ... .Indeed I should not think this symbol was more illustrious when it was stamped on the imperial coinage and passing from hand to hand than now, when it is sent out beyond the bounds of Christendom, on all kinds of books, in both languages, recognized, owned and praised by all to whom liberal studies are holy.... Consider as well that, however one may sing the praises of those who by their virtue either defend or increase the glory of their country, their actions only affect worldly prosperity, and within narrow limits. But the man who sets fallen learning on its feet (and this is almost more difficult than to originate it in the first place) is building up a sacred and immortal thing, and serving not one province alone but all peoples and all generations.35 Once this was the task of princes, and it was the greatest glory of �MASCHLER 71 Ptolemy [the ruler, not the astronomer]. But his [Ptolemy's] library was contained between the narrow walls of its own house, whereas Aldus is building up a library which has no other limits than the world itself. Of Proben he writes: What Aldus was striving to do among the Italians ...John Proben is trying to achieve on this side of the Alps ... .lf the northern princes were to favor good learning as honestly as the Italians, the serpents of Proben would not be so far from the riches of Aldus's dolphins. Aldus, making haste slowly, gained both riches and fame, and deserved both; Proben, holding his staff erect, looking to nothing but usefulness to the public, not losing the simplicity of the dove while he expresses the wisdom of the serpent ... Proben has amassed less money than fame. The interpretation of Proben's caduceus emblem that Erasmus gives derives, of course, from the New Testament. Erasmus is quoting Jesus' words, who says, addressing his disciples: "I send you out as sheep admidst wolves, so be ye wise as serpents and innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16). Whether the Proben bird really is a dove I cannot tell from the picture. Nor have I seen a Proben imprint with this motto. It may exist. But it is equally possible that Erasmus is pulling everybody's leg, rousing hopes for the revelation of secrets that are non-existent. But perhaps both of his comments constitute an apologia pro vita sua? Erasmus never joined Luther's Protestant fold. And while court records of inquisitorial interrogation of men accused of heresy show that some, for example, Baptist, laymen framed the formula of their Christian faith exactly in the terms provided by Erasmus's New Testament text,36 which they knew by heart and quoted to the inquisitor, �72 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Erasmus, unlike these Baptists, died in his bed, not at the stake. For this he has been blamed. Luther denies him the title of Christian and calls him a sceptic. Some pre-World War 2 twentieth-century historians have called him a coward. I don't call him anything but thank him. Notes 1 Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, Weidenfeld and Nicolson English ed. of 1955, pp. 72££, first published in French in 1795 . A richly detailed working out of what's "in" these words of Condorcet's is given by Elizabeth Eisenstein's book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Earlymodern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1979). Somewhat surprisingly, Eisenstein does not mention Condorcet. 2 Francis Bacon, New Organon, trans. Fulton H . Anderson (Library of Liberal Arts, 1960); Advancement of Learning, ed. G.W. Kitchin. 3 Italics, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. Please notice that the printer is sufficiently self-possessed to take it upon himself to address the reader. Since the list of Elzevier science books deserves to be known, I tick off some of them: Descartes's Geometry, Meditations, Principles, Passions, Opera Omnia; Gilbert's De Mundo nostro sublunari philosophia nova; Hobbes's Elementa Philosophica; several of Francis van Schooten's mathematical books, which were studied by Newton; Vieta's Collected Works; Stevin's Mathematical Works, in a French version; Christian Huygens's Theoremata; the medical writings of that Professor Tulp whom Rembrandt depicts in his ''Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp,"-all of these were brought out by the Elzeviers. 4 5 The Amsterdam branch of Elzevier, which used the goddess Athena, along with her shield, olive, and owl as its imprint, likewise stressed that curbing hybris is the mark of wisdom, for their motto was a quotation from Aristophanes' Frogs, line 993: me ... ektoth ... ton elaon (Not Beyond The Olive Trees) . A.C.J. Willems, in his book about the Elzeviers, reports that an ancient �MASCHLER 73 scholiast explained the meaning to be something like ''Acknowledge limits!" A.C.J. Willems, Les Elzeviers, 1880, p. xciii. Yeats's chestnut tree at the end of ''Among School Children," the "tree diagrams" of Chomskyan linguistics, the genealogical tree of Jesse, the tree of which the Duchess speaks to John of Gaunt in Act 1, scene 2 of Shakespeare's Richard II, not to mention the fact that in the days when our St. John's Liberty Tree still stood, it was spoken of as a symbol for our nation in that "the relation between branches and trunk suggests the joining of unity with diversity, which is the genius of America." 6 7 Evidently, scholars who do intellectual or cultural history rather than study great books, have long taken cognizance of the fact that the capitalist enterprise of printing and publishing has, as Bacon claimed and the eighteenth-century philosophes reiterate, changed the face of the world. 8 Fred Schreiber, in his book The Estiennes (E.K. Schreiber, New York, 1982), terms Robert Estienne the founder of modern lexicography through his Latinae Linguae Thesaurus. Robert was also the publisher of David Kimchi's Sefer haShorashim, a Hebrew thesaurus designed on the principle of grouping words of the same (usually triliteral) root together. Henri 2 Estienne, Robert's son, later applied this same principle of organization to his huge Thesaurus of the Greek language. The Plantin polyglot Bible, in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, and Aramaic is, by cognoscenti, ranked as "the most important work ever produced in the Netherlands by one printer"-so says L. Voet, former director of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp and author of The Golden Compasses: A History and Evaluation of the Printing and Publishing Activities of the Officina Plantiana at Antwerp (Amsterdam, London, New York, 1969-72). According to the business records preserved at the PlantinMoretus House in Antwerp, Louis Elzevier had done some bookbinding for the Plantins in 1565-7, and his father, Hans Elzevier, had-between 1567 and 1589-worked as a "pressman"for the Plantins. Colin Clair, Christopher Plantin (Cassell and Co., London, 1960), pp. 154ff. 9 �74 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW For a summary of this little book, see Ch. 14 and 18 in Edward Dijksterhuis's remarkable Dutch biography, Simon Stevin, an abbreviated English version of which was published by R. Hooykaas and M.G.J. Minnaert under the title Simon Stevin: Science in the Netherlands around 1600, (Martinus Nijhoff, 1970). (For Dijksterhuis's comment on what I called Stevin's teaching style, see especially p. 121, beginning ?lines from the bottom of the page, describing the distinctive logical and rhetorical attributes of Stevin's famous "wreath of balls" demonstration). Dijksterhuis, in the concluding chapter of his biography of Stevin, cites a fascinating passage about city planning. Stevin recommends that on both sides of the street houses be furnished with canopies. These would serve pedestrians as protection against rain, sun, and traffic. "Such protection would not only be agreeable for the wealthy but also advantageous to the poor, who must, to gain a living, stay outside and who don't have a change of clothing when once they're drenched to the skin, and whose stockings and shoes wear out with mud, so that they walk around with wet feet, as a result of which they contract many diseases, diseases that are infectious, so that they reach the wealthy. Therefore, if the wealthy were to underwrite the erection of such canopies, they would advance their own interests as well." (I tried to render this amazing prose roughly as it stands in Stevin's sixteenth-century Dutch. Dijksterhuis expects the modern reader to find fault with Stevin for caring so little for the well-being of the poor per se. It has, strangely, not occurred to him that (a) the Adam-Smithean idea of enlightened self-interest is entirely in accord with the rest of Stevin's thinking and (b) that Stevin, precisely if he really wants those overhangs built, had better appeal to the interests of the only burghers who have the wherewithal to put them up.) 10 J. 11 According to Dijksterhuis's list, the books published under this particular Plantin vignette are: Dialectic (1585), The Art of Tenths (1585), La Pratique d'Arithmetique (1585), The Building of Forts (1594). I give the Dutch titles in English. We, who take the availability of printed self-help books on every conceivable subject for granted, need a little dose of history to realize how huge a difference it makes that even commoners with just a little education can, without going to school, teach themselves double entry bookkeeping or "how to draw a picture, compose a madrigal, mix paints, bake clay, survey a field, handle all manner of tools." (p. 243 �MASCHLER 75 Eisenstein). Self-help literature is, to this day, the most lucrative part of publishing. 12 Cf Bacon's New Organon Bk 2, last sentences of the concluding aphorism, 52 (pp. 267f. LLA ed.). See also the quotation from Bacon that Kant selected as frontispiece for the 2nd edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al, (University of Chicago, 1948), pp. 223££. 13 14 On the Dignity of Man, p. 28, Library of Liberal Arts ed. Cf. Renaissance Philosophy of Man, p. 249. I am a little bewildered that, as the English sentence runs, the elm is earthly and lower, the vine heavenly and higher. 15 Pico holds that there are two kinds of magic. The first, he says, the Greeks called goeteia. "The second sort they called mageia, the perfect and highest wisdom as it were. Porphyry says that in the language of the Persians, magician means the same thing as interpreter and lover of divine things means in our language .... The first is the most fraudulent of arts, the second is firm, faithful, and solid .... From the second comes the highest splendor and glory of letters, desired in ancient times and almost always since then. No man who was a philosopher and desirous of learning good arts has ever been studious of the first. Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Plato, travelled across the sea to learn the second. When they came back they preached it and held it chief among the esoteric doctrine ....As the first magic makes man subject to and delivered over to the powers of wickedness, so the second makes him their prince and lord .. ..The second, among the virtues sown by the kindness of God and planted in the world, as if calling them out from darkness to light, does not so much make wonders as carefully serve nature which makes them," Dignity, p. 27-28. For commentary on Pico's distinction between goeteia and mageia, compare D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, (London: Warburg Institute, 1958). See also Maryjoe Teeter Dobbs, Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, (Cambridge University Press, 1975). I found the latter book especially helpful in its effort to explain how and why moral and religious self-formation was thought to be accomplished through alchemical practices. This ought to be an important question for those who value the distinction between �- - - - - - - - - --- -- --------- - 76 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW liberal and servile arts on the ground that, unlike the merely useful arts, the role of the liberal arts is to improve the human soul. To determine whether alchemy and Pica's "magic," understood as Dobbs and Walker explain them, are rivals to the Sacrament of the Eucharist, one might have to study the portions of Part 3 of St. Thomas's Summa Theologica that directly concern the latter. 16 Cf. Rousseau's Second Discourse, on Human Inequality, trans. Masters and Masters (St. Martin's Press, 1964), pp. 113f. 17 Something analogous is reported, for Latin, by Henri 2 Estienne, in a Preface addressed to his son Paul (see his 1585 edition of Aulus Gellius). The father writes: ''And as I am on the topic of speaking Latin, I will add another notable reminiscence of my father's family, by which you may understand the facilities I enjoyed as a boy for acquiring that tongue. There was a time when your grandfather Robert entertained in his own household ten men employed by him as correctors on his press, or in other parts of his business. These ten persons were all of them men of education; some of them of considerable learning; as they were of different nations, so they were of different languages. This necessitated them to employ Latin as the common medium of communication, not at table only, but about the house, so that the very maidservants came to understand what was said and even to speak it a little. As for your grandmother, except one made use of some very unusual word, she understood what was said in Latin with the same ease as if it had been French. As to myself and my brother [Robert 2], we were allowed at home to use no other language whenever we had to address my father or one of his ten journeymen." Quoted by M. Pattison, Essays, vol. 1, p. 71. Readers of Montaigne may be struck by the resemblance between Montaigne pere and Robert Estienne. I am reminded of the household of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, "the father of modern Hebrew," where, long before the founding of the modern state of Israel, only Hebrew was to be spoken. This last observation is relevant to my purposes because I am trying to convey how large a debt we owe to the single-minded, perhaps fanatical, devotion of these men who believed that through the right kind of filial piety, a critical filial piety, re-birth is possible. 18 Before his elevation to the Papacy, Leo X was Giovanni de Medici. �MASCHLER 77 19 I could imagine that the relatively lengthy narrative about the Aldine press is included in the eleventh ed. of the Brittanica because the Encyclopedia's editors felt that their own enterprise of serving the public good through the diffusion of knowledge beyond the halls of the University and that of the house of Aldo were one and the same (If you are of little faith with respect to the educational value of encyclopedias, you may be willing to reconsider in light of the report that young Faraday picked up the rudiments of science in the course of reading the scientific articles included in the encyclopedia volumes which he was binding while he was apprenticed to a French emigre bookbinder). For a detailed acount of Aldo Manuzzio, see Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice, Blackwell and Cornell, 1979. Lowry reports that there is a letter from Aldo to Catherine Pia which expresses the "idealism" inspired in him by, among others, Pico's faith in human dignity and Pico's hope of "reconciling all faiths in a single ultimate mystery." Unfortunately Lowry does not quote from this letter. He does, however, quote a "sort of declaration of intent" which Aldo, from 1495 on, attached to all of his editions of Lascaris' Greek Grammar and of his own Latin Grammar. It runs: "I have decided to spend all my life in the service of my fellow men. God is my witness, I desire nothing more than to do something for them, as my past life shows, wherever it has been spent, and as I hope my future life will show still more," Lowry p. 66. 20 In 1509 the Archbishop of St. Andrews presented Erasmus with a ring bearing a figure that Erasmus identified as an image of the Roman godlet Terminus. Erasmus adopted the Terminus figure, having added the inscription Cedo Nulli (I Yield to No One), as his personal emblem, with which he confirmed his most important documents (see Erasmus, volume 2 of Correspondence, ed. R.A.B Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson (University of Toronto, 1974), p. 150). I am, however, obliged to report that according to Lisa Jardine (Erasmus, Man of Letters, p. 82), there is a letter of Erasmus to Charles V's secretary Alfonso Valdes, in which Erasmus attaches the words Cedo Nulli to Terminus, not to himself, and Terminus he identifies as Death. Yet since Erasmus so writes in response to his being criticized for pride, it is hard to tell who is "really" speaking in the motto. �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 78 The school still exists. It counts John Milton (1616), the Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), G.K. Chesterton (1874-1938), and Montgomery (1887-1975) among its graduates. 21 22 Cf Frederic Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers, (London, 1869); J.A. Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus, (New York: Charles Scribner, 1912) 23 Erasmus, Correspondence, 3.220. Urban Rieger, in a letter to Erasmus quoted on p. 33 of John C. Olin, Six Essays on Erasmus, with a translation of Erasmus's 1523 Letter to Carondelet, (Fordham University Press, 1979). 24 25 Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum came out one year before Luther affixed his 95 Theses to the portal of the church of Wittenberg. Valla's reputation as an enemy of the Catholic Church derived in large measure from his having employed his philological expertise to debunk the genuineness of the so-called Donation of Constantine. In this document, "the emperor Constantine, in gratitude for his conversion by Pope Silvester, supposedly granted to that pope and his successors for ever, not only spiritual supremacy over the other great patriarchates and over all matters of faith and worship, but also temporal dominion over Rome, Italy, and 'the provinces, places, and civitates of the western regions."' I have not read Valla's De (also credita et emendita Constantini donatione declamatio, though there is an English translation by Christopher B. Coleman. All my information about Valla derives from Cassirer et al., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, (University of Chicago, 1948), and the 11th ed. of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. 26 Letter to Christopher Fisher of 1505, Correspondence, vol. 2, pp. 89-96. 27 That Augustine's "reduction of all bad concupiscences to the concupiscence of sex and the identification of sexual concupiscence with the ... corruption [we all have inherited from Adam was] something new, introduced by Augustine into Christian theology," is argued at length by Harry Wolfson in a 1959 lecture reprinted as Essay 6 in his paperback volume Religious Philosophy: A Group of Essays (Atheneum, 1961). See also Elaine Pagels, "The Politics of 28 �MASCHLER 79 Paradise: Augustine's Exegesis of Genesis 1-3 versus that of John Chrysostum" and "Christian Apologists and 'the Fall of the Angels' : An Attack on Roman Imperial Power?" in Harvard Theological Review 78:1-2 (1985) 67-99 and 78:3-4 (1985) 301-25. On this same topic (the so-called Pelagian controversy), see Peter Brown, "Pelagius and his Supporters ... " and "The Patrons of Pelagius: The Roman Aristocracy... " in Journal of Theological Studies, N.S., volume19, Pt 1, April1968 and volume 21, Pt 1, April 1970. Our own Peter Gilbert's finely balanced account of the Pelagian controversy in his recent lecture "Predestination in the New Testament and St. Augustine" reopens the issue. In Erasmus's edition of the New Testament the last chapter of 1 John lacks the Vulgate's verses 7, 8: "Quoniam tres sunt qui testimonium dant in caelo: Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus sanctus: et hi tres unum sunt. Et tres sunt qui testimonium dant in terra: Spiritus, et aqua, et sanguis: et hi tres unum sunt." When he was criticized for thus deleting the "proof text" for trinitarianism, Erasmus answered that he had not found any Greek manuscript containing these words "though he had in the meanwhile examined several others besides those on which he relied when first preparing his text." (Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, (Oxford, 1964), p. 101, quoted by Coogan. 29 Newton, along with every other Christian anti-trinitarian of modern times, uses the philological labors of Erasmus. It is reported that six years after the Council of Trent and sixtythree years after Erasmus's death, the following dialogue between a Franciscan friar and an Anabaptist layman occurred: INQUISITOR: What, don't you believe that Christ is the second person of the Holy Trinity? ANABAPTIST: We never call things but as they are called in Scripture.... The Scripture speaks of one God, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit. INQUISITOR: If you had read the creed of Athanasius you would have found in it God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. �80 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW ANABAPTIST: I am a stranger to the creed of St. Athanasius. It is sufficient for me to believe in the living God, and that Christ is the Son of the living God, as Peter believed; and to believe in the Holy Spirit which the Father has poured out upon us through Jesus Christ our Lord, as Paul says. INQUISITOR: You are an impertinent fellow, to fancy that God pour out his spirit upon you, who do not believe that the Holy Spirit is God. You have borrowed these heretical opinions from the diabolical books of the cursed Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, in his Preface to the Works of St. Hilary pretends that this holy man says, at the end of his twelfth book, that the Holy Spirit is not called God in any part of the Scripture .... Will you be a follower of that antitrinitarian? .... You have sucked the poisoned breast of Erasmus .... But St. John says ... There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. ANABAPTIST: I have often heard that Erasmus, in his Annotations upon that passage, shows that this text is not in the Greek original." The source for this dialogue is an early Mennonite martyrology recorded in G. Brandt, The History of the Reformation in the Low Countries, (London: 1720-23). All of the foregoing information derives from Coogan, pp. 68££, who also reports that the Anabaptist, a certain Herman van Flekwijk, died at the stake at Bruges on 10 June, 1569. Bruges is Simon Stevin's city of birth. Erasmus's peace-loving "accommodationism" is in the spirit of Paul's Romans 14, broadly interpreted. 30 31 Olin, pp. 99-101. See also pp. 105, 108-10 of this same letterpreface. Erasmus concludes the letter, manifestly addressing contemporary issues (his tract against Luther-the Discourse on Free Will-comes out the following year): "Diverse are the gifts of men of genius, and many are the different kinds of ages .... Reverence is the due of ancient authors, especially those authors who are recommended by the sanctity of their lives in addition to their learning and eloquence. But this reverence does not exclude a critical reading of them." The Colloquies, the Discourse on Free Will, the Paraclete, the Anti-Barbarus are all to the same effect. 32 University of Toronto ed., vol. 33, p. 82 �MASCHLER 81 33 Alphonse Charles Joseph Willems, Les Elzeviers, Histoire et Annates typographiques (Paris, Bruxelles, The Hague, 1880), p. xciii University of Toronto ed., vol. 33, pp. 3-17. In the Margaret Mann paperback edition of (selected) Adages (now out of print) this is the lead entry. 34 Cf. Bacon on the three kinds of ambition, pp. 118f. LLA ed. of New Organon. I leave it to the Bacon scholars to determine whether the resemblances between Erasmus's commentary on the adage Festina lente and Bacon's Aphorism 119 are significant. 35 36 See footnote 21 on pp. 26f. �82 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW �83 t The Empires of the Sun and The West Eva Brann This lecture is dedicated to my friend and fellow tutor William Darkey in Santa Fe, who first introduced me to the book behind this lecture, William Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico. >f I shall begin with two sets of facts and dates. On or about August 8 of 1519 Hernan 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 1000 as they marched inland. Early in November they passed at 13000 feet between the two volcanoes that guard the high Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was delivered on September 13, 2002, at Santa Fe and was the Homecoming Lecture on October 4, 2002, at Annapolis. �84 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 of 200,000 men with a highly trained officer corps, quietly surrendered his person to the custody of Cortes, declared himself a vassal of Emperor Charles V, sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire, 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 plastered-over door in the palace aviary. Cortes's surmise that just to enter Tenochtitlan 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, eighteenyear-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 �BRANN 85 Indian army from Tenochtitlan's old enemy, Tlaxd.la, 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 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 hard 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 army 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 �86 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 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 administered 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) Persian Wars hqw in July of480B.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 army of who knows how many hundreds of thousands, led by Xerxe~, 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 .behem<?th. The Spaniards' situation in Mesoamerica isjustthe inverse, except that in each case the few were the . free. What, we may �BRANN 87 wonder, would our world be like if the Asians had prevailed in 480 B.C. or the Nahua in 1519 A.D.? 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 modern 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-! 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 Aztecslet me interrupt myself to say that the people of the imperial city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan 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 wprld by the aforementioned. Prescottthese Mexica, then~ of course thought of the invaders as being from the quarter pf the rising sun, from the e;ast. This .turns out to be .a significant Ja~t. C~lumbus thought that he was "sailing not the u1)ual. way" but w:est-:-:-sailing west to reach the East, Japaq, China, India. It was for quite a while a very unwelcome discoyery 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 J:lal:'row isthmus in the middle, blocked the ocean. route to the fabul9us Orient.. Thus .Prescott calls Tenochtitlan "the great capital of .the western world .." So "West" is, strictly �88 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW speaking, nonsense as used in this context, but I cling to it because it is the 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 necessary 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 javelin-throwers, 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 of Montezuma'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 �BRANN 89 numbers an encumbrance on the heavily defended causeways into the island city and by their excited hatred for their Mexica oppressors a danger to Cortes's prudent intentions; moreover, they tended to fade away when things went badly). 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 Spanish success. But a number of contemporaries thought that at various junctures it might well have gone otherwise. For example, the strong-minded king of Texcoco, Cacama, 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 a fait 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 �90 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW factors because both empires were autocracies, but were also in 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 Teotihuacan, 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: rhe daily, annual and epochal returns of the. heavenly bodywere 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 bpth th.e Nahua empire and the Nahua's souls. The West's relation t.o 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 �BRANN 91 it he shows that the mathematical rationalization of the 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 nature is ever~reliable, well-illuminated and confidenceinspiring. 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 starving Mexica came to the barricades. 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 .of Mexico ofl843, and his Conquest ofPeru of 1847. Of the first ~ook he himself wrote that it was conceived "not as a philo$ophical theme but as an epic in prose, a romarice.of, chivalry.'' For this approach later historians, for who111 demythification, deromanticization, and rhe dispersal of human deeds into forces and patterns is a professional requirement, despise.him somewhat, .and it .took me awhile. to see what valuable lesson..could be .drqwn from .his telling. Presc,ott has it right: first the great ,tale: then . the critical theory~ �92 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW From the first I knew I was reading the American Gibbon. We at St. John's used to read parts, particularly the 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 of 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 turn 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 imagine, belittled these days as naive, culture-bound, and ethnocentric. I shall have a �BRANN 93 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, thirtysix 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 �94 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW here write it down in this manner, for there is so much to think over that I do not know how to describe 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 knight-errants 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-of the 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 which the Mexica regarded as 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 �BRANN 95 completely removed from those foreign contacts that harden and protect, that at the very breath of conquest it vanished. Our tutor Jorge Aigla in Santa Fe has made a verse translation of an anonymous transcript of Tlatelolco, written only seven years after the starved and sick Mexica, who had defnded their city foot by foot, finally surrendered its devastated remains. Here are a few stanzas: And all of this happened to us. We saw it all We watched it happen With this sad and mournful fortune We saw each other's anguish. On the road lay broken arrows; Hairs are scattered The houses unroofed Their walls red, blackened. *** A price was set upon us. A price for the young man, the priest, The child, the virgin maiden. Enough! The price of a poor man was two handfuls of corn, only ten insect cakes; Our price was only twenty cakes of salty gruel. Gold, jades, rich embroidery, Quetzal plumages, All that which was precious Was valued not at all. .. �96 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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. Dfaz describes after decades a necklace made of golden crabs (others say crayfish) that Montezuma placed around Cortes's neck. Of course, Dfaz 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 of life. 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, teotl 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 frightfullooking 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: Sahagun, of whom I will shortly tell, records an Aztec ruler's admonitory speech in which he says: "For our lord seeth, �BRANN 97 heareth within wood, within stone." The god-representations were 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 relaci6n, letters of report, 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 postConquest 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-! don't know whether in mitigation or exacerbation-that he was also willing to suppress a brave but irrepressible compaflero'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 Garda Marquez to invent so magical �98 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW a reality. For, he says, "we saw things so 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 Bernadino 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 carry on the task of conversion, because, 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 native-born 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, Mexico (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 �BRANN 99 work, in twelve volumes, is known as the Florentine Corpus. Lisa Richmond, 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-fe, 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 �100 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW his Indian parishioners Motolinia, Nahuatl for "Little Poor One," since 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 �BRANN 101 accusation against the Spanish conquerors and colonists, and Cabesa de Vaca's Relaci6n, the 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 of "the 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 �102 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 Indiansand 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 home 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 tradition-since 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 sacrifice was unique, while Indian sacrifices were multitudinous. Las Casas is the preceptor of Tzetan 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 �BRANN 103 civilization than have the condoning contemporaries. For he induces 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 self-criticism 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 half in New Mexico; Incan Cuzco is nearly on our longitude of 76° 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 tamdlli 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 Dfaz 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 �104 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW imagination-experiments by which we see the world anew: What if, as King Cad.ma of Texcoco and some later historians thought possible, the Mexica 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 midfifteenth 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 postConquest 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 word-agglutinations; suppose as well that the speech of the Nahua 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 turn out to contribute the core and the other the decoration? My provisional answer is that �BRANN 105 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 the uninoculated 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. 1. 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 �106 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 MexicoTenochtitlan, 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 semisavages 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 those little hummingbirds are fierce fighters and 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-! 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 nectar-perfect examples of a dominant Aztec characteristic, the abrupt juxtaposing of or transiting from the brutal to the delicate. �BRANN 107 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 figures with their attributes all drawn indistinguishably on one plane and discriminable only to an expert in Aztec divinity. �108 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 of life. 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 mischief-making 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 Tolteca to sing 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 �BRANN 109 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 their 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 dcatl, One Reed, had come round again. In this year the Dear Lord was destined to return by boat from his trans-oceanic 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 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 �110 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 stoneand 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. 2. 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 of Huitzilopochtli, 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 their social life, must have had qualms and doubts-unless there is no way to infer from ourselves to others. �BRANN 111 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 presented 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-one 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 human was evidently well co-opted into the performance. Moreover, the cactus button peyotl and the mushroom teonandcatl, "Flesh of the Gods," both hallucinogens, and the alcoholic pulque seem to have been �112 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW administered to the sacrifices, who were, in any case, intoxicated with the ritual swirl and the musical stridor around them. For the prepared chosen at least this passage into a flowery next world was perhaps a high point of this lifethough 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 of Huitzilopochtli's people, the soldiers of the Sun, was war, and the object of war was to take captives, an even higher object than the merciless 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-! 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 of Tlaxcala, seated between itself and the eastern coast. There was a bizarre but logical institution in Anahuac, the so-called "flowery war," xochiya6yotl. The Triple Alliance of Anahuac, eventually dominated by Tenochtitlan and including Texcoco, had a �BRANN 113 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 high-born 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. 3. Montezuma was installed as tlatodni of MexicoTenochtitlan in 1502. Tlatoani 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 coming. Motolinia says (probably incorrectly) that his very name-nomen omen-meant one who is sad and serious, as well as one who inspires fear and respect. �114 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 their 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 thou 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? �BRANN 115 But there was also public education, a dual system. The Young Men's (and Women's) House, the telpochccilli, 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 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 were 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 revolutions and being an evil convention-as they said: "the fruit of a compact with the Devil." �116 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 year-bundles had gone by as would make the setting of the fifth Sun imminent, and with it the final destruction by earthquakes of Huitzilopochtli, his city, and the world whose center was Tenochtitlan. The year of 1519, moreover, was, as I said, ce acatl, "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 horrified 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 turn 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 �BRANN 117 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. Though it be jade it falls apart, though it be gold it wears away, though it be quetzal plumage it is torn 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 was 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. Myhouses, 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. �118 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 campania, the Holy Company, might indeed be bringing back QuetzalcoatlCortes, "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 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 �BRANN 119 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 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. Octavia Paz says in his Labyrinth of Solitude that the Aztecs committed suicide because they were betrayed by their gods. I think they were, speaking more precisely, betrayed by their trust in their visible and palpable gods, who (as I think 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. 4. 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 �120 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 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 fictiondefying 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 faithand 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; �BRANN 121 prudent and daring; circumspect and lightning-quick; generous and grasping; kind and manipulative; and always an adventurer and a wanderer and an elegant teller of adventures and wanderings-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 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 man 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 compamons. 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 turn up quite recognizably in the other, beginning with "constancy of purpose" -Odysseus is polytlas, the "much enduring"-including the occasional bouts of lassitude and 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-to-control 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 self-sufficient, who �122 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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-more parallelism-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 312 turned the Roman Empire Christian. Cortes's Christianity is a debated subject, but to me it seems unquestionable. It is-to state the obvious-Cortes's chief distinction from his pagan avatar, and to my mind the reason why, unlike Odysseus the Sacker of Troy who returns, however dilatorily, to his own rocky Ithaca, Cortes the Conquistador of Anahuac stays to colonize it for his "Most Catholic and Invincible Emperor." 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 of Huitzilopochtli. 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 permission from the priests for Cortes, who was clearly already �BRANN 123 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. 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 be 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 �124 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW there were none. But above all, Machiavelli doesn't seem to know, or at least to enunciate, the two kindred qualifications most needful to an imperial conquistador: large dreams and deep 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 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 of Huitzilopochtli'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: �BRANN 125 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, Cortes assumes that the Mexica are legally in rebellion (an imperial arrogation, to be sure, on par with the Aztec emperor's treatment of cities that refused the dominion of Huitzilopochtli). 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 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 Vargas 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 �126 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 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 and still is, albeit somewhat muted by recent events. 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 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 an unintelligible divine antic. �BRANN 127 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 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 QuetzalcoatlSt.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 similarseeming 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 belong- �128 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW ing 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 stupendously unwieldy 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 simply told "Good News" (Evangel/ion), 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 selfconfidence 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 physical toppling, to being bodily thrown down the temple stairs, as Moses had once burnt the golden calf. This 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 �BRANN 129 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 inventioninertia. Why did they not lever their simple tools into machines, those devices for compelling nature to outdo herself? Why did they refrain from enlarging their bare-eyed observation through those instruments that bring close things that are beyond and below human vision? Why had they, as gifted a people as ever was, no interest in seizing the mechanical advantage or extending sensory acuity? Well, as for the latter, they had no glass for lenses (which is why Cortes's glass baubles were acceptable gifts). But then-why not? 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 was deliberately remote-the tlatoani, the Speaker, not the spoken-to, whose subjects had to avert their eyes when he passed-and autocratic; the project of propagating to all the world a truth felt �130 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW to be universal that unquestionably drove Cortes if not the "Holy Company"-the name was first given ironicallywhereas the Mexica, once the conquered cities had accepted Huitzilopochtli, collected their gods in turn, ever more of them, for whom Montezuma even established a sort of allAnahuac pantheon; and (significant for our times) above all, the tenacity of the Christians in holding on to life, whereas the Aztecs seemed somehow-I'm far from understanding it-to surrender themselves more readily to the thought of death and so 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 All 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, Malinali or Malinche, the Mexican princess christened Dona Marina. It was his �BRANN 131 partnership with her that gave him his Nahua nicknamethe 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, Don Martin Cortes (named after the Conquistador's father), a son to whom he was attached, as Odysseus was to his-more legitimate-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 this self-reliant, energetic type produces the tradition of trust in nature's manageableness or the tradition of inquisitiveness generates the type of the man of many devices, the polymechanos. 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 in their high-bred, melancholic rigidity and their fearful care for the courses of their Sun characteristics that were, so to speak, the fateful complement, the matched antithesis, of the confident and focused daring of the Western invaders. 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 our West in its apparently irresistible expansiveness and if, on thoughtful consideration, it proves necessary, acknowledge candidly its superiority-superiority, that is, in the scope it gives, remarkably enough, to individual human nature by the very universality of its conceptions. And two, that we, as conscious representatives of that tradition, owe those overrun and �132 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW extinguished civilizations, with all their irreplaceable strange beauty, a remembrance-not merely as projects for research but as objects of human regard. Addendum: In the question period at the Santa Fe campus on September 13, 2002, a deeper issue than is broached above was raised. I have presented Cortes as the apt heir of a European tradition of ever-hopeful receptivity to and invention of machines and devices (one such, not mentioned above, is the huge-and ludicrously failed-catapult employed in the retaking of Tenochtitlan). Now the question was asked whether, aside from being a more freeing and invigorating faith than was the service of the Aztec pantheon, Christianity also provided the conditions for the transformation of the ancient theoria of natures into the modern science of Nature and the project of mastery; in other words: was Christianity implicated in technology? I have come upon this claim in an article by M.B. Foster in Mind of 1935-36. Its main point is this: Natural science presupposes that nature must embody an intelligible mathematical scheme, but which of the possible laws it realizes is left to experimental observation. These conditions imply that the world was created (not generated) by a God who wills it-hence its contingencybut whose will is constrained by his understanding-hence its intelligible lawfulness. This, Foster argues, is basic Christian theology. 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 ofTenochtitlan: Center and Periphery of the Aztec World. Berkeley: University of California Press. �BRANN 133 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nunez. 1542. The Account: Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's Relaci6n. 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, Davfd. 1982. Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Clendinnen, lnga. 1991. Aztecs: An Interpretation . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. Columbus, Christopher. 1492-1504. The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus. 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, Hernan. 1520's. Hernan Cortes, Letters from Mexico. Translated by Anthony Pagden. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1986). Diamond, Jared. 1999. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton. Dfaz del Castillo, Bernal. 1555. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. Translated by A. P. Maudslay. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1956). Dfaz, Gisele and Alan Rodgers. c. 1500. The Codex Borgia: A FullColor Restauration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript. New York: Dover Publications (1993). Florescano, Enrique. 1999. The Myth of Quetzalcoatl. Translated by Lysa Hochroth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. �134 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Foster, M.B. 1935 and 1936. "Christian Theology and the Science of Nature." Mind, 44 : 439-66 (part 1) ; 45: 1-27 (part 2). 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. 178 8. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1. New York: The Modern 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 Davfd Carrasco. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado. Lafaye, Jacques. 1976. Quetzalc6atl and Guadalupe: the Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813. Translated by Benjamin Keen. Foreword by Octavia 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 �BRANN 135 Aztec, Yucatec, Quiche-Maya and Other Sacred Traditions. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press. Llosa, Mario Vargas. 1990. "Questions of Conquest," Harper's Magazine (December):45-53. - - - . 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: Modern Library (1950). "Motolinfa" (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 ElDorado: 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 of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru. New York: The Modern Library. ---.History of the Conquest of Mexico. Introduction by James Lockhart. New York: Modern Library (2001). - - - . 1823-1858. The Literary Memoranda of William Hickling Prescott, Vols. 1, 2. 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Thomas, Hugh. 1993. Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico. New York: Simon and Schuster. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America: 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 Modern 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. �137 1- Plato's Timaeus and the Will to Order Peter Kalkavage "And whoever thinks another a greater friend than his own fatherland, I say that man is nowhere." Sophocles, Antigone 182-3 The Timaeus is the strangest of Plato's dialogues. It is so strange that one wonders whether anything in it can be taken seriously. Here conversation and inquiry are suspended, and in their place Plato gives us long speeches that take the form of myths. Socrates for the most part is silent. His silence is like the receptacle we hear about in Timaeus' speech: it provides the receptive "space" for all the stories and images to come. We hear about Solon among the Egyptians, the lost continent of Atlantis, an Athens grown young and heroic, the musical construction of the soul, and the geometric construction of body. We also hear about ourselves. These are the most bizarre tales the dialogue has to offer-tall tales about our souls and bodies, about how we came to have a sphereshaped head, a neck and torso, eyes and ears, liver and spleen, bone and flesh, an upright posture; about the manifold diseases that afflict body and soul; about where sex came from, and how birds evolved from feather-brained astronomers. With the Timaeus, even more than with other hat dialogues, we wonder what in the world Plato is up to. \'(T is the point of all this cosmomania? And why is Socrates silent? The silence of Socrates in the Timaeus signals the absence and withdrawal of philosophy itself, as Socrates understands it, from the day's proceedings. In particular, it signals the Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John's College. This lecture was delivered in Annapolis on March 24, 2000. �138 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW absence of that erotic stnvmg that draws the philosopher beyond the passing show of mortal opinion to a godlike vision of what eternally is. Plato's strange drama draws us away from this striving. It directs our attention to a form of thymos or spiritedness that may be called a "will to order." This will is glorified in the famous likely story of Timaeus. Craftsmanship, rather than contemplation, is the hero of the story. Philosophy in a sense makes an appearance ; but it tends to be understood as the mastery of distinct disciplines, the systematic presentation of theories, the building of models, and the solving of problems. It is philosophy made technical and effective-philosophy (if one may call it that) with all the divine madness taken out of it. Plato was so thorough a student of Socrates that he imagined what it would mean to go beyond Socrates-beyond the knowledge of ignorance, the claim not to teach, the treatment of virtue as a perpetual question, and the tension between philosophy and the city. In the Timaeus, Plato seeks to interest us profoundly in one such experiment in going beyond Socrates, an experiment in which the love of wisdom is displaced by the will to order.l The true center of the Timaeus is not its cosmology but the desire of Socrates. This is the motive force behind all the speeches to come. Socrates presents his desire in his longest and most important speech in the dialogue. Yesterday, Socrates gratified the desire of Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates, and the absent fourth to hear what Socrates thought about the best political order. He did so, he says, because he knew he would then be able to make a demand on them (20B). He knew that those who showed up today would be compelled by justice to pay him back with a "feast of speech" -a feast that would depict the just city in the act of , waging war. Socrates expresses his desire through a provocative simile. "My affection," he says, "seems to be something like this: it's as if someone who gazed upon beautiful animals ' somewhere, either produced by the art of painting or truly living but keeping their peace, were to get a desire to gaze �KALKAVAGE 139 upon them moving and contending in some struggle that seemed appropriate to their bodies" (19B-C). The most striking thing about this desire is its irrationality. Socrates does not say, ''And so, now that we've looked at the just city at rest, it makes sense to investigate the city in motion." On the contrary, he portrays himself as a man struck by a passing fancy. It is no thought, no logic that leads to the city in motion but a mere feeling or pathos. The irrationality is heightened by Socrates' reference to chance: he just happens to feel like this (19B), the way we might just happen to want to go to the movies. Furthermore, the desire for the deeds and words of war seems to spring from thymos or spiritedness, which delights in honor and victory rather than truth. Socrates depicts himself as desiring, not a philosophic account, but an encomium or song of praise. What he seems to want from his hosts is not truth but beautification or flattery. This fits well with the dominant word of the dialogue, kosmos, which means not just order but ornament and beautiful display. It also fits with the name Timaeus, which suggests time, honor. But why would Socrates, who refuses to put up with the flattery of love in the Symposium, here in the Timaeus compel his hosts to engage in flattery? And how is the cosmology of Timaeus related to such a project? The Timaeus is the story of a descent into Becoming. It appears to be a sequel to the Republic. In that dialogue, Socrates and Glaucon bring the discussion to its highest point when they take up the question of philosophic education. To reveal the need for such an education, they go down into a cave. Human nature, we are told, dwells in a cavelike condition of ignorance and deception (7 .514A). The word for condition in this passage is the same as the one Socrates uses here in the Timaeus to describe himself-pathos, which also means feeling or affection, as well as suffering or affliction. The cave is the place of political orthodoxy or right opinion. The cave dwellers sit in a sort of prenatal position with their gaze forced upon the cave wall. They are enthralled-that is, �140 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW both fascinated and enslaved-by moving two-dimensional images of three-dimensional artifacts, projected. on the wall by the enforcers of the city's opinions. These projectionists are no doubt the poets, whose art of making deceptive imitations of human excellence binds the souls of the cave-citizens to the city's beliefs and customs. The prenatal position of the cave people suggests that they are in a kind of womb which paradoxically refuses to give them birth and bring them to light, refuses to let them grow into free and upright beings. To ensure their provincialism, the protective cave-mother keeps them in the dark and charms them with exciting political movies that stir the soul to praise and blame. The potential philosopher seeks freedom from this stultifying, prenatal condition. He is turned around, converted, from Becoming to Being and eventually to the study of the Good. The art of thus turning the soul around, as Socrates describes it, comes from the power of mathematics.2 Just as the Republic takes us from Becoming "up" to Being, so the Timaeus brings us back "down"-back to the cave of body, custom, opinion, and change. The dialogue is a grand defense or apologia of Becoming in response to Socrates' indictment of Becoming in the Republic. The will to plunge from the heights of Being into the depths of Becoming is intimately connected with the will to order, for the turn from Being to Becoming is also the turn from theory or contemplation to practicality and accomplishment. Becoming engages us as practical, productive beings. As children of Becoming, we are caught up in the doing and making of things. We are ambitious, restless beings desirous of both honor and mastery. Socrates' hosts, who are praised for their reputation and accomplishment,3 have an agenda: to make the realm of doing and making look as good as possible. They will try to renovate th~ cave of Becoming in order to make it more receptive to the intentions and designs of enlightened political craftsmanship. But this political agenda requires a �KALKAVAGE 141 preliminary step: a divine sanction and a basis in the overall scheme of things. The will to order cannot accomplish politically what nature will not let it accomplish in the first place. There must be a predisposition to order. This is where the cosmological myth of Timaeus comes in. Through the power of science and fiction combined, Timaeus will make Becoming stand forth as a kosmos or beautifully ordered Whole. This Whole is not so much discovered by the cosmologist as it is made. Mathematics, here, has a role contrary to the one it had in the Republic. Instead of turning the soul from her fixation with Becoming to the dialectical study of Being, mathematics now supplies the beautifying principles in accordance with which the cave of Becoming can be transformed into an enlightened home for moral correctness, political reform, and scientific research. The adjective kosmios in Greek means decent and well behaved. This is the quality that Timaeus will try to infuse into the world of Becoming. He will try to make the wild world of body and change decent and law-abiding, at least in speech. The turn from Being to Becoming is, in effect, the undoing of philosophic conversion. This turn is most clearly seen in the character of Critias, the spokesman in the dialogue for nomos or convention. At one point he tells Socrates that the city described on the previous day was in fact a myth, and that he, Critias, will carry over Socrates' merely theoretical city into what he calls "the truth" (26C7-D3) . Critias identifies the truth with Becoming. His extreme vanity regarding his genealogy and his family connections with the great Solon confirms this fact. The ancient Athens Solon hears about from the Egyptian priests is more real than Socrates' city because it actually existed in a real terrestrial place-so Critias would have us believe. According to the wisdom of Egypt, a wisdom Critias clearly admires, what is older is more real and authoritative than what is younger and more recent. Old ways are best. The oldest things are the most real and true, and the oldest priests are the wisest of all. Truth is a �142 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW long-standing custom or nomos, and knowledge consists in the oldest hearsay about the oldest things.4 The Timaeus is a time machine. It attempts to unearth hidden origins by taking us back to those origins in mythic time. Throughout the dialogue, speech is playfully depicted as generative or originating and, in that sense, thoroughly temporal. Solon's story takes us back to a forgotten place at a forgotten time . What he hears from the Egyptian priest is about the periodic structure of time itself. Critias, in order to retrieve this story, goes back to the time when he was very young. Timaeus, too, stresses the playfully generative power of speech: he presents the cosmic order, not as it eternally is, but as it came to be "once upon a time." This temporalization of logos is yet another way in which the Timaeus takes us back to temporal beginnings but not "up" to eternal principles. Instead of recollection, as we hear it described in the Meno, the Timaeus steeps us in the shadow land of memory. Such is my prelude to the speech of Timaeus. In what follows, we shall explore how this speech embodies the will to order. What is thinking in the likely story? What does it mean to be kosmios, cosmic, in one's thinking? What is the strength, and the weakness, of such thinking? My attempt to address these questions falls into three parts, which mirror the tripartite order of Timaeus' speech: The Piety of Physics, Space Dreams, and The Human Condition. The Piety of Physics Timaeus introduces the phrase "likely story" in what Socrates calls the prelude or preamble to the speech itself (29D). Socrates reminds Timaeus that he ought to invoke the gods according to nomos or convention. Timaeus agrees that it would be sound-minded or moderate to do so, thereby exhibiting his favorite moral virtue. He adds an invocation that reflects a curious brand of piety. "We must also invoke to hemeteron," he says-what comes from, or has to do with, ourselves, our own resources (27D). This self-invocation �KALKAVAGE 143 embodies the will to order that animates the upcoming myth. God, as Timaeus proceeds to say, is a demiurge or craftsman. But a stronger and more daring claim seems to be at work: the claim that productive art, demiurgy, in some sense is our god. Timaeus begins his prelude by drawing a sharp distinction between Being and Becoming. The strictness of the distinction makes it extremely difficult to understand how a cosmos, as the mixture of Being and Becoming, could ever come about at all. This is typical of Timaeus: he makes hard and fast distinctions and then immediately proceeds to blur them. After thus distinguishing what always is from what always comes to be, Timaeus introduces his famous demiurge. This mythical figure, in whom the will to order is most evident, hovers between the realms of Being and Becoming. The word demiourgos means "one who works for the people or demos." It refers to anyone who crafts anything.s Now we all delight in a thing well made-a well-made chair, building or piece of music. We love the way everything fits together beautifully, and how a thing well made is a thing that lasts. In the likely story, Timaeus counts on and seeks to gratify this human delight. He makes the world of nature into a well-made, longlasting artifact.6 The divine craftsman is postulated, willed into being. There is no proof for his existence. The question for Timaeus is not whether there really is such a being but what he was looking at when he made the world: was it a changeable or an unchangeable model? Timaeus at one point expresses skepticism regarding our ability to discover the true poet and father of the world (28C). He makes us suspect that the demiurge is a practical postulate that fills the void of our theological ignorance, that he is not the true god, whom we cannot presume to know, but the god whom decent, intelligent people should believe in if they are to affirm the best of possible worlds. Later we hear that this divine craftsman is good and therefore ungrudging (29£) . Unlike the gods of �144 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Herodotus, the divine craftsman had no envy: he did not jealously guard his divine prerogative, the flame of artful intelligence, but wished that all things should possess it to the extent that their natures allowed.7 Artful intelligence, one might say, is always in the mode of generosity. It seeks to bestow itself on the world as a divine gift; it rejoices in seeing itself multiplied, reflected, and embodied. The cosmos comes about, not through chance and necessity, nor through the sex and violence depicted in Hesiod's Theogony, but through the sober professionalism of techne or art. By presenting god as a generous craftsman, a divine being who works for the common good, Timaeus saves us from making god in the image of a tyrant. For Timaeus, the world of body and change is made in the likeness of a changeless and purely intelligible archetype or model. Timaeus expresses his preference for a changeless model in pious terms: it would be "not right," ou themis, that is, blasphemous to say otherwise (29A). Herein lies one reason why the likely story is likely. Likely, eikos, means "has the character of a likeness." It also means probable, reasonable, and equitable or fair. Speech for Timaeus imitates the condition of its objects. Accounts of what is abiding and intelligible, he says, "are themselves abiding and unchanging" (29B), while accounts of the nonabiding and changing, accounts of mere likenesses, are afflicted with likelihood. In an echo of the divided line in the Republic, Timaeus says: "just as Being is to Becoming, so is truth to trust" (29C). Likely stories are not put forth for the sake of insight but are a kind of rhetoric. We must be persuaded by them, trust them, and put up with their necessary flaws. The infirmity of speech about divine origins points to a deeper infirmity-human nature. Timaeus tells Socrates that he must not wonder if many of the things said about the gods and the birth of the All are self-contradictory and imprecise (29C). This is where the phrase "likely story" first appears. Adopting the formal tone of a man accused, Timaeus says: �KALKAVAGE 145 "But if we provide likelihoods inferior to none, one should be well pleased with them, remembering that I who speak as well as you my judges have a human nature, so that it is fitting for us to receive the likely story about these things and not to search further for anything beyond it" (29C-D).9 This sentence about accepting likely stories points to the connection that physical accounts have, for Timaeus, to both piety and prudence. Timaeus draws a line beyond which prudent human beings should not go in speaking of things divine. But the drawing of this line is not just an admission of infirmity. Rather, it demarcates the realm within which human beings precisely because they are aware of their limitations and all the contingencies of life, are all the more able to exert their powers of prudent mastery, their will to order. Timaeus' defense of the inevitable shortcomings of his speech is a not-so-veiled warning against the immoderateness and erotic striving of philosophy. The immoderate questioning of everything, if left to itself, would undermine the controlled play of invention with the unpredictable play of conversation. In the end, it would prevent human nature from being as masterful as it could be. Timaeus thus cautions Socrates against being Socrates, against asking questions and striving to go beyond the boundaries of plausibly established grounds. Socrates must be receptive to, and content with, the likely story about divine origins. If he wants to enjoy his feast, he must mind his manners and act like a gentleman. He must control his striving to be divine and remember that as Timaeus' harshest judge, he too is, after all, only human. Socrates is more than happy to accept the terms on which his guest-gift is offered. In the most telling moment of the dialogue, Socrates calls the likely story, not a logos or mythos, not an account or a story, but a nomos (29D). Nomos is both law and song, as well as custom and convention. Timaeus is our singer and legislator for the day. He will entertain us, but he will also lay down the law. His logos is a form of music. It sings of Nature as both a divine Artifact and a divinely estab- �146 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW lished nomos or Convention. It celebrates the prudent founding of the cosmic regime and invites us to join in by following all the mathematical constructions. Long before Critias gives man his Athenian citizenship in the dialogue, the physics of Timaeus will make us dutiful citizens of the world at large-good cosmopolitans. The world for Timaeus is both image and god.9 This is his central teaching. Unlike the images put forth by Socrates, the cosmic image does not point beyond itself. If it did so, it would cease to be a god. In the divided line, Socrates revealed the power of what he calls eikasia, imagination. It was at the bottom of the line and served as the foundation for the whole line. This is the power of recognizing images as images, likenesses as likenesses.lO It is the power by which we are able to make our ascent up the line. In the upper, intelligible portion of the line, eikasia is the power by which we move from hypotheses to non-hypothetical archai or principles. This power is absent in the Timaeus, where we have plenty of image making and imitation but no image recognition as such, at least not the sort of image recognition by which the soul is enabled to move from images to their intelligible originals. To be sure, the world of Timaeus is full of images. But these are all internal to the cosmos, all within the realm of Becoming. Images here do not transcend themselves, even though they are crafted in the likeness of intelligible originals. This seems to be the direct result of the fact that they are artificial: art, whether human or divine, conceals its foundations in order to build on them. The original points "down" to the image; but the image does not point back "up" to the original. Mathematics is no longer the prelude to "the song of dialectic," as it was in the Republic,11 and the eide seem to be necessary only in the way that a lifeless blueprint guides and points ahead to the actual building. Furthermore, when Timaeus first appeals to the intelligible model, he does so for the sake of beauty and stability rather than truth (28A-B). The model is postulated so that the cosmic edifice will be secure j' �KALKAVAGE 147 and beautifully built-not so that the human soul, by reflecting on the heavens, might be drawn to the super-heavenly beings that are beyond all hypothesis. The construction of the cosmic soul is the most impressive architectural feat of Timaeus' first account of origins. The soul is made out of music-a scale that stretches four octaves and a major sixth in Pythagorean tuning. This act of scale building is the most revealing instance of the will to order and of what cosmic thinking means for Timaeus. Cosmic thinking is productive and practical rather than theoretical. It makes sturdy and beautiful wholes out of beautiful parts by negotiating its way through technical difficulties. Here the divine craftsman takes the beautiful ratios of the Pythagoreans and finds a way of fitting them together in a coherent whole. He then bends his diatonic pattern into circles and makes the orbits for the Sun, Moon, and planets. These outwardly appearing circles are then mythically presented as the inward revolutions of discursive thought, dianoia. But before he does any of this, the craftsman first makes a kind of intelligible dough out of the forms of Being, Same, and Other, and kneads them into "one entire look." He must use force or violence, since Other is loath to mix with Same (35A-B). Here we have the most obvious example of the will to order in the dialogue. Same and Other, as Timaeus understands them, have no natural togetherness. He denies them the dialectical interweaving and participation in one another's natures that we hear about in the Sophist (253A). Same and Other are simply separate ingredients, like Being and Becoming. Force is required to get them to mix. The result is not an intelligible unity but a highly useful blur. It is as though Timaeus wanted to convince us of the impossibility of ever understanding the world dialectically so that he could get on with the more productive task of flattering the world with mathematical constructs. He raises a dialectical problem only to bury it with art. �148 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW At several pivotal moments in his speech, Timaeus reminds us that the cosmos is a god. The god who made the world, in other words, bestows his divinity on the world. Physical science, especially astronomy, thus becomes the ' truest form of piety. Strictly speaking, astronomy, like scale building, is not theoretical for Timaeus but is a form of praxis. This praxis supplies medicine and therapy for the human soul. In our heads are housed the divine circuits of Same and Other (44D). These are the circuits of sound judgement or phronesis, the circuits that govern a morally healthy life. But once they are immersed in the sea of Becoming and given mortal birth, they become deformed and we grow abysmally ignorant and disordered. (Witness the behavior of babies.) Before our birth as mortal beings, we dwelled with the gods, whose happy life consisted in regularity, symmetry, and perpetual health. This divinely healthy life Timaeus calls the form, eidos, of our "first and best condition" (42D). Astronomy is thus the great human homecoming, the happy return to our heavenly origins. It is also the medicine by which we correct and stabilize what Timaeus calls "the wander-stricken circuits in ourselves" (47C).12 The piety, moderation, and lawfulness of Timaeus set him at odds with eros and its notorious destabilizing influence over human life. His war on eros is evident throughout the dialogue. Eros, as it is described in the Symposium, is a yearning for that which one lacks, and Timaeus cannot abide lack. He is driven to structural perfection, completeness, and mastery. Timaeus is always filling things up. We see him filling up the part of a missing fourth at the very beginning (17A-B), filling up the musical intervals of octave and perfect fourth (35C ££.),rejecting the existence of a void (SOC), and filling our ignorant souls with scientific explanations designed to dispel our wonder and cure our perplexity (SOB-C). He is careful to make the cosmos into a nonerotic animal, an , animal that feels no lack. If the cosmos is to be a "happy god," as he calls it (34B), then it must be complete and �KALKAVAGE 149 autonomous or self-related. Timaeus bestows on it the shape of a sphere to ensure this result (33A ff.). As a sphere, the god Cosmos neither needs nor fears anything whatsoever outside itself. It has no arms, no legs, no sense organs, none of the things we humans have that remind us of our condition of dependence and vulnerability.13 This happy lack in the cosmic body is mirrored in what is said about the cosmic soul-the best of all begotten things (3 7A). The life of this soul consists in thinking. This is not philosophic contemplation but the condition of unending, unerring sensibleness or right judgement. This judgement is mythically depicted as the inward circling of thought. Happiness, for Timaeus, is really healthiness, and the healthy process and condition of thinking are, in the end, more important than what thinking is ultimately about. If there is any pleasure in the soul's life of perpetual sensibleness, it must be the pleasure of being constantly busy gathering information. She has no leisure. Soul is the thought-energy of the world-always knowing what is going on everywhere and always reporting to herself what she finds. She is like the Egyptian priests described in Solon's account, and her truth, like theirs, is really factual correctness. In the complex description that Timaeus gives of the soul's intellectual activity, he avoids the metaphor of seeing. Seeing suggests the possibility of arousal and the pleasure we take in simply beholding the objects of desire. The dominant metaphor instead is that of touch, which is more amenable to a mechanical and physiological view of thinking. This absence of seeing in the cosmic soul stands in marked contrast with what we hear in the myths of the Phaedo and Phaedrus, where the soul's ultimate joy consists in the leisured and ecstatic vision of eternal truth. Seeing is honored in the likely story. Without our vision of the starry motions, we would never have discovered the arts of arithmetic and astronomy (47A-B). But this seeing inspires thoughts of duty rather than of love. Indeed, the stars �150 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW themselves move in circles for Tirnaeus not, as Aristotle suggests in the Metaphysics, because they are in love with the divine intellect,14 but because it is their assigned duty to do so. Their prompting comes from piety toward a father rather than desire for a beloved. In beholding the starry motions, we indeed behold beauty. The function of this beauty, however, is not to entice or arouse but to rectify. The glory of seeing, for Tirnaeus, is that it leads, ultimately, to the highest form of touch: the being in touch with our better, starry selves. To think cosmically is to align our souls with the authority and will of the heavens, especially with the all-mastering circle of the Same (36C-D). In such a world as this, to think is not to see but to obey-to obey, that is, the masterful motions of our own souls projected onto the starry sky. Space Dreams The Timaeus is not just about order; it is also about disorder. Plato makes disorder a rich and interesting topic. It even acquires a certain dignity in the likely story. Disorder comes from chance or what Tirnaeus also calls "necessity" (47E) and "the wandering cause" (48A). This cause is present from the very beginning of the dialogue when a fourth failed to show up according to plan. Tirnaeus, in his very first likely story of the dialogue, asks Socrates to believe that the mysterious fourth was absent because he carne down with something, that his absence was the work of chance and necessity rather than choice. Chance and necessity are also present in the best city that Socrates summarizes. Try as the city may to vanquish disorder and keep people in their proper classes, the unpredictable sway of eros and sexual generation messes things up (19A).15 The city can maintain its good order only by a constant and hard to imagine redistribution of human types.l6 But necessity is not just the spoiler of the best-laid plans. It is also the other great cause, without which the cosmos , could never have been made. This is its dignity. Just as artful intelligence is the cause of the good and the beautiful, so �KALKAVAGE 151 necessity is the cause of power and effectiveness. At a pivotal moment in the likely story, Timaeus says: "For mixed indeed was the birth of this cosmos here, and begotten from a standing-together of necessity and intellect" (47E-48A). He goes on to tell us that the world came about through the persuasion of necessity by intellect. The world, in short, originated in a grand piece of rhetoric. Presumably, this rhetoric goes on continually, as the realm of efficient causes constantly cooperates, for the most part, with that of final causes. It is hard to see what Timaeus means by "persuasion" here. Nevertheless, a direct consequence of the image is that it reminds us that intellect and necessity are two fundamentally different and opposed orders of causality. Even as it yields to thoughtful persuasion, necessity retains its right to do as it pleases. Timaeus thus saves the phenomenon of unpredictability. In this second founding of the cosmos, Timaeus is at pains to make Becoming sound as perplexing as possible. Becoming is the realm of unstable and illusory appearance.17 Earth, air, fire, and water all appear to be constantly changing into each other. They cannot be called elements at all, since they lack integrity and steadfastness. To use Timaeus' language here, you can never accuse fire of being a "this," since, no sooner do you call it "this," fire, than it changes into "that," air. It is always escaping the indictment of stability (49E). The legitimate name for any of the elements is therefore not "this" but "suchlike" or "of this sort" (49B-50A).18 The assumption of radical flux leads Timaeus to postulate the existence of a mysterious "in which" that is prior to body and is the abiding and underlying substrate of change. In the language of Spinoza, this "in which" is the enduring substance of which earth, air, fire and water (not to mention their composites) are but passing modes. It is not really a thing at all but a force field, the medium not of determinate things but of tensions and resolutions-the field of things happening. Just as the soul seems to be the world's thought-energy, the receptacle �-------------------------------------- 152 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW seems to be its body-energy, energy that somehow remains self-same and "conserved" even as it assumes a variety of forms. Timaeus has many names for this field of dynamic qualities that underlies and causes change. He calls it a receptacle and wet nurse (49A, 52D), a mold (SOC), and a mother of Becoming (52D). It is simultaneously the unpredictable cause of motion and the indeterminate ground of imaging. Art and nature are continually blended in the likely story. Here this uneasy blend-one of Timaeus' many blurrings-is especially prominent. On the one hand, Timaeus likens the receptacle to gold, which is constantly being worked into different geometric shapes by a tireless goldsmith (50A-B). The curious image reminds us of Timaeus' fascination with ornament: even the matter out of which a cosmos is made must be thought of as artistic and golden-a beautiful medium just begging for a craftsman. On the other hand, the receptacle is clearly biological or natural-not an artificial "it" but a living "she," the cosmic womb and mother who gives birth to the four kinds and keeps them in motion. The elusive receptacle is not a merely passive substrate for form but a never-failing process that somehow differentiates itself spontaneously or from within, like the morphogenesis we witness in living things. If the receptacle is body-energy, it also seems to be life-energy. That is, the receptacle seems to correspond to a certain primordial understanding of soul. In spite of Timaeus' attempt to bring space down to earth through humble similes like winnowing baskets (52E) and the manufacture of perfumes (50E), the parts of his account are obscure at best and don't seem to fit together. The incoherence seems to reflect the elusive character of space itself. For example, space, chora, not only gives all things place; it also dislodges them from their place (52E-53A). Space, we are told, is like an instrument that causes shaking (53A). It is the underlying cause of all the circulation and turbulence in the mortal realm. It governs everything from vibrating strings to �KALKAVAGE 153 the circulation of the blood to earthquakes. We experience this turbulence in the constant flow of our bodies and in the passion of our souls. We also witness it, or rather hear about it, in the rise and fall, the flowering and ruin, of cities and even whole civilizations. The cycles of birth and death recorded by the Egyptians are all due to the sway of space, and so are the fates of legendary Atlantis and Plato's contemporary Athens. But the most interesting thing Timaeus says about space has to do with dreams. Space is neither purely intelligible nor purely sensible. It is "graspable by some bastard reasoning with the aid of insensibility, hardly to be trusted, the very thing we look to when we dream and affirm that it's somehow necessary for everything that is to be in some region and occupy some space, and that what is neither on earth nor somewhere in heaven, is nothing" (52A-B). This amazing description of space reminds us of Critias, who claimed to make Socrates' city real by giving it place-Athenian place. If the chora is, as Timaeus' description seems to indicate, a seductive Siren who bewitches us into thinking that to be is to be spatial, then Critias appears to be her adoring slave and victim, her "space man." The dream-inducing power of space reminds us of the cave-mother of the Republic. Space is the cosmic counterpart and ground of our cave-condition. It is the prepolitical, natural ground of our susceptibility to political indoctrination and of our unreflective rootedness in a political place. Critias first heard the story about Athens and Atlantis during the festival of Apaturia (21A-B). On this day, Athenian boys were initiated into their tribe as a preparation for fullfledged citizenship.19 The ceremony involved the singing of songs. Critias remembers singing the songs of Solon, which were new at the time. Through the festival that Critias nostalgically recalls, Plato draws our attention to the very moment in time when, through songs that are also laws, young prepolitical souls are planted in the soil and chOra of �154 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW the motherland. The word Apaturia derives from the word pater, father. But it also suggests the word apate, deception, thus suggesting a dark side to this heart-warming event. In being welcomed into the fold of tribe and city, the nascent citizens are nourished on the nomoi. These laws and customs are made sweet through song and are thus magically transformed into sentiments. The laws and customs will, from this moment on, give the children eyes to see with and ears to hear with. As dyed-in-the-wool citizens, they will be incapable of seeing and hearing anything else, anything outside the boundaries of their protective "space." Convention will be their wisdom. Earlier, I suggested that eikasia, image recognition, is not present in the Timaeus. Here in the receptacle we have the sort of imagination that is present. The cosmic space that is the ground of body seems, at another level, to be the inner "space" of imagining-the phantasia of our souls. This is the faculty that does not recognize images as images but rather makes images and welcomes them unquestioningly. According to this inner sense, the receptacle is our phantasia writ large and made into a cosmic cause. When Socrates expressed his desire for animals in motion, he seemed to speak from within this very faculty. His irrational receptivity to the speeches of his hosts, the pathos that he seems to have contracted, is a playful imitation of our all-too-human susceptibility to exciting images. It is the susceptibility that allows us to be entertained and kept in the cave. Timaeus calls attention to the fact that space is like a dream-inducing drug. He also makes it clear that he posits the existence of what he calls "the unsleeping and truly subsisting nature" (52B). Presumably this refers to Being and the realm of the eide of the four elements. Timaeus at one point "casts his vote" for such beings (51D). But as we saw earlier, it is not Timaeus' intention to use cosmic images to wake us up from our space dreams so that we might transcend the cosmos through dialectic. Likely stories employ the hypothesis of the �KALKAVAGE 155 forms in order to involve us, safely and entertainingly, in the dangerous realm of body and Becoming. They are the dreams of a sly and healthy soul. Having alerted us to the fact of deception, to the poetic sophistry of space, Timaeus proceeds to manufacture deceptive dreams of his own. These are the beautiful mathematical dreams that invite us to imagine the four elements of body, four beautiful animals in motion, as though they were four regular geometric solids. Along with the construction of soul out of musical ratios, the construction of body out of geometrical figures is a paradigm of what cosmic thinking means for Timaeus. The demiurge is virtually absent here, and so the ingenious model building arises completely from what has to do with us and our will to order. The whole account is playfully deceptivea grand piece of poetic sophistry, in which image-making is promiscuously fused with argument, mythos with logos. The sophistry of geometrical physics reminds us of what Timaeus had earlier called bastard or illegitimate reasoning. And the poetry or phantasia that plays the guardian to this reasoning reminds us of what he had called insensibility. Timaeus would have us believe that geometric solidity or three-dimensionality can explain the properties of physically solid bodies. Like Descartes, he attempts to explain body in terms of extension. The questionable nature of this project is underscored by Timaeus himself, who calls on "god the savior to grant us safe passage out of a strange and unusual narration to the decree based on likelihoods" (48D). Like his mythic goldsmith, Timaeus schematizes space with geometrical shapes. First, he selects the regular solids as archetypes for the four elements of body. He does so on the grounds that they are "the most beautiful bodies" (53D). Truth seems not to be at issue, unless "is true" means nothing more than "beautifully fits the appearances." Next, he fits together or "harmonizes" the geometric solids by constructing their faces and assembling them through a kind of cut-and-paste method. The construction here is very childlike �156 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW and unsophisticated. Finally, he assigns each solid to the elemental body or kind that seems to be most like it: the cube to earth, the pyramid to fire, the octahedron to air, and the icosahedron to water. This account of body renovates and beautifies our imagination of change. Change, the drunken spree of appearance, is now the elegant rearrangement of structural parts. Dionysus, it seems, has been persuaded to accept the sober gifts of Apollo. As for the dodecahedron, the god, we are told, used it to make panels for decorating the sky with animals, presumably the animal figures of the zodiac and the various constellations (55C). The apparently off-hand explanation actually reveals the point of all that has gone before: the regular solids are a kind of jewelry that beautifies and flatters the world. The mathematization of body and change makes nature more presentable and more pleasantly thinkable for decent-minded human beings. In his Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl refers to what he calls the "garb of ideas," with which modern mathematical physics dresses up nature, covers its naked truth, with the formal attire of constructs and symbols.20 Timaeus is doing consciously and deliberately what Husserl says the modern physicist does for the most part unconsciously. He is covering up nature with a gorgeous dress of ratios and geometric figures. Through Timaeus' playful, ceremonial act of dressing up the world, Plato entertains us with a new kind of physicsa mythematical physics. The properties and behavior of fire, for example, are now traced to geometric causes. Why is fire hot? Why does it burn? Why, because it is a pyramid, and pyramids have sharp angles and keenly cutting sides (5 6E57A). Why is earth resistant to change and motion? Why, because it is a cube, and the isosceles triangles out of which a cube's square faces are composed are not capable of being redistributed to form the equilateral triangular faces of the other solids. Furthermore, a triangular base makes an object easy to tip, and a square base makes it harder to budge. Cause here is completely analogical. To explain body, for Timaeus, �KALKAVAGE 157 is to build geometric models for body that function as beguiling analogies. Perhaps it is more correct to call them metaphors, since the noble sophistry at work here consists in identifying physical body with its geometric analogue, that is, in blurring the distinction between the model and that of which it is the model. This is what Critias says he will do with Socrates' theoretical city: He will establish a beguiling correspondence and harmony between that city and ancient Athens (26C-D)-a correspondence that will be so exact that one would swear that the two cities were one and the same. Socrates' desire was, at bottom, to be entertained by deceptive, life-like images that blur the distinction between the real and the fabricated: the animals in motion he wanted to see and hear about could be either "truly living" or "produced by the art of painting." Timaeus and Critias enact a will to order that provides Socrates with just such entertainment. Like astronomy, physics for Timaeus has a practical function. Becoming is not just something we contemplate and want to get to the bottom of. It is also our life-sustaining world, the cosmic source of our coming to be and passing away. We are the children of Becoming and must speak appropriately about our cosmic mother. In speaking rightly of the cosmos in general, Timaeus attempts to give physical science a moral defense and reason for being. In fact, his physics seems to be a direct response to Socrates' youthful disenchantment with physics in the Phaedo. Timaeus does what Anaxagoras had failed to do-present the phenomena of change in terms of a best of possible worlds. He re-enchants the world with intelligence, moral purpose, and a kind of piety. Mathematical physics, quite apart from whether or not it reveals nature itself as mathematical, acquires its truest vocation in making us dutiful sons of the cosmic order. In addition, it soothes our serious and turbulent lives with a decorous distraction and provides what Timaeus calls "a pleasure not to be repented of" (59C-D). �158 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW The likely story teaches us how to sing noble songs of change. These songs aim at "saving the appearances." But they offer a form of consolation. They save us from despair over our world and help us to cope with, and even to enjoy, the otherwise meaningless spectacle of instability, violence, decay, and death. Indeed, according to the official report of the likely story, death from old age is geometric in nature and is therefore a pleasure to contemplate: it consists in the collapse of the perpendicular or root that keeps our inner triangles erect. These triangles give way at last after fighting numerous battles with the alien triangles that would invade and destroy us (81D). Structure is power, and Becoming is a war of structures, all battling constantly to preserve the identity of their constitutions or regimes. All mortal things eventually lose in this war-they die. But at least likely stories furnish us human beings with intellectual armor so that we may fight in the noblest and most intelligent way. Armed with what Timaeus calls "the power of likely accounts" (48D), we take on all comers who would disparage our cosmic place and sing a song of despair. As we go off to do battle with unhealthy opinions about the world, we remember the songs of our cosmic Apaturia. The Human Condition Timaeus' role in the dialogue is assigned to him by Critias. "It seemed good to us," he says, "that Timaeus here-since he's the most astronomical of us and the one who's most made it his business to know about the nature of the All-should speak first, beginning from the birth of the cosmos and ending in the nature of mankind" (27A). Man, prepolitical man, is the goal of the likely story. Timaeus achieves this goal in some of the weirdest, and funniest, moments in all the dialogues. What is human nature for Timaeus, and why were we born in the first place? Let us take the latter question first. Man comes about because the cosmos must be complete. If �KALKAVAGE 159 the world is to be perfectly filled, it must contain all the animal kinds represented in the eternal archetype that Timaeus calls "the intelligible animal" (39E). The various animals derive from the mystic number Four, which is alluded to in the dialogue's opening. The four animate kinds correspond to the four elements of body (39E ff.). The star gods are mostly made of fire. Then come animals that crawl on the earth, fly through the air and swim in the water. Man is not one of these four kinds. He is rather the generator of the mortal kinds, the means by which the lower kinds come to be. In his head, man lives the life of the gods, the life of circularity and prudence. But in his torso he contains all the lower animal possibilities-the thymos and rage of a lion, and the epithymia or desire of all mortal animals. In the very shape of his body, man thus unites the two cooperating causes of cosmic order. He is the unity-in-opposition of the good and the necessary. The original humans were in some sense male, although strictly speaking they lacked sexuality. When these "first men" yield to emotionality and vice, when they abuse their divine heritage, they are reborn, first as women, and then as the various subhuman animals they imitated in life (42C-D). The likely story, having begun with the stars, ends with shellfish. These animals devolve from humans who were "the most mindless and ignorant men of all" and whom the gods deemed no longer worthy of "pure breathing" (92B). The cosmos is thus completed by what Timaeus calls dike or just retribution (92C). And yet blame and punishment seem to have nothing to do with it at all. Vice and ignorance are necessary if the world is to have its full complement of animals. In spite of the fact that they are said to be "punished" by cosmic justice, vice and ignorance are nevertheless useful, indeed necessary, to the cosmic purpose. Man completes the world through his fall from divinity into the various animal forms. Timaeus is so complete in his will to order that he puts even moral evil and ignorance to an artistic use, thereby �160 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW completing his justification of god's ways to man. Evil, in a sense, becomes both ornament and demiurge. It is like the dissonance for which a piece of polyphony is all the sweeter. Such is man's cosmic function: he perfects and beautifies the world with his evil. But what is man's nature? Here I return to the word pathos, which occurs frequently in the dialogue. The recurrence of this word and its cognates signals the extent to which necessity rules the dialogue and its conception of a world. The human condition is a continual state of affection and affliction, a continual suffering or "being done to." Man suffers his birth and all his mortal baggage. His pathemata or passions are also sufferings, as Timaeus poetically reveals when he catalogues our "affections terrible and necessary." He cites "pleasure, evil's greatest lure," "pains, deserters of goods," "anger, difficult to appease," "hope, easy to seduce," all mixed together with Timaeus' archenemy, "all-venturing eros" (69C-D). Since he suffers desire, man must have arms, legs, and a digestive system. He must also have a respiratory system and a circulatory system. A reproductive system is grafted onto him only later, after he has suffered his first fall. Timaeus gives a long account of breathing. Breathing is completely mechanical in nature and requires no action of the soul. It is a pathos (79A)-not something we do but something we suffer. The surprisingly long discussion of disease highlights the fact that life is suffering. It is the correlate to Timaeus' glorification of health. Ignorance, too, is a disease-the greatest of all diseases (8 8B)-and education is therefore our greatest medicine and therapy. In Timaeus' case, we would have to say, ''A cosmologist looks at the world as a doctor looks at a patient." Just as Timaeus reveals the nature of the cosmos in the act of showing the cosmos being made, so too man's nature is revealed through the artful making of man. The likely story puts us at the scene of our own birth-or rather, manufacture. The gods put us together piece by piece, like benevolent �KALKAVAGE 161 Dr. Frankensteins. Since there is no intelligible model for man, they must make us up as they go along. The work is neither easy nor desirable. In fact, the gods make us only because they were told to do so by their father (41C-D). The making of man, as Timaeus explicitly describes it, is a pious desecration (69D). In obedience to their father and his will to order, the gods must take the good and beautiful principle of intelligence, the principle he most embodies, and defile it with mortal madness and complexity. Their work consists in the delicate and dangerous art of compromise. They must make us capable of unintelligent organic life while at the same time making us as good and intelligent as possible. The art of compromise is most evident when they invent our hair. Hair is a compromise between an unshielded head, which would make us very intelligent but short-lived, and a head protected by lots of flesh, which would make us long-lived but "dense" (75E-76D). The gods are provident for Timaeus. They make our parts always with an eye to the various falls we are destined to experience. They are always saving us from ourselves. They make flesh as a protective padding (74B) . They make our neck to keep our intelligent heads both separate from and attached to the lower regions of our being (69D-E). They make our intestines to fend off the constant gluttony that would prevent us from engaging in philosophic research (73A). And they make our liver smooth and shiny so that the intellect can use it as a reflecting medium to frighten and pacify the desirous part of the soul with appropriate moving images, thus bringing about a condition of law and order (71A-D). The point of all this outrageous wit seems to be that there is moral meaning and purpose to how we are built and who we are. Through all his physiological jokes, Timaeus causes our inward nature to appear right at the "surface" of our bodies. We are what we look like, and our being is revealed not through a dialectical inquiry into our nature but �162 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW through the scientific examination of our prudently designed structures and motions. Throughout the likely story, Timaeus gives mathematics a moral employment. In his account of man, he mathematicizes morality itself. At one point, we are told, "all the good is beautiful, and the beautiful is not disproportionate" (87C). Virtue and happiness are a matter of establishing the right ratios and proportions in things. Timaeus does not seem to think that virtue is something we don't know, something about which human beings most need to ask: what is it? Moral education is like medicine and gymnastics. It is simply a matter of paying attention to the manifest ratios that regulate life and seeing to it that the proper ratios and regimen are established (87C-E). Thinkers should make sure they get some physical exercise, and athletes should make sure they study music and the liberal arts (88B-C). A sound mind in a sound body. Like the cosmos, we must be well rounded. The human good is uncomplicated. It is, like the art of medicine, simply the conscientious application of sensible theory to life. It is the will to order. As we have seen, Timaeus is driven to filling things up and making them complete. But in at least one respect his cosmos is not complete. It does not contain the philosopher as dialectician. In the opinion of the likely story, Socrates, the erotic troublemaker, must be banished from the cosmos. There is no worldly place, no chora, for him. One who questions the nomos and the dreams that attach us to place must be left atopos-that is, both placeless and strange. Concluding Unscientific Postscript So why is this dialogue taking place? Why has Socrates allowed himself to sit passively by while his hosts entertain him with the flattery of Becoming? It seems that the hesychia of Socrates, his silence and his peace, is really a form of passive aggression. Socrates has set up his ambitious hosts for a Sicilian expedition in speech-an ambitious project that �KALKAVAGE 163 ends in ruin. He probably knows, in general, what to expect, as he cunningly draws them out by imitating the cave-desire for moving images-a desire that is theirs rather than his. But, being an avid connoisseur as well as judge of human souls, Socrates also wants to see exactly how they will reveal themselves, and how far they will go, in the act of trying to defend Becoming and surpass the city in speech. In the Timaeus, Socrates has shown up to guard the city in speech from ever coming into being in space and time. He does so to reaffirm what he said about the best city in the Republic, that it is not a blueprint for political actualization but "a model ... for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself."2l Under a deceptive flag of truce and welcoming receptivity, he draws out his hosts as though onto a field of battle. Their effort is sure to entertain Socrates and perhaps even to instruct him. But I suspect he is still more entertained, and gratified, by their ultimate failure. This failure is represented by Critias. In the dialogue that bears his name, Critias never gets to the war-story he promised Socrates. Plato cuts him off in mid-sentence, just as he is about to give the speech of Zeus that will bring divine retribution upon the Atlantians. The promised flattery of Athens is consigned to oblivion, like Atlantis itself. It is as though Critias, who had boasted so mightily of his powers of memory (26B-C),22 simply and utterly forgot. Through his failure to recover the speech in praise of Athens' heroism, Plato playfully mimics something deadly serious-the folly of forcing a city back, in deed and not merely in speech, to a purported first and best condition. In his speech to Solon, the old Egyptian priest referred to the myth about Phaethon, son of Helios. Phaethon tried to drive his father's car, the sunchariot, in order to prove that he too was a god. The result was destruction for him and near destruction for the whole earth (22C). The Egyptian priest tells Solon that the truth of this myth has to do with a periodically recurring alignment of the planets. The priest's piety for scientific explanation blinds �164 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW him to the political significance of Phaethon. The insolence of Phaethon is the potential insolence of would-be reformersreformers like the famous Critias, who tried to force a democratic Athens into an oligarchic mold. The will to order, when infected by the love of honor and the lust for power, easily degenerates into the will to tyranny. Plato, more than any other philosopher, is constantly reminding us of the dangers of being human as well as the dangers of philosophy. Danger and safety, perhaps the most central terms of the Platonic dramas, become central because of Plato's care for what we do and what we suffer. Through the drama of the Timaeus-Critias, Plato continues his care for the human condition. In the likely story of Timaeus, he concocts a bizarre yet healthy-minded dream about a world set straight by the will to order, a dream in which the world is saved from disorder and despair. In the vanity and ambition of Critias, he points to the diseases this will itself can contract. Shakespeare's Ulysses supplies the most fitting last word on the strength and the weakness of the will to order: "0, when degree is shaked,/ Which is the ladder of all high designs,/ The enterprise is sick. "23 Notes 1 Other experiments in going beyond Socrates include the Eleatic stranger from the Sophist and Statesman, and the Athenian stranger from the Laws. 2 For the "art of conversion or turning around," see Republic 7. 518D ff. The mathematical arts that pave the way for dialectic are, in order of appearance, arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry, astronomy and harmonics. The conversionary art must "draw the soul from Becoming to Being" (7. 521D) . The praise of Timaeus is breathtaking (20A) . He is rich, powerful, honored, and he comes from an aristocratic family. The city from which he hails is Locri, which Socrates calls "a city with the best laws in Italy." Furthermore, he has "reached the very peak of all philosophy." 3 �KALKAVAGE 165 Solon heard the story about ancient Athens in the district of Sais (21E). The word for district here is nomos. (Nomos comes from the verb nemein, which means to apportion or distribute, and districts are areas of distributed land.) Plato thus combines in one word the deep connection between attachment to custom and attachment to place. 4 The demiourgoi or craftsmen are central to Socrates' critique of imitation in Republic 10. After postulating three kinds of couchesthe one produced by carpentry, the one produced by the art of painting, and the one that is in nature-Socrates playfully suggests that perhaps the couch that is in nature was also produced by some kind of craftsman, not a demiourgos but a phytourgos or "natureworker" (597B-D). Socrates refers to a "craftsman of heaven" at 7. 530A. 5 6 Sometimes Timaeus makes the cosmos sound as though it were eternal. But there are also indications that, while it is very long-lasting, it is nevertheless mortal. This fits with what Socrates announces in the Republic: "for everything that has come into being there is decay" (8. 546A). For example, time is said to come into being along with the heavens "in order that, having been begotten together, they might also be dissolved together-should some dissolution of them ever arise" (38B). And when the god makes the cosmic body, he saves it from old age and disease but falls short of making it deathless (33A ff.). 7 The ongoing presence of god's generous artistry in the world is signaled by the fact that things other than the divine craftsman are called demiurges in the speech, and that the verb demiourgein, to craft, sometimes occurs as a synonym for "causes" or "brings about." Earth, for example, is called "the guardian and craftsman of Night and Day" (40C); fire is at one point the craftsman of nonuniformity in air (59A); and again, the color red is "crafted by the cutting and staining action of fire upon moisture" (80E). 8 Timaeus' use of eti, still or more, seems to echo Socrates' use of this little word at the end of his political summary. He asked Timaeus whether he was "still yearning for something more in what was said" (19A). Socrates seems to be tempting Timaeus to go beyond the boundaries of his political mentality, beyond the will to order. Timaeus has no yearning to do so. He says, "Not at all." �166 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Timaeus calls the cosmos "the god who was one day to be" (34AB) and a "happy god" (34B). See also 55D, where Timaeus says that the cosmos is "by nature one god." In the dialogue's closing sentence, the cosmos is a "sensed god" (92C). 9 10 Republic 6. 509C ff. For the definitive account of eikasia in the Republic, see Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965, pp. 112-125. 11 Book 7. 532A. Socrates' language here is very close to the way in which he describes the likely story. He speaks of the "song itself that dialectic performs," autos ... ho nomos han to dialegesthai perainei. 12 At the beginning of the Critias, Timaeus prays to "the god who has just now been born through speeches" (1 06A). He identifies the just retribution of this god (dike) with medicine (pharmakon) and this medicine with knowledge (episteme). Timaeus derives his catalogue of happy privations from two fragments by Empedocles (29 and 134). He discretely suppresses what Empedocles in both fragments makes explicit-that the cosmic god lacks organs of reproduction. 13 14 The final cause of motion moves things, says Aristotle, has eramenan, "as the object of erotic love" (Metaphysics 12. 7. 1072B). 15 Sexual generation is the cause of the decay of the best city in the Republic. The rulers will fail to perceive and calculate the marriage number, "and they will at some time beget children when they should not" (8. 546B). 16 This political redistribution of types foreshadows the cosmic reshuffling of the four kinds by what Timaeus later calls the ch6ra or space. Socrates even uses the word chara in this part of his summary. This is its first appearance in the dialogue. 17 Necessity, in the form of what Timaeus calls "assistant causes," first began to assert itself in the likely story just as Timaeus is giving a mechanical account of the reflective, and deceptive, power of mirrors (46C-D). 18 In the simile of the goldsmith, Timaeus has a hypothetical someone ask the question "Whatever is it?" in response to the constant "morphing" of the receptacle. The safest answer, says Timaeus, is �KALKAVAGE 167 that it's gold (SOB). This is the closest Timaeus ever gets to Socrates' What is it? question. It is very interesting that his concern for safety (which reminds us of Socrates' similar concern in the Phaedo when he recounts his "second sailing" in search of cause) and the What is it? question lead Timaeus, not to the determinate form whose likeness fleetingly appears in the midst of change, but to that which is itself undergoing change. His answer, in other words, already points "forward" to geometric schematization rather than "backward" and "up" to the eidetic "father" of the spatiotemporal "offspring" (SOC-D). 19 For more on the Apaturia, see H. W Parke, Festivals of the Athenians, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 88-92. 20 "In geometrical and natural-scientific mathematization, in the open infinity of possible experiences, we measure the life-worldthe world constantly given to us as actual in our concrete worldlife-for a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of the so-called objectively scientific truths" (Ibid., p . 51). The drama of the Timaeus takes place during the Greater Panathenaea, the festival in honor of Athena. The central event of this festival was the procession in which an elaborately embroidered peplos or robe depicting the Battle of Gods and Giants was carried to the Acropolis and draped over the statue of the goddess. In his likely story, Timaeus participates in, and corrects, the Greater Panathenaea. His ceremonial "garb of ideas," paraded before the silent Socrates, replaces the Battle of Gods and Giants with decent gods and the beautiful war of mathematical objects in motion. Republic 9. 592B. The centrality of place in the Timaeus and the man who was gazing upon beautiful animals "somewhere," pou, contrast sharply with what Socrates says about the best city in this passage: "It doesn't make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere (pou)." 21 In the Critias, Critias invokes Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as the divinity on whom the whole project of gratifying Socrates depends (108D). 22 23 Troilus and Cressida I. 3. 101-103 . �� 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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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2003/1 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Carey, James Ruhm von Oppen, Beate Sachs, Joe Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Castle, Justin Sachs, Joe Cornell, John F. Maschler, Chaninah Kalkavage, Peter Description An account of the resource Volume XLVII, number one of The St. John's Review. Published in 2003. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_47_No_1_2003 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fbc279a1d18ffb6499fde9726c393eee.pdf 90b15ad1354d943490cbb061e2f31afc PDF Text Text The St. John’s Review Volume XLVII, number two (2003) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Beate Ruhm von Oppen Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Shanna Coleman The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year. Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are .O. available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2003 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Essays and Lectures The Wisdom of Jacob Klein..........................................5 Olivier Sedeyn, Translated by Brother Robert Smith History and the Liberal Arts........................................11 Jacob Klein Prudence and Wisdom in Aristotle’s Ethics..................25 Eric Salem Jacob Klein and the Phenomenological Project of Desedimenting the Formalization of Meaning......................................................................51 Burt Hopkins Opening Questions......................................................69 Ronald Mawby �4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 The Wisdom of Jacob Klein Olivier Sedeyn Translated by Brother Robert Smith In the Apology Plato tells us what led Socrates to the practice of philosophy, a practice that finally landed him before the Athenian court of law to defend himself against the charges of not believing in the gods of the city and of corrupting the youth. It happened, Socrates said, because his friend Chaerophon had asked the Oracle at Delphi if any man existed who was wiser than Socrates, and had been given the answer that there was none. Socrates reacted characteristically in refusing to believe the oracle and, upon noting “a god cannot lie,” in wanting to verify the answer. The best way to do this was to find people who everyone agreed were wise and to examine them in order to “show the gods” that there were many men wiser than Socrates. Everyone knows the outcome: Socrates examined these men and realized that, although they were reputedly wise and thought themselves genuinely wise, they were not. Insofar as Socrates himself did not claim to be wise but was aware of his ignorance, he could in a sense be said to be wiser than they. Perhaps human wisdom consists in knowing that one doesn’t know, in being aware of one’s ignorance, rather than in the “divine” wisdom that those who think they penetrate the secrets of nature or who think they know the secrets of education, like the Sophists, supposedly possess. Olivier Sedeyn, graduate of L’École Normale Supérieure, is professor of philosophy in a lycée in Caen. He has completed a translation into French of Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein and is translator of works of Leo Strauss in twelve volumes. The above essay originally appeared in Commentaire, number 88 (1999-2000), pages 831-33, to introduce the French translation of “History and the Liberal Arts,” and is reprinted with their kind permission. Klein’s essay is reprinted below. Brother Robert Smith is tutor emeritus at St. John’s College on the Annapolis Campus. �6 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW But are there wise men among our contemporaries? The very posing of this question shows how strange it is. Even so, is not philosophy the “love of wisdom”? It is said that Alexandre Kojève thought Jacob Klein was a wise man. What can such a claim mean when made by the famous Hegelian who inspired the idea of the “end of history”? Surely we are not being shown an example of Hegelian wisdom, which rests on the idea of the cyclical completion of the Concept, and is founded on the history of Reason. He can mean none other than ancient wisdom—that of Socrates, the seeker who knows that he does not know, who never ceased to fascinate Kojève, as his dialogue with Leo Strauss on tyranny shows. Jacob Klein was a life-long friend of Leo Strauss, whom he knew from the time the two were students at Marburg in the early 20’s. And Leo Strauss felt it possible to say: “In my opinion, we are closer to one another than to anyone else of our generation.” It can be said that Strauss and Klein tried, each in his own way, to reopen the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, and that each was determined to show that the ancient point of view can be legitimately held today. Obviously this stance did not win them widespread admiration—Klein is even less well known than Strauss. My purpose in writing this introduction to the seemingly simple lecture that follows is to encourage readers to consider it thoughtfully. Klein was born in Russia in 1899. He was educated in Germany between 1912 and 1922. He studied philosophy, physics, and mathematics. He then continued his study of mathematics and ancient philosophy. In 1923, he was influenced decisively by Heidegger’s way of reading the ancients: to read them without presupposing the superiority of the modern view; to read them for what they are, according to their own criteria. From that point on Klein tried to deepen his understanding of Plato and Aristotle. To acknowledge Heidegger’s influence—and this is important—does not mean an acceptance of Heidegger’s own philosophy. Neither Klein SEDEYN 7 nor Strauss was ever in that sense a Heideggerian. They were drawn exclusively to his way of reading the ancients. We see this in the fact that Strauss and Klein, who throughout their lives were intent on understanding and judging the differences between the ancients and the moderns, rejected Heidegger’s judgment that subjectivity and modern metaphysics had their origin in Plato. The break, according to them, occurred at the birth of modernity. Klein’s most important book, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra,1 locates the difference between the ancients and moderns in the distinctive way they conceptualize number. To give a brief and insufficient account of this matter, we can say that the ancients considered number to be “a definite quantity of definite things”; or, in other words, number always refers to some thing beyond itself. On the contrary, for the moderns, beginning with Vieta and Descartes, number does not refer to things, but to a general concept, namely body or extension. Modern abstraction is “symbol-generating.” It cuts number off from a world it is supposed to reveal. This explains the connection between this concept of number and “universal method,” itself inspired by a mathesis universalis, a method valuable in every domain. This is quite different from the Greek notion of method as always particular, that is to say, related to the objects under consideration. Klein’s reflections thus bear directly on what seem to be the most powerful pillars of the modern conception, the origins of mathematical physics. Klein tried to point out this striking ontological shift, linked to the new way of conceptualizing number, which allowed modern science to be concerned no longer with ontological problems, to “leave them aside.” We hope that it will soon be possible to read Klein’s book in French. It is strange that a work whose importance is considerable is not better known: it opens up an understanding of the origin of mathematical physics, a discipline that holds a unique position of authority in the modern world. �8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Be that as it may, circumstances forced Strauss to emigrate during 1932-33, first to France, then to England; and forced Klein, after having taught in Prague, to immigrate to America in 1938. He came to know Scott Buchanan, who was then trying to renew an old college in Annapolis. In that Maryland town, Klein was to find a new direction for his activities. The program of learning that he along with Scott Buchanan established aimed to provide “over four years an education in the liberal arts in which one reads great books from Homer and Euclid to Freud and Russell.” Klein’s main work from 1938-1976, at least up to his partial retirement in 1969, was consequently to teach the liberal arts. The liberal arts, as is generally known, are composed of the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—and the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric.2 It is surprising that in an era in which it seems that education and instruction ought to have as their aim social utility, a university should choose as its model a type of study drawn up in the Middle Ages and rooted in Greek antiquity. Yet maybe the utilitarian purposes of today find their true meaning, if they are to have one, in the higher purpose of making us free. Jacob Klein consecrated his life to transmitting his knowledge of the fundamental texts of the Western tradition. In particular, he placed emphasis on the arts helpful for interpreting texts. In his own way, Klein, like Strauss, insisted on “the problem of the art of writing,” and a great part of the program at St. John’s College consists in the reading of “great books.” Klein pressed us especially to read Platonic Dialogues paying particular attention to the dramatic structure of the conversation. It even appears that he was the first to recognize the necessity of doing so. Every claim of a Platonic character, even Socrates, has to be interpreted in the particular context of the dialogue in which it appears. It cannot be said, as is perhaps common in contemporary works, that one finds the theology of Plato, for example, at the end of the 10th book of the Republic, because this “theology” derives its SEDEYN 9 meaning from its place in the construction of the just city in books 2-4. Klein was right to raise again and again the question of how to read a Platonic dialogue. Klein wrote only three other books: A Commentary on Plato’s Meno,3 which he pondered for several decades and was published only in 1965; Plato’s Trilogy,4 comprising the Theatetus, Sophist and Statesman, which is clearly imbued with his knowledge of Greek mathematics; and a volume entitled Lectures and Essays,5 assembled by his students and friends after his death, that treats Greek mathematics and mathematical physics, speech, and precision, and thinkers such as Virgil, Dante, Plato, and Aristotle. This collection constitutes a remarkable introduction to liberal education. The following lecture is from this collection. Klein attempts to show what specifically constitutes history and what distinguishes it from what we call an “historical sense.” History understood in the modern sense is in fact one of the great gods of our era. Understanding history amounts to preparing to better understand what is at stake in the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, since the ancient, Socratic notion of wisdom has perhaps not disappeared. It may yet be valid, despite the claims of universality of the “historical sense.” Notes 1 Die Griechiche Logistik und die Enstehung der Algebra, Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, fasc. 1 (Berlin, 1934): 18-105 (first part); fasc. 2 (1936): 122-235 (2nd part). Published in English as Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968. 2 Thirty years ago, the corridors of the National Pedagogical Institute were decorated with windows representing these liberal arts. I suppose that these ancient references have disappeared. 3 A Commentary on Plato’s Meno, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965. �10 4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Plato’s Trilogy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977. 11 History and the Liberal Arts 5 Lectures and Essays, Annapolis: The Saint John’s College Press, 1985. Jacob Klein Friends and enemies of the St. John’s Program, visitors to the college and many of its alumni often raise the question: Why is History neglected in the St. John’s curriculum? They point to the obvious contrast between the chronological order in which the “Great Books” are read and the remarkable lack of historical awareness displayed by the students. The time has come, I think, to deal with this question extensively. I propose to do that in this lecture. Let us reflect on the role and significance of History in a liberal arts curriculum. The first, rather simple, statement that can be made is this: Man, having the ability to understand and being inquisitive by nature, wants to explore everything that he sees about him—the various plants and animals, the stars and the clouds and the winds, the surface of the earth, the rivers and the forests and the stones and the deserts. Whether this preoccupation stems from his immediate and urgent need, whether his inquisitive attitude is merely an extension of his concern to provide the necessities of life for himself, whether it is the manifestation of his very nature or simply idle curiosity, need not be discussed at this point. Whatever the origins of this desire, man wants to find out, to figure out, to know. In this sense, then, man may be said to be inquisitive not only about what surrounds him, at the present time, but also about the future: he wants to know what is going to happen to him as well as to everything else around him. And finally he wants to know what happened in the past. Out of this latter desire, we may somewhat naively say, grows History, i.e., the exploration of the past, the finding of the past, the description of what has happened in the recent as well as in the most remote Jacob Klein (1899-1978) was a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis, serving as dean from 1949-1958. �12 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW past. Curiously enough, as you know, the Greek word historia means originally exploration of any kind. Gradually, it came to mean, even to the Greeks, the exploration of the past and the description or narration of past events. Thus we have History, i.e., historical books: Herodotus, Thucydides, chronicles of all kinds, histories of Europe, America, India, of Guatemala, of the city of Annapolis, of the Universal Postal Union, of St. John’s College, of the Imperial Palace in Peking. Such histories may be more or less correct. Descriptions of events must be checked as to their accuracy with the help of all the evidence available: books, old records, letters, inscriptions, etc. Special skills in exploring and checking the evidence must be developed. Historical science and the methodology of historical science become a branch of knowledge; history can be taught and learned. Departments of History and archives are established. Historical journals come into being, dedicated to the improvement and enlargement of historical knowledge. All this circumscribes what may be called the domain of History. Is this, then, what History is? You sense immediately: this is not quite it, this is not a sufficient description of History and what History means. First of all, there is a special emphasis in the pursuit of History which is lacking in other branches of learning. Take the science of geology, for example. However important and interesting its investigations and findings might be, this science does not make universal claims, it restricts itself to a definite domain. There is no such thing as a “geological approach” to any given problem. And yet there always seems to be an “historical approach” to almost any kind of problem in almost any field. Secondly, it is not quite correct to state that history is the description and narration of past events. Not everything that is past is “historic.” That one of us here went to Washington or to San Francisco last week or some time ago does not necessarily belong to any history. It might, though. From a KLEIN 13 certain point of view, with regard to an event we judge a significant one, we can—retrospectively—recognize the importance of events which led to that significant one. Nobody, indeed, ever assumed that all events and happenings are equally important and significant and could become recorded in history books. Even Tolstoi, who formulated the idea of such an all-comprehensive history, based on integration procedures in the face of infinite series of minute events, of historical infinitesimals, as it were, did that merely to reduce history thus understood to absurdity. All written and traditional history is based on a principle of selection. This means that we must have—and in fact do have—some yardstick to measure the significance and importance of events, whatever history we may be writing. It is not too difficult to discern these yardsticks in Herodotus or Tacitus or Gibbon, for example; more difficult perhaps, but not impossible, to discover them in Thucydides. We can even venture to say that in general the yardstick is provided either (a) by the consideration of the present state of affairs, the salient features of which want to be traced back to their origins, in a sort of genealogical procedure, or (b) by the desire to derive a lesson for the future either from mistakes and failures or from exemplary actions in the past, which desire leads to what has been called, since Polybius, pragmatic history. Sometimes both kinds of yardstick are combined. I say that both—the universality of the tendency to subject any theme to an historical investigation and the selecting of events or facts to be dealt with historically—help us to win a better understanding of this human enterprise called History. This enterprise does not seem to be grounded in an inherent property of events or facts that permits us to arrange them in a sequence, an historical sequence, but seems rather to depend on a certain way of looking at things which stamps them into an historical pattern. One might be tempted to apply Kantian terminology to this phenomenon—and people �14 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW have actually done so—: there might be something of an historical a priori, a form of our thinking that inescapably leads us to see things in an historical perspective. Let us consider this for a moment. Let us beware though lest we indulge in an empty, if easy, construction. As far as pragmatic history is concerned, the selection is based on our sense of moral virtues or our understanding of practical maxims of conduct. Hybris versus Moderation, Tyranny versus Freedom, false hopes and foolish fears versus prudence—these are presented and pointed out to us in the unfolding drama of historical successes or catastrophes. Here, then, the historical scene is merely the enlargement of our daily life, providing us with great examples in large script. History in this sense is founded on completely “unhistorical” points of view. That is why this kind of history writing does not constitute a specific domain like Physics or even Poetry. Note that Aristotle, the great systematizer of human knowledge, in the face of such history—the only one he knew—did not treat it as a pragmateia, a discipline in its own right. The same Aristotle who investigated, defined, elaborated on every conceivable art and science—grammar, logic, physics, botany, zoology, astronomy, theology, psychology, politics, ethics, rhetoric, poetry—did not elaborate on history, although he so often prefaces his investigations with a review of positions and opinions held in the past. I conclude: there is no historical a priori in pragmatic history. The same holds true of the genealogical type of history, though not in the same way. The very notion of genealogy comprises notions of origin, source, development, more generally, the notion of a temporal order. But these notions are not strictly historical ones. They also determine our understanding of biological phenomena, or more generally, of phenomena of change. They are not constitutive categories of historical experience. They are operative in any myth, they help to picture the growth and decay of institutions, the expansion of dominion and power; but the emphasis is on the KLEIN 15 nature of those institutions and the overwhelming character of that power. The bases of this type of history, exemplified in Polybius and the Roman historians, are still unhistorical, mostly legal and political. But when we turn to that universal tendency to view things historically, to use the historical approach in almost any field, the picture changes. It seems, indeed, as if here the form of History shapes the material under consideration so as to make anything we look at assume historical clothing, as if the very basis of our looking at things were—we hear it so often—History itself. When, a moment ago, I denied that this was the case in pragmatic and genealogical history, I implicitly assumed, by way of contrast, the possibility of such a view. The question, then, is whether this historical way of looking at things is itself a necessary form of our understanding. One way of answering this question would be to apply the following test: Can we approach and solve this problem historically? The pragmatic and genealogical types of history are the only ones known in antiquity and the understanding of the nature of history corresponds to them. But a new understanding of history begins with the advent of Christianity. Let us consider briefly in what it consists. I shall use two outstanding examples: Augustine and Dante. Augustine, in the City of God (15-18), gives a World History based on a fundamental distinction. Mankind consists of two parts: there are those who live according to Man, i.e., in sin, and those who live according to God; there are two communities, the city of men and the city of God. The latter is in the making and after the Second Advent will become the everlasting Kingdom of God. The earthly city will then be destroyed and its inhabitants will join Satan. As long as this world exists, both cities are intertwined. Augustine distinguishes six ages: 1) from Adam to the Deluge; 2) from Noah to Abraham; 3) from Abraham to David (the “prophetic age”); 4) from David to the Babylonian captivity; 5) from �16 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the Babylonian captivity to Jesus Christ; 6) from Jesus Christ to the end of this world. This universal history is conceived mainly in terms of the Biblical account; but the great oriental kingdoms, as well as Greece and the Roman Empire, have their place allocated in the general flow. This is not a “Philosophy of History”; it is rather History itself, i.e., the description of succeeding ages according to God’s providential ordering of all events. The important thing for us to note is that historical succession itself, the fact of History, the fact that men’s lives weave the history of the World, is not an accidental property of those lives but their very essence. Our and our fathers’ years have flowed through God’s eternal Today, says Augustine in the Confessions: “from this everpresent divine ‘To-day’ the past generations of men received the measure and the mould of such being as they had; and still others shall flow away, and so receive the mould of their degree of being.” History, then, reflects the essential temporality of man, but reflects no less the eternal timeless pattern of his being. In following up the chain of historical events we do not select significant links. We follow God’s providential plan. Our historical perspective is our view of an eternal order, just as the flow is our way of incomplete existence. For us “to exist” is identical with “to exist historically.” But that, again, means that our existence spreads out in time the timeless pattern of God’s wisdom. This is neither pragmatic nor genealogical history. It is, one might say, symbolic history. History presents the symbols that unfold in succession the eternal relations between creation, fall, redemption, and salvation. Let us turn to Dante. Here, again we see a World History conceived in terms of God’s timeless providential pattern. History is the sinister chronicle of man’s fall pursued through all generations of men. The Greek and Roman worlds occupy a far more important place in this chronicle than in that of Augustine. The horrors of Thebes more than those of Babylon indicate the complete abnegation of God’s grace. It KLEIN 17 is not the contrast between the City of Men and the City of God which determines Dante’s general view of historical events, but rather the contrast and intertwining of God’s spiritual and God’s secular order, of Church and Empire. The secular order, stemming from God, reflects but is not identical with the spiritual order. Troy and its destruction are symbols of man’s pride and man’s fall. “And it happened at one period of time,” Dante writes in the Convivio, “that when David was born, Rome was born, that is to say, Aeneas then came from Troy to Italy. . . . Evident enough, therefore, is the divine election of the Roman Empire by the birth of the Holy City (i.e., Rome), which was contemporaneous with the root of the race from which Mary sprang.” The history of the world is here a kind of symbolic duplication of the spiritual history of man. It is by this very nature, as in Augustine, twodimensional. Or, to put it in different words, the horizon of this kind of history, or better, of this kind of historian, is not historical. In this respect this kind of history is akin to the pragmatic and genealogical kinds. Here, again, it is worth noting: the primary liberal disciplines listed by Dante in the Convivio and linked to the ten heavens of the world (the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the sphere of the fixed stars, the primum mobile and the Empyrean Heaven) are Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy, Physics and Metaphysics, Ethics, Theology. History is not one of them. When Machiavelli and Hobbes dethrone classical philosophy and revert to pragmatic history as the best teacher man can have in planning and conducting his life, they still cling to a two-dimensional history to build their own political philosophy. But now the scene changes: Vico’s New Science marks a new beginning. Like Machiavelli and Hobbes he defies all preceding philosophy. He bases his work on the fundamental (Leibnizian) distinction: the true and the certain. What is true is common and therefore abstract. What is certain is the �18 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW particular, the individual, the concrete. “Certum and commune are opposed to each other.” The philosophers pursue what is common. They lack certainty. Only history (which includes philology) deals with the certain. The most certain for us is that which we ourselves have made, the facta, the facts. “The world of civil society has certainly been made by man; its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations or civil world, which, since man had made it, men could hope to know.” Vico sets out to fulfill this hope. This is the scope of his New Science. It is historical by definition. The historian looking at man-made worlds can understand their innermost core. He will thus attain a more certain truth than the philosophers ever could; he will discover “the common nature of nations” or the “ideal eternal history” of nations established by divine providence. The New Science will thus be “a rational civil theology of divine providence.” “Since divine providence has omnipotence as minister, it develops its orders by means as easy as the natural customs of men.” This also means that this science is a “history of human ideas” (not a philosophical reflection on ideas). There are recurrent cycles in the history of nations that always comprise three stages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. The proper field of the historian is the customs of men, their institutions, their laws, their writings, their poetry. In understanding them he understands truth that is certain—truthful certainty—precisely what the philosophers are unable to accomplish. At first sight it seems as if history in Vico’s understanding preserved its two-dimensionality, since the objects of his findings are the “universal and eternal orders established by providence.” But these orders do not exist outside of time. Divine KLEIN 19 providence is not the providential plan of salvation anymore. Vico’s history is bent on finding the laws governing the human world in contradistinction to the laws governing the world of nature. Historical reality with its recurrent stretches is one-dimensional. On the other hand, the historian alone is now the true philosopher. The methods of interpretation and of philology he has to use constitute a new organon comprising axioms, definitions and specific rules of inference. In other words: Vico’s work competes with the work of Natural History, with the work of Mathematical Physics. We have here a rather amazing historical fact before us. Let us remember. Towards the end of the sixteenth century a reinterpretation and reconsideration of the traditional, “classical,” mathematical sciences lead to the establishment of Algebra, a hitherto obscure and “vulgar” discipline neglected by all recognized institutions of learning, as the eighth Liberal Art. Its progress coincides with the development of a new symbolic discipline, understood as Universal Mathematics, a new and most powerful instrument of human knowledge which is meant to replace the traditional Aristotelian Organon. The science of nature becomes mathematical physics, begins to dominate all human understanding and gradually transforms the conditions of human life on this earth. The only force opposing this development is History with its claim to universality, first attributed to it by Vico and maintained with increased vigor up to this moment. It is significant, I think, that Vico’s idea of an “ideal eternal history” is a derivative of the idea of a Universal Mathematics, a shadow, as it were, that the latter casts. As Universal Mathematics is to all specific mathematical disciplines so is the “ideal eternal history” to all specific histories of nations. But this parallelism between Universal Mathematics and Universal History is to be understood in the light of the distinction between that which is “abstractly true” and that which is “concretely certain.” The new science of Mathematical Physics leaves the natural experience of nature far behind: all �20 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW that is concrete vanishes behind a screen of mathematical symbols. Any teleology loses its meaning. The new science of History tries to restore the dignity of the concrete, fills the gap between the abstract symbolic understanding of nature and the immediate human experience of the world around us. It cannot dispense with the notions of means and ends. It is the distinction between the true and the certain which underlies the familiar and superficial distinction between Science and the Humanities. The latter are conceived as inseparable from History, can only be approached in historical perspective, come actually to life only in the medium of History. Since Vico, the idea of an eternal pattern of history, a vestige of the original Christian understanding, although occasionally forcefully advanced, has been generally abandoned. The emphasis is on the development of what has been called the historical sense. Three consequences follow. First, the fascination with the “otherness” of the past: the discovery or reconstruction of cultures and civilizations “different” from ours, each with a different “sense of values” ascertainable in customs, institutions, works of art, architecture, literature, philosophy, religion. This very notion of an autonomous “culture,” underlying the various manifestations of human activity can arise only within an historical horizon. Truth itself becomes a function of “culture,” the existence of which appears a certain fact; “relativity of values” becomes inevitably the concomitant of the historical perspective. Secondly, the sense of participating in the relentless historical flow makes observable trends the guide of our actions. The acceptance of events and doctrines that are supposed to follow the “historical trend” is one of the most potent causes for the predicament in which European nations have found themselves in recent decades. The impact of Marxism which goes under the name of historical materialism and the reaction to it derive their strength from the historical sense projected into the future. The Gallup Poll is KLEIN 21 one of the most recent and most ridiculous examples of this preoccupation with trends. Thirdly, a man understands himself completely as an historical being. “Historicity” becomes his very nature, but not in the sense that it reflects some timeless pattern. His Self disintegrates into a series of socially, and that means historically, conditioned reflexes. Historicity does not mean Tradition. To see ourselves as historical beings means to break the invisible traditional ties in which we live. At best, tradition then becomes a romantic notion, at worst, an academic phantom. If we consider the disciplines taught in our schools, it is easy to see that all natural sciences are patterned on the model of mathematical physics. The idea of a universal mathematics as the new organon of all science, however, dies away. On the other hand, all the disciplines within the realm of the humanities have become historical to the very core. The study of literature, philosophy, religion, music and the fine arts, for example, is almost exclusively the study of the history of literature, the history of philosophy, the history of religions, the history of music, the history of art. Fields of study of a more practical applicability as, for example, languages, political science and economics, retain a certain autonomy. The theoretical dignity they may have, however, is safeguarded only by historical considerations or, for that matter, by methods borrowed from mathematical physics. It seems, then, that Mathematical Physics and History divide between themselves, in a fairly exhaustive way, the rule over the entire domain of human knowledge. Does this permit us to consider them as the two necessary ways and forms of our understanding? If this be so, Mathematical Physics and History would come close to being the two Liberal Arts of the modern age. Any liberal arts curriculum ought then to concentrate on these two great bodies of learning in keeping with the trend of events and in preparing students to follow it further. �22 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW At this point, we can pause and reflect on the results we have reached. As to Mathematical Physics, the task before us is clearly not the tracing of its historic development. We have rather to understand the methods and the nature of the concepts that have made this development possible. We have to understand the specific use made of mathematical symbols, the relation of a mathematical deduction to a verifying experiment, the relations between observations, hypothesis, theory and truth. That is indeed what we are trying to do in our Mathematics Tutorials and in the Laboratory. And if we do not do that fully and in the most satisfactory manner, we have to improve our ways. The danger we are running in this case is the very same that has threatened the integrity of scientific understanding since the seventeenth century and which has barely begun to be warded off in recent developments: the danger to confuse the symbolic means of our understanding with reality itself. If we turn to History, we have first to remember the question which gave rise to the preceding historical account. The question was: Is the historical way of looking at things a necessary form of our understanding? The answer—in the perspective of History—is in the negative: The universal historical approach is itself a product of, and presumably nothing but a phase in, an historical development, which cannot claim any absolute validity, no matter how “natural” and familiar it seems to us at the present moment. We have to recognize, moreover, the possibility of a dangerous confusion similar to the one I just mentioned with regard to Mathematical Physics. The results of historical investigations based on specific historical concepts and methods of interpretation ought not to be confused with the real picture of a real past. Not to see that, means to surround us with a pseudo-historical horizon of almost mythical quality so as to make us talk glibly of “Greek culture,” “medieval times,” “Renaissance,” the “Seventeenth Century,” the “Age of Enlightenment,” etc. Such pseudo-mythical notions are usually in the minds of KLEIN 23 people who recommend that we take into account the proper “historical background” whenever we read and discuss a book. The assumption behind this recommendation is a rather naive one, to wit, that in the effort we make to understand a book or a series of books we could fall back on an objective and certain datum, the general culture in which the ideas expressed or propounded in those books are rooted and from which they derive their strength and intelligibility. We ought to see instead that the commonly accepted picture of an historical period is largely due to an interpretation of the content of books and other documents which presupposes in the first place the ability to deal with grammatical patterns, to discern rhetorical devices, to grasp ideas in all their implications. In point of fact, the main task of any historian is of necessity the interpretation of whatever data he may collect. The art of interpretation and all the other arts which minister to it depend on the understanding of the function of signs, of the complexity of symbolic expressions, and of the cogency of logical relations. To understand a text is not a simple matter. To arouse and to cultivate this understanding is one of the primary tasks of our Language Tutorials. More than anything else, more, certainly, than the historical sense fed so often on sheer ignorance, an improvement of our interpretative skills could help foster genuine historical research and writing. We may ultimately get to see that the problem of History is itself not an historical problem. It follows, then, that in pursuing these goals we should ignore history’s claim to universality, ignore History itself, if you please, in order to devote our full attention to the development of all the arts of understanding and all imaginative devices man can call his own. It takes courage to pursue a rather narrow and steep path hardly visible from the highways of contemporary learning. But let us remember the inscription on the old seal of the College: No path is impassable to courage. The reward may be high. �24 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 25 Prudence and Wisdom in Aristotle’s Ethics Eric Salem In Book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle defines happiness or the human good as an “activity of the soul in accordance with virtue,” then adds immediately, “and if the virtues are many, in accordance with the best and most complete” of them (1098a 16-18).1 Aristotle spends the next five books filling in this “sketch” or “outline” of happiness. He distinguishes intellectual and ethical virtue (1103a4-18).2 He defines ethical virtue and its centerpiece, choice (1105b291107a2; 1111b4-1113a14). And he discusses at great length a total of thirteen virtues, eleven ethical, and two intellectual. But nowhere in these first six books does he tell us which of these virtues is “best and most complete.” Could it be courage, the first of the virtues taken up by Aristotle? Does happiness consist in doing beautiful deeds on the field of battle, in withstanding one’s fear of death and tempering one’s eagerness for the fight (1115a4-b24)? Or is it perhaps justice, the only virtue to which he devotes an entire book of the Ethics? Does the human good show itself, above all, in the setting right of wrongs and the distributing of good things according to merit (1130b30-1131a1)? Again, is wisdom, the last of the virtues defined by Aristotle, a likely candidate? Can we be fully ourselves, fully achieve human happiness, only in looking away from the shifting tangle of human affairs and looking to the unchanging sources of all things (1141a16-1141b2)? Or is the sought-for virtue perhaps that curious disposition tucked away at the end of Book 4 which inclines us to listen and speak to one another in a fitting way in our moments of leisure? Is happiness to be found Eric Salem is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This essay is a revision of a paper originally prepared for delivery at the 1986 meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association. �26 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW in the witty play of intelligent conversation, in telling the right joke at the right time to the right sort of people (1127b28-1128a33)? We are not told. We are not even told—or at any rate, not told explicitly—how we might go about deciding the question, how, that is, we are to decide whether one virtue is better and more complete than another. And yet we are dealing with a matter of the greatest practical import, and Aristotle knows it. It is not just that our own good, our personal happiness, is at stake. From the outset Aristotle characterizes his investigation of the human good as “a sort of political inquiry” and he reminds us repeatedly, especially in the early books of the Ethics, that the primary task of the statesman or lawgiver is to make his citizens good, i.e., to educate them in virtue by means of the laws (1094b10-11; 1102a7-10; 1103b2-6). But to set down laws with a view to happiness would clearly require both that one know the order of the virtues—and hence which one of them is best and most complete—and also that one know whether that highest virtue is the sort of virtue that can be brought about by means of the law.3 I think Aristotle has his reasons for almost leaving us in the dark about these questions. Were he to dot every “i” and cross every “t” in his argument, he would do us, his readers, an injustice. We would not be disposed, or not as disposed, to read his account of the virtues with discernment, to make that argument our own by asking ourselves at every moment, “Could this be the virtue that will bring me or my fellow citizens happiness?” Like Plato, the teacher and fellow lover of wisdom to whom he refers with affection in Book 1, Aristotle invites his readers to participate in, and not merely to observe, his own inquiries. Aristotle the inquirer writes his books for inquiring minds. I said a moment ago that Aristotle almost leaves us in the dark. I do not mean by this that he provides us with clear-cut, final answers to the questions I’ve just raised at some later SALEM 27 point in the Ethics, say, in Book 10. For I think—and I’ll say more about this later—that what Aristotle says there about happiness and the virtues is fraught with difficulties and full of questions. I rather mean that in various passages throughout the Ethics Aristotle leaves hints which help us to think through, if not to answer once and for all, the question, “Which of the many virtues lies at the core of human happiness?” The famous discussion in Book 10 is certainly one such passage. Another, and one of the most helpful, forms the conclusion of Aristotle’s inquiry into the virtues. In what follows I want to focus on the latter passage, to see what progress one can make by working through what Aristotle says and implies at this critical juncture of his inquiry.4 * Aristotle begins the final section of Book 6 by raising two questions about the intellectual virtues. The first question concerns the usefulness of prudence and wisdom; the second treats the relation between them.5 Aristotle spins out the first question roughly as follows. Men do not seem to become happy through wisdom, for wisdom, as knowledge of the eternal, knows nothing of becoming, “contemplates none of those things through which a human being will be happy” (1143b19-22). Nor are men better off for having knowledge of the human good, i.e., prudence. For what prudence knows, namely, “the just and beautiful and good things for man,” the good man does (prattei) and does without needing to know them (1143b22-28). What’s more, even if prudence were knowledge, not only of the human good, but also of the means whereby men become good, an already good man would not need it. And a man who wished to become good would not need to have it himself. After all, men do not become doctors in order to become healthy—they simply visit and obey them (1143b28-33). Or as Aristotle himself had suggested as early as Book 2, men become virtuous, not by reflecting on virtue, but by doing virtuous things, that is, by doing the things prescribed by the law and the lawgiver �28 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW (1103a31-1103b7; 1103b14-23; 1105b9-17). Why, then, should a man who desires to become good or virtuous and hence happy seek to acquire either wisdom or prudence? Before we look at Aristotle’s answer, or rather answers, to this question, we would do well to reflect for a time on the particular understanding of both happiness and virtue that gives rise to it. In the first place, Aristotle’s question seems to rest on the assumption that the activity or being at work (energeia) which constitutes happiness lies in deeds (en ergois), in performing good and beautiful works (erga): happy men are men who act courageously, justly and so on. Because happiness is this sort of activity (and not, say, the activity of thinking), Aristotle can further assume that the virtues it accords with are, in the first instance, the ethical virtues: if happiness consists in doing courageous and just deeds, then it makes sense to say that the virtues are courage and justice. Some form of thinking might be an element of happiness, but it could be only if it somehow made possible and were for the sake of the doing of such deeds. Finally, Aristotle’s question assumes that in fact the ethical virtues can both arise and flourish within the human soul without the aid of thinking. The sphere of ethical virtue and action is, as it were, a selfsufficient whole. Men acquire the ethical virtues, become men of good character, by doing virtuous deeds, and once they have acquired them, they need only exercise them, i.e., act in accordance with them, to be happy. In sum, Aristotle’s question concerning the usefulness of prudence and wisdom hints at a first answer to our initial question; in fact, it presupposes an answer to it: the virtue we are looking for is simply ethical virtue. For if happiness is a matter of doing the right deeds, then ethical virtue, the stable readiness to do such deeds, has to form at least part of that virtue. But if ethical virtue is in itself sufficient to produce those deeds, if ethical virtue can do without the help of reason, then it seems to possess the character of completeness which Aristotle’s definition demands. Ethical virtue, by itself, SALEM 29 seems to be the “best and most complete virtue,” best because it issues in the highest human good, and most complete because it accomplishes this without help from elsewhere. Of course, someone might note at this point that we are looking for one virtue and might raise the objection that ethical virtue is not a single virtue, but a name for eleven distinct virtues. This objection seems to have been anticipated, however, by Aristotle’s own presentation of the ethical virtues, where it is intimated, at least twice, that the ethical virtues may be one in more than name (or even kind). First, in his account of the magnanimous or great-souled man, whose perfect goodness and self-sufficiency he repeatedly emphasizes, Aristotle calls magnanimity “all-complete” and describes it as “a sort of kosmos of the virtues; for it makes them greater and does not come to be without them” (1024a2-10).6 Here we seem to be invited to imagine that the various ethical virtues become fully themselves only as they occupy their proper places within the spacious soul of the magnanimous man—to imagine, that is, that ethical virtue becomes one complete whole in the person of the magnanimous man. Again, several times in the course of his account of justice in the broadest sense, Aristotle identifies such justice with “complete” or “whole” virtue (1129b26-27; 1130a14-16; 1130b6-8). The notion here seems to be that the laws, at least the laws in the best regime, enjoin men to be good in every sense of the term—to be zealous in defense of the city, to be generous and gentle and fair toward fellow citizens and so on—so that, in principle, to be just, to be steadfast in one’s obedience to the law, is to be virtuous simply (1129b11-26). Once more we seem to be invited to regard the ethical virtues, not as a heap of disparate dispositions, but as a unified whole, in this case a whole that has its origin in law and its end in the good of the political community.7 Someone might also wonder why, after spending a whole book discussing the intellectual virtues, Aristotle would choose to raise a question which so pointedly calls into ques- �30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW tion the goodness or usefulness of prudence and wisdom. The first thing that must be said here is that Aristotle’s question, and the assumptions upon which it rests, are in keeping with much of what he says in the earlier books of the Ethics. Activity and action, ethical virtue and virtue are treated as near synonyms throughout the first five books. Only occasionally does Aristotle suggest that the life of action might depend, ultimately, on the activity of reason, much less on a virtue of reason; he never even broaches the possibility that thinking might be choiceworthy for its own sake. Generally speaking, the life of action and ethical virtue remain at center stage in that discussion: reason and thought lurk in the wings, barely visible at rare moments.8 Perhaps Aristotle wrote the first half of the Ethics in the awareness that even the most serious of his readers would tend to identify ethical virtue with virtue and happiness with right action, and would have to be persuaded—and could be persuaded only gradually—that excellence in reasoning must play a central role in the good life. Or what may amount to the same thing, Aristotle’s curious way of proceeding may arise out of the determination, exhibited everywhere in his works, to think his way to the truth of a matter by way of everyday experience and common opinion—in this case the common opinion that courage, moderation, liberality and the like are the virtues and that happiness is a matter of eu prattein, acting or faring well.9 Whatever the reasons for Aristotle’s way of proceeding in Books 1 through 5, the first question elaborated by him at the end of Book 6 seems to sum up the general view of happiness found in those books: ethical virtue, perhaps in the form of magnanimity or justice, is the “best and most complete virtue” whose issue is happiness. In Book 6 prudence and wisdom come in from the wings and occupy center stage for a time, but the body of that book still leaves us wondering whether those virtues are to be more than minor characters in the drama of the Ethics. SALEM 31 * How, then, does Aristotle answer the question he has raised about the usefulness of prudence and wisdom? His first answer can be summarized as follows. Even if prudence and wisdom produced nothing, each would be worthy of being chosen for its own sake, for each of them is a virtue of the part of the soul that thinks (1144a1-3). Moreover, wisdom and prudence do produce something. Wisdom, in particular, produces happiness, not in the way that medicine produces health, but in the way that health itself produces healthiness or healthy activity (1144a3-5). “For being part of whole virtue, it makes a man happy through its possession and its activity” (1144a5-6). Perhaps the first thing we should notice here is the use Aristotle makes of medicine and health. Earlier, in the course of framing his question, he used that analogy to suggest that reason is of no use to the virtuous man: ethical virtue was likened to health, and reason likened to the art of medicine for which a healthy man has no need. Now reason, especially in the form of wisdom, is itself likened to health, and the art of medicine, for the moment at any rate, drops out of the picture entirely. If wisdom does not replace ethical virtue as the health of the soul, it is at least set on an equal footing with it. Two elements seem to be involved in this shift in analogy or argument. The first is a certain deepening of our understanding of causality or responsibility. Aristotle’s question assumed that wisdom and prudence could be regarded as useful or productive only if they brought forth virtue and virtuous activity in the manner of so-called efficient causes. But wisdom, at any rate, cannot—and need not—be regarded as a cause in this sense. Like the other virtues—and the vices as well—wisdom is a hexis, an enduring condition, and, as such, it both forms the soul and shapes the soul’s activity (1106a1012; 1139a15-17).10 But for just this reason it can be regarded as a cause, and in the measure that the part of the soul it �32 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW conditions and the corresponding activity it shapes are central to our being human, wisdom can be regarded as responsible for human happiness. Wisdom, in other words, is, or may be, a formal cause of human happiness.11 The second and, to my mind, more fundamental element involved in the shift—without it the question about what sort of cause wisdom might be could never arise—is Aristotle’s abrupt setting aside, without the slightest comment, of the assumption that happiness consists simply in right action. That is, the ethical virtues could earlier be assumed to constitute the health of the soul, and wisdom could be dismissed in a sentence as useless, only so long as happiness was assumed to be a matter of acting well. And conversely, wisdom can now be placed on an at least equal footing with the ethical virtues only if the reigning assumption of Books 1 through 5 is no longer allowed to be the measure of the usefulness or goodness of the virtues. Clearly, then, Aristotle’s first answer is a radical one; it goes to the root of his question concerning the usefulness of prudence and wisdom by denying the very premise upon which that question rests, by denying, that is, that happiness consists simply in right action.12 Indeed Aristotle’s answer might leave us wondering whether happiness has anything at all to do with right action. After all, he does not say that wisdom and the ethical virtues together constitute the health of the soul and together produce happiness; he simply likens wisdom to health and says that wisdom produces happiness. Aristotle does say that wisdom produces happiness in the measure that it is part of “whole virtue,” and we might be inclined to think that by “whole virtue” he means wisdom plus the ethical virtues plus prudence, but he is in fact silent about the meaning of the words “whole virtue.” Perhaps the ethical virtues have no part in the whole of which wisdom is a part. It may be useful at this point to spell out in some detail the various possible consequences of Aristotle’s answer. In the first place, if we accept Aristotle’s claims about wisdom, we SALEM 33 can of course no longer regard ethical virtue, taken as a whole, as the “best and most complete virtue,” and can no longer assume that the activity of soul that is happiness is exhausted in the performance of good and beautiful deeds. Good works are not good enough. The activity that makes up happiness must somehow include the being at work of thinking, and not just any thinking, but the knowing of objects which are at once “most honorable” and “incapable of being otherwise” (1139b18-22; 1141a18-20, b2-3). And the disposition of soul that makes this activity possible, namely, wisdom must form at least part of the “best and most complete virtue.” This is not to say that the ethical virtues cannot also be part of the “best and most complete virtue.” It could be the case that by “whole virtue” Aristotle means “the sum of the virtues,” that wisdom, prudence and ethical virtue together constitute the “best and most complete virtue.” If this were true, the happy man would be the man whose soul’s parts each possessed its proper virtue, and his happiness would show itself in the beauty of his deeds, in his understanding of human affairs, and in his knowing of the first and highest of things. Again, if this were true, we might be compelled to deepen and broaden our understanding of magnanimity, to see it as the kosmos or constellation of all the virtues, including prudence and wisdom. And finally, if this were true, we would surely be obliged to read the “if ” clause in “if the virtues are many, in accordance with the best and most complete of them” as a genuine question: “if the virtues are many” would have to mean “if the virtues are many and not facets or parts of one whole virtue.” On the other hand, it could well be the case that the ethical virtues are to be excluded from the notion of whole virtue. Wisdom and prudence might be the two parts of whole virtue. Or wisdom might be part of a whole whose other parts are as yet unnamed. Finally, it seems at least possible that the words “whole virtue” are simply the first line of �34 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW defense in Aristotle’s freeing of wisdom from the charge of uselessness. By locating wisdom within the whole of virtue, he suggests that wisdom deserves at least equal consideration with the ethical virtues. But Aristotle’s final position might be that wisdom, in isolation from the rest of the virtues, is the sole cause of human happiness. * Aristotle’s second answer, to which I now want to turn, seems to me to be a far less radical defense of reason than his first. It answers the charge of uselessness, not by posing an alternative to the life of action based in ethical virtue, but by showing that reason in the form of prudence is an integral part of that life. In effect, Aristotle shows here that the analogy drawn from medicine and health does not adequately represent the relation of prudence to ethical virtue. That analogy suggests that the ethical virtues, and the actions commonly associated with them, are in themselves independent of prudence, and only incidentally in need of it. But in fact, Aristotle argues, the ethical virtues cannot themselves produce the equivalent of healthy activity, as health presumably can in the case of a healthy body. The character of a man’s actions depends on the quality of his thinking as well as the goodness of his character. We aim to do justice or to act generously, we are moved to do what is just or what is generous, because we are just or generous; the ethical virtues are responsible for the rightness of desire and the rightness of our ends. But it is up to prudence to see all that bears on or contributes to those ends (ta pros ta telê), and hence to discover just what the right things are, right here and right now: we must think, and be able to think well, if we are to see the particular shape that generosity or justice must take on in a particular situation. In short, prudence and the ethical virtues are co-causes of those motions or activities of the soul which make for happiness on the level of deeds—assuming, that is, that such deeds have SALEM 35 anything to do with happiness (1144a6-9, 20-22; 1145a26).13 But Aristotle’s answer goes further than this. Not only the actions we associate with the ethical virtues, but also the ethical virtues themselves depend on the presence of prudence within the soul. To be sure, Aristotle argues, there seem to be certain natural bases for the ethical virtues. Certain men seem to be by nature disposed to be just or moderate or courageous, and these “natural virtues” can exist in separation from prudence (1144b4-9). But ethical virtue in the strict sense cannot be or come into being without prudence (1144b14-17). And the reverse is also true. Again, there appears to be a natural power or faculty within the soul that enables us to discover the means necessary to accomplish a given end (1144a23-26). But this power of the soul, which Aristotle calls shrewdness or cleverness, is open-ended; it can be used for good or for ill (1144a26-27). Once developed and perfected, it becomes prudence, but it cannot be developed and perfected unless the ethical virtues are there to make the ends that we aim at the right ends (1144a271144b1). Ethical virtue and prudence, then, are not only cocauses of right action, but also co-causes of one another. They form a two that does not admit of division: neither can be or be at work without the other; neither of the parts of the soul of which they are virtues can be fully itself in the absence of the virtue of the other (1144b30-32). The consequences of Aristotle’s second answer seem clear enough. If by the words “best and most complete virtue” Aristotle means to refer to only one of the many virtues he has discussed, and if by “complete” he means, even if only in part, “able to be and be at work without help from elsewhere,” then clearly neither prudence nor any of the ethical virtues can even qualify for the position of “best and most complete virtue.” This would leave wisdom as the only possible candidate. And the account of wisdom that Aristotle provides in the body of Book 6 suggests that wisdom does indeed �36 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW possess the completeness which prudence and the ethical virtues lack. For there wisdom is distinguished from knowledge precisely on the grounds that knowledge as knowledge lacks insight into its starting-points, and is therefore incomplete, while in wisdom insight into starting points and knowledge of what follows from those starting points are inextricably linked (1139b25-35; 1140b31-35; 1141a17-20).14 And yet the very way in which Aristotle articulates the relation between prudence and ethical virtue in his second answer suggests that those virtues, taken together, possess something like completeness. Although each by itself is incomplete, prudence and ethical virtue together seem to form a sort of self-sufficient whole, independent of wisdom and, indeed, analogous in structure to wisdom, with ethical virtue supplying prudence with the starting points from which it deliberates, and prudence supplying ethical virtue with that discernment and judgement of particulars upon which any right action depends. * We seem to have reached an impasse. Although it has become clear that the ethical virtues cannot themselves constitute the “best and most complete virtue,” clear that reason in some form must play a part in the good life, it still remains unclear which form of reason is most likely to lead to happiness. Of all the virtues, wisdom best fits Aristotle’s definition of happiness. Wisdom must not only form part of complete virtue, as we gathered from Aristotle’s first answer; it may well be that virtue. But it seems that prudence, in company with the ethical virtues, could also lay claim to the title of complete virtue. In fact, Aristotle goes out of his way here to single out prudence, as if it, rather than magnanimity or perfect justice, were the true unifying ground of the virtues related to action (1144b32-1145a2). Should his bare assertion that wisdom plays a major part in happiness be allowed to obscure what can be said for prudence? Finally, we have not yet seen any evidence to contradict the hypothesis, again drawn from SALEM 37 Aristotle’s first answer, that by complete virtue Aristotle means “whole virtue” and by whole virtue he means all the virtues. Why should happiness not consist in the being at work of all the parts of the soul, each in accordance with its proper virtue? As it turns out, the second of the two questions Aristotle raises in the final section of Book 6 bears directly on the issue before us, i.e., the relation between prudence and wisdom. If that question and its answers do not provide us with final solutions to the difficulties I have just articulated, I think they may at least help us to understand them more clearly. Aristotle asks: can prudence, whose work it is to rule and give orders concerning each thing, also be said to rule and give orders to wisdom (1143b33-36)? Like his first question, Aristotle’s second question has two answers. And like those earlier answers, these answers point us in different directions. In this case, each answer hints at a different understanding of the relation between prudence and wisdom. Let me begin with Aristotle’s second answer. To say that prudence rules wisdom, Aristotle claims, would be like saying that politics rules the gods because it gives orders concerning all things in the city (1145a10-12). Just as the gods dwell outside the city, out of the reach of politics, so too, we infer, wisdom lies outside—indeed, above—the domain in which prudence properly exercises its authority. Aristotle’s answer seems at first glance to be a straightforward denial of the power and right of prudence to rule wisdom. But the very brevity of his answer—and if brevity is the soul of wit, it should probably count as the wittiest response ever made to a fundamental question—seems to invite further reflection. We might wonder, for instance, whether politics can and must give orders concerning all things in the city precisely because the gods take no interest and no part in the life of the city. And we might wonder, too, whether political life takes on a kind of wholeness and self-sufficiency precisely because the gods leave men to their own devices. In short, we �38 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW might wonder whether the supremacy and self-sufficiency of the gods not only limits the extent of political authority, but also constitutes that authority and the very domain in which it is exercised: perhaps politics and the city are only in the wake of divine withdrawal. But what may hold for the city and its gods may hold for prudence and wisdom as well. Perhaps the particular character that wisdom takes on over the course of Book 6—its self-sufficient contemplation of the unchanging sources of all things, its consequent separation from human affairs and human doings—requires Aristotle to grant the life of action a certain wholeness and requires Aristotle to find a central place for prudence within it (1141b2-8). The two apparently contradictory views articulated a moment ago, the view that wisdom alone possesses completeness and the view that prudence in company with the ethical virtues possesses a sort of completeness, may not be incompatible after all: the second view may follow from the first. The assumption about happiness which characterizes such a large part of the Ethics, the assumption that human happiness lies in acting well, may be the result, curiously enough, of Aristotle’s gradually unfolded claim that wisdom and true happiness exist in utter separation from ordinary life. Of course, to return to Aristotle’s image, it does not quite seem true to say that politics and political life exist in complete separation from the gods. Surely one of the tasks of politics, one part of its educative work, is to teach citizens to honor the gods.15 If so, might prudence not have an analogous task: to make the superiority of wisdom visible on occasion, to remind the ethical virtues, or those who possess them, that wisdom is after all the most honorable of activities? Granted that for the most part prudence must keep its ear to the ground, its nose to the grindstone and its eye on the particular; granted that in general it must take its bearings by what the ethical virtues disclose as the human good; still, it seems difficult to believe that prudence would not in some SALEM 39 form and on some occasions look beyond and point beyond the horizon established by the ethical virtues.16 Indeed, isn’t this just what we find Aristotle himself doing in Book 10? There he makes his most explicit claim for the absolute superiority and self-sufficiency of wisdom, and he does so in the strongest language imaginable (1177a18-b4; 1177b17-27; 1178b22-24). In light of that claim, the claims of prudence and the ethical virtues pale: in Book 10 Aristotle insists that the life based on prudence can be called happy only in a secondary way, that the wise man will take up that life, a merely human life, only with a certain reluctance (1178a9-23; 1178b3-8). And yet, almost in the same breath Aristotle begins to speak of educating men in what seems to be ethical virtue, and begins to introduce his study of politics as if nothing had happened (1179a30-b4; 1179b23-28). One minute he is telling his readers not to settle for the human-alltoo-human but “to be immortal” instead, the next he is exhorting them to attend to families and friends and to engage in his “philosophy concerning human” i.e., mortal, affairs (1177b32-35; 1180a29-33; 1181b12-16). He gives his readers a glimpse of the highest life, shows them enough of it to make them honor its claims, but then leaves them and their lives more or less intact. * Aristotle’s first answer to his question concerning the relation of prudence to wisdom tells a somewhat different story, and leads to a somewhat different way of reading the drama of the Ethics. Once again, the superiority of wisdom to prudence is emphasized: Aristotle calls wisdom the virtue of the “better” part of the soul. And once again, Aristotle insists that prudence does not give orders to wisdom. Likening prudence to the medical art and wisdom to health, he says that prudence does not “use” wisdom, but sees to it that it comes into being: prudence gives orders for the sake of wisdom, not to wisdom (1145a7-10). �40 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Still, Aristotle’s very use of this medical analogy—yet again—points to a different way of understanding the relation between prudence and wisdom than we find in his other answer. Much earlier, in his initial question, Aristotle had used the analogy to suggest that the ethical virtues are sufficient unto themselves: prudence might be needed to bring those virtues into being, but those virtues, once in place within the human soul, can do without the help of prudence. Now, having rejected this analogy in the case of the ethical virtues, Aristotle resurrects it in the case of wisdom. He thus suggests that wisdom in fact enjoys the self-sufficiency earlier attributed to the ethical virtues. But he also suggests, as he had not in his other answer, that wisdom in some sense depends on prudence. Indeed his use of the words “sees to it that it comes into being” seems intended to underscore this dependence.17 Wisdom is not a god after all; it may possess a divine self-sufficiency once it has come into being, but it must come into being and prudence is somehow responsible for bringing it forth. What follows from Aristotle’s suggestion that wisdom is not quite self-sufficient? If wisdom depends, for its very being, on the activity of prudence, it cannot be regarded as the sole cause, among the virtues, of human happiness. If by the “best and most complete virtue,” we mean all those human excellences through which happiness comes into being, then that virtue would have to include prudence as well as wisdom. But if prudence, in turn, depends on the ethical virtues, would it not follow that happiness depends on the presence within a soul of all the virtues—at least in the measure that wisdom is not fully present and at work within that soul? Does Aristotle, then, intend us to identify complete virtue with the sum of the virtues? Are we to understand, after all, that happiness somehow consists in the being at work of all the virtues, including the ethical virtues?18 Perhaps. But Aristotle’s words “prudence gives orders for the sake of wisdom” oblige us, I think, to reconsider the rela- SALEM 41 tion of prudence to the ethical virtues. According to Aristotle’s earlier argument, prudence depends on the ethical virtues because the ethical virtues, in directing desire aright, illuminate or disclose the ends by which prudence takes its bearings. But if the proper ends for the sake of which prudence makes its deliberations are not, or are not primarily, courageous, moderate or just actions, if the proper end of prudence is wisdom or the activity of wisdom, the ethical virtues would seem to fall short in their work of forming right desire. What seems to be needed instead is a new hexis, a new ordering of the soul, that corresponds to the desire for and delight in wisdom above all things. In short, what seems to be needed is an inner condition or virtue we might call philosophia, love of wisdom.19 This is not to say that in the new order of things ethical virtue would be rendered useless. What seems to be required instead is a sort of transformation of the ethical virtues, a reformation of them that would leave wisdom at the core of right desire. The man who underwent such a reformation might, to all appearances, be scarcely distinguishable from the man for whom right action was everything. The ethical life would not have to be a matter of reluctance to him, as it seems to be to the wise man alluded to in Aristotle’s other answer. But his would be a greatness of soul, a “kosmos of the virtues,” big enough to house a longing to take in the very sources of all things; an ever-present appetite for wisdom, which would somehow shape his every deliberation, would distinguish him from the man who honors wisdom without pursuing it. In short, the complete or whole virtue of such a man, in whom prudence gives orders for the sake of wisdom, would include the ethical virtues without being defined by them. Now nowhere in the Ethics does Aristotle explicitly discuss the constellation of virtues I have just described. He does, however, point to it from time to time. For instance, I think it is difficult to read Aristotle’s account of the curious �42 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW disposition mentioned at the beginning of this essay without being reminded of the philosophical life, especially when it is read in conjunction with the discussion of its two companion virtues, also unnamed: “friendliness” (displayed toward those with whom one is not fully friends) and “truthfulness” or “love of truth” (in which Socrates and Socratic irony or selfdepreciation loom large) (1126b19-31; 1127a33-1127b9; 1127b22-32). Indeed, by placing his account of the readiness to engage in playful, leisurely, tactful conversation in the midst of his account of the ethical virtues, Aristotle suggests that philosophy can occur in the midst of the ethical life.20 But perhaps the clearest of Aristotle’s allusions to this conjunction of the virtues is to be found in his account of friendship, which by its position provides a delicate contrast to the account of the apparent disjunction between wisdom and the other virtues in Book 10.21 There, when at the end of Book 9 he returns to the theme of complete friendship or the friendship between good men, Aristotle makes it clear that the virtue or goodness of such men lies in thought and action. In the course of a single chapter he at once describes the unalloyed delight which good men take in contemplating one another’s deeds, and yet insists that their living together comes to completion in philosophic conversation, in their “sharing of words and thought in common” (1169b30-1170a4; 1170b10-12). Aristotle even suggests that something like the completeness or self-sufficiency that belongs to wisdom characterizes the life of reflection and action enjoyed by good men who are friends. Using language which seems intended to remind us of his account of the divine life in Book 12 of the Metaphysics—the life in which wisdom at work presumably shares—Aristotle describes the “living together” of good friends as a sort of “thinking of thinking” (Meta. 1074b15-35). Since friends are other selves, friends see themselves “at work” in seeing their friends “at work,” and this seeing or “theorizing,” being itself a form of being at work, brings completeness and joy to their SALEM 43 common life (1169b30-1170b19). While men who are lovers of wisdom rather than wise may not themselves possess the divine self-sufficiency which comes with wisdom, their lives acquire a kind of wholeness and divinity in the presence of their friends.22 * Why does Aristotle leave us with these two, rather different accounts of happiness? Some time ago I suggested that Aristotle, exercising his own prudence, makes the superiority of wisdom visible in order to instill in his readers a kind of distant respect for wisdom, but then leaves them and their lives more or less intact. I think that this suggestion, while true, has its limits. Some of his readers might retain their focus on the life of action; they might come away from the Ethics with a deepened understanding of the foundations of the ethical life along with a well-founded, if distant, admiration for wisdom and its pursuit. But for others, for those most engaged by Aristotle’s inquiry into the highest good and most eager to make his inquiry their own, the experience of reading the Ethics, especially Books 6 and 10, would surely be different. They would see, with Aristotle, the insufficiency of the everyday, customary understanding of virtue and happiness, would see that the life of action must in truth be suffused and completed by deliberative thought. But they would also see, with Aristotle, the ultimate insufficiency of thought aimed at action, would see that thought as thought reaches completion only in the thinking for it own sake of what is simply thinkable. They would thus see, with Aristotle, that there is a space in the human soul—the soul of the animal defined by thinking—that only wisdom can fill, would see that being complete as a human being ultimately means passing beyond what is human. For such readers a simple separation of spheres—“my life of action here, the sphere of being wise somewhere over and up there”—is simply not a possibility. For to have taken in the thought that wisdom is the highest good, to have made it truly one’s own, is already to have undergone the re-orien- �44 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW tation of prudence described above; it is to have become philo-sophic. And to have arrived at the thought that wisdom is the highest good, to have taken a genuine part in Aristotle’s philosophic deliberations, is to be already on the way to wisdom; it is to have made a beginning in the being at work of philosophizing.23 To leave such readers with only a distant vision of the superiority of wisdom would not be enough. Aristotle must provide some sense of the sort of life to be lived on the way to wisdom, if only to show how the pursuit of wisdom might “fit” within ordinary life. Prudence and the wish to see respect for wisdom flourish among those dedicated to a life of thoughtful action may require Aristotle to voice the claims of wisdom, but prudence and a kind of friendship with certain of his readers equally oblige him to show them, in word and in deed, what a life of loving wisdom might look like. SALEM 45 4 1 All references to the Nicomachean Ethics are to Bywater’s edition, the Oxford University Press (London, 1894). Citations and references are generally given in Bekker numbers. Translations are my own. Because the following investigation begins with the middle of Aristotle’s own inquiry, it will have to take for granted any number of claims, above all, the claim that happiness is an activity (rather than, say, an occasional feeling) and the claim that it has everything to do with virtue or excellence (rather than, say, pleasure). Aristotle himself argues for both claims in Book 1, most explicitly in the chapters (7 and 8) that treat his definition directly. A brief reflection on the words he uses to define happiness may help make more apparent what is at stake there. The word I have translated as “activity” or “being at work,” energeia, is one of two words used by Aristotle for the core meaning of a thing’s being; the near synonym for it is entelecheia, which means something like remaining fully at one’s end or being fully complete (Metaphysics 9, 1048a32-b9; 1050a3-24). Kata, “in accordance with,” clearly has its strong causal meaning here; it means “through” or “because of ” rather than simply “in alignment with” (Meta. 5, 1022a14-23). Finally, “virtue,” aretê, related to the verb arariskô, “to join” or “fit together,” means “fitness,” the inner condition that allows for something to be and work as well as possible (Ethics, 1106a15-21). To say that happiness is an energeia, then, is to say that it is that activity in which what we are as human beings, i.e., our human form, becomes fully present. And to search for the virtue it accords with is to search for the inner condition through which that complete presence arises, i.e., through which we are fully human or, as we like to say, “are all there” (Meta. 9, 1050a34-b2). 2 5 Notes Roughly speaking, the ethical virtues are the human excellences that define character (êthos); they thus shape our responses to the world, i.e., our feelings or passions (pathê), and our actions (praxeis) within it. The intellectual virtues have to do with the activities most central to the “part” of us that thinks, that “has reason (logon echei)” in almost every sense of those terms. 3 Aristotle’s inquiry is clearly meant, in the first instance, for men who are serious about the pursuit of happiness both for themselves and their cities (1095a8-11; 1102a12-26). His book is thus addressed to hoi charientes kai praktikoi, “men of a certain cultivation or grace who are also able to act”—and this means, to men who, if asked, would identify happiness with honor but who, if pushed, would identify it with virtue (1095b22-30). “Prudence” and “wisdom” are traditional translations of phronêsis and sophia. Neither is entirely adequate to the task. Sophia has overtones of skill and precision in the arts entirely missing from the ordinary sense of “wisdom,” while its connection to craftiness in speech (as in “sophistry”) turns up only in degraded forms like “wise guy” and “wisecrack.” Prudence, on the other hand, can suggest a caution that has no correlate in phronêsis: Aristotle’s phronimos is no fool; still, there might well be occasions and circumstances in which phronêsis would demand that a man throw caution to the winds and hurl himself once more into the breach. 6 Kosmos has been variously translated as “ornament” (Apostle), “crowning ornament” (Rackham) and “crown” (Ross). Though magnanimity may be a crown, it is surely much more than an ornament. How it might serve as something like a unifying ground for �46 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the virtues begins to become clear as we recollect that hoi charientes kai praktikoi are lovers of honor to begin with, that being chosen for their own sake rather than the sake of honor is the hallmark of virtuous actions and that magnanimity is the virtue concerned with one’s response to another’s conferral—or failure to confer—honor on one’s virtue (1105a26-1105b5; 1124a4-12). More generally, magnanimity has to do with the way the good man keeps a grip on himself and his virtue in the face of good and bad fortune (1124a112-16). Hence its first appearance (in Book 1), where it is said that, “the beautiful shines through whenever someone bears many and great misfortunes with good grace, not through want of sensibility, but because he is well-bred and great-souled” (1100b3033). 7 I have focused here on what magnanimity and whole justice share in common. But there are also significant differences between them, differences that point to significant difficulties with each of them. The emphasis in the account of magnanimity is on self-sufficiency and near stillness: the magnanimous man is said to be “lazy” or “workless” (argos=a-ergos) in the absence of a project worthy of his virtue and “to be unable to live for (pros) another (except for a friend)” (1124b23-26; 1124b31-1125a1). In the description of complete justice, by contrast, the whole emphasis is on the activity or “using” of virtue for (pros) others; the perfect citizen is apparently completely absorbed in promoting the happiness of his city and fellow citizens. The self-sufficiency and activity that together characterize happiness seem to fall asunder in these first attempts to characterize complete virtue (1097b14-21). 8 To be sure, Aristotle defines choice in Book 3 and defining it involves him in a discussion of deliberation; he also mentions the intellectual virtues at points and notes once that there will have to be a discussion of “right reason” later on (1111b4-1113a14; 1103b31-34). Still, the whole emphasis is on the importance of doing, of acquiring a good and stable character by acting in a certain way; “mere” knowing looks like a refuge for the lazy and weak, and Aristotle no sooner gives himself opportunities to talk about the virtues of intellect than he squanders them (1103b20-31; 1105b9-18; 1098a7-17; 1098b23-26). 9 For enunciations of the “hermeneutical” principle at work here, see 1095a30-b4 and the beginning of the Physics, 184a16-184b14. SALEM 47 For the centrality of the principle to the whole dialectical enterprise, see the beginning of the Topics, 100a30-b23 and 101a35-b4. The grounds for the principle are perhaps best stated best at Metaphysics 2, 993a30-b11. John Burnet provides a useful summary of the business and character of Aristotelian dialectic and its relation to ethical inquiry in the introduction to his excellent edition and commentary on the Ethics. See The Ethics of Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1900), pp. xxxiv-xliv. 10 For an illuminating discussion of the meaning of hexis and its place within the ethical life, see J. Sachs, “Three Little Words,” St. John’s Review 54, no.1 (1997), 1-9. Mr. Sachs underscores the distinction between hexis and mere habit as well as the activity implicit in hexis. Both points are well worth making. It is no accident that hexis is an action word derived from the future form of echein, which means “have” “hold” or (used intransitively) “be in a certain condition.” A hexis is no mere effect of an activity, as, say, poverty is an effect of thinking; nor is it a mere condition for activity as, say, eating is a condition for thinking. It is instead a particular readiness for a particular activity; it is a being-in-shape-for, an intending-to, a being-about-to that requires nothing but opportunity to spring into action; it is, one might say, that activity “on hold.” 11 For the senses in which wisdom and the other virtues can be regarded as formal causes, see Burnet, op. cit., pp. 144 and 283. 12 Has anything in the intervening discussion in Book 6 prepared us for this change in perspective? I think so. Although the bulk of Book 6 remains focused on thought as it bears on human action, at the beginning of the book and again in the discussion of knowledge in the strict sense (epistêmê) we are reminded that not everything we think about has to be marked by the changeability of human affairs: there are some objects of thought which exist of necessity and we have the “parts” to know them (1139a6-11; 1139b22-23). Then, in the discussion of wisdom (sophia), we are reminded, or told, that man is by no means the best thing in the cosmos—and that it is precisely the “action” of sophia which puts us in contact with the best of those unchanging things (1141a20-22, a33-b2). 13 Once Aristotle reminds us here of the part that reasoning plays in the life of action, his question about the usefulness of the intellectual virtues may begin to seem merely odd, at least as regards �48 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW prudence. But I think we should beware of dismissing that question too quickly. In the first place, there seem to be any number of moments in life when the most honest answer we can give for why we did something is, “It just felt right” or “I had the sense there was nothing else I could do.” In fact Aristotle himself notes in his discussion of courage that we really see whether the virtue is truly there precisely in moments of sudden danger, when deliberation simply is not a possibility (1117a17-22). Moreover, it seems possible to argue that the perspective of Aristotle’s initial question is simply the perspective of the law. We have already taken note of those places where it is said that the intention of the law is to make men good, i.e., to be a sufficient condition for (ethical) virtue in men. But Aristotle also notes that it is the very nature of law to overlook the particulars with which prudence works: from the point of view of law, prudence, which frees a man to become “a sort of law unto himself,” seems to be at best unnecessary (1128a29-33). Hence the need for “equity,” which ad-justs for the universality of law by looking, if you will, from the particular situation, through the law to the intention of the lawgiver (1137b11-34). 14 For example, the mathematician as mathematician uses his definitions and postulates rather than reflecting on them; he takes his slice of being, his “field,” for granted and sets to work learning as much as he can about it. The man engaged in first philosophy, the man in pursuit of wisdom in the strict sense, accepts no such limit on his thinking; even the so-called principle of non-contradiction— the mathematician’s favorite tool—becomes for him an occasion for reflecting on the being of beings. See Metaphysics 1003a20-28; 1005a19-b8. 15 For Aristotle’s comments on the place and necessity of “care concerning the gods” in the city, see the Politics 1322b18-29, 1328b1113; 1329a27-34. 16 At 1141b22-30 Aristotle distinguishes two aspects or modes or kinds of prudence, an “architectonic” form that closely resembles lawgiving and a form that corresponds to politics in the ordinary sense, i.e., the hands-on deliberative engagement with the particulars of political life. 17 Aristotle’s words here directly echo the language he had used earlier in Book 6 to characterize art (technê): “art” or “the activity of SALEM 49 art” (depending on what text one chooses to follow) “sees to it (theôrein hopôs) that there comes into being some one of the things that admit of being and not being . . . ” (1140a10-14). 18 I am assuming here that what Aristotle is referring to in the first instance is the relation of prudence to wisdom within a single soul, that the wisdom that prudence is working to bring forth is in the first instance wisdom for oneself: the prudent man is like the doctor who tries to heal himself. To be sure, prudence in this sense might also direct itself toward bringing about wisdom and the pursuit of wisdom in others; one need look no further than the Ethics for evidence of this. Yet I think—and this should become clearer momentarily—that prudence can direct itself outward in this way only if it has already undergone an inner realignment, into a prudence that sees wisdom as the chief good. Only a man who had come to see wisdom in this way, and so wanted it for himself, would want to see others have it as well. 19 For the appropriateness of the name, consider Aristotle’s discussion of philo-words at 1099a7-21 (especially the philo-theôros, the man who loves to behold) and the passage from the Republic it clearly echoes, where Socrates “defines” the philosopher as a “lover of the sight (philo-theamon) of the truth” (475b8-e4). 20 It is here that Aristotle first introduces the thought that a man might be responsive to the demands of law or custom while remaining independent of it: “So the graceful (or gracious) and free (or generous) man will keep himself in this condition, being a sort of law unto himself ” (1128a31-32). 21 That friendship in some form may be a candidate for “best and most complete virtue” is suggested by the following considerations. Aristotle opens his account of friendship with the claim that friendship is “a virtue or involved with virtue . . . ” (1155a3-4). We later learn that genuine friendship (philia) involves more than mere liking (philêsis); it is a hexis and involves choice, i.e., it shares certain important structural features with ethical virtue (1157b28-31). We also learn that justice, which at least in its broadest sense was earlier identified with whole or complete virtue, is in important respects superseded by friendship (1155a22-28; 1163b15-18). Finally, Aristotle’s name for friendship at its peak, “complete friendship,” points directly back to the language of “best and most complete �50 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW virtue,” and the friendship in question is between men who are simply good or virtuous without qualification (1156b7-35). The connection between friendship and philosophy begins to become apparent in chapter four of Book 9, the beginning of the sequence that leads to the passage discussed below. Here, for the first time in the Ethics, man is openly identified with the intellect or thinking part of himself, and the good man is characterized by his abiding love and cultivation of his self in this sense (1166a13-23). 22 Cf. Amelie Rorty, “The Place of Contemplation in Aristotle’s NE,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1980) esp. pp. 388-391. 23 In the Ethics itself we are witness to a peculiar coming together of theôria and praxis; “philosophic deliberations” is meant to get at this conjunction. From one point of view Aristotle’s inquiry is simply a sustained practical deliberation about what to do with our lives; from another it is a sustained philosophic exploration of a what-is question—“What is the human good?”—in which any number of basic features of human being come to light. In it we see the thinking of what is turn practical as it turns its gaze on itself—the being capable of thought—and the conditions for its own activity. But more to the point, we see practical thought turn theoretical as it turns from deliberation about the particular conditions for this or that virtuous act to deliberation about the virtues themselves, i.e., the conditions for happiness itself. Once we take into account this doubleness in Aristotle’s own inquiry we must begin to wonder seriously just how settled the distinction is between prudence and wisdom—or at any rate, between prudential and philosophic inquiry (1112b20-24; 1142a31-b2). 51 Jacob Klein and the Phenomenological Project of Desedimenting the Formalization of Meaning Burt C. Hopkins Scope and Limits of Husserl’s Reactivation of the Sedimented Origins of the Modern Spirit For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology as First Philosophy has but one goal: intuitive knowledge of what is. On his view, both what in the world the formalized meaning formations of mathematical physics (e.g., f = ma) refer to and therefore make intuitable, and how in the world this reference and corresponding intuition is possible, is obscure. He traces this obscurity to the fact that the formalized meaning at issue in modern mathematics is made possible by the progressive “emptying of its meaning in relation” (Crisis, 44/44)1 to the “real [real]” (35/37), that is, to the intuitive givenness of the things manifest to everyday sense experience in the surrounding world. Husserl’s historical reflection on the beginnings of the development of modern, Galilean science, reveals that it is first made possible by this progressive emptying of meaning. That is, the meaning formations of the mathematics that make physics possible are themselves made possible by their “becoming liberated from all intuited actuality, about numbers, numerical relations” (43/44), and, of course, from the intuitively given shapes of actual things. More precisely, the ideal shapes of Euclidean geometry are Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is CoEditor of The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy and is currently writing a book whose working title is Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein on the Origination of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics. �52 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW substituted for the intuited shapes of things, while algebraic calculation with “‘symbolic’ concepts” (48/48) that express numbers in general—as opposed to determined numbers— excludes the “original thinking that genuinely gives meaning to this technical process and truth to the correct results” (46/46). To be sure, Husserl’s investigations of this problem in the Crisis-texts are fragmentary. Their focus is on the origin of geometry and on what he refers to as the “sedimentation” (52/52) involved in the Galilean impulse to treat Euclidean geometry in a taken-for-granted, and therefore straightforward, manner. Husserl uses the term “sedimentation” to designate the “constant presuppositions . . . [of the] constructions, concepts, presuppositions, theories” that characterize the significations of the meaning formations of a science—in the case at hand, of Galilean natural science—insofar as they are not “‘cashed in’ [einzulösenden],”2 (OG, 376/366), that is, reactivated in terms of the original activities that produced their meaning. Cashing in the meaning formations in question requires that we eventually reactivate the “historical beginning” (367/356) that this science “must have had,” which in the case of Galilean natural science means that we eventually have to reactivate the origin of the Euclidean geometry that was taken for granted when its meaning formations were first established. Husserl’s fragmentary analyses of the “origin of the modern spirit” (Crisis, 58/57), in which he links to Galileo’s name “all of our characterizations . . . in a certain sense simplifying and idealizing the matter,” function therefore to “de-sediment” the meaning formations and thereby to reactivate their historical beginnings. Specifically, Husserl’s de-sedimentation cashes in the impulse of the Galilean spirit to mathematize the world by tracing this accomplishment back to its origin in “the sphere of immediately experiencing intuitions and the possible experience of the prescientific life-world” (42/43). Husserl encounters the obscure or unintelligible meaning for- HOPKINS 53 mations of present-day mathematical natural science, and moves backward to an historical reference that mediates his access to the life-world. Thus it is not as if Husserl, sitting in his study, is somehow able to conjure up the direct experience of the prescientific life-world and to compare it with the abstract view of the world presumably found in the meaning formations that make up mathematical physics. Rather, his experience of mathematical physics, when combined with his expectation that its meaning formations must somehow be ultimately founded in a reference (or, more precisely, an intention) to the world that is capable being intuitively fulfilled at some level, leads to his discovery (or, more properly, his re-discovery) of the prescientific life-world and its true origins. Rather than rehearse Husserl’s well-known analyses, what is necessary here is to thematize their salient results and highlight their fragmentary character. Husserl shows that the Galilean impulse rests on both a direct mathematization of the appearances of bodies and an indirect mathematization of their sensuous modes of givenness as they show up in the intuitively given surrounding-world. That is to say, Husserl’s attempt to cash in the ideal meaning formations of the pure shapes of Euclidean geometry, which Galileo took for granted as the “true” shapes of nature, reveals that our direct experience of nature never yields geometrical-ideal bodies but “precisely the bodies that we actually experience” (22/25). Directing our regard to the mere shapes of these bodies in an abstractive way cannot yield what modern science understands as “geometrical ideal possibilities,” nor can their arbitrary transformation in fantasy. Even though the latter yields “‘ideal’ possibilities” in a certain sense, these possibilities remain tied to sensible shapes and thus can only manifest their transformation into other sensible shapes. The method of operating with the pure or ideal shapes that characterizes Euclidean geometry thus does not point directly back to the sensible shapes of the bodies we actually �54 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW experience in the life-world, but rather to measuring, “the methodology of determination by surveying and measuring in general, practiced first primitively and then as an art in the prescientific, intuitively given surrounding-world” (24/27). It is therefore the praxis of perfecting such measuring, “of freely pressing toward the horizon of conceivable perfecting ‘again and again’,” (23/26) which yields “limit shapes [Grenzgestalten] as invariant and never attainable poles” toward which the series of perfecting tends. Euclidean geometry is then born when “we are interested in these ideal shapes and are consistently engaged in determining them and in constructing new ones out of those already determined.” This is the geometry that was pregiven to Galileo as a takenfor-granted tradition. The original activity in which the ideal meaning formations of Euclidean geometry were accomplished remained concealed to Galileo. Thus when Galileo mathematized the intuitive shapes of bodies directly and their sensuous manners of appearing indirectly by substituting for them the ‘anticipation’ of their true being in the ideal shapes of Euclidean geometry, the original intuition of the sensible shapes of bodies, along with their transformation into limit shapes by the praxis of measuring, became “sedimented.” That is to say, as a consequence of Galileo’s methodical construction of the “true nature” through the substitution of the ideal shapes of Euclidean geometry for the experience of sensible shapes proper to bodies, the original intuition of sensible shapes was lost. Hence, Husserl’s famous characterization of Galileo as “at once a discovering and a concealing genius” (53/52). Husserl’s analyses of the Galilean mathematization takes cognizance of the fact that “one thing more is important for our clarification.” This “one thing more” is the “‘arithmetization of geometry’” (44/44). Aided by “the algebraic terms and ways of thinking that have been widespread in the modern period since Vieta,” this arithmetization transforms the ideal shapes of Galileo’s Euclidean approach to the world into HOPKINS 55 algebraic structures whose symbolic formula-meaning displaces—“unnoticed” (44/45)—the signification of magnitudes. The geometrical shapes of Galilean science are covered over when replaced by algebraic notations. Husserl considers this the “decisive accomplishment” (42/43) of the natural scientific method. In accord with its “complete meaning” (Gesamtsinn), this accomplishment makes possible the anticipation of systematically ordered, determinate predictions about the practical life-world. Such predictions are made possible by hypothesizing underlying ideal mathematical structures expressed in general formulas with indeterminate values. By means of these, empirically verifiable regularities can anticipate the intuitions that constitute immediate, prescientific experience. Consequently, “[t]his arithmetization of geometry leads almost automatically, in a certain way, to the emptying of its meaning” (44/44). Husserl points out that this unnoticed emptying of meaning eventually “becomes a fully conscious methodical displacement, a methodical transition from geometry, for instance, to pure analyses, treated as a science in its own right” (44/45). Thus this process of methodical transformation leads beyond arithmetization to “a completely universal ‘formalization’.” A purely formal analysis transcends the pure theory of numbers and magnitudes of algebra: analysis assumes the guise of a mathesis universalis, a universal mathematics of “manifolds.” Manifolds are thought of in “empty, formal generality”; they are conceived of as defined by determinate modalities of the “something-in-general.” And although Husserl does not explicitly mention it here, the construction of the “formal-logical idea of a ‘worldin-general’” at issue in the mathesis universalis is what he elsewhere refers to as “formal ontology.”3 In contrast to his analyses of the Galilean geometrization of nature, however, Husserl’s analysis of mathesis universalis or formal ontology does not attempt to reactivate the historical beginnings of the original accomplishment that makes it possible. He makes no attempt to cash in the sedimentation of meaning that accom- �56 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW panies it. This sedimentation is inseparable from the displacement of the immediate intuitive experience of the lifeworld that takes place in the arithmetization of geometry, the displacement that originally makes possible the formalization of meaning at issue in formal ontology. Despite Husserl’s failure to pursue this task of de-sedimentation with respect to formalization, it is clear that he thinks that its de-sedimentation would lead to immediate intuitions in the life-world. This is evident from the following passage: If one still has a vivid awareness of this coordination [among mathematical idealities] in its original meaning, then a mere thematic focus of attention on this meaning is sufficient in order to grasp the ascending orders of intuitions (now conceived as approximations) indicated by the functionally coordinated quantities (or, more briefly, formulae); or rather, one can, following these indications, bring the ascending order of intuitions vividly to mind. Likewise in Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl expressed the conviction that the meaning-relation of all categorial meanings to something individual, that is, on the noetic side, to evidences of individuals, to experiences—a relation growing out of their meaning-genesis and present in every example that could be used by formal analytics—surely cannot be insignificant for the meaning and the possible evidence of the laws of analytics, including the highest ones, the principles of logic. Otherwise, how could those laws claim formal-ontological validity? (217) However, neither the Crisis-texts nor Formal and Transcendental Logic contain, respectively, concrete analyses HOPKINS 57 that bring vividly to mind the ascending order of intuitions at issue in the original meaning of symbolic formulae-meaning or that trace the meaning-genesis of formal analytics from the immediate intuitions of individual objects. Consequently, Husserl’s conviction that it is possible to provide such analyses remains without a demonstrable phenomenological foundation. In what follows, I shall argue with the help of Jacob Klein’s work that the peculiar character of the abstraction that yields the symbolic formulae that underlie formalization precludes, in principle, the cashing in of its meaning formations in the intuition of individuals. More precisely, I shall show that the categorial meaning formations at issue in formal ontology do not refer directly to individual objects but only to other materially and individually empty meaning formations. I shall do so by demonstrating that the original accomplishment of the symbolic representation of numbers leads to an indirect understanding of numbers and ultimately to the substitution of symbolic expressions for the ideal numerical entities referred to by Greek arithmetic. I shall also show that the consequence of this is that a sedimented understanding of numbers is superimposed upon the sedimented geometrical evidences at issue in Galileo’s mathematization of nature. Finally, I shall argue that the result of this “double” sedimentation is the impossibility of locating in the immediate experience of the life-world a direct referent proper to formalized categorial meaning formations. Jacob Klein’s De-Sedimentation of Symbolic FormulaMeaning Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra,4 which was published in two installments in 1934 and 1936 (on the basis of research completed in the early 1930s5 and thus before Husserl began his Crisis-texts in 1934)6 is remarkable in that it, in effect, accomplishes the de-sedimentation of the historical genesis of the development �58 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW of symbolic thinking in modern mathematics that remained unclarified in Husserl’s fragmentary analyses of mathematics in the Crisis-texts. Klein accomplishes this by reactivating what he refers to as the process of “symbol-generating abstraction” (GM, 129/125), a process which he contends initially makes possible the formalized meaning formations of mathematics. Yet unlike Husserl’s attempt to reactivate the Galilean impulse behind the development of mathematical physics, Klein’s reactivation is based upon actual research in the history of mathematics. Klein’s reactivation of this development traces its basis to an abstraction that is radically different from the ancient aphairesis (abstraction). Klein shows how the meaning formation that results from symbol-generating abstraction does not refer to the direct perception of the quantity or magnitude of things. Rather, the term symbolum, which originated with Vieta, was used both for the letter signs and the connective signs that referred neither to determinate numbers nor to the arithmetical operations performed upon them, but to indeterminate numbers and the general rules that govern the algebraic art of calculation. Klein reactivates the meaning that became sedimented in Vieta’s “universal extension [universale Erweiterung]” (179/172) of the ancient concept of the eidos (species) of an arithmos (counting number), an extension “through which the species become the objects of a ‘general’ mathematical discipline which can be identified neither with geometry nor with arithmetic.” Regarding the transformation of the ancient concept of number, the first part of Klein’s study definitively establishes that Greek mathematics shared a common understanding of arithmos as a “determinate amount of determinate things” (53/46). Greek arithmetic sought to establish the truth of its object, first as it shows up in counting, then as a determinate amount of pure units (monads), and finally with respect to its mode of being. Notwithstanding the ancient debate over the ontological dependence (Aristotle) or independence (Plato) HOPKINS 59 of the latter, the “theoretical” concept of number, as an ideal being comprised of a determinate amount of “pure” units that are indivisible, remained constant for the ancients. With Vieta’s innovation of calculating with species represented by letter signs, however, the direct relation of “number” to a determinate amount of determinate things or units is lost. As Klein puts it: While every arithmos intends immediately the things or the units themselves whose number it happens to be, his letter sign intends directly the general character of being a number which belongs to every possible number, that is to say, it intends “number in general” immediately, but the things or units which are at hand in each case only mediately. (182/174) Klein appeals to the mediaeval distinction between first and second intentions (intentio prima and intentio secunda) to characterize the letter sign as designating a “second intention,” that is, as designating “a concept which itself directly intends another concept and not a being,” i.e., not a thing or unit. In addition, the independence accorded the general character of number (or “general number”) signified by the letter sign insofar as it is now the object of Vieta’s calculational operations, “thus transforms the object of the intentio secunda, namely the ‘general number’ intended by the letter sign, into the object of an intentio prima, of a ‘first intention’, namely of a ‘being’ which is directly apprehended and whose counterpart in the realm of ordinary calculation is, for instance, ‘two monads’, ‘three monads’.” The consequence of this is that the “being” of the species “is to be understood neither as independent in the Pythagorean and Platonic sense nor as attained ‘by abstraction’. . . in the Aristotelian sense, but as symbolic. The species are in themselves symbolic for- �60 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW mations—namely formations whose possible objectivity is understood as an actual objectivity” (183/175). As a result of this shift in the intentionality of the concept of number, what was originally a “concept” for the ancients, namely the eidos, species, is now treated as an “object.” It is impossible, however, “to see amounts of things or units in the isolated letter signs ‘A’ or ‘B’” (183/176) used by Vieta to represent this “object.” Hence, their “numerical character” is only “comprehensible within the language of symbolic formalism” (183/175). According to Klein, Vieta derived the rules of this formalism from “‘calculations’ with amounts [Anzahlen] of monads.” Thus it is only through the application of these rules to the letter signs or symbols, that they acquire a numerical character. Indeed, “[t]hese rules therefore represent the first modern axiom system; they create the systematic context which originally ‘defines’ the object to which they apply.” However, because letter signs do not signify amounts of things or monads but rather the “concept” of “number in general,” Klein observes that they can retain a numerical character “only because the ancient ‘amounts’ (Anzahlen) of monads are themselves [eventually] interpreted as ‘modern numbers’ (Zahlen), which means that they are conceived from the point of view of their symbolic representation” (184/176). For Klein, Descartes was the first—and perhaps the only—thinker to attempt to render intelligible the new mode of abstraction at issue in the symbolic “mode of being” of the modern concept of number. In addition, Descartes extended the methodical scope of the general analytic of algebra. In Vieta’s hands, algebra was thought of as an auxiliary discipline, in the sense that he still understood it as the method for finding the solutions to traditional arithmetical and geometrical problems. By contrast, Descartes identified the methodically “general” object of the algebraically conceived mathesis universalis, “number in general,” “which can be represented and conceived only symbolically—with the ‘substance’ of the HOPKINS 61 world, with corporeality as ‘extensio’” (207/197). This identification amounts, of course, to Descartes’s symbolic interpretation of Euclidean geometry, an interpretation that for Klein involves “a ‘sedimented’ understanding of numbers. . . [being] superposed upon the first stratum of ‘sedimented’ geometrical ‘evidences’”7 at issue in Galileo’s direct and indirect mathematization of nature. As a consequence of this, “the ‘general analytic’ takes over the role of the ancient fundamental ontological discipline” (GM, 175/169). With this, “an effort is made to let it supersede the traditional logic completely,” an effort that for Klein gave rise to the battle between the ancients and moderns in the seventeenth century, a battle that “is still being waged today, now under the guise of the conflict between ‘formal logic’ and ‘mathematical logic’ or ‘logistic’, although its ontological presuppositions have been completely obscured.” All of this can be seen more clearly on the basis of Klein’s analysis of Descartes’s thinking in the Regulae. In that work, Descartes attempted to come to terms with the mode of being of the “pure” concepts presupposed by the “formal” meaning proper to the symbolic concepts of the new algebraic quantities. Descartes speaks there of “‘abstract beings’ (entia abstracta)” (210/200) that are the products of the “‘pure intellect’ (intellectus purus),” which the mind apprehends “when it thinks” and “in a way turns itself toward itself.” In order to be true, these abstract beings “must be altogether divorced from the imagination” (209/199). Thus for Descartes “‘extension is not body’” (208/198), “‘number is not the thing enumerated,’” and “‘a unit is not a quantity’” (209/199). The mind’s attempt to represent the pure concepts extension, number, or unit by means of the imagination “‘would necessarily arrive at contradictions,’” because “‘in the imagination the “idea” of extension cannot be separated from the “idea” of body, nor the “idea” of number from the “idea” of the thing enumerated, nor the “idea” of unity from the “idea” of quantity.’” However, when the “pure” intellect, �62 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW for instance, separates “from a multitude of units ‘represented’ in the imagination (a number of units, that is), their ‘multitudinousness’ as such, i.e., the ‘mere multitude’. . . the ‘pure’ indeterminate manyness to which simply nothing ‘true’, nothing truly in ‘being’, and hence no ‘true idea’ of a being corresponds, it must employ the imagination in order to be at all able to get hold of the thing separated.” Thus for Descartes the imagination, which allows the mind to envisage, for instance, “‘five units’, here enters into the service of a faculty not ‘perceptually clear’, namely the ‘pure intellect’, which, being bare of any reference to the world, comprehends ‘fiveness’ as ‘something separated’ from ‘five’ counted points or other arbitrary objects—as mere ‘multiplicity in general’, as ‘pure’ multiplicity” (211/201–2). Hence, according to Klein for Descartes “the imaginative power makes possible a symbolic representation of the indeterminate content which has been ‘separated’ by the ‘pure intellect’” (211/202). Klein calls the “abstraction” at issue here a “‘symbol-generating abstraction.’” On his view “[i]t alone gives rise to the possibility of contrasting ‘intuition’ [Anschauung] and ‘conception’, and of positing ‘intuition’ as a separate source of cognition alongside of reason.” This is the case because for Descartes neither the “pure” intellect nor its symbolically represented “pure” ideas have any “relation at all to the being of world and the things in the world.” And because the ontological issue here is not so much the “incorporeality” of the “pure” intellect and its ideas but their separation from the corporeal, it is a philosophical legacy of Descartes and the formalization of the modern concept generally that “intuition” comes to fulfil the function of “re-establishing” an ontological connection between cognition and the world. The result of all of this for Klein is Descartes’s view that the intellect, when directed to the “idea” of number as a “multitude of units” presented by the imagination, turns to its “own knowing” (221/208) and no longer sees it directly in “the ‘performed act’ (actus exercitus). . . but ‘indirectly’, HOPKINS 63 ‘secondarily’ (secundario), or in terms of another scholastic expression, in the ‘signified act’ (actus signatus). . . . Its immediate ‘object’ is now its own conceiving of that ‘multitude of units’, that is, the ‘concept’ (conceptus) of the number as such; nevertheless this multitude itself appears as a ‘something’, namely as one and therefore as an ‘ens’, a ‘being’.” And when this “ens rationis as a ‘second intention’ is grasped with the aid of the imagination in such a way that the intellect can, in turn, take it up as an object in the mode of a ‘first intention,’ we are dealing with a symbol, either with an ‘algebraic’ letter sign or with a ‘geometric’ figure as understood by Descartes.” If we substitute Husserl’s terminology of intentionality for the mediaeval terminology employed by Klein, we can readily understand the symbolic meaning formation yielded by symbol-generating abstraction as an “empty intention.” However, it is “empty” in a sense that Husserl did not appear fully to appreciate, and could not because his programmatically announced project in the Crisis-texts has as one of its goals the intuitive “cashing in” of the formalized intentional meaning formations of symbolic formulae.8 But this is precisely what Klein’s de-sedimentation of the symbol-generating abstraction that produces such meaning formations shows is impossible in principle. It is impossible for the simple reason that what such empty meaning intentions intend is a concept or category (presented in a “secondary” or “categorial” intention), which is apprehended by means of a first or straightforward intention and which therefore presents a “formalized” meaning formation that does not directly refer to or intend the kind of individual entities that can be presented or fulfilled in “intuition.” Put differently, Husserl’s “felt” need to “de-formalize” the empty intention characteristic of the mathematical formula in the intuition of individual objects in the pre-scientific life-world—in order to provide a foundation that would render such meaning formations intelligible—is itself symptomatic of the lack of direct �64 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW reference to these objects, a lack that makes symbolic meaning formations possible in the first place. He, of course, recognized that a progressive “emptying of meaning” was inseparable from the initial constitution of symbolic meaning formations. In other words, when the standard of meaning is conceived as the immediate intuitive contact with the things of the world, the formalized meaning formations that make modern science possible cannot but be experienced as “empty” of meaning. But this conclusion only follows if the intuitive contact with the individual things of the world is established as the sole criterion for providing a foundation for meaning. However, this is precisely what Husserl fails to establish but instead simply assumes. He assumes this as a consequence of what he supposes is the “inner intentional unity” of the history of philosophy and, therefore, the unity of the intention proper to the First Philosophy of the ancients and his transcendental phenomenology. Klein’s de-sedimentation of the historical accomplishment of the symbol-generating abstraction demonstrates that this standard for meaning cannot be established for all meaning formations and therefore demonstrates that the relationship between ancient First Philosophy and modern metaphysics is characterized by a historical discontinuity. In Husserl’s terms, what Klein shows is that the intentional referent proper to the “empty intention” of formalized meaning formations is essentially different from that of the “empty intention” proper to general meaning formations. Thus, whereas the latter—for instance, the categorial meaning of a house that is presented to consciousness in the absence of the perception of a house—lends itself to the direct intuitive fulfillment of its meaning when a house is “given” in perception, the “empty intention” of the formal meaning of y = mx + b does not lend itself to a direct intuitive fulfillment of its meaning.9 The consequence of this, then, is not the unintelligibility per se of the formal meaning intention of the formula, but rather its relative “unintelligibility” in comparison to the “foundedness” of the general HOPKINS 65 (i.e., the traditional categorial meaning formation or eidos) meaning formation in the intuition of the individual things in life-world. Postscript: Symbol-Generating Abstraction and the Universal Formalization of Meaning The universal formalization of algebraic thinking that began with Leibniz’s concept of a mathesis universalis, which severs Descartes’s identification of the formalized meaning formations yielded by symbol-generating abstraction with extension, eliminates once and for all the possibility of establishing even an indirect relation between such meaning formations and the pre-given scientific life-world. Whatever else this universalization of formal analysis accomplishes, it is clear that it removes the basis for any reference to the life-world by the “empty intention” of the formal category proper to “the something-in-general.” The consequence of this is that the possibility of—however indirect—an intuitive “cashing in” of the formalized meaning formations of the mathesis universalis of modernity is in principle precluded. Thus, also precluded in principle is the possibility of realizing Husserl’s dream of grounding the formal ontology presupposed by mathematics and formal logic in the intuition of individual objects in the life-world. Notes 1 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana 6 (The Hague: Nijhoff, (1)1954; (2)1976); The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Hereinafter cited as Crisis, with German and English page references, respec- �66 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW tively. Quotes in series will bypass the convention of repeating the reference to their source. 2 Originally published in a heavily edited form by Eugen Fink as “Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-historisches Problem,” Revue internationale de Philosophie 1 (1939), 203–25; Fink’s typescript of Husserl’s original, and significantly different, 1936 text (which is the text translated by Carr) was published as Beilage 3 in Biemel’s edition of Hua 6; “The Origin of Geometry,” appears in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 353-83. Hereinafter cited as “OG” according to the convention for serial quotes stated in n. 1, above. 3 Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), 190; German text: Formale und transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen, Husserliana 17 [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974], 67; hereinafter cited as FTL with original page reference, which is included in the margins of both the German and the English additions cited. 4 Jacob Klein, “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra” in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, no. 1 (Berlin, 1934), 18–105 (Part 1); no. 2 (1936), 122–235 (Part 2); Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969; reprint: New York: Dover, 1992). Hereinafter cited as GM, with German and English page references respectively, following the convention for serial references stated in n. 1, above. 5 Klein’s wife, Dodo Klein (who was Gerhart Husserl’s ex-wife), reports that it was “probably 1932, 1933” when he wrote this text. The quote is from p. 14 of a typed transcript of a tape recording of memories of her second husband. The transcript (the tape recording is apparently lost) is among Klein’s papers housed in St. John’s College Library, Annapolis, Maryland. 6 Husserl’s work on the Crisis was begun in 1934, whereas his work on the origin of geometry dates from 1936 (see Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Reinhold N. Smid, Husserliana 19 [Doredrecht: Kluwer, HOPKINS 67 1993)], editor’s introduction, xi and lvi). The former was first published in 1936 and the latter, posthumously in 1939 in the version edited by Fink. 7 Jacob Klein, “Phenomenology and the History of Science,” in Marvin Farber, ed., Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940), 143–63; reprinted in Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis, MD: St. John’s Press, 1985); the quote is from p. 84 of the latter. 8 This goal is consistent with Husserl’s articulation of the possibility of a formal judgment in FTL. Regarding the “ideal ‘existence’ [Existenz] of the judgment-content” (193) that is at issue in formal judgments, he writes: “we are referred to the syntactical cores, which seem to be functionless from the formal point of view. That would imply, then, that the possibility of properly effectuating the possibility of a judgment (as a meaning) is rooted not only in the syntactical forms but also in the syntactical stuffs. This fact is easily overlooked by the formal logician, with his interest directed onesidedly to the syntactical—the manifold forms of which are all that enters into logical theory—and with his algebraizing of the cores as theoretical irrelevancies, as empty somethings that need only be kept identical” (194). Thus for Husserl: “Prior to all judging, there is a universal experiential basis. It is always presupposed as a harmonious unity of possible experience.” And this means that “in respect of its content, every original judging and every judging that proceeds coherently, has coherence by virtue of the coherence of the matters in the synthetic unity of the experience, which is the basis on which the judging stands.” However, it is just this experiential basis that Klein’s analysis of the shift and transposition of the levels of intentionality at issue in the symbol-generating abstraction shows is no longer a factor in the “intentional genesis” of the formal judgments that are at issue in algebraic calculations. 9 Husserl, of course, recognizes that “formalization is something essentially different from variation. It does not consist in imagining that the determinations of the variants are changed into others; rather, it is a disregarding, an emptying of all objective, material determinations” (Erfahrung und Urteil [Hamburg: Meiner, 1985], 435; Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks [Evanston, IL: Northwestern, 1973], 359). However, it is �68 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW precisely the lack of relevance of the variation of an intuitively apprehended individual variant (presented in the straightforward intention proper either to the perception or imagination that yields the individual exemplar that is the basis of variation) that is at issue in formalization, which eliminates the possibility of tracing the intentional genesis of the formal meaning (yielded by the formalizing abstraction proper to the symbol-generating abstraction) to an intentional activity directed to the experience of the life-world’s objects. Thus, in the case of the “empty intention” of a house, the possibility of its general categorial meaning refers to an intentional genesis in the intelligible structures of a straightforwardly intended house. In the case of the “empty intention” of an algebraic formula, however, its formal categorial meaning refers to an intentional genesis in a straightforwardly intended category—in other words, the intentional referent of its “empty intention” is not the “synthetic unity” yielded by the “harmonious unity of possible experience.” “De-formalizing” the “empty intention” of a formal meaning formation, then, does not lead to the possible experience of straightforwardly intended objects in the life-world, but to ideal meanings, meanings that of necessity have only an indirect relation to this world. Insofar as the latter must already have been mathematized in order for the ideal meanings in question to achieve a “worldly” status, the referent proper to the “empty intention” characteristic of formal meaning formations is in principle precluded from straightforwardly intending the pre-scientific (pre-mathematical) objects of the natural life-world. 69 Opening Questions Ronald Mawby Introduction One of the delights of language is that a single string of symbols can entwine so many meanings. So it is with my title, “Opening Questions,” which unravels five ways. This essay is first a reflective exploration of questions, so I will be opening questions to our examination. We look briefly at what questions are, how they arise, what they presuppose, and the like. Second, questions often occur in speech or thought as opening moves. When we think in the sense of engaging our minds to find out what is true, we begin and direct our inquiry with questions. Thus every episode of thought opens with a question. Third, questions appear as openings or gaps in the fabric of knowledge. The relation of enclosure between the area of ignorance and the area of knowledge—which encloses which—divides, I shall argue, the taxonomy of questions at its root. Fourth, we call a question open when its answer is not yet settled, so opening questions means posing but not answering them. The adage says, “a fool can ask more questions in a hour than a sage can answer in a week.” Here I play the part of the fool. The final thread ties these reflections to our point of departure, which is the rich and important question that opens Plato’s Meno. Rationale Before going further, I will say why I consider this undertaking to be worthwhile. Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the statement that all humans by nature desire to know. A desire to know is expressed by a question, so Aristotle Ronald Mawby teaches in the Honors Program at Kentucky State University. �70 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW appears to be saying that we are by nature questioners. If so, exploring questions is one way to obey the Delphic injunction, Know Thyself. Aristotle goes on to say that in the Metaphysics he is seeking knowledge of the highest kind, which he calls wisdom. He thus intimates that seeking or desiring or loving wisdom, that is, philosophy, is inherent in human being. I am told the Greek usually translated as “desire to know” may be rendered as “stretched out toward knowledge,” and “stretched out” indicates a certain tension that may be uncomfortable. A teacher of mine thought Aristotle was wrong, that human beings by nature desire to feel comfortable, and implied that the tension inherent in the desire to know is something we seek to avoid. Oscar Wilde famously remarked that one way to avoid temptation is to give in to it. Likewise we can avoid unfulfilled desire by fulfilling it; we eliminate the tension of desiring to know by actually coming to know. This, I take it, is what Hegel thought himself to have done. He finished philosophy as the quest for wisdom by actually attaining wisdom, or rational knowledge of the whole. Others tell us that the quest for wisdom should be finished by being abandoned. Recent positivists, for instance, say philosophy is pointless because its questions are meaningless. They depict the speculative philosopher as a failed Houdini who entangles himself in verbal confusions from which he is unable to escape. On this view philosophical problems are pseudo-problems, calling not for solution but dissolution. Kant, though his sensitivities differ, is often taken by the positivists as a precursor. His critique of human reason purports to establish the necessary conditions for knowledge, and to show that our reason is unsuitable for certain of its traditional speculative employments. Both Kant and the positivists suggest that we sublimate the desire for wisdom by turning it into channels where knowledge is possible, such as mathematics or natural science. Still others say philosophy is futile because philosophical issues support no genuine epistemic MAWBY 71 distinction between knowledge and opinion. In philosophy, they say, the distinction between truth and falsehood resembles Hobbes’s distinction between religion and superstition: both are “fear of powers invisible,” religion “from tales publicly allowed,” superstition from tales “not allowed”(Hobbes, 56). What the community allows is truth, what it does not allow is falsehood; the community may be either a proper political entity or an academic group. This has been a position of rhetoricians from the ancient Sophists to the present day. All the foregoing, from the Sophists to Hegel, share this opinion: the quest for wisdom is temporary. Philosophy lasts only until we either get wisdom or give up wanting it. But philosophy as a way of life takes the desire for wisdom as permanent. If Socrates may be said to have a position, this might be it. Socratic wisdom is the same as Socratic ignorance; the height of human wisdom is knowing what you don’t know. Inquiry into which life is best reveals that very life of inquiry to be best. But perhaps the only result of a life devoted to philosophy, the only result defensible in speech, is some coherent understanding of fundamental questions. If our most concentrated and orderly stretch toward wisdom results only in the awareness of questions, then, at least for those of us drawn to philosophy, it is worthwhile to ask about questions themselves. Meno’s Opening Question In the dialogue that bears his name, Meno asks two large questions, one to start the conversation, the other in an attempt to stop it. Meno opens the dialogue by saying: Can you tell me, Socrates, whether excellence can be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way?(70) �72 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW What can we say about this question? First we can say that it is important. We all have a stake in bringing about human excellence. As parents, teachers, citizens, members of the human community, as people trying to shape for ourselves good and satisfying lives, the answer to Meno’s question is important for us. How does one attain excellence? The question surely seems natural, the kind of question that might arise for anyone who reflects on what he or she is doing. The question is old, but fresh. It is a question that won’t go away. Second, we can say that the answer is not obvious. Is excellence teachable? Perhaps, but is it teachable in the way that mathematics is teachable? Perhaps not. Do we attain excellence by practice, as we acquire a skill or habit “by doing”? This is plausible, though not self-evident. Does excellence arise from nature? Is it inherent in us, or at least in those of us who have good natures? It seems reasonable that nature at the least could help or hinder in the pursuit of excellence. Are there other ways in which excellence could arise? Perhaps from the grace of God? Perhaps in some way that we cannot even name? Although Meno’s is a natural question to ask, it is not an easy one to answer. Third, we see very quickly that the question conceals another question, namely, what is human excellence? If excellence is a kind of articulable knowledge, then it may be teachable. If excellence is a practical skill, then it may arise through practice. If excellence depends on an innate capacity or disposition or insight, then it may arise from nature. If excellence is a free gift of the gods, then it comes to be neither by teaching nor practice nor nature but in some other way. And there is a further question, namely, is there such a thing as human excellence? This question has both a formal and an existential sense. Is there a single non-disjunctive characterization of human excellence, and if there is, has it or can it be realized? We may know what we mean by excellence in mathematics, or athletics, or music, and we may be confident that there are excellent mathematicians and athletes and musi- MAWBY 73 cians. But do we know in like fashion what it means to be an excellent human being, and are we fully confident that excellent human beings do or can exist? Meno's opening question is thus important, difficult, and it exfoliates other questions. Let us explore it, for it is a question that bears examination. Meno begins “Can you tell me, Socrates. . . . ” What is Meno seeking? Does he seek the source of excellence, or to discover if Socrates knows that source? The form of words does not tell us. Interpreted strictly the question asks about Socrates’ abilities, and invites the response, “Yes I can tell you” or “No I cannot.” But the question may be intended otherwise. When I say “Can you pass the salt?” I am not really asking about your abilities. I am making a polite request for the salt. “Can you tell me” in this sense means “Will you tell me” and that means “Tell me, please.” Meno, rather than demanding a response, may be asking for one. Is Meno’s question sincere, that is, does he genuinely want the answer? If Meno’s question is really about excellence I see no reason to doubt that it is sincere. A sincere question expresses a desire to have in mind the requested information. One asks in order that one may come to know. A sincere question expresses a desire for knowledge. In the soul a question is a cognitive desire. If we use eros as the general name for desire, questioning is an erotic act. If Meno’s question is about what Socrates knows, it may be sincere, or it may be put to embarrass Socrates. Meno says “Can you tell me, Socrates. . . . ” I think we should hear this phrase in three ways, by emphasizing in turn “you,” “tell,” and “me.” “Can you tell me, Socrates” sounds like a challenge. We sense in the background something like this: “Gorgias could tell me, Socrates; I could tell you; anyone who undertakes public speaking or instruction should be able to tell; you think you’re so smart, can you tell me?” This puts a challenge, or at least sets a task. �74 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW If we retain the emphasize on the word “you” but omit the challenge, we get a question whose focus can be put this way: “I am looking for someone who can tell me about excellence; are you that someone, Socrates?” This is an important question for the interpretation of this dialogue, indeed for most Platonic dialogues: just what does Socrates know? What can he tell us? And if we generalize this part of the question, so that it reads, “Can anyone tell me. . . ” we hear a question addressed to us all, which may be taken as a question about our cognitive capacities. Next, change the emphasis and say, “Can you tell me, Socrates.” Now the focus suggests this background: “Socrates, there might be a number of different ways to convey to me the requested information; is telling among the ways?” This emphasis makes us aware that telling through the content of explicit speech is not the only way to convey an answer. Showing by pointing, or by enacting, or through the action of speech rather than its content, are alternatives. The dialogue shows the importance of these alternatives. In the slave boy section, where the question is: given a square, what line will produce a square with twice the area?, the importance of pointing rather than telling is made manifest. For the line sought is the diagonal of the given square, and the side and diagonal of a square are incommensurable. Thus if we call the length of the side one unit, there is no finite specification of the length of the diagonal in terms of the unit. The requested length is irrational, unsayable. We could of course call it the square root of two, but in context that is just a way of saying “the line whose square is double the given square,” and repeating the question is not telling the answer. The answer can be given, but not directly in speech—we can point to the diagonal. The intrusion of the irrational raises the issue of whether human speech and reason are adequate to answer questions of human excellence. I also merely mention the suggestion that Socrates answers Meno’s question not in word but in deed. Human excellence might come to be pre- MAWBY 75 cisely in the quest for knowledge of human excellence, and Socrates, by showing Meno how to inquire, displays both the route to acquisition and the possession of excellence. Thirdly, we can emphasize Meno’s words in a way that I doubt Meno would approve: “Can you tell me, Socrates.” The background now is this: “Socrates, I suppose you can convey the answer to some people, but perhaps not to everyone; perhaps there are conditions for being told that not everyone can meet; can I, Meno, meet those conditions, so that you can tell me?” This raises the issue of what you must have already in order to get what you ask for. Perhaps only the sincere seeker can receive the answer. Perhaps only those who already in some sense have the answer within themselves can receive it. Perhaps we can pose questions that have answers, but answers that we cannot grasp. These alternatives too have importance in the dialogue. It is natural to ask, who is Meno? Scholarship identifies a historical Meno who was greedy, cunning, and unscrupulous. We recall Aristotle’s statement that only a person with a good upbringing and disposition can benefit from ethical discourse. Perhaps Meno is too vicious to be told about virtue.1 Later in the dialogue Socrates angers Anytus by suggesting that he and his peers lack the excellence of an older generation. Generational decay may occur either because virtue is not teachable or because Anytus and his peers are not teachable. Perhaps the condition for hearing the truth is not directly moral but intellectual, if indeed we can make this distinction. Perhaps Meno is too obtuse to be told—too shallow or too stubborn or perhaps too little aware to see that the answer to his question is not conveyed by telling. Perhaps Socrates cannot tell Meno the answer. Whether Socrates can tell us is a question we must ask ourselves. How does Socrates take Meno’s question? In part as a challenge, in part as a sincere question. Meno may want to test Socrates, but he gives Socrates an opportunity for real inquiry. Socrates’ reply is certainly not a direct answer; �76 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW rather, his reply corrects two false assumptions of the question. First, in a conversation a questioner, by the very act of posing a question, seems to assume that the one to whom the question is put knows its answer. Socrates denies this assumption when he denies that he knows. Second, in an inquiry the questions should be put in rational sequence; thus by putting this question first Meno appears to assume that it is properly the first question. Socrates denies this assumption when he says that he does not know what excellence is, and that no one can tell how excellence arises without knowing what it is. To Meno’s opening thrust Socrates makes a judo-like response, saying in effect that Meno has put the wrong question to the wrong person. Socrates admits his ignorance of the source and nature of excellence. When he adds that he never met anyone who knew what excellence is, he turns the tables on Meno, who is now challenged to tell Socrates something. Socrates has inverted their roles, and called Meno’s assumptions into question. Meno then tries to tell Socrates what excellence is. He describes the excellence of a man, and a woman, and says there are excellences for young and old, slave and free. Since there are very many excellences, Meno is not at a loss to say what excellence is. But of course this swarm of excellences is not what Socrates seeks. Socrates wants the one “look” that makes them all excellence. Meno has failed to understand what counts as an answer. We are invited to wonder whether Socrates’ question has an answer of the kind that he seeks; perhaps Socrates is asking the wrong question. Meno denies that there is a single excellence for all until Socrates leads him to admit that all excellence involves moderation and justice. Meno agrees, saying that justice is excellence. Is justice excellence, Socrates asks, or is justice an excellence? To get Meno to understand the question Socrates uses the examples of shape and color. Roundness is a shape, but not shape, for there are other shapes, and white is a color, but not color, for there are other colors. Likewise justice is an MAWBY 77 excellence, but not excellence, for there are other excellences. Meno then, to better understand what Socrates is looking for, asks for a definition of shape. Socrates gives him two: shape is the only thing that always follows color, and shape is the limit of solid. Meno objects that the first is useless to one who doesn’t know what color is. Socrates agrees that in a friendly conversation one must define with terms understood by both parties. Later Meno asks Socrates to define color, which Socrates does after the manner of Gorgias, saying color is an effluvium from shapes which fits the sight and is perceived. Do the examples of shape and color tell us something special? In reading Plato the safest assumption is that nothing is accidental, so the choice of shape and color is likely to be significant. What might it mean? Well, one candidate for excellence is that it consists in, or is correlative with, knowledge. If we take that seriously, we get the following proportional analogy: as shape is what always follows color, so excellence is what always follows knowledge. Shape stands for excellence, color for knowledge. Since shape limits the solid, we may think that the solid stands for the soul. The soul is then likened to a finite three-dimensional object. As such it has a shape, and that shape is disclosed to us in self-knowledge. Excellence, if there be such a thing, is the proper shape of soul. The pursuit of excellence involves us with shapes. Geometry is the science of shapes. If the soul is a solid, it is bounded by a surface. Whatever depths of soul we have, the inner shines forth in what appears to others and to ourselves as we reflect. We disclose ourselves in speech and deed, so properties of the surface should correspond to speech and deed. A surface is both visible and tangible; we yoke visibility to speech and tangibility to deed. The tangible is perceptible by touch, and touch can operate without sight, though often sight guides touch. We touch things usually to change them, to alter the way things are. We look to see, to discover the way things are. Looking eventuates in belief, touching arises from desire.2 �78 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Explicit belief and desire depend on ideas, not Platonic Forms but Platonic images, in which content is distinct from reality, the what-it-is divorced from the that-it-is. That the mind can handle ideas makes belief and desire possible. Since a question is a desire for a true belief, that the mind can handle ideas makes questions possible. No eros or no ideas means no questions. Meno is soon to present a paradox the nerve of which is that questions are nonsensical. One implication is that when he puts the paradox, Meno lacks eros or ideas or both. Meno says that Socrates resembles a torpedo fish in both his look and his touch; Socrates is one in speech and deed. To grapple with Socrates, as Meno has done, is to be numbed with perplexity. To be numbed is to be unable to speak and act because one can feel nothing. Perplexity is to feel nothing. When we are perplexed, the surface of the soul, the visible and tangible limit that defines what we are, is felt to be rent or torn. A gap is opened in the smooth fabric of our speech and deed. To feel that emptiness is to be perplexed. Perplexity ruptures us, it opens us, and the articulation of that opening is a question. The desire for wholeness is the desire for closure, and that is the desire that spurs us to try to answer questions. Meno’s Paradox and the Myth of Recollection After Meno admits he is numb, he proposes his paradox, the large question he puts to Socrates to stop the conversation. When Socrates wants to seek together after excellence, Meno says How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know? (80d) MAWBY 79 The conclusion of the paradox is that inquiry is pointless. The argument is formally a dilemma. We either know or don’t know. If we do know, inquiry is pointless, for we are seeking what we already have. If we don’t know, inquiry is pointless, for without knowing what we are looking for we can neither direct our search nor tell when we have succeeded. Socrates resolves the paradox by denying that we either know or don’t know. We inquire when we both know and don’t know. We possess knowledge but do not have it at hand. It is in our souls but not immediately accessible. This, by itself, is not enough to answer the paradox, for we need some way to direct the search for what we don’t know and some way to tell when the search is successful. We need a way for our present ignorance to lead to the absent knowledge. The myth of recollection—duly elaborated—presents us with an image of how this is possible. The myth supposes that the soul, the organ of knowledge, is an original whole, a single totality, for all nature is akin. The complete whole comprises all knowledge. The whole is now broken and fragmentary; the fragments remain in the depths of the soul, but the surface of the soul has gaps or holes where pieces are missing. Gaps in our knowledge keep us from what we want to do or see. Most of these openings are entirely surrounded by the firm surface. What we can’t do lies within the horizon of what we can do, and what we don’t know is framed by what we do know. Absence of knowledge is bounded by knowledge. Ignorance thus appears like gaps in a jigsaw puzzle. The enclosed emptiness has a specific shape. This shape partially defines a content that can be held in mind and used to direct the search for the missing piece. The hole is not simply nothing. Although it is a hole because it is not there, it is just the hole it is because where it fails to be is just there. To articulate its shape is to formulate a question, to say precisely what gap in knowledge one aims to fill. When we see what is not there we both know and don’t know. Ignorance is emptiness, shadow, a hole in the light. The desire �80 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW for full insight is the erotic impulse that moves us to inquire. As an emptiness with a boundary shape, the hole enables us to search for what will fill it. Like Cinderella’s prince, when we have the empty shoe we can seek the foot that fits it. If the shape of a hole is to direct its own filling there must be a prior totality in which the hole is set. A gap in the fabric of knowledge implies a fabric of knowledge; to see a shadow one needs light. If we were in total darkness where all is shadow or in unbounded space where all is empty, then Meno would be correct that inquiry is pointless. Questions are boundary phenomena. They arise from the edges of belief, and if there were no beliefs there would be no edges. Inquiry arises in situations where knowledge bounds ignorance, where what we know shapes what we don’t know so that we can know what we don’t know. Socrates tells Meno that the immortal soul has learned all things. All knowledge has been collected together, and needs only to be re-collected. The jigsaw puzzle was once assembled, and all the pieces are present, floating in the depths of the soul. If one is brave and tireless one can assemble it again. Or, at the least, Socrates says, we will be better, braver and less helpless if we believe this than if we believe that inquiry is pointless. The completed puzzle will form the surface of the soul and thus fix the boundary shape or definition of human excellence. Later in the dialogue Socrates introduces the distinction between right opinion and knowledge. In our image right opinion would have the right pieces in the right places, but they would be liable to fall out again. The numbing touch of Socrates, for example, would be liable to shatter to pieces a whole that is not firmly tied together. Knowledge surpasses right opinion in part because it cements the pieces into a cohesive whole. In our picture human excellence is knowledge, but not knowledge only of human excellence. It is all knowledge, complete knowledge, or knowledge of the whole. The whole soul is the excellent soul, and the whole soul is MAWBY 81 composed of knowledge of the whole. The excellent soul is an image of the cosmos, so in the myth ultimately self-knowledge converges with metaphysical knowledge.3 Wisdom as a moral virtue and wisdom as metaphysical understanding are thus related. The questions regarding human excellence and metaphysics are alike. Asking what it means to be human resembles asking what it means to be. Questions of Mathematics and Human Excellence Socrates gives the myth and shows the slave boy’s recollection of geometrical truth to overcome Meno’s reluctance to inquire. Socrates’ argument is by analogy, and goes like this. The slave boy was ignorant of the solution to the geometrical problem, and once he became aware of his ignorance through the numbing touch of Socrates, he grew eager to overcome that ignorance, and succeeded in drawing the solution out of himself. Likewise, Meno has been shown to be ignorant of the nature of excellence by the numbing touch of Socrates, and if Meno too becomes eager to overcome that ignorance he too may succeed in drawing the solution out of himself. My question is, should we accept the analogy? The analogy is problematic on two counts. First, consider how the slave boy was able to succeed. Was it by teaching, practice, nature, or in some other way? Socrates asked leading questions, and in that sense directed the boy’s inquiries as his teacher. The boy initially beheld the solution as in a dream, but Socrates says the solution would become fixed in his mind by practice. The boy answered out of his own convictions; his answers, right or wrong, were his own, arising not from learned opinion but from natural capacity. So the boy succeeded in some other way, namely, through the combination of teaching and practice and nature. Now the teaching was performed by Socrates through questioning, and his directing questions had this property: Socrates knew their answers. Socrates was directing an inquiry into something of �82 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW which the boy was ignorant, but which Socrates knew very well. In the inquiry with Meno into excellence, however, Socrates purports not to know the answer. It is not so clear, then, that inquiry into the nature of excellence can be as successful as inquiry into the double square. The second problematic feature of the analogy concerns the properties of the respective questions. The geometrical question is well defined. We know what counts as an answer. We can present to ourselves in thought a series of increasing lines and think that one of those lines is the one that is sought. Once we see that the doubled line is too large we eliminate an entire range of candidate answers. When we see that the three-halves line is also too large, we eliminate another range of candidates. We narrow our search as each thread is picked up to knit together the hole in the fabric of knowledge. That hole is determinate, and determinate because wholly enclosed. What about the general question of human excellence? Is that question also wholly enclosed? I think not. If we ask about the excellence of a particular station in life, such as auto mechanic or neurosurgeon or gentleman’s personal gentleman, we get an answer insofar as the gap in our understanding is enclosed. Comprehending the station, we can say what is needed to fulfill the station. But it is otherwise when we ask about human excellence as such. Here we do not have a fabric of understanding with an enclosed hole in it. We have the entire fabric of human life held in mind, and we are looking for the place into which it fits. When we ask about particular stations we have the puzzle and are looking for the missing piece. When we ask about human excellence as such we have the piece and are looking for the puzzle. Aristotle says that since the function of the eye is to see, the excellence of the eye is to see well. We can all agree. Aristotle goes on to say that if a human being as a whole has a function, then human excellence is to perform that function well. Yes, but does analysis in terms of function work the MAWBY 83 same way when we consider parts and wholes? The proper function of the eye is to see well. The analogous function of the whole person would be to live well. But seeing well just means seeing as required for living well. The parallel statement for the whole person—living as required for living well—merely reopens the question. Aristotle’s ethical inquiry is immensely intelligent, and is usually kept from being radical by its massive common sense. Aristotle proceeds, I think, by differentiating the parts of the soul and discussing their respective excellences, and then saying that living well happens when each part of the soul functions well. Aristotle assumes a soul functioning in a certain way, and asks how it would look if it were excellent. He posits an adequate soul, and seeks a great soul. It is as though he were given a square, and sought a double square. At times, though, Aristotle reveals his uncommon sense, as when he presses the claims of the contemplative life. There Aristotle suggests that the best life enjoins us to change shape as well as size. The Meno pictures what I am pointing to when in the slave boy sequence Socrates puts three equal squares together and asks the boy if they could fill in the space in the corner. This is an intriguing question, for in one sense the three squares already form a complete figure. There is no space in the corner, just space outside the figure. Of course what Socrates invites the boy to say is that the triple square be completed with a fourth square. This is the common sense response. Once the figure is seen as an incomplete square, we know what piece is missing. If coming to know what constitutes a complete human life is like completing that figure with another square, then inquiry into excellence is like geometrical inquiry. The ordinary soul and the great soul are similar figures. But we could also fill in the space in the corner with other figures, equal in area but different in shape.4 How we complete the figure is not determined solely by our intent to make the resulting figure four square in area. The question of how �84 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW to fill in the space in the corner has a mathematical dimension, but not a unique mathematical solution. The question, of which whole is the three-square figure a part, is not a mathematical question. If knowing what constitutes a complete human life is like knowing how to fill in the space in the corner, then inquiry into human excellence fails to resemble geometrical inquiry. Inquiry into the double square and inquiry into human excellence are not alike. Topological Inversion of the Area of Ignorance How did we get from questions as holes in the fabric of belief to questions of what encompasses the totality of belief? What works this inversion? Several paths force the same twist. When we are trying to put different pieces together, that is, when we are trying to integrate diverse domains of experience, we may be led to the question of what larger frame encloses them. So the quest for a synoptic view of several pieces of experience is one path to inversion. Another way arises from any single question that is large enough. When we are serious about answering such questions, we wish to put them precisely, so we must accurately map the boundary of our ignorance. If the question is a large one, that is, if the hole in our knowledge is extensive, then we may not be able to see at a glance the entire boundary of the hole. We must move around the boundary in an attempt to encompass it. It is as though we were trying to map the boundary of an inland lake, a lake too large to see across. Inversion happens when we discover that the shore we trace is not the edge of an inland lake but the boundary of an island on which we stand. We encompass everything we know, and see our island set in an ocean of ignorance. The known is encompassed by the unknown, the familiar by the strange. We experience wonder. What, we ask, is the significance of all this? Where does it all fit? MAWBY 85 We ask this sort of question when we are turned around on the other side of the boundary. We ask it as outsiders. Anytus takes Socrates’ questioning into human excellence as an attack on Athens by one with no commitment to its ethos. Socrates is a strange citizen, a citizen who questions like a stranger. Metaphysical questions are likewise strange. All ultimate questions are strange. If our life consists of filling the familiar holes with the familiar pieces, answering the routine questions with the ordinary answers, then we need never face such questions. Philosophy is evitable. But, as Whitehead remarks, the refusal to think does not imply the nonexistence of entities for thought. If we think far enough we will get to the limits of land. What should we do when we get there? Here is what Kant says in the first Critique: We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place. This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth— enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion. (257) Kant’s answer is that we should map the extent of the isle, then turn back and cultivate our garden. Though the very gravity of our mind will pull us down to that ocean shore, once there we must discipline our reason. Though mathematics and natural science are boundless, speculative thought must restrain itself within strict limits.5 �86 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Hegel’s answer is that we live on a finite globe, part of which is indeed submerged, but we are amphibian creatures, both subject and substance, both knower and known. Every line that limits understanding is temporary, for to be aware of a boundary is already to have crossed it.6 The land is the sea’s edge also; we find ourselves on each side of the boundary. The whole globe is properly our home. Speculative thought culminates in an equilibrium in which every question has its answer. Pascal’s answer is that we find ourselves marooned in the midst of an infinite, empty, terrifying expanse that reason cannot cross.7 Faith alone lets us pass over to the safety of the mainland. Theology teaches that God’s power is unlimited, and the gospel tells us that Jesus can walk on water, so the Savior can perform the infinite task of bringing us to safety as easily as he steps to shore from a boat on the sea of Galilee. These three agree that the isle of knowledge is of fixed size. Kant says that critical reason can determine the circumference once and for all, and teach us to stay on our own side of the line.8 Hegel says reason operates in an Absolute that is finite but unbounded—a sphere. Whatever encloses a finite area also excludes a finite area. To grasp what is inside we cross and look from the outside, and the dialectical sequence of crossings and recrossings leads to a great circle of maximum circumference. Seeing both sides at once of that allencompassing circle is the absolute insight. Pascal says human reason is finite but the world is infinite, a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Knowledge of beginnings and ends is forever beyond the scope of human reason. Others say that the boundary of knowledge can be pushed back and the domain of the known enlarged. One such is Whitehead, a twentieth-century advocate of the value of speculative philosophy. He writes, “Speculative philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our expe- MAWBY 87 rience can be interpreted” (Whitehead, 3). Whitehead says the method of speculative philosophy is imaginative generalization. We generalize the shape of present knowledge to obtain our metaphysical categories, which “are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities” (8). They are tentative because, for Whitehead, “In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly” (xiv). I am suggesting that ultimate questions, the questions of speculative philosophy, are persistent because of their topological relations to what we know. They seek the whole understanding in which our current limited understanding has its proper place. Likewise ultimate ethical questions, such as the nature of human excellence, persist because of their topological relations. Thinking as the desire for the whole truth and willing as the desire for the whole good are analogous. Looking for the Puzzle One thing we can learn from Plato’s practice is to take our images seriously. Let us see what we can extract from the image of the piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Take our current epistemic and ethical situation as a given puzzle piece. We ask for the whole puzzle. What are some candidate answers? I offer six. 1. When we look at a piece we may say that it is already complete. Epistemic incompletion depends on questions, and questions depend on ideas whose content is distinct from their reality. Ethical incompletion depends on some distinction between is and ought, and that too depends on ideas whose content lacks reality. To say that our current situation is complete is to deny any importance to free ideas, either in belief or desire. It seems to me to deny the essence of our humanity, but that is precisely its point. Free ideas make possible belief and desire independent of perception and action, �88 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW and thus raise epistemic and ethical questions. If we eliminate free ideas we cut off such questions at their root. The conceptual level of awareness may define humanity, but human being is an unstable and unsatisfying way of being. Better to be a beast or a god, to turn and live with the animals or dissolve into the godhead. No ideas means no felt discrepancy between mind and world; when belief and desire go the thinking and willing self disappears. Certain mystical and meditative techniques aim at this—their view is that thought disrupts mindfulness. A soul reduced to perfect stillness, to total ideational inactivity, would experience no incompletion. On this side of the mystic dissolve, what might this way of life be like? Think of surfing. You paddle out, feel the water and the sun, the seventh wave approaches, you stroke hard to get it, you’re up, in the curl, thrust along by a surging wall of water. In the exhilaration of that locomotive rush there are no questions, no reflections, just total immersion in the vivid now. The wave breaks, you end the ride, but suppose that when you leave the water you retain the awareness, the concentration, the music of each moment moving through you and sustaining you like the wave. Your life is complete in each passing moment—no plan for the future, no recollection of the past, just embedded in a present presence as in a music, in Eliot’s words, “heard so deeply it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts”(Eliot, 136). Of course you might need to think sometimes, to prepare a case at law, or deliver pizza, or whatever, but thought never displaces the immediate experience in which you find your satisfaction. Thought is good only if it helps you, as Thoreau says, “. . . to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line” (Thoreau, 11). Perhaps the best life would be one of simple routine, like a well-learned dance. 2. When we look at a puzzle piece we may say that the given piece uniquely determines the entire puzzle, for the piece is premise and the puzzle is deductive conclusion. MAWBY 89 Reasoning can make explicit what is implicit and so complete the whole. There are no genuine alternatives in the completion of the puzzle, for what now looks to be contingent is in the end either necessary or impossible. The difference between incomplete and complete is just the difference between what we know and what follows from what we know. This is a rationalism. One of its ethical versions teaches the virtue of complete understanding, and says that complete understanding reveals the coincidence of the is and the ought. Unlike the doctrine that denies any distinction between is and ought, rationalism accepts the distinction between incomplete and complete insight, and says that we ought to attain complete insight. Being as such is good, evil is privation, and ignorance is privation of understanding. With adequate insight, we see that everything is as it must be. On the way to complete insight we seek awareness of the permanent present, that which remains always as it is. Pellucid apprehension provides our satisfaction. Lured by an experience of beauty and power in one, we seek the calm certainty of fixed insight. 3. When we look at a piece we may say that what is given may be completed in any way whatever. Whereas rationalism says the completion is unique, this view says the completion is arbitrary. Any puzzle can have any shape cut from it, since carving is arbitrary—the world has no joints. Thus given a piece there is no way to tell from what puzzle it comes. Reason neither determines nor limits a completion. This is a skepticism. Whereas for the rationalist we are free if we grasp necessity, for the skeptic we are free if we see that everything is contingent and could be other than it is. The ethical version of this is some sort of relativism. It may be conservative, as with Montaigne, or revolutionary, as with the utopians, or libertine, as with the young. Ethics might be grounded in current practice, understood as relative and historical, but if we push this doctrine we see that current practice does not deter- �90 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW mine its own continuation. Anything can follow anything else, and we make up everything as we go along. Skepticism is often an interim position on a path that ends in celebrating art and activity. Looking beyond our puzzle piece and finding no shape at which to aim, we project there a figure of our own making, and get our satisfaction by bringing it into being. Of course skepticism is not the only source of this impulse to generation. We might find outside our puzzle piece a latent ideal figure calling for realization. In either case action, either production or deeds, engenders our satisfaction. We take the emptiness surrounding the puzzle piece as the painter’s empty canvas, or the architect’s vacant lot, or the engineer’s drawing board, or a field for sport, or the silence in which we make our song. Or we may take it as the empty space where our other half should be, a vacancy we fill when, as we say, we make friends, or make love, or when, extending our line beyond ourselves in a way that somehow completes us, we beget children. Be it artifacts or deeds or relationships, our satisfaction is made through effective action. 4. When we look at a puzzle piece we may say that what is given is discontinuous with what would complete it. An epistemic gap divides what we know from what would give us adequate moral and metaphysical insight. That gap cannot be crossed by reason. The completion is given to us from the other side of the chasm by divine revelation. This is a doctrine of faith. God is the puzzle that tells us what being is and who we ought to be. Faith shares with skepticism a conviction that reason is inadequate, and with rationalism a conviction that our proper completion is unique. Like the Muslim, we submit to a superior. In constant intimate relation with that superior we find our satisfaction, like a little child who, leaping into the embrace of a loving parent, feels himself at home. 5. When we look at a puzzle piece we may deny that it is complete, for it lacks wholeness. It is not in equilibrium, since it satisfies neither intellect nor desire. We may be dissatisfied MAWBY 91 with the deductive completions we have seen, for they appear to rest, despite their own intent, on premises that are neither self-evident nor inescapable. We may deny that completion is arbitrary, for such a conclusion itself seems arbitrary.9 If we refuse revelation, reject the incompetence of reason, and insist that thought and desire be satisfied rather than eliminated, we seem to be left with philosophy. We seek, as one philosopher says, “...a means by which, reflecting on our moral and intellectual experience conjointly, taking the world and ourselves into account, we can put the whole thing together” (Green, section 174). 6. Finally, we may look at our puzzle piece in some other way. This residual category makes the list of alternatives formally complete. Notice how little insight mere formal completion gives. Unmediated mindfulness, luminous certitude, free creativity, obedient faithfulness, persistent inquiry, or something else—these are the ultimate ways. Philosophy, when it poses the question about the best life, includes philosophy itself as a candidate answer. This sort of philosophy, which I understand to be Socratic, tries to occupy a place between rhetoric and mathematics. Like rhetoric, its fundamental questions arise from concerns that shape and move the soul. Like mathematics, it seeks fully adequate insight. Its logic I believe to be nonmonotonic, its inferences defeasible, which implies that it must always be open to beginning again. Of course when we ask for the best way of life we are seeking not just candidate answers, but true answers. Questions stretch us toward knowledge only if we desire the truth. Philosophy may draw us toward excellence even though, as Socrates found, it may not keep us out of trouble. Finish Line It is time to bring this essay to a close. We asked about questions. If we view asking a question as a conversational act, we �92 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW can split asking into questionings where the asker knows the answer and those where he does not. If we view a question as an epistemological instrument that directs a course of inquiry, we can split questions into those where ignorance is encompassed by knowledge and those where knowledge is encompassed by ignorance. Crossing these dichotomies breeds four kinds of question. The search for the double square in the Meno arose from an enclosed question asked by one who knows. The question of human excellence, and the metaphysical questions which it resembles, are I believe of another type, namely, unenclosed questions asked by one who does not know. The persistence of philosophical questions—the fact that they won’t go away—stems from this. They are open questions asked by those aware of their ignorance. Socrates in the recollection myth implies that while our souls are broken, imperfect and incomplete, the missing fragments drift submerged in our depths. We live the philosophic life when we fish in the depths of the soul for what would make our knowledge and our excellence whole. Whether our nets are fine enough, whether our lines are long enough, will remain for us open questions. Notes 1 It is not certain, of course, that Plato intends the Meno of the dialogue to be identical to Xenophon’s Meno. Jacob Klein in his commentary on the Meno says we are to make the identification, and so should be astonished that a paragon of vice such as Meno would initiate an inquiry into virtue. Klein may be right. If he is, it is extremely unfortunate that no English translation of which I am aware brings out the viciousness of Meno. 2 Blind children who are given a fragile object and told, “look but don’t touch” respond by lightly running their fingers over the surface. “Looking” is seeking information through the sense of touch; touching is manipulation, handling for one’s own purposes. MAWBY 93 3 “We may agree, perhaps, to understand by metaphysics an attempt to know reality as against mere appearance, or the study of first principles or ultimate truths, or again the effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piecemeal or by fragments, but somehow as a whole” (Bradley, 1). 4 For example, we could fill in the space in the corner with a single figure composed of two different kinds of parts. Place the top half of an ellipse on the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose equal shorter sides are the same length as the sides of the other three squares. The hypotenuse forms the major axis of the ellipse, and we set the semi-minor axis to (√ 2)/π . The half-ellipse together with the right triangle then make an area equal to that of each of the other three squares. 5 Kant asserts that we can see now that certain speculative questions are forever unanswerable; these are immortal questions. In the land of truth, where knowledge can be grounded, Kant affirms instead the immortality of questions, and he says the proper use of the Ideas of pure reason is as regulative ideals within the phenomenal domain. 6 “To say the reality is such that our knowledge cannot reach it, is a claim to know reality; to urge that our knowledge is of a kind which must fail to transcend appearance, itself implies that transcendence” (Bradley, 1). 7 “When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape” (Pascal, Pensées, #198). 9 “Our reason is not like a plane indefinitely far extended, the limits of which we know in a general way only; but must rather be compared to a sphere, the radius of which can be determined from the curvature of the arc of its surface—that is to say, from the nature of synthetic a priori propositions—and whereby we can likewise specify with certainty its volume and limits. Outside this sphere (the �94 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW field of experience) there is nothing that can be an object for reason; nay, the very questions in regard to such supposed objects relate only to subjective principles of a complete determination of those relations which can come under the concepts of the understanding and which can be found within the empirical sphere” (Kant, 607-608). 9 It is not the skepticism of the skeptic that I object to; it is the dogmatism. Until one has encountered it repeatedly, it is hard to credit the insistent and unyielding conviction behind the claim “It’s true that there is no truth.” References Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality. London: Oxford University Press, 1893. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971. Green, Thomas Hill. Prolegomena to Ethics. New York, NY: Thomas Crowell/Apollo,1883/1969. Hobbes, T. Leviathan. Indianapolis, IN: Library of Liberal Arts,1958. Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan,1929. Pascal, B. Pensées. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. London: Penguin, 1966. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. Ed. Owen Thomas. New York, NY: Norton, 1966. Whitehead, A. N. Process and Reality. (1978 Corrected Edition edited by D. R. Griffin and D. W Sherburne). New York, NY: . Macmillan, The Free Press, 1978. MAWBY 95 � 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2003/2 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Carey, James Ruhm von Oppen, Beate Sachs, Joe Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Coleman, Shanna Sachs, Joe Sedeyn, Olivier Smith, Brother Robert Klein, Jacob Salem, Eric Hopkins, Burt Mawby, Ronald Description An account of the resource Volume XLVII, number two of The St. John's Review. Published in 2003. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_47_No_2 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8afa074196c868cf70b52bf059bc7b68.pdf 91e07be419a07f2456b15ab1307208e2 PDF Text Text The St. John’s Review Volume XLVII, number three (2004) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Beate Ruhm von Oppen Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Shanna Coleman The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year. Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are .O. available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2004 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Essays and Lectures Educating by ‘the Question Method’: The Example of Kierkegaard.........................................5 Mark W. Sinnett What It Means To Be Human: Aristotle on Virtue and Skill........................................43 Corinne Painter Reviews Kant’s Afterlife Immanuel Kant’s Opus Postumum...............................59 Eva Brann Odysseus’s World of the Imagination Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments....................................87 Paul Ludwig The City: Intersection of Erôs and Thumos? Paul Ludwig’s Erôs and Polis.....................................105 Michael Dink �4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 Educating by ‘the Question Method’: The Example of Kierkegaard Mark W Sinnett . “There was a young man as favorably endowed as an Alcibiades. He lost his way in the world. In his need he looked about for a Socrates but found none among his contemporaries. Then he requested the gods to change him into one.” This is an entry in the Journal of Søren Kierkegaard from the winter of 1842,1 when he was putting the finishing touches on his first great aesthetic work, Either/Or. It is a reference to the pseudonymous author of the texts that compose the first volume of Either/Or, and as such it contains within it both the purpose and the origin of Kierkegaard’s entire literary work. Kierkegaard’s works embody the attempt of this gifted young man to be the Socrates whom he could not otherwise find among his contemporaries; they represent Kierkegaard’s attempt to educate by what he calls “the question method,” to educate by the method he has learned from his own teacher, “the simple wise man of antiquity.” In My Left Hand and in My Right In the midst of the long-standing and ongoing disarray of scholarly interpretation of Kierkegaard, there are two facts on which there is general agreement. The first of these presents us the fundamental problem in understanding Kierkegaard’s work, while the second, as I argue, presents us the solution. Everyone knows, first, that Kierkegaard divided his writings into two streams: the works, such as Either/Or, Fear Mark Sinnett is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This lecture was delivered at Annapolis on April 6, 2001. �6 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW and Trembling, and Philosophical Fragments, which are populated by various pseudonymous authors and editors; and the “religious” works, such as the six volumes of Edifying Discourses published concurrently with the above works in 1843-44, and signed in Kierkegaard’s own name.2 Kierkegaard’s rather elliptical explanation of this curious procedure is given in The Point of View for My Work as an Author which he wrote (but did not publish) in 1848. Written in anticipation of the republication of Either/Or, the The Point of View emphasizes that his writings have been misread and misunderstood, but that from the proper “point of view” they can be understood “in every detail” (16). The misunderstanding in question, Kierkegaard explains, is inseparable from the fact that he has come to be regarded as an aesthetic writer turned religious. He asserts, to the contrary, that he has been a “religious author” from the beginning; that “the whole of my work as an author is related to Christianity, to the problem ‘of becoming a Christian’, with a direct or indirect polemic against the monstrous illusion we call Christendom” (5-6). This is demonstrated, he says, by the fact that from the beginning of his authorship his pseudonymous, “aesthetic” works were accompanied by “religious” works signed in his own name. The “duplicity,” thus, “dated from the very start. For the Two Edifying Discourses are contemporaneous with Either/Or. The duplicity in the deeper sense, that is, in the sense of the authorship as a whole, is not at all what was a subject of comment at the time: the contrast between the two parts of Either/Or. No, the duplicity is discovered by comparing Either/Or and the Two Edifying Discourses” (11). Unfortunately, however, not only did no one undertake this comparison, virtually no notice of any kind was taken of the little volume of discourses, notwithstanding its relatively greater significance. “Although Either/Or attracted all the attention, and nobody noticed the Two Edifying Discourses, this book betokened, nevertheless, that the [upbuilding]3 was precisely what must come to the fore, that the author was a SINNETT 7 religious author, who for this reason has never written anything aesthetic, but has employed pseudonyms for all the aesthetic works, whereas the Two Edifying Discourses were by Magister Kierkegaard” (12).4 The popular success of the pseudonymous work was very gratifying, especially that of “The Seducer’s Diary”—“how wonderful!”—but it was of no avail since no attention was paid to the “contemporaneous” discourses, another instance of the all too frequent phenomenon that “things of the most vital importance often seem insignificant, . . . [like] ‘a little flower hidden in the great forest, not sought out either for its beauty, or for its scent, or because it was nourishing’” (19). And he summarizes the mishandling of his works as follows: “I held out Either/Or to the world in my left hand, and in my right the Two Edifying Discourses; but all, or as good as all, grasped with their right what I held in my left” (20); and, we may add, grasped not at all what he held in his right.5 These remarks, brief as they are, furnish certain basic parameters for the interpretation of Kierkegaard’s authorship, namely, that what is offered with the left hand is to be received with the left hand and, simultaneously, what is offered with the right is to be received with the right. Until quite recently there have been no interpretations of the writings that satisfy these parameters. The “true explanation,” nevertheless, “is at hand and ready to be found by him who honestly seeks it” (16). It is to be found, as we shall see, in Kierkegaard’s references to his “dialectical position” (6), to the “dialectical” character of his authorship (15), to “dialectical reduplication” (16, 17), to his “indirect method” that “arranges everything dialectically” (25), to “patient finger exercises in the dialectical” (38), to “the criss-cross of dialectics” (39)—and many more can be adduced. This brings us to the second generally accepted fact about Kierkegaard’s work; namely, that his “dialectical method” is also his “Socratic method” (40); in other words, that his procedure is inspired by the “simple wise man of antiquity” who is his “teacher” (41). Although many have written about �8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Kierkegaard’s use of Socratic “irony,” and referred to Kierkegaard’s maieutic role as “midwife,” and even to Socratic “dialogue,” we find nowhere in the secondary literature a detailed comparison between Kierkegaard’s efforts and his Socratic model as presented in Plato’s dialogues. The insight that emerges from a close, comparative reading of the chronologically associated texts, and that makes sense of the “duplicity” of the authorship as a whole, is that these texts constitute between them the question and answer of Socratic dialectic. The reason both sides of the authorship are needed—the reason the dramatis personae on both sides have a real dramatic role to play—the reason Kierkegaard insists his intended meaning will emerge only through “comparing” the pseudonymous works with their associated discourses—is that the associated texts constitute between them a “conversation” (dialektos), a dialogue, within which “Magister Kierkegaard,” speaking in his own voice, is able to critically examine the perspectives of his own pseudonyms, and thus to apply his “indirect polemic against the monstrous illusion we call Christendom.” The task of understanding this dialectical structure of the authorship of Kierkegaard requires that we understand the inspiration he received through the example of Socrates. We begin our quest for this understanding with Kierkegaard’s discussion of Socratic dialectic—what he calls “the question method”—in his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. The Question Method The significance of Socrates in The Concept of Irony lies in his being, in Kierkegaard’s view, the originator of irony (9). Among the members of the “Socratic movement” known to him—Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes—Kierkegaard prefers the latter two, laying particular emphasis upon the “narrative” and “dramatic” dialogues of the one and the Clouds of the other. Clearly realizing that all of these texts are artistic constructions, Kierkegaard nevertheless believes that SINNETT 9 the “genuinely Socratic” can be recovered from them through careful comparative study. But this brings us to what Kierkegaard regards as the single most important source of the “Socratic,” Plato’s Apology, which, he believes, presents us “an authentic picture of the actual Socrates” (80). The first lesson we learn from Apology, according to Kierkegaard, concerns the utter “negativity” of Socrates. This is illustrated in the course of Socrates’ defense by his indifference to the order of the family (184-85)6 and to the collective authority of the state (193-94).7 This implies, says Kierkegaard, Socrates’ “completely negative relation” both to the “state” (160) and to “the established order with respect to religion” (168). The latter is especially clear in Socrates’ reliance on the daimonion, whose silence in the face of the Council’s death penalty persuades Socrates that he has nothing to fear from it (Apol. 40B-C). This suggests, according to Kierkegaard, not only the privacy of Socrates’ religious life in what is otherwise a very public Greek world (160-61), but the silence that is here substituted for the “divine eloquence” that permeated the whole of Greek religion (161). This is consistent with the characteristic of the daimonion, which, even if it is “something divine,” is “something that precisely in its abstraction is above definition, is unutterable and indescribable, since it allows no vocalization” (158). And the negativity of Socrates is confirmed, Kierkegaard asserts, by the same qualities of abstraction and silence in the “dramatic” dialogues: the negative character of love as an “empty longing” in Symposium (45, 46, 49); the “total negativity” of teaching in Protagoras (52); the completely “negative” views of death and of the soul in Phaedo (64, 71); and the “negative conclusion” of Republic, book 1 (111, 115). What is significant, Kierkegaard insists, is that in each case the discussion ends, not simply with no conclusion, but with a “negative conclusion”; in other words, that it ends, not simply with no positive result, but with Socrates’ “ironic smile” at the vacuous result (57). �10 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW This suggests the quality that is actually Kierkegaard’s principal concern, namely, the irony in which the negativity of Socrates is properly expressed. Apology, once again, is a good illustration, for its “total structure” lets “Socrates’ position become apparent as irony” (79). For example, in speaking, not in his own defense but on his accusers’ behalf (Apol. 30D), “lest they sin against the gift of the deity” (96), the relation of prosecution and defendant has been unexpectedly reversed, demonstrating not only the lack of any real point of contact between Socrates and his accusers (88), but “the ironic infinite elasticity, the secret trap-door through which one suddenly plunges down . . . into irony’s infinite nothing” (26). In Socrates, in short, Kierkegaard sees “irony in all its divine infinitude, which allows nothing whatever to endure” (40). That “irony levels everything” (79), moreover, is in Kierkegaard’s view no accidental circumstance: it is not simply expressive of Socrates’ “negative relation” to the established order of things, but the means of his conscious and unrelenting challenge to it. The irony of Apology, thus, is not simply Socrates’ failure to present any real defense, but the fact that it is Athens that is on trial and Socrates who is proceeding as “counsel for the prosecution” (173). The irony of his “wisdom” was the weaponry of his “campaign” (175), the means of his “cutting off all communication with the besieged, . . . which starved the garrison out of opinions, conceptions, time-honored traditions, etc. that had been adequate for the person concerned.” He purposed, not to supply “the idea” which he had glimpsed, but, by the application of that “causticity . . . which nothing can resist” (206), to strip away anything and everything that stood in the way. Although his “total skepticism” (115) often invited comparison with that of the Sophists, Socrates singled out the “teachers of wisdom” for his most intense “polemic” (209, 210): “When the Sophists, in good company, had befogged themselves in their own eloquence, it was Socrates’ joy to introduce, in the most polite and modest way of the world, a SINNETT 11 slight draft that in a short time expelled all these poetic vapors” (37). Socrates’ irony was the means of his challenge to both the ancient order of the polis and the Sophists’ attempted “surrogate” order; it was the “the glaive, the twoedged sword that he swung like an avenging angel over Greece” (211). Of course Socrates is especially known for the particular means by which he presented his challenge: As illustrated by his examination of Meletus and Anytus in Apology (24C-28A), his “customary way is that of asking questions” (45). The “question method” (55), which Kierkegaard also describes as Socrates’ “dialectical method” (124), was precisely the means of his challenge to the surrounding culture. Socrates begins his inquiry where people already are—“on the periphery, in the motley variety of life endlessly interwoven within itself ” (32)—and “an exceptional degree of art is needed to unravel not only itself but also the abstract of life’s complications.” The “art” in question is “the Socratically disciplined dialogue,” “the rather well-known Socratic art of asking questions or, to recall the necessity of dialogue for Platonic philosophy, the art of conversing” (33). This art is preserved by Plato, the dialogical form of whose writings appear, in Kierkegaard’s view, to be not only inspired by but also intended as an extension of Socrates’ life and teaching (30, 188-89). What we find in Plato’s dialogues, according to Kierkegaard, is a Socrates created by “poetic productivity” (15, 18, 125), and a literary form engendered by the “epoch-making” experience of him (29). And thus is revealed Socrates’ significance “in the world-historical development”; namely, “to be the infinite beginning that contains within itself a multiplicity of beginnings” (216-17), including the “beginning” undertaken by Kierkegaard himself in 1843. We are surely entitled to ask, however, what this “beginning” really amounts to. If the result of Socratic inquiry is simply “negativity”—if, as already suggested, this method “allows nothing whatever to endure”—is it not better described as the end rather than as a “beginning”? What we �12 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW will now discover in considering somewhat more fully Kierkegaard’s understanding of the nature of inquiry is that “the question method,” both in the classical tradition and in his own employment of it, is neither “negative,” nor “positive,” but always in between the two. The In-Between Structure of Inquiry “To ask a question,” Kierkegaard insists, “ultimately became the primary issue for [Socrates]” (37). The crucial point is that Kierkegaard regards this endeavor as being a form of knowing. The polemic Socrates directed at the established religious tradition, for instance, reflected his intimation of better things to come: “The heavenly host of gods rose from the earth and vanished from mortal sight, but this very disappearance was the condition for a deeper relationship” (173-74). Socrates’ insight represented, in this respect, “the beginning of infinite knowledge” (174) and a “new direction” for the age (175). According to Kierkegaard all of Socrates’ inquiry implies his apprehension of a reality worthy of being explored and more fully understood. He describes Socrates’ questioning of his fellow citizens as the means by which “the bonds of their prejudices were loosed . . . [and] their intellectual sclerosis was softened” (190)8; but “when his questions had straightened everything out and made the transformation possible, then the relation culminated in the meaningful moment, in the brief silvery gleam that instantly illuminated the world of their consciousness.”9 Kierkegaard elaborates on this image by means of a story about “an Englishman who traveled in order to see the sights”: When he came to a mighty forest and found a place where he could open up an amazing vista by having the intervening woods cut, he hired people to saw through the trees. When everything was ready, when the trees were sawed through for toppling, he climbed up to this spot, took out his binoculars, gave the signal—the trees fell, and his SINNETT 13 eyes instantaneously delighted in the enchanting view, which was even more seductive because in almost the same moment he had the opposite. (190) “So also,” Kierkegaard says, “with Socrates. By means of his questions, he quietly sawed through for toppling the primeval forest of substantial consciousness, and when everything was ready—look, then all these formations vanished, and the eyes of the soul delighted in a vista such as they had never seen before.”10 This illustration is significant in that it suggests the directionality of questioning. Just as the traveler, glimpsing the light filtering through the trees, “found a place where he could open an amazing vista by having the intervening woods cut,” so Socrates knew how to direct his inquiry so as to reveal to “the eyes of the soul . . . a vista such as they had never seen before.” The “ideality” that irony demands is clearly already present in the desire because, as Kierkegaard claims, “intellectually that which is desired is always in the desire already, inasmuch as the desire is regarded as the agitation of the desired itself in the desiring” (213). “In Socrates’ demand,” otherwise said, “the satisfaction was [kata dunamin (potentially)] present” (214). The challenge of Socrates’ polemic, therefore, was just as much a beginning as it was an ending, “for the destruction of the earlier development is just as much the ending of this as it is the beginning of the new development, since the destruction is possible only because the new principle is already present as possibility.” This invites comparison with the importance placed upon questions and the process of questioning in the thought of such modern philosophers as Gadamer, Lonergan and Polanyi.11 Kierkegaard’s account of questioning is particularly reminiscent of Eric Voegelin’s understanding of philosophical inquiry “as a movement in the psyche toward the [divine] ground that is present in the psyche as its mover.”12 The philosopher’s wondering and questioning, Voegelin argues, is itself a form of cognitive participation in the reality being sought—a “knowing questioning and a questioning knowledge.”13 As such, “the questioning unrest �14 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW carries the assuaging answer within itself inasmuch as man is moved to his search of the ground by the divine ground of which he is in search.”14 “The man who asks questions, and the divine ground about which the questions are asked, . . . merge in the experience of questioning as a divine-human encounter and reemerge as the participants in the encounter that has the luminosity and structure of consciousness.”15 This realm of divine-human encounter is further characterized by Voegelin as the “In-Between,” or the “metaxy”: Question and answer are intimately related one toward the other; the search moves in the metaxy, as Plato has called it, in the In-Between of poverty and wealth, of human and divine; the question is knowing, but its knowledge is yet the trembling of a question that may reach the true answer or miss it. This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking of the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer, is the life of reason.16 The symbolism of the metaxy is derived from Diotima’s account of the “spiritual realm” in Plato’s Symposium, a discussion which it will be helpful (in the following sections) to bear in mind.17 Inhabited not only by “the great spirit,” Erôs, but also by the man who has “skill” (sophos) in spiritual matters, “the whole realm of the spiritual,” Diotima explains, “is in between [metaxu] the divine and the mortal”; it “is the means of all relation [homilia] and converse [dialektos] of men with the gods and of the gods with men” (Symp. 202E-203A). The “spiritual man” is also described as a “lover of wisdom” (philosophos); that is, as one (like Erôs) who is neither “resourceless” or “wealthy,” but “is in the middle between wisdom and ignorance [sophias te au kai amathias en mesô estin]” (203E). In order to explain this, Diotima notes that neither the “gods” nor the “ignorant” (amatheis) are “lovers SINNETT 15 of wisdom” (philosophousin) (203E-204A). The former already possess wisdom and the latter, though they utterly lack it, are satisfied with themselves and have no desire for that of which they feel no defect (204A). “Who then,” asks Socrates, “are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the ignorant?” Diotima responds: “They are the ones in between [metaxu] the two, and one of them is Erôs” (204B). The “lovers of wisdom” are subsequently characterized by Diotima in terms of their loving quest of wisdom and beauty: Each of them climbs aloft, “as on the rungs of a ladder, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies, . . . to beautiful institutions, . . . to beautiful learning, and from learning at last to the special lore which is study of none other than the beautiful itself [ho estin ouk allou ê autou ekeinou tou kalou mathêma]” (211C). “Whoever has been initiated so far in love-matters [ta erôtika], viewing beautiful things in the right and regular order [theômenos ephexês te kai orthôs ta kala], suddenly, as he draws near to the end of his dealings in love, an amazing vision, beautiful in its nature, may be revealed to him [pros telos êdê iôn tôn erôtikôn exaiphnês katopsetai ti thaumaston tên phusin kalon]; and this, Socrates, is the final object of all those previous toils” (210E). Here we see the in-between structure of inquiry, the character of inquiry as being neither empty nor full, neither ignorant nor wise, neither “negative” nor “positive,” but always in between. Accordingly, we see also the character of inquiry as a form of knowing, displaying a rational structure (as indicated by Diotima’s “ladder”) and providing a sense of orientation through the intimation of a reality worthy of being more fully understood, a reality, indeed, that invites the philosopher into the quest for understanding. This is especially clear in Symposium in that Socrates, in attacking the uncritical opinion of Agathon as to the beauty of Erôs, admits that he is only re-enacting the examination by which the priestess “honored by the god” (diotima) had challenged the same viewpoint in himself (201E).18 The philosopher’s �16 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW inquiry, in other words, is an encounter in which the philosopher “is moved to his search of the ground by the divine ground of which he is in search,” or, otherwise said, in which what is desired is recognized to be “in the desire already, inasmuch as the desire is regarded as the agitation of the desired itself in the desiring.” That Kierkegaard does indeed share this understanding of the in-between structure of inquiry is confirmed in an entry from his Journal from 1851: “I certainly do think that my presentation or illumination of the essentially Christian comes some points closer to the truth than the proclamation of Christianity hereabouts ordinarily does—but I am only a poet.”19 Commenting on this disclaimer, Kierkegaard concedes that “‘the pastor’ can make capital of this; he can say: To be a pastor is something higher; a poet, and Magister Kierkegaard is right here, is inadequate when it comes to the essentially Christian, and Mag. K. is only a poet—oddly enough, says so himself.” Kierkegaard then emphasizes, however, that this is not what he said: “I have not said that I, measured against ‘the pastor,’ that is, every pastor as such, am only a poet, but measured against the ideal, I am only a poet” (emphasis added). Similarly, a little farther on, he notes that: I have also said “that before God I regard my whole work as an author as my own education”; I am not a teacher but a learner. Every teacher of religion, every music teacher, every gymnastics coach, every part-time teacher may make capital of this if he wishes and say: There you see what it is to be a teacher if Magister Kierkegaard, who is for all that a gifted person, is only a learner, as he himself says. But I have not said that I, measured against every part-time teacher, could not be called a teacher, but that before God, measured against the ideals for being a teacher, I call myself a learner. (emphasis added) SINNETT 17 Recalling the ironical stance of Socrates in Symposium, we recognize here the daimonios aner, the “spiritual man,” who moves “in between” the amatheis, the spiritual dullards (represented especially by the “pastor,” complacent in his authoritative possession of what is “higher”), and transcendent reality (represented here as the “ideal,” embodying the inexhaustible challenge and invitation of God’s truth); we find, in other words, the one who is wise only in his admission of ignorance, who is a teacher only because he is first and always a learner. As we now turn to Kierkegaard’s account (in The Point of View) of his own application of “the question method”— what he calls the “criss-cross of dialectics”—we will find Plato’s Symposium a useful guide. The Criss-Cross of Dialectics We begin with Kierkegaard’s description of the “monstrous illusion” of Christendom that he seeks to challenge. A situation in which everyone is automatically certified by the church and state as a Christian (22-3) indicates the presence of “a tremendous confusion, a frightful illusion” (23). At the motivating center of this illusion, Kierkegaard maintains, is a profound horror at the possibility of uncertainty in relation to God: in a manner analogous to those in Socrates’ time who sought the technai, the techniques, with which to insure the attunement of human society to divine reality,20 the common characteristic of those residing comfortably within Christendom is to have suppressed all conscious awareness of “the problem of ‘becoming a Christian.’” Given that “the problem,” as a problem, is for Kierkegaard inherent to Christian faith, the “monstrous illusion” of Christendom can only be maintained through suppression of this fundamental question. Kierkegaard’s endeavor, in turn, may then be described as the effort by means of “the question method” to restore to his society conscious awareness of “the problem”; in other words, to gain a hearing for this fundamental question. �18 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW The first thing to be understood about this task, Kierkegaard says, is that it cannot proceed directly. “Direct communication,” after all, “presupposes that the receiver’s ability to receive is undisturbed” (40), a condition that is not satisfied in the case of those who live in a state of illusion. In a manner reminiscent of Plato’s contrast between Socratic inquiry and Sophistic speech-making, Kierkegaard asserts that there is “an immense difference, a dialectical difference, between these two cases: the case of a man who is ignorant and is to have a piece of knowledge imparted to him, so that he is like an empty vessel which is to be filled or a blank sheet of paper upon which something is to be written; and the case of a man who is under an illusion and must first be delivered from that” (40).21 The “dialectical difference,” furthermore, corresponds to that “between writing on a blank sheet of paper and bringing to light by the application of a caustic fluid a text which is hidden under another text” (40). This “caustic means” is also described as “negativity” (40), indicating again the ambition which Kierkegaard shares with his “teacher” to dispel the mists and clouds of illusion. Kierkegaard subsequently says that “negativity understood in relation to the communication of the truth is precisely the same as deception” (40). This “deception,” Kierkegaard explains, “begins with self-humiliation: the helper must first humble himself under him he would help, and therewith must understand that to help does not mean to be a sovereign but to be a servant, that to help does not mean to be ambitious but to be patient, that to help means to endure for the time being the imputation that one is in the wrong and does not understand what the other understands” (27-8). In this way, precisely as he describes his “teacher” doing, Kierkegaard begins by getting in touch with a person where he is (26); not by vaunting himself over the other as teacher over learner, but by identifying himself with the other as a fellow learner (29), and thereby submitting himself to the other’s perspective (30).22 SINNETT 19 At this point, however, we discover the ultimate purpose of the deception, for of course, neither for Socrates nor for Kierkegaard, is it an end in itself. There is one thing, indeed, “the author must not forget, namely, his purpose, the distinction between this and that, between the religious as the decisive thing and the aesthetic incognito—lest the criss-cross of dialectics end in twaddle” (39). The “criss-cross of dialectics” refers to the conversational collision between the aesthetic and the religious in which Kierkegaard’s aesthetic deception is intended to involve his unsuspecting readership: If a man lives . . . in categories entirely foreign to Christianity, in purely aesthetic categories, and if some one is capable of winning and captivating him with aesthetic works, and then knows how to introduce the religious so promptly that with the momentum of his abandonment to the aesthetic the man rushes straight into the most decisive definitions of the religious—what then? Why, then, he must take notice. What follows after this, however, no one can tell beforehand. But at least he is compelled to take notice. (37, emphasis added) Just as Socrates seduced his interlocutors into conversation through his repeated admission of ignorance, the religious writer must begin with the aesthetic in order to gain the attention and willing participation of the person lost in aesthetic illusion, but “he must have everything in readiness, though without impatience, with a view to bringing forward the religious promptly, as soon as he perceives that he has his reader with him” (26, emphasis added). The “simultaneous achievement of aesthetic and religious production,” thus, was no accident (31-32), for it is the “criss-cross” of the two—the dialectical interrogation of the former by the latter—that was intended to bring the inhabitants of Christendom unexpectedly and unwittingly into collision with the challenge of the “religious.” �20 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW As we began the section by noting this occurs indirectly: the “indirect method,” in fact, “loving and serving the truth, arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive, and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before God—that he has lived hitherto in an illusion” (25-26). By directing the critique of the discourses at the pseudonymous perspectives of the aesthetic works, Kierkegaard leaves his reader free to judge the state of his own existence, just as the readers of Plato’s writings are left free to judge between the different participants in the various dialogues.23 Only insofar as the reader is indeed made “captive” to the pseudonymous perspectives—only insofar as the reader finds himself in them—is he then possibly, and “indirectly,” subject to the challenge of reality, which is what Kierkegaard means by “the most decisive definitions of the religious.” This leads to the further similarity with Socrates that is clear in Kierkegaard’s understanding of his work as commissioned and empowered by “Governance.” His work, Kierkegaard explains, had to be performed under conditions of strict “divine discipline” (67). Unlike the poet, who is supplied his thoughts under inspiration of the divine muse, Kierkegaard “needed God every day to shield [him] from too great a wealth of thoughts” (68). From the beginning, God’s “aid” was experienced by Kierkegaard in his being “under arrest” (69), in his vast talents for “poetical” and “aesthetic” productivity being under restraint by God. “It is as if a father were to say to his child: You are allowed to take the whole thing, it is yours; but if you will not be obedient and use it as I wish—very well, I shall not punish you by taking it from you; no, take it as yours . . . it will smash you. Without God I am too strong for myself, and perhaps in the most agonizing of all ways am broken” (69-70). In the midst of the overwhelming riches of his imaginative capacities, he repeatedly confronted “the frightful torture of starving in the midst of abundance” (70). SINNETT 21 This tension between his poetic talents and the divine “arrest”—what Kierkegaard refers to as the “dialectical factor” (69) in his work—is subsequently described in terms of a conversation between himself and “Governance.” The actual work began with “an occurrence,” a “collision”; namely, his failed engagement with Regine Olsen.24 “What was to be done? Well, obviously the poetical had to be evacuated, anything else was impossible for me. But the whole aesthetic productivity was put under arrest by the religious. The religious agreed to this elimination but incessantly spurred it on, as though it were saying, Are you not now through with that?” It had been Kierkegaard’s original plan to be “through with that” (i.e., through with the aesthetic work) very quickly indeed. “In a certain sense it was not at all my original intention to become a religious author. My intention was to evacuate as hastily as possible the poetical [by publishing Either/Or]—and then go out to a country parish” (86). On its own, Kierkegaard emphasizes, Either/Or did not communicate his religious intentions, for “there was as yet no scale presented, nor was the duplicity posited” (85, n.). He had initially thought that “the most vigorous expression of the fact that I had been a religious man and that the pseudonyms were something foreign to me was the abrupt transition—to go immediately out in the country to seek a cure as a country parson” (86); but “the urge of productivity” remained so great within him that he sought another way to present the “scale” that was needed for the proper interpretation of Either/Or: “I let the Two Edifying Discourses come out, and I came to an understanding with Governance. There was allowed me again a period for poetical productivity, but always under the arrest of the religious, which was on the watch, as if it said, Will you not soon be through with that?” The “duplicity” of the authorship, thus, is the outward expression of the “divine arrest” of “Governance,” the outward expression of the divine inward challenge to Kierkegaard’s own poetic “reflection.” The dialectic of �22 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW pseudonym and discourse, in other words, is the outward expression of the inward “dialectical factor,” an outward expression of Kierkegaard’s inward conversation with God. Kierkegaard, furthermore, clearly understands the outer, literary expression of this inner dialogue as the means of his transmission of God’s challenge to the surrounding society. He writes, he claims, “without authority” (87), since the critique that the discourses present to the aesthetic perspectives of the pseudonyms has its origin in the inner “divine arrest” to his own “poetic production.” Governance, thus, has “educated” him, “and the education is reflected in the process of the productivity” (73); he has been “conscious of being under instruction, and that from the very beginning.”25 This, however, far from disqualifying him as the agent of God’s challenge to others, is the real source of his power: And now as for me, the author, what, according to my opinion, is my relation to the age? Am I perhaps the ‘Apostle’? Abominable! I have never given an occasion for such a judgment. I am a poor insignificant person. Am I then the teacher, the educator? No, not that at all; I am he who himself has been educated, or whose authorship expresses what it is to be educated to the point of becoming a Christian. In the fact that education is pressed upon me, and in the measure that it is pressed, I press it in turn upon this age; but I am not a teacher, only a fellow student. (75, emphasis added) The comparison with Socrates is, once again, irresistible. In Symposium, as we have seen, the examination to which Socrates subjects the Sophist Agathon is presented as the re-enactment of the examination to which Socrates had himself been subjected by Diotima. In both cases, thus, the Socratic figure not only begins by sharing the delusions of those around him, but is able to challenge others outwardly only by means of the challenge he himself has received SINNETT 23 inwardly; he “press[es]” upon others the challenge that “is pressed upon [him], and in the measure that it is pressed.” Kierkegaard, in particular, seeking a hearing for the question—“the problem of ‘becoming a Christian’”—pursues outwardly, through the dialogue of discourse and pseudonym, the inward dialogue within which he himself has heard the question posed by God. Finally, there is one further similarity with Socrates to which Kierkegaard draws our attention in The Point of View, namely, to the fact that the Socratic figure is, in both cases, entirely without assurance as to the effect of “the question method.” Kierkegaard can hope, as we saw, that “with the momentum of his abandonment to the aesthetical [a] man rushes straight into the most decisive definitions of the religious”; and Kierkegaard is confident that thereby the man “must take notice.” “What follows after this, however, no one can tell beforehand”(emphasis added). As with Socrates, who could reliably arouse in his interlocutors the “sacred rage” but could not guarantee their response to it,26 Kierkegaard admits that “it is impossible for me to compel a person to accept an opinion, a conviction, a belief . . . [even though] I can compel him to take notice” (35). This is by way of contrast with the standards of Sophistic education, with its emphasis upon the assurance of reliable techniques and predictable results. We will now find that this contrast between Socratic and Sophistic education is an important theme in Kierkegaard’s first dialogue, that which unfolds between Either/Or and the Two Edifying Discourses of 1843. Educating the Poet In Either/Or, the first of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, we are presented with a conversation between two friends. The first volume (Either) contains various texts pertaining to the “poetic” life, written by an extraordinarily gifted young man (hereafter referred to as “the poet”). Through a bewildering variety of compositions, ranging from the seemingly �24 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW random aphorisms of the “Diapsalmata,” through several essays in literary and musical criticism of a very high order, to the concluding “Seducer’s Diary,” all of it communicating an equally bewildering variety of moods and emotions, many troubling aspects of human existence are examined, many comfortable conventions of respectable life exploded. In volume two (Or), as if in response to the poet’s challenge, we find two long letters from a magistrate, Judge William, along with a sermon by his friend, a Jylland pastor, all of it intended as advice for the guidance of the errant young poet. Here we find an elaborate and rather clever defense of the sort of respectable life—and especially of married life—the poet appears to hold in derision. Here also, especially with the help of the pastor, we find reliable techniques for the overcoming of the despair that the poet does in fact clearly display. The two volumes together present (what appear to be) two very different views of life in conversation with each other, the “poetic” life on the one hand challenging, and being challenged by, the “ethical and religious” life on the other. As we learn from The Point of View, however, the “two sides of Either/Or” do not by themselves fulfill Kierkegaard’s intentions for his writings. Several months after the publication of Either/Or there appeared, signed in Kierkegaard’s own name, Two Edifying Discourses, through which Kierkegaard shows us exactly what he thinks of the characters of Either/Or.27 The question of educational method is explicitly addressed in the first of the discourses, “The Expectancy of Faith,”28 and is, in and of itself, a main point of Kierkegaard’s challenge to Judge William. In the introduction to the discourse (8-16), Kierkegaard presents us a man—the “perplexed man”—who is seeking to share his faith with a friend and falling into greater and greater perplexity in the attempt. He learns that, while it is indisputably a good gift, faith is the one gift he cannot give his friend by wishing it for him, realizing in the process the questionable character of his SINNETT 25 own faith.29 Finally giving over care of his friend to God, who alone, the man realizes, is the teacher all men can equally claim (12-13, 14-15, 28-29), he contents himself with the essentially negative, maieutic role of challenging the delusions which, as he knows from his own experience, shut his friend off from faith (15-16).30 Like Socrates in his inner dialogue with Diotima, and like Kierkegaard in his inner dialogue with “Governance,” the perplexed man has no pretensions to question his friend except in terms of that which has first questioned him. The “perplexed man,” in others words, precisely in his perplexity, has been equipped as the expert practitioner of “the question method.” He is to be assisted in his task by the main section of the discourse (16-28), which is devoted to description and analysis both of the forms of “expectancy” by which human beings seek to maintain control of their own lives, and of “the expectancy of faith” in which alone that control is given over to God. The “friend” Kierkegaard really has in mind, however, is the poet of Either (1.17-445). The categories of expectancy in the discourse, in fact, correspond exactly to the measures taken by the poet to defend himself from the threat of time. The essence of the “poetic life,” in fact, is the “making” (from the Greek verb poein) of an illusory world in which the poet can shield himself from the anxieties of temporal existence. As he says at the close of the “Diapsalmata,” from the sorrow which is his “baronial castle,” sitting “like a eagle’s nest high up on the mountain peak among the clouds,” “I swoop down into actuality and snatch my prey” (42, no. 88). He does not stay there, of course, for the whole point is to bring his booty home, and this booty is a picture I weave into the tapestry at my castle. Then I live as one already dead. Everything I have experienced I immerse in a baptism of oblivion unto an eternity of recollection. Everything temporal and fortuitous is forgotten and blotted out. Then I sit like an old gray-haired man, pensive, and explain the pictures in a soft �26 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW voice, almost whispering, and beside me sits a child, listening, although he remembers everything before I tell it. Depicted here is one whom the poet himself calls “the unhappiest one,” a man “turned the wrong way [in time] in two directions” (225), hoping for what lies behind him, recollecting what lies ahead, a man utterly lost in the illusion of his own “making.” The matter receives particularly clear treatment in the poet’s essay entitled “Rotation of Crops.” This refers not to an agricultural procedure but to the necessity of constantly varying our experience, and more importantly to a technique for the proper “cultivation” of experience. The recommended procedure is to achieve an appropriate balance “between recollecting and forgetting.” No part of life should be allowed such importance that it cannot be forgotten at will; neither should any part of life be relegated to such triviality that it cannot be remembered at will (293). The key is to throw hope “overboard” (292), for only then “does one begin to live artistically; as long as a person hopes, he cannot limit himself.” “It is indeed beautiful to see a person put out to sea with the fair wind of hope,” but hope makes for a dangerous pilot of one’s own ship, steering a course and speed which threaten the greatest of all calamities (292-93). For he who “runs aground with the speed of hope will recollect in such a way that he will be unable to forget” (293). Far better to throw hope overboard than to collide with that experience so recalcitrant as to defy every attempt at the poesis of recollection. The challenge Kierkegaard seeks to present the poet through the discourse is to set sail with hope still on board, to face the future as it really is, in all its threatening and indeterminate contingency, and yet with the “expectancy of faith [which] is victory,”31 the trust that whatever comes will reflect the will of God, that it will be the victory to which no one can give a shape beforehand. And there is reason for confidence that Kierkegaard’s challenge may not fall on SINNETT 27 entirely deaf ears. The poet says himself that he can imagine being converted from his boredom and despair through experience of “the faith that moves mountains,” but this remark only serves to demonstrate that he has never had that experience. To the contrary, in several further remarks in “Diapsalmata,” he emphasizes his disdain for the “timorousness” of the representatives of Danish Christendom (33-34, no. 67) who are pale and bloodless, without sufficient courage to passionately affirm or deny anything (23, no. 22), and who can know nothing of salvation (20, no. 8), since they are too “wretched” even to sin (27-28, no. 41). The poet, we recall, is the gifted young man looking for a Socrates, looking for someone who can question him, who can give his confusion direction and sharpen it into the joyous perplexity known as faith.32 The poet’s despair, therefore, is part of Kierkegaard’s indirect polemic against the society that could not challenge him. We most directly encounter the society in question in the person of Judge William (Either/Or 2.3-333). As husband, father, magistrate, church member, and devotee of fashionable philosophy, the good Judge is representative of respectable Danish society in every respect. Judge William is Danish society writ small. Kierkegaard’s “direct” attack on the Judge’s “ethical and religious” life, therefore, is also simultaneously his “indirect” critique of the spiritual poverty of Danish Christendom. Particularly at issue is the Judge’s educational method. Judge William, too, is anxious to help the poet, and, unlike the “perplexed man” of the discourse (as well as the perplexed man who wrote the discourse), he knows exactly how to go about it. The poet is afraid of the uncertainties and discontinuities of time, so the Judge shows how the disjointed and contingent facts of “outer history” may be “transformed and transferred” into the “continuity” of “inner history” (98-9, 250-51). The poet is afraid of the rigors of duty and responsibility, so the Judge explains that duty is the road sign that never directs a person anyplace he doesn’t already wish to go (149), the old friend that never �28 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW commands anything a person is not already ready to do (146). The poet is afraid of dependence upon the uncertain things around him, so the Judge shows him how he can posit his own “self ” in “absolute security” (213). Choose something, says the Judge; choose anything; choose even to despair (208-9). By freely choosing to despair the poet will have posited an “either/or,” one of many possible either/or’s, and this, being a realm which implies a discernible distinction between what he will have chosen and its alternative, will lead him to the “ethical.” Since this choice will have been made in freedom, moreover, the self which chooses will have been established in complete independence from anything outside itself (180). A particularly important case of this desired independence is that of the complete independence of the self from God. This is to be achieved, says the Judge, by that free choice in which we place ourselves always in the stance of “repentance” before God (216). Only by the freedom of this choice, in which human love for God is unmotivated by God’s love for humanity, and in which humility before God bears no relation to the majesty and holiness of God, can the self choose itself “absolutely” (216). By placing ourselves reliably in the wrong before God, more importantly, we also deny ourselves the perspective from which to notice what the Judge regards as being otherwise unavoidable, the necessity to “take God to court” for the ills and injustice of human existence (216-17, 237). To do otherwise would be to confront the “riddle” that throws everything into confusion; it would be to acknowledge the possibility that we may not know what God intends for us in this life, the possibility that the complacent joys of hearth and home may not be God’s ultimate purpose for us; it would be to acknowledge the contingencies of existence in time which would be for the Judge of all things the most horrifying. These procedures, the Judge claims, not only produce predictable results for himself, but will do so as well for SINNETT 29 anyone who employs them. His pretensions to “absolute” security notwithstanding, the real goal of the Judge’s technique is to fight down his own despair in facing the uncertainties of life, to bring the threat of time (and, in particular, of the poet) under control. As in various of Plato’s dialogues we find a sharp contrast of educational method between the Socratic figure who is powerful only in his perplexity, and the practical man of affairs (like Callicles in Gorgias, to whom Kierkegaard clearly compares the Judge33) who, if he is not himself the Sophist, ideally represents the end-form of Sophistic education. He thus also represents the society that Paul Shorey (in his edition of Republic) calls “the Great Sophist,”34 the society in which the Sophist has become the representative human being. The Sophist himself we find in the Jylland pastor, whose “edifying discourse” comprises the “final word” (ultimatum) in Or (2.335-54). It has often been asserted, of course, that the pastor’s sermon is actually Kierkegaard’s, that it represents Kierkegaard’s commentary on the conversation that unfolds between the poet and the Judge.35 This, however, is inconsistent with the dramatic structure of the dialogue; with the fact, namely, that the Judge sends the sermon to his younger friend in support of his own writings (337-38). The pastor, like Judge William, is deeply troubled by the ills of human life as well as by the merest possibility of uncertainty in our human dealings with God (342-44). As with the Judge, moreover, the solution is to lay hold of “the upbuilding that lies in the thought that in relation to God we are always in the wrong.” In this way, not only do we establish for ourselves a determinate relation with God, we also avoid the necessity of imputing evil to God. The pastor asks his listeners to imagine that they have been wronged by a beloved friend. In this situation, he reasons, we would derive no comfort from the thought that we were entirely in the right with our friend. “If you loved him, [the thought that you had done right by your friend] would only alarm you; you would reach for every probability, and if you found none, �30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW you would tear up the accounting to help you forget it, and you would strive to build yourself up with the thought that you were in the wrong” (348). “So also,” he continues, “in your relationship with God. You loved God, and therefore your soul could find rest and joy only in this, that you might always be in the wrong” (349). In effect, as an expression of his love for God, the pastor has extended to God a mercy and forgiveness that he believes God doesn’t deserve. The pastor’s “God,” in other words, is “without hope except in the sovereign grace and mercy of [humanity].” The pastor is indeed the Sophist, the man who can make the worse appear the better case, the man possessing the technical virtuosity to disguise his cowardly “projection” in the persiflage of Christian proclamation. He is precisely the man who can provide the Judge the intellectual support he needs to defend himself from the terror of contingency in relation to God. He is also a man who has placed himself in the direct line of fire from Kierkegaard’s second discourse, “Every Good and Every Perfect Gift Is from Above.”36 The two discourses are in fact mirror images of each other: whereas the pastor emphasizes the “upbuilding” that arises only through free choice, Kierkegaard emphasizes the power of the Omnipotent One to crush such arrogant pretension and the repentance that arises only through the challenge of God’s Word (38); whereas the pastor extends his grace to God, Kierkegaard emphasizes the creative power of God’s grace through which alone we celebrate each circumstance of life as “the good and perfect gift of God” (40-2); whereas the pastor seeks the security of a relationship—being always in the wrong before God—that can never change, Kierkegaard emphasizes the mercy of God that is even greater “than the anxious human heart,” the mercy that may place us unaccountably in the right before God (48). Kierkegaard’s brightest hope is therefore the pastor’s (and the Judge’s) worst nightmare, that we cannot know the future God has prepared for us. The sense of contingency that both the Judge and the pastor fear, especially in relation to God, is the whole SINNETT 31 point of the “conversation” Kierkegaard pursues with his characters, the whole point of the question for which he seeks a hearing in the midst of the “monstrous illusion” they represent. The Conversation Continued The conversation Kierkegaard began with the personalities of Either/Or continued throughout the remainder of his short life. We meet them again in Stages on Life’s Way, published on 30 April 1845, one day after the publication of Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, a volume of “edifying discourses” signed in Kierkegaard’s own name. And, of course, they appear again with the republication of Either/Or on 14 May 1849, the exact same day as the publication of The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, a collection of “three devotional discourses” which, once again, are signed in Kierkegaard’s own name, and which seek to gain a hearing for the same question—“the problem of ‘becoming a Christian’”—that the personalities of Either/Or are variously attempting to ignore.37 In the course of our brief consideration of Kierkegaard’s “direct” conversation with the personalities of Either/Or, we have noted some indications of the “indirect” conversation Kierkegaard was hoping to pursue with his fellow Danes. The subtlety of his dialectic, however, was too great, and the shades of meaning that distinguished him from the plausible Sophistry of his pseudonyms too fine, for his critique to be generally noticed. Kierkegaard’s “indirect” conversation with Danish Christendom, thus, never really came off; nor, with the passing of that cultural arrangement, will it ever do so. Other conversations remain, even today, a lively possibility. Kierkegaard’s “interrogation” of the pseudonyms, in the first place, will now be “indirectly” applicable to those moderns, such as the philosophers of existentialism, who are variously adherent to the pseudonymous perspectives. Thus may Kierkegaard’s strategy finally be vindicated: having gotten his readers with him—even if not quite the readers he had �32 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW in mind—it is still possible to bring “the religious” promptly forward so as to effect the “collision” through which one can be compelled to “take notice.” There are surely as many in our day as in that of Socrates or of Kierkegaard who look about them for a practitioner of “the question method.” There are many in our day, in fact, who resemble no one so much as that gifted young man with whom we began: He lost his way in the world. In his need, he looked about for someone who could transmit to him, someone who could be for him, the “true question”: He went to the “good people,” looking for the “the faith that moves mountains,” only to find them comfortable, and competent, and full of good advice. He went to the magistrate, longing to see the self-sacrifice of duty; only to learn that duty is an old friend who never demands anything we are not already prepared to perform. He went to the pastor hoping to hear of the grace of the Omnipotent One to call his fantasy in question and to remake him in the divine image; only to hear of the “God” who stands in need of our human grace to avoid indictment for the ills of human existence. He looked about for a Socrates, but found none among his contemporaries. Then he requested the gods to change him into one. We have the evidence before us, in the dialogue of discourse and pseudonym, to know who that gifted young man was, and to know also that his request was granted. Notes 1 Kierkegaard, JP 5.5613 (Pap. 4 A 43). SINNETT 33 4 See also the “First and Last Explanation” at the close of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which Kierkegaard claims responsibility as “the dialectically reduplicated author of . . . the [pseudonymous] authors” (627); but also insists that “in the pseudonymous books there is not a single word by me” (626). 5 Cf. the Preface to the Two Edifying Discourses of 1844 (in Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 179), where Kierkegaard describes “that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, who with the right hand accepts what is offered with the right hand.” The same point is emphasized in the Preface to The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses, in Kierkegaard, Without Authority, 3. 6 This is indicated, according to Kierkegaard (184-85), by Socrates’ assertion that sons should not necessarily be taught by their fathers, as was traditional, but by whoever was most competent. 7 This follows, according to Kierkegaard (193-94), from the fact that in remarking on the closeness of the vote by which he was condemned Socrates indicates his exclusive concern for the beliefs of people as individuals and his utter indifference to the “opinion” of the Council as a whole. 8 The imagery of “bonds” refers to the imagery of the Cave in Republic, 7.514A-515D. 9 Cf. Symp. 210E; Rep. 515E; and Ep. 7.341D. 10 For subsequent uses of this notion of a “clearing in existence,” see Heidegger, Being and Time, 171 (and n. 2), 214, 401; and Voegelin, “Anxiety and Reason,” in Collected Works, 28.87. 11 Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 362f; Lonergan, Method in Theology, 22f; and Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 33-46, 309-15; and Polanyi, Knowing and Being, 117f. 2 Cf. the appended “Publication Schedule of Selected Works of Søren Kierkegaard.” 3 The term opbyggelig is variously rendered as “edifying” (W F. . Lowrie) or “upbuilding” (H. V and E. A. Hong). The latter, more . recent, translation is preferred as implying a more broadly existential development of life than a merely intellectual growth. 12 Voegelin, “Reason: the Classic Experience,” in Collected Works, 12.277, 272 (emphasis added). For an introduction to Voegelin’s thought, see Webb, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History; Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution; and Sinnett, Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Theological Paradox. 13 Voegelin, “What Is Political Reality?” in Anamnesis, 148. 14 “Reason,” 271. �34 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 15 Ibid. 16 Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” in Collected Works, 7.175. 17 The importance of Symposium for Kierkegaard is demonstrated by his extensive discussion of it in The Concept of Irony and by his use of it as a model for his own “banquet” dialogue, “In Vino Veritas,” in Stages on Life’s Way. For an extended version of the following discussion, see Sinnett, “Eric Voegelin and the Essence of the Problem”; and Restoring the Conversation, ch. 3. 18 Similarly, in Republic (515E-520A), the philosopher who seeks to free the prisoners from their bonds is one who begins as a prisoner himself, only to be mysteriously freed, forced to turn around, dragged “by force up the ascent which is rough and steep . . . [and] drawn out into the light of the sun.” SINNETT 35 who find ourselves addressed and who are called upon to account for what we are saying.” 24 Cf. Lowrie, Kierkegaard, 1.191f. 25 Cf. Diem, 187-88. 26 Cf. Symp. 215D-E. 27 Cf. Sinnett, Restoring the Conversation, Part 2. 28 Kierkegaard, Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 8-29. 29 The challenge that brings the “perplexed man” to this realization is supplied in an excursus on the nature of faith (10-13) which interrupts his meditations. 30 20 In Symposium the first speeches in praise of Erôs by Phaedrus (178A-180B), Pausanias (180C-185E), and especially by Eryximachus (185E-188E), variously praise the technai of sacrifice and divination which reliably establish that “communion between gods and men” which is the basis of the right order of society. Cf. esp. “The Expectancy of Faith,” 15: “And if he does not possess it, then I can be very helpful to him, because I will accompany his thoughts and constrain him to see that it is the highest good. I will prevent it from slipping into any hiding place, so that he does not become vague about whether he is able to grasp it or not. With him, I will penetrate every anomaly until he, if he does not possess it, has but one expression that explains his unhappiness, namely, that he does not will it—this he cannot endure, and then he will acquire it.” 21 31 Kierkegaard, “The Expectancy of Faith,” 23. 32 Cf. “A,” “Diapsalmata,” in Either/Or, 42-3, n. 90. 19 Kierkegaard, JP 6.6786 (Pap. 106 B 145) n.d., 1851, in the Supplement to Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 488-89. Cf. Symp. 178A-D: In response to Agathon’s request to have Socrates sit next him in order that he might be able to share in “the piece of wisdom” that “occurred” to him as he was entering the banquet hall, Socrates denies that genuine wisdom is so easily, or so directly, transmissible: “I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing one could share by sitting close to someone—if it flowed, for instance, from the one that was full to the one that was empty, like the water in two cups finding its level through a piece of wool.” 22 Cf. Symp. 175D-E: “[If direct communication of wisdom was possible,] I’m sure I’d congratulate myself on sitting next to you, for you’d soon have me brimming over with the most exquisite kind of wisdom. My own understanding is shadowy, as equivocal as a dream.” 23 Cf. Gadamer, “Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic,” in Dialogue and Dialectic, 128: “In [Plato’s] dialogues we ourselves are the ones (thanks to the lasting effect of Plato’s artful dialogical compositions) 33 Cf. “B,” Either/Or, 2.16: “The intellectual agility you possess is very becoming to youth and diverts the eye for a time. We are astonished to see a clown whose joints are so loose that all the restraints of a man’s gait and posture are annulled. You are like that in an intellectual sense; you can just as well stand on your head as on your feet. Everything is possible for you, and you can surprise yourself and others with this possibility, but it is unhealthy, and for your own peace of mind I beg you to watch out lest that which is an advantage to you end by becoming a curse. Any man who has a conviction cannot at his pleasure turn himself and everything topsyturvy in this way. Therefore I do not warn you against the world but against yourself and the world against you.” Compare this description of the poet by the Judge with Callicles’ description of Socrates in Gorgias, 485A-C: “It is a fine thing to partake of philosophy just for the sake of education, and it is no disgrace for a lad to follow it; �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 36 but when a man already advancing in years continues in its pursuit, the affair, Socrates, becomes ridiculous; and for my part I have much the same feeling towards students of philosophy as towards those who lisp or play tricks. For when I see a little child, to whom it is still natural to talk in that way, lisping or playing some trick, I enjoy it, and it strikes me as pretty and ingenuous and suitable to the infant’s age. . . . But when one hears a grown man lisp, or sees him play tricks, it strikes one as something ridiculous and unmanly, that deserves a whipping.” 34 Cf. Paul Shorey’s Loeb Classical Library edition of Republic, 2.34, n.d. 35 Cf. W Lowrie, “Translator’s Preface,” in Either/Or, 2 (1944), 19. . 36 Cf. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 31-48. 37 37 SINNETT Publication Schedule of Selected Works of Søren Kierkegaard Pseudonymous (“Esthetic”) Works 20 Feb. 1843 Either/Or, I-II edited by Victor Eremita 16 Oct. 1843 Repetition by Constantin Constantius Fear and Trembling by Johannes de Silentio Cf. Sinnett, ch. 10. Signed (“Religious”) Works 16 May 1843 Two Upbuilding Discourses 16 Oct. 1843 Three Upbuilding Discourses 6 Dec. 1843 Four Upbuilding Discourses 5 Mar. 1844 Two Upbuilding Discourses 13 June 1844 Philosophical Fragments by Johannes Climacus 17 June 1844 The Concept of Anxiety by Virgilius Haufniensis Prefaces by Nicolaus Notabene 8 June 1844 Three Upbuilding Discourses 31 Aug. 1844 Four Upbuilding Discourses 30 April 1845 Stages on Life’s Way published by Hilarius Bookbinder 29 April 1845 Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions 27 Feb. 1846 Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Johannes Climacus 27 Feb. 1846 “A First and Last Declaration,” appended to Postscript 14 May 1849 Either/Or, I-II edited by Victor Eremita 14 May 1849 The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses �38 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Bibliography Burkert, W Greek Religion. Trans. J. Raffan. Cambridge, Mass.: . Harvard University Press, 1985. Collins, J. The Mind of Kierkegaard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Diem, H. Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Existence. Trans. H. Knight. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1959. Dunning, S. N. Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Emmanuel, S. M. Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation. Albany: State Universityof New York Press, 1996. Ferguson, H. Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Søren Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology. London: Routledge, 1995. Friedländer, P Plato. Vol. 1: An Introduction. 2d ed. Trans. H. . Meyerhoff. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Gadamer, H.-G. Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. P C. Smith. New Haven: Yale University . Press, 1980. ________. Truth and Method. 2d rev. ed. Translation revised by J. Weinsheimer and G. G. Marshall. London: Sheed & Ward, 1989. ________. Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus. Trans. R. M. Wallace. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Giannantoni, G., ed. Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae. 2d ed. Naples, 1990. SINNETT 39 Hartshorne, M. H. Kierkegaard Godly Deceiver: The Nature and Meaning of His Pseudonymous Writings. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. San Fransisco: Harper and Row, 1962. Kahn, C. Plato and the Socratic Movement: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kierkegaard, S. The Point of View for My Work as an Author. Trans. W Lowrie. London: Oxford University Press, 1939. . ________. The Concept of Irony; Schelling Lecture Notes. Trans. and ed. H. V Hong and E. H. Hong. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 2. . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. ________. Either/Or. Vol. 2. Trans. by W Lowrie. Revised by H. A. . Johnson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972 [1944]. ________. Either/Or. Vols. 1 and 2. Trans. and ed. H. V Hong and . E. H. Hong. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vols. 3 and 4. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. ________. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Trans. and ed. H. V . Hong and E. H. Hong. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 5. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. ________. Stages on Life’s Way. Trans. and ed. H. V Hong and E. . H. Hong. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 11. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. ________. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Trans. and ed. H. V . Hong and E. H. Hong. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 12. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Gouwens, D. J. Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ________. Without Authority. Trans. and ed. H. V Hong and E. H. . Hong. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 18. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Guthrie, W K. C. A History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. 4: Plato: The . Man and His Dialogues: Earlier Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. ________. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers [JP]. Trans. and ed. H. V Hong and E. H. Hong. Seven volumes. Bloomington: . Indiana University Press, 1967-78. Hannay, A. Kierkegaard. The Arguments of the Philosophers. Ed. T. Honderich. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Law, D. R. Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian. Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993. �40 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW SINNETT 41 ________. “The ‘Ultimatum’ of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Part Two, and the Two Upbuilding Discourses of 16 May 1843,” in Perkins, ed., International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or, 259-90. Sinnett, M. W Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Theological . Paradox: A Critical Assessment. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cambridge University, 1993. Lonergan, B. J. G., S. J. Method in Theology. 2d ed. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1973. ________. “Eric Voegelin and the Essence of the Problem: The Question of Divine-Human Attunement in Plato’s Symposium,” in Politics, Order and History: Essays on the Work of Eric Voegelin. Ed. G. Hughes, S. A. McKnight, and G. L. Price. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. ________. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983. Lowrie, W Kierkegaard. Two volumes. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter . Smith, 1970. McCarthy, V A. The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard. The . Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978. Mackey, L. Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Malantschuk, G. Kierkegaard’s Thought. Ed. and trans. H. V Hong . and E. H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Pattison, G. “A Dialogical Approach to Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses,” in Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte / Journal for the History of Modern Theology, 3, 187-202. Perkins, R. L., ed. International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or. Two Parts. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1995. Planinc, Z. Plato’s Political Philosophy: Prudence in the Republic and the Laws. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Polanyi, M. Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969. ________. Restoring the Conversation: Socratic Dialectic in the Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard. St. Andrews, Scotland: St. Mary’s College, 2000. ________. Under the Impact of the Answers: Theological Meditations on the Reformed Faith. Manuscript in preparation. Vander Waert, P A., ed. The Socratic Movement. Ithaca: Cornell . University Press, 1994. Vlastos, G. Platonic Studies. 2d ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Voegelin, E. Order and History. Vol. 3: Plato and Aristotle. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1957. ________. Anamnesis. Trans. and ed. G. Niemeyer. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1978. ________. Collected Works. Vol. 12: Published Essays, 1966-1985. Ed. E. Sandoz. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Press, G. A., ed. Plato’s Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Press, 1993. ________.Collected Works. Vol. 28: What Is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings. Ed. T. A. Hollweck and P Caringella. . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Ricoeur, P The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. E. Buchanan. Boston: . Beacon Press, 1967. Watkin, J. Kierkegaard. Outstanding Christian Thinkers. Ed. B. Davies. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1997. Rosen, S. Plato’s Symposium. 2d ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Webb, E. Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978. Sandoz, E. The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Zaidman, L. B. and P S. Pantel. Religion in the Ancient Greek City. . Trans. P Cartledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. . �42 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 43 What It Means To Be Human: Aristotle on Virtue and Skill Corinne Painter In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argues very forcefully that virtue and skill are distinct. Although a distinction between virtue and skill can be seen as philosophically important in a number of ways,1 and despite the force with which Aristotle argues for this distinction, it is nonetheless the case that Aristotelian virtue runs the risk of being mistaken for a sort of skill, and vice versa. In fact, Aristotle’s lengthy argument for their distinction suggests that he was aware that this risk existed. The likely reason for such a mistake is that virtue and skill to some extent share two important qualities: each has a necessary connection with the knowledge of how to do something and the exercise of each is connected to a desired end that is taken to be of distinctive “value.”2 Moreover, because of these “shared qualities” it is even possible to associate both virtue and skill with happiness, since knowledge of how to do those things that we take to be of value, i.e., those things that are connected to our desired ends, is usually considered an essential ingredient of a happy life. To speak more generally, it is even understandable to conceive of the virtuous person as the one who has mastered “the art—the skill—of living,” indeed as the one who knows how—has the requisite skills—to do whatever he or she deems is necessary to bring about a fulfilled and satisfying life. In this case, it would seem to follow that exactly those persons who possess this so-called “skill of living” will enjoy the happy life. In this essay, I will carefully reconstruct Aristotle’s argument for the distinction between virtue and skill, in order to bring out why he argues for it. In so doing, I will Corinne Painter is a visiting Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 44 attempt to show that this crucial distinction is intimately bound up with Aristotle’s conception of the essential relationship between virtue and happiness. Toward this end, I will first examine the key claims that attempt to establish the distinction between virtue and skill, which appear in Book 2, chapter 4 and Book 6, chapter 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics,3 and, second, I will consider Aristotle’s account of the relationship between virtue and happiness, which we find within various chapters in Book 1. Finally, I will conclude by arguing that because of the distinctive nature of virtue, which serves to separate it in fundamental ways from skill, and which links it to the distinctive nature of being human, and because of the distinctive nature of happiness, which characterizes the way of life of those human beings who live most excellently, virtue alone is a prerequisite for attaining happiness in the full Aristotelian sense. Virtue and Skill In Book 2, chapter 4 as well as in Book 6, chapter 5 of the NE, Aristotle argues that the exercising of virtue is not analogous to the exercising of skill. Aristotle firmly establishes virtue’s distinction from skill by offering several related arguments that show how the two activities are fundamentally different. One argument for their distinction is that while what might be called the “value”—or, more appropriately, the “being-well-made”4—of a product of skill is independent of the actual ability (skill-level) of its producer, so that the value of such a product is the same regardless of how (e.g., by accident) or by whom (e.g., an unskilled laborer) it is produced, the “value” or the “being-well-made” of a virtuous act depends on whether it is done virtuously, on whether, that is, the person performing the act is virtuous or not. As Aristotle states in a central passage in Book 2: It is not the same in the case of the arts as with the virtues, for the things that come into being by means of the arts have their being-well-made in PAINTER 45 themselves, [so that] it is sufficient for these [i.e. the products] to come into being in a certain condition. But with the things that come about as a result of the virtues, just because they themselves are a certain way it is not the case that one does them justly or temperately, but only if the one doing them also does them being a certain way: if one does them first of all knowingly, and next, having chosen them and chosen them for their own sake, and third, being in a stable condition and not able to be moved all the way out of it. (1105a27-35, emphasis mine) A second, closely related reason for maintaining that virtue and skill are distinct lies in the latter’s necessary connection to external results as compared to virtue’s connection not to external results or achievements, but rather to the internal source from which acts done in accord with virtue5 are generated, namely, acting virtuously or being virtuous; for according to Aristotle, “the end of making is different from itself, but the end of action could not be, since acting well— virtuously—is itself the end” (1140b6-7). In appealing to the differing ends of making or exercising skill and acting well or exercising virtue, this passage intimates that for Aristotle one of the primary ways in which virtue and skill are distinct involves the motivation or reason for exercising a skill in comparison to the motivation or reason for exercising a virtue. Interestingly, in emphasizing the distinction in the ends, this passage in a sense binds together the first and second ways in which virtue and skill are said to be distinct one from another. It should be clear that Aristotle holds that one exercises a skill in order to bring about or produce a good that is other than or distinct from the activity by which it is brought about, so that skills are not exercised simply for the sake of themselves. Skills, then, in Aristotle’s view, are intimately related to the distinctive products that they are responsible for bringing into being. Virtue, however, is engaged in for the �46 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW sake of itself and not simply for the sake of bringing about another good that is wholly distinct from itself,6 which it is said to “produce.” Thus, in connection with the first argument, we may reaffirm that the “value” of exercising a skill is determined on the basis of evaluating the worth of the product of the skill rather than on evaluating either its producer or the process by which it came to be produced. In contrast, the value of virtue lies primarily in its exercise, which is dependent upon the character of the person performing the virtue and not simply on its “result.” As Aristotle himself claims, “it is possible to produce something literate by chance or by being advised by someone else” (1105a23-24, emphasis mine), whereas this is not possible in the case of virtue (1105a27). In connection with this, it may be instructive to appeal to Aristotle’s discussion in Book 1 of the possibility of engaging in an activity either for the sake of itself or for the sake of some thing other than itself. While exercising virtue belongs to the former sort, according to Aristotle, exercising a skill belongs to the latter, and, given that the former kind of activity “is more complete (teleion) than an activity pursued on account of something else” (1097a31-33), exercising virtue is more complete than performing a skill. Later, I will return to this point in order to argue why virtue is essential to happiness while skill is not. A third and equally important way in which virtue is distinct from skill can be formulated thus: skills are abilities that stem from knowing how to do something, such that the “knowing how” has (at some point) been satisfactorily demonstrated in practice, whereas virtues are firm and stable character traits of an agent, indeed, active conditions of the soul. This suggests that, although it is possible for one to have a skill and not exercise it even in a situation in which its exercise is called for, it is impossible for a person to possess a virtue and knowingly fail to exercise it, given the proper circumstance and barring any exceptions.7 Thus, in the case of skill, Aristotle writes, “these things [i.e., choosing the act for its own sake as well as performing the act from a firm and PAINTER 47 unshakable condition] do not count, except the mere knowing, but for having the virtues, the knowing is of little or no strength, while the other conditions have not a little but all the power” (1105b1-4, emphasis mine). Here we can see that for Aristotle, possessing virtue, which is to say, acting in accord with virtue, is a “taller task” than possessing a skill. As an example of this, one can properly be characterized as a skilled basketball player if one has satisfactorily demonstrated in practice that one knows how to play basketball well, so that if the skilled player chooses not to play in perfect playing conditions, he will not lose his status as a skilled player. In contrast, one may not be properly characterized as virtuous, as possessing, e.g., the virtue of courage, just in case one has demonstrated in practice that one “knows how” to hit the middle mark between cowardice and rashness that courage, as the mean condition between these two (vicious) extremes of deficiency and excess, is said to represent. Rather, in addition to “knowing how” to be courageous, whenever the conditions call for courage, the virtuous person will actively and willingly choose to be courageous from out of a firm and unshakable character. To put this in the words of another scholar, “unlike skills, virtues are entrenched character traits that one cannot turn on and off as one pleases. Virtues are always on, so to speak, and if one fails to perform virtuous acts, it is either because one has encountered an exception or because one is not [really] virtuous.”8 The discussion of the conditions that must be met in order for an action to be properly characterized as virtuous brings us to a fourth way in which Aristotle attempts to establish that virtue and skill are distinct. Although it is preferable for the skilled person to make mistakes willingly, so that the mistakes are not made accidentally or unintentionally, as this would certainly call into question the actual skill, it is “better” if the practically wise person—i.e., the virtuous person—make mistakes only accidentally and not knowingly, especially as one cannot purposefully behave nonvirtuously and remain virtuous. Aristotle claims, in fact, that “in art �48 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW someone who makes an error willingly is preferable, while in connection with practical judgment this is worse, as it is in connection with the virtues” (1140b24-27). Thus far we have discovered that the following conditions must be met in order for an act to be rightfully called virtuous: (1) it must be done with knowledge, that is to say, knowingly, (2) it must be freely chosen for its own sake, and (3) it must stem from a firm and unshakable character. Given these conditions, we must attempt to understand what Aristotle might mean when he claims that it is “better” if the virtuous person make mistakes only accidentally rather than knowingly or willingly. For on the basis of what we have discovered, it would seem that virtue cannot be exercised erroneously, unwillingly, or accidentally. Aristotle in fact states repeatedly (e.g., at 1111b5-7, 1113b4-6, 1114b29) that this is the case. Consequently, what renders virtuous acts “better” or “more valuable” than those acts “performed by accident” or “in error” cannot be that virtuous acts are performed intentionally and with knowledge. Indeed, virtuous acts are always and in the strictest sense voluntary acts of choice9 for Aristotle, and thus they simply cannot be performed accidentally10 or unwittingly by a person who lacks the virtue in question.11 Consequently, even though action comes first, virtue grows out of it, so that truly virtuous action can only come about after the formation of virtue occurs, through repeated actions. In this connection, Aristotle writes “active states [e.g., virtue] come into being from being at work in similar ways. Hence it is necessary to make our ways of being at work be of certain sorts, for our active states follow in accordance with the distinctions among these” (1103b23-25).12 This passage indicates that while a person may unwittingly perform an act that could be said to “look like” or “imitate” a virtuous act, and while he must willingly attempt such acts in order to become virtuous, strictly speaking, Aristotle would not permit us to characterize these acts as virtuous until they are the result of an active virtuous character at PAINTER 49 work. It is for this reason that he writes: “while actions could be called [e.g.] just or temperate whenever they are the sorts of things that a just or temperate person would do, the one who does them is not just or temperate unless he also does them in the way that just and temperate people do them” (1105a29-b9, emphases mine). Admittedly this passage most directly thematises the conditions that must be met in order for a person to be correctly called virtuous. Nevertheless, I submit that it at the same time shows that unless an act is performed by such a person, it is at best a virtuous act “in name only,” but it is not truly virtuous, given that it is not performed by one who does it while “being in a certain way” (1104b32).13 Furthermore, we must reject the notion that virtuous action can be the result of an intentionally performed mistake, as seems possible in the case of exercising a skill. For in the case of skill, it seems at least possible that the skilled person can actually demonstrate skill by intentionally making a “mistake” in the performance of the skill. For example, the skilled person might intentionally make a different product than is expected, or may intentionally proceed differently as he or she exercises the skill. Interestingly, both cases reveal that “intentional mistakes”—“willing deviations,” if you prefer—could be ways to display skill rather than call it into question, especially since such deviations point to the skilled person’s ability to exercise skill creatively. Alternatively, to intentionally err in hitting the middle mark between the vices of excess and deficiency that virtue is said to consist in does not produce virtuous action, it produces precisely the opposite, namely, vicious action. Indeed, it is not only impossible for the virtuous person to demonstrate a virtuous character by accidentally hitting the middle mark, since a virtuous act must be performed knowingly, it is also impossible to willingly stray from hitting the middle mark between the vices of excess and deficiency and still act in accord with virtue, for to act virtuously requires that one deliberately hit the appropriate middle mark. �50 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Finally, then, the claim that prompted us to consider what Aristotle could mean when he suggested that it is “better” for a virtuous person to make a mistake accidentally rather than on purpose is meant to point out not whether the knowing, deliberate and intentionally chosen virtuous act is better than the accidentally or erroneously performed virtuous act; rather, this claim is meant to highlight a fundamental distinction between virtue and skill, namely, that while it is possible and even preferable for the skilled person to err in the exercise of skill willingly, since this could be a way to demonstrate skill, to do so in the case of virtue has the opposite effect, as it brings to a crashing halt the possibility of acting in accord with virtue. Virtue and Happiness Having considered the central Aristotelian arguments for the distinction between virtue and skill, we are now in a position to consider the special relationship that Aristotle claims exists between virtue and happiness, so as to show that only virtue is a prerequisite for attaining happiness in the full Aristotelian sense. Notwithstanding the sense in which the exercise of virtue is to be understood as an activity whose goodness lies in its very doing, as argued earlier,14 if we are to fully understand how Aristotle conceives of virtue, we must not make the mistake of claiming that virtue remains completely untied to any good or activity that is distinct from itself. For as we learn in Book 1 of the NE, virtue in its very essence is linked to human happiness, which is not to be identified with virtue but should be understood as the proper end of virtue. This is to say that virtue functions as the means for achieving the end of human happiness (1097b5-6), which constitutes the ultimate good for human beings, as it is the only good that is sought only for its own sake and never for the sake of another good, whereas virtue, in contrast, is chosen both for its own sake and for the sake of bringing about happiness (1097b1-8). PAINTER 51 Indeed, happiness, as we will see shortly, is not a fluctuating, fleeting, temporary, circumstance-dependent, or incomplete good or activity, as are all other goods and a ctivities to some extent, including moral virtue, about which Aristotle states that as great as virtue is, “even it seems too incomplete” (1095b30-33) to be awarded the role of the highest and most complete good. No doubt this is hardest to understand in the case of virtue; as we have taken great care to show, it would be incorrect to characterize the truly virtuous person as being virtuous in a merely fluctuating, fleeting, or temporary manner. In addition to the passages we considered earlier, which show quite clearly the stable and unwavering nature of the virtuous character as well as of the action that comes from such a character, Aristotle, speaking of moral virtue in Book 1, confirms virtue’s stable nature, claiming that “in none of the acts of human beings is stability present in the same way it is present in ways of being at work in accordance with virtue” (1100b12-14). Notwithstanding virtue’s stability, we must also admit that the actual exercise of any particular virtue is connected to certain conditions that present themselves within the context of varying circumstances. For virtue as a whole is itself “divided,” that is to say, it breaks up into many kinds—e.g., courage, temperance, patience, generosity, justice—each of which is called for in a particular situation, given certain circumstances, but none of which alone is enduring, self-sufficient, complete, or final. In this connection, it is instructive to consider what Aristotle writes in the context of discussing the distinction between moral virtue and the intellectual virtue of contemplation: “a just person still needs people toward whom and with whom he will act justly, and similarly with the temperate and the courageous person and each of the others” (1177a32-34). Here we see rather clearly that the particular virtues are not always performable, as certain external conditions, over which the actor has no or very little control, must be met in order for their performance to take place. �52 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW In contradistinction to virtue, happiness is an active (1100b19-20), enduring and permanent (1100b18), self-sufficient (1097b8-9), complete (1097b1-2; b20-21), and final way of life (1100b34, 1101a8); for happiness is the “thatfor-the-sake-of-which” every other activity is ultimately performed (1097b5-7; 1102a2-3). Happiness does not need particular external circumstances or conditions in order to be exhibited; once one’s life has earned the “right” to be characterized as happy, that life exhibits happiness at each and every moment (1100b21-22). Indeed, happiness is the active condition—the constant being-at-work of the soul— that describes or defines the way of living of the excellent human being. More specifically, happiness characterizes the kind of life that is lived by those who are able to live excellently, which is to say, by those who exercise moral virtue regularly (1098a15-17; 1099b5-7; 1101a15; 1102a4-5), in the varied and distinct ways that are called for on the basis of the specific circumstances with which one is faced at different intervals in one’s life.15 In this way, happiness characterizes the whole of the virtuous person’s life, while the exercise of moral virtue characterizes the way in which the virtuous person responds to each individual practical situation with which he or she is confronted, where the exercise of such virtue constitutes the means by which the happy life comes into being (1099b17). “[T]he virtue of a human being,” Aristotle writes, “would be the active condition from which one becomes a good human being and from which one will yield up one’s own work well” (1106a24-25, emphases mine).16 This passage highlights the sense in which the exercise of virtue yields or brings about a good that is distinct from itself, to put it simply, the good—the happy—life, albeit certainly not in the same sense in which the exercise of a skill produces a “product.” In order to better understand the relationship between virtue and happiness, particularly how the former is said to bring about the latter, as well as why happiness is ultimately that condition of being for the sake of which we do every- PAINTER 53 thing else, it may be instructive to remember that according to Aristotle while virtue is “praiseworthy” (1101b13-15; b32), “happiness is . . . the prize of virtue . . . the highest end and something divine and blessed” (1099b15-18, emphases mine). Acknowledging both the supremacy of happiness that this passage suggests as well as its status as the “prize of virtue” allows us to go a long way towards understanding the special place that happiness occupies in the thought of Aristotle, as well as how he conceives of virtue’s relation to it. If we add to this our recognition of what we noted earlier, namely (a) Aristotle’s claim that “no one chooses happiness for the sake of . . . anything else at all” (1097b6-7), (b) his claim that happiness is complete and self-sufficient (1097b2021), together with (c) his related claim that happiness constitutes the only good to which nothing may be “added” in order that it become “better,” given that happiness is lacking in nothing (1097b14-21), then it becomes clear why happiness is characterized as that condition of being towards which all human activity ultimately aims and beyond which there is nothing else. At this point we have recounted how Aristotle establishes that happiness is the final “that-for-the-sake-of-which” all other human activity ultimately aims; so also have we elucidated its completeness, self-sufficiency, and permanence. But in order to bring our consideration to its proper end, we must say more clearly why Aristotle claims that happiness characterizes the most excellent human life, for as Aristotle himself admits, “perhaps to say that the highest good is happiness is . . . something undisputed, while it still begs to be said in a more clear and distinct way what happiness is” (1097b22-24). Here, we would do well to follow Aristotle’s lead and elucidate what it is about virtue that causes it and not skill to serve as the means for becoming happy. Indeed Aristotle suggests that if we “examine virtue . . . we might get a better insight into happiness” (1102a7-8), and, thus, into the life of human excellence. �54 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW If we are to discover what kind of life is most excellent for man as distinct from all other living creatures, we will have to determine what work is distinctive to him and his unique way of being (1097b25f). In a central passage about this in Book 1, Aristotle maintains: If we set down that the work of a human being is a certain sort of life, while this life consists of a being-at-work of the soul and actions that go along with reason, and it belongs to a man of serious stature to do these things well and beautifully, while each thing is accomplished well as a result of the virtue appropriate to it—if this is so, the human good comes to be disclosed as a being-atwork of the soul in accordance with virtue. (1098a12-17) From this passage we get a clear statement of just how uniquely special virtue is, since we are told without ambiguity that virtue consists in the “being-at-work” of the human soul who lives its life and acts in accord with reason in the most beautiful and best way. That such a life, i.e., the virtuous life, is the most beautiful and best for man, that it is the way in which man shows forth his unique way of being in the way that he ought—for this is what is meant when we claim that something is “best”—immediately leads us to link virtue to the good life for man, whatever this turns out to be. But if we are led to make the connection between virtue and the good life for man, then given what we know about happiness, we should be compelled to further understand both (a) that the good life for man is nothing else than the life of happiness, and thus (b) that virtue is therefore linked to happiness. For indeed, happiness, according to Aristotle, is that condition of being that characterizes the human life of excellence, that is to say, the life of virtue. Notwithstanding the clarity we have gained concerning the nature of happiness, one last step must be made if we are to understand why Aristotle does not think that skill plays an PAINTER 55 essential role in securing the life of happiness. Toward this end, we should not forget that unlike virtue, skill is less stable and less complete than virtue, since (a) skills seem to be performed, or not, according to the “moods” of the skilled person, which are easily changeable, and (b) skills are never exercised for the sake of themselves but only for the sake of the distinctive products that they produce. Alternatively, whenever virtue is called for it is exercised, and, moreover, it is exercised both for the sake of itself and for the sake of happiness. Thus, given that exercising virtue is a more stable and complete activity than exercising skill, naturally it will be a better candidate for the role of securing happiness, even if only because it is a more reliable and satisfying activity. If, then, we understand the reasons why exercising virtue brings about the life of happiness, we should immediately understand why exercising skill does not. For virtue secures the life of happiness because (1) it is that activity on account of which “people become apt at performing beautiful actions” (1101b32-3), (2) it allows one “to live well and act well” (1098b24), and especially, (3) it is the way in which man, as man, does what he ought to do and is how he ought to be. But skill, in stark contrast, neither makes one apt to perform beautiful actions (inasmuch as skill can also be connected to knowing how to perform ugly actions) nor makes one live and act well (since skills bear no necessary association, for Aristotle, with living or acting well). Furthermore, while the exercising of skill allows one to demonstrate a special ability to perform a particular act or to make a particular product, as our earlier consideration of skill should have made apparent, there is nothing about skill that suggests that it allows one to do or be what one ought to do or be as a human being. Consequently, since the life of happiness constitutes the fullest expression of the most excellent human life, which is to say the human life that is in the best and fullest way what it ought to be most essentially, skill will not be ableto to get ithe job done, so to speak. Indeed, the only virtue can fulfill �56 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW this important task, which is nothing short of the human project itself. Notes 1 For instance, contemporary ethical theorists may employ Aristotle’s arguments for the distinction between virtue and skill to support the general consensus that whatever moral virtues are, they are not best conceived as skills. However, although the distinction between virtue and skill is fairly widely maintained in the Ethics literature, some scholars argue against a (strong) distinction, including Julia Annas, Paul Bloomfield, and Robert Roberts. See: Julia Annas, “Virtue as a Skill” in International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol. 3 (2), 1995: 227-43; Paul Bloomfield, “Virtue Epistemology and the Epistemology of Virtue” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 60, No. 1, 2000: 23-43, as well as Moral Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and finally, Robert C. Roberts, “Will Power and the Virtues” in Robert B. Kruschwitz and Robert C. Roberts, eds., The Virtues: Contemporary Essays on Moral Character (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1987): 121-136. In addition to the relevance of this distinction within ethics, Aristotle’s arguments for the non-identity of virtue and skill can also be of use within contemporary debates in epistemology. In fact, the movement referred to as “virtue epistemology” has as one of its primary goals to call in to question the paradigmatic status that perceptual knowledge has enjoyed in the tradition, by showing how something like Aristotelian virtue is necessary for knowledge. The scholarship that discusses the connection between virtue and knowledge, or “virtue epistemology,” is extensive, and thus I will not give a listing of sources here, except to mention that the literature includes work from scholars such as Robert Audi, Lorraine Code, Alvin Goldman, Alvin Plantinga, Ernest Sosa, and Linda Zagzebski (just to mention a few). For quick reference to an introductory essay on virtue epistemology, I refer the reader to an article published on the world wide web, which can be found at the following address: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemologyvirtue. Especially impressive is this article’s extensive bibliography, which offers many references to works that deal with the question of the connection between virtue and knowledge. PAINTER 57 2 Shortly, I will discuss my employment of the term “value” in this context, as it is in need of explanation. 3 All references to the Nicomachean Ethics (except where the translations are my own) are from: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Translation, Glossary, and Introductory Essay by Joe Sachs (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Company, 2002). Hereafter, in this essay, the text will be referred to as NE. 4 Aristotle never really speaks of “value” when discussing the “being-well-made” or the excellency of a thing or an act, but as we can easily understand what is in a significant sense at issue here for Aristotle, namely, what makes a product or a virtuous act “full of worth,” by using the English term “value,” I have chosen to include it in my explanation of the text. 5 Not incidentally, a closer translation of the Greek demonstrates that Aristotle never uses the phrase “virtuous action” or “virtuous act”; rather, he uses always “action resulting from (or, in accord with) virtue.” 6 Although later, in the second part of my paper, in the context of considering the special relationship between virtue and happiness, I will discuss how virtue is also exercised for the sake of bringing about happiness, as it is the means for securing the happy life. 7 In order to respond to a possible objection to this strict view— which many scholars advance against Aristotle’s “virtue ethics”— we should acknowledge that Aristotle does not rule out the possibility that the virtuous person might, in some, very infrequent and exceptional cases, fail to act virtuously. These cases would likely only include, however, the following scenarios: (1) the virtuous person is deceived by others; (2) the virtuous person accidentally (i.e., non-willingly and unknowingly) makes an error in determining how to attain the virtuous end; and possibly, (3) different virtues prescribe incompatible actions. 8 This formulation comes from a paper delivered by Heather Battaly at the Northwest Philosophy Conference held at Lewis and Clark University, Portland, Oregon (October 2002), entitled “Linda Zagzebski and Aristotle on the Distinction between Virtues and Skills.” �58 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 9 Aristotle distinguishes between willing acts and chosen acts, claiming that while chosen acts are always willing (voluntary) acts, chosen acts cover a narrower range (1112a15-16), since they involve greater capacities (1111b8-18ff), most especially, the capacity to “reason and think things through” (1112a16). For a fuller discussion of what is involved in choice, especially its connection to deliberation, see Book 3, chapters 2 and 3. 10 This is also the case for vicious acts (see: 1113b6-15ff and 1114b21-25). 11 In this connection it might be helpful to remember Aristotle’s discussion of the praiseworthiness of virtuous acts and the blameworthiness of vicious acts (which actually begins in Book 2 and is filled out in Book 3). This discussion strengthens his claim that neither virtuous acts nor vicious acts are performed accidentally, since people typically do not praise or blame persons for committing an act accidentally, without knowledge, intent, or choice. 12 For a fuller discussion of this, see 1103b7-26. 13 Recall the central passage quoted in its entirety early on in the paper, for it directly confronts us with the strict conditions that must be met in order for an act to be rightfully called virtuous. 14 There are in fact numerous passages in which Aristotle claims that virtue is exercised for the sake of itself, some of which we considered earlier, many more of which are dispersed throughout the NE. 15 And this is to neglect mention of the practice of contemplation, which also figures into the happy life, and which is, according to Aristotle, unlike the exercise of moral virtue, “the only activity that is loved for its own sake, for nothing comes from it beyond the contemplating, while from things involving action [e.g., moral virtue] we gain something for ourselves, to a greater or lesser extent, beyond the action” (1177b3-5). 16 Some scholars might object to the use of the words “yield up,” preferring the more usual translation of “perform,” but in agreement with Joe Sachs, I submit that “yield up” better captures the true sense of Aristotle’s meaning: to give back a return on one’s effort. 59 Kant’s Afterlife Eva Brann “Better late than never” is the motto of this review. The work known as Kant’s Opus Postumum occupied him during the last fifteen years of his working life, from 1786 to 1801. (He died at 80 in 1804.) The first English translation, which underlies this review, was published in 1993. The first German printing began in bowdlerized form in a Prussian provincial journal in 1882. 1882—that is the year after Michelson and Morley carried out their epoch-making experiment in search of the ether wind that must sweep over the earth if it indeed travels through space filled with some sort of observable matter. It had a dramatic null result. The ether, however, had a huge role in Kant’s final project—final in both senses: last and eschatological. Whether Kant’s ether is in principle amenable to experiment or not is, to be sure, problematic; nonetheless there is, to my mind, a certain pathos to the posthumous work’s first publishing date, a pathos over and above the fact that it took nearly a century to appear. Eckart Förster’s English edition of 1993 (which I should have studied ten years ago) is both an ordering and a selection. Kant left a manuscript, its pages covered in small tight writing with even tinier marginalia, of 527 sheets (1161 pages in the great Prussian Academy edition). The unnumbered leaves had at one time evidently been dropped on the floor— It was a labor to arrange and date them, a task mainly performed by Ernst Adickes in 1916, and then to make the Immanuel Kant. Opus Postumum. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Eckart Förster. Translated by Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Eckart Förster. Kant’s Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus Postumum. Cambridge, Mass.: The Harvard University Press, 2000. Ms. Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. �60 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW work accessible by judicious selection, which is what Förster has done in the Cambridge edition. The latter effort was called for by the character of Kant’s writing—and, evidently, thinking—which is obsessively repetitive, ever circling about the issues in the terminological German of the Critiques glossed by formulaic Latin, only to explode suddenly into astounding new resolutions. But then, this whole post-Critical legacy is astonishing. In 1790, Kant declared in his third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, that here “I conclude my entire Critical enterprise” (¶ 170). Only the dependent metaphysical doctrine was to be worked out, that is, the system of a priori cognitions that are implied in the Critical foundations. But almost simultaneously finished business turned into unfinished business. People who first saw the discombobulated manuscript put about the rumor of Kant’s senility. On the contrary: If in the three Critiques we see everything fall into its systematic “architectonic” place, in the Opus Postumum we see the foundations of the edifice broken open in the attempt to make the system more encompassing. Not that Kant is countermanding any major postulate of the Critical system but rather that, in the effort to specify it, to make embodied nature and man fall out from it, he opens up its abysses, not only for the enthralled reader but, palpably, for himself— though the one chasm he steps over without the slightest regard is, to my mind at least, the most abysmal one; more of that below. In any case, during the last years, before he stopped writing, Kant seems to have returned not to a second childhood but to a second vigor, to the searching modes of his pre-Critical years. Here I want to insert a personal note. Why ever, I ask myself, did it take me so long to come to this remarkable work, especially when I was trying to think about Kantian topics: imagination, time, memory, and nonbeing? Well, I sought help in the Critiques and then elsewhere, in Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Russell, Meinong, Husserl. Of the Opus Postumum only one—unforgettable—fragment had penetrat- BRANN 61 ed to me: “I, the Proprietor of the World.” It should have been intimation enough that the Critiques were—possibly— being transcended. To me Kant had never been primarily the systematician, whose thinking was a relentlessly unificatory construction and whose expression was an intricate terminological rococo. He was rather the philosopher who, more than the selfavowed tightrope dancer Nietzsche, built his edifice over an abyss. I found this the more absorbing since Kant seemed to me the soul of probity, a philosopher of originality and rectitude, the rarest of combinations in a vocation whose business ought to be not novelty but truth, though it has occasionally incited its professors to the self-exaltation of invention and the blue smoke of mystification. Kant is the man who reconceived philosophy as work (in the essay “On a Refined Tone Recently Raised in Philosophy,” 1796). Yet in that sober mode he works himself late in life into strange new territories. Förster, to be sure, ends his book by saying that it is a futile exercise to speculate on the ultimate— unachieved—destination of this last phase. But to me this speculation, though it may well be beyond the reach of scholarship, has a particular attraction: Do these late second sailings, to be found, for example, in Homer (Odyssey), Plato (Laws), Shakespeare (e.g., Cymbeline), Jane Austen (the unfinished Sanditon), as well as in the great musicians, express a necessary development implicit in the work of their floruits or novel, adventurous departures into terra incognita? So as not to mystify the reader let me say here, for later amplification, what seems to me the drift of the Opus Postumum: It is a drift toward solipsism, the radical selfauthorship or “autogenesis” of the human subject and the nature with which it surrounds itself. Now to Kant’s work itself. My advice is to reverse good St. John’s practice and to read Förster’s explication of the Opus Postumum first. It is a conscientious and in places brilliant introduction to what is, after all, an unwieldy, unrevised and unfinished masterpiece. �62 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Since, however, the Opus Postumum takes off from the three Critiques, particularly from the first, the Critique of Pure Reason (A edition 1781, B edition 1786), I will give a very stripped-down and tailored version for those few alumni who don’t perfectly recall that high point of their junior year (1). Then, since I can make the attraction of the Opus Postumum most plausible by listing the above-mentioned rifts and chasms in the first Critique, I will articulate the global perplexities that have always accompanied any local understanding I thought I had achieved (2). Then, with Förster’s help, I shall give a brief sketch of the main topics of the Opus Postumum (3), which I shall follow with a summary of the way in which Kant’s last work confirms or reshapes or resolves my perplexities (4). Finally I will attempt to say a word about the work’s bearing on Kant’s afterlife in our contemporary thinking (5). 1. Though Kant did not expect, while working on the first Critique (which deals with theoretical reason as it constitutes nature), to write a second Critique on practical reason (that is, on moral action), it is arguable that his central concern is all along with morality, with human reason as it causes deeds. From that point of view, the mission of the first Critique is to ground a system of deterministic nature in deliberate juxtaposition to the spontaneity of the freedom evinced by the rational will when it acts as it ought, from duty. The realm of nature is a system of necessary and universal rules which we ourselves both constitute and cognize: We can know nature with certainty because we are its authors. (The terms pertaining to this cognition itself rather than to its objects are called “transcendental,” or almost synonymously, “Critical”: concerned with the conditions that make knowledge possible.) Though the first Critique, as it finally appeared, has as its positive consequence the grounding of experience, meaning the real knowledge of nature, its negative impact is to clear a region for human freedom conceived as autonomy, self-subjection to self-given law. Kant does this by showing BRANN 63 that the theoretical understanding and the reason which organizes it are strictly limited to human experience and incapable of dealing with transcendent questions except in terms of “ideals” expressing the human need for completeness. The crucial difficulty in establishing a sure and certain knowledge of nature is for Kant the doubt cast by Hume on causality: Cause is nowhere to be observed; we see constant conjunctions of events but never necessary interconnections among them. Kant’s answer, the crux of his solution, is that we know our way through nature with complete certainty because and insofar as we make it. Thus its laws are ours from “the very first”—a priori. Our cognitive constitution is twofold: by our understanding we think spontaneously (that is, originatingly, out of ourselves) and also discursively (that is, by connecting concepts), thereby unifying manifolds; by our sensibility we are affected receptively by intuitions which are already given as unities. The understanding is thus a formal, logical faculty whose categories are adapted from a well-established tradition. But these categories are empty grasps in the absence of the pure material of the intuition to fill them, where “pure” means unaffected by ordinary sensory influence. To me this pure, pre-experiential sensibility and its pure, non-sensory matter is Kant’s most original, not to say mindboggling, discovery (or invention—I am as perplexed about it now as ever), for a sensibility is, after all, usually understood to be a capacity for being affected by the senses. It has two branches. The pure “inner” intuition is our sense of time. It is pure because it is analytically prior to sensation. It is “inner” because it is, in ways that become progressively more unclear in the second edition of the Critique and in the Opus Postumum, closer to our ego, called the “transcendental apperception,” meaning the subject, the I that underlies every object we present to ourselves. For that is what human consciousness means for Kant: presenting objects to ourselves. Self-consciousness or apperception is awareness of the I that is putting this object before itself. It is that �64 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW awareness which is said in the first Critique to represent itself to us as a phenomenon in inner sense; we know ourselves as pure egos when we attend to numerable time as it ticks away. The corresponding outer sense is pure space. All we intuit (except ourselves—so far) we give the form of space; space is not formal (as is thinking) but formative. In this pre-sensory sensorium we find externality within us. Or better, to assume the form of externality objects must be within our receptive sensibility, together with the sensations that give them their quality, the material manifold that gives them body. Nothing could be more contrary to our ordinary sense of things, where “outside” means precisely not within. What is the purpose of this dizzying reversal, Kant’s sequel to the Copernican revolution? That first revolution made the sun stand still and our earth move, while this one makes us again home base, though now the world moves to our measure rather than to a divine maker’s plan. Kant’s purpose is to bring causality from an outside world, where it is objectively non-observable, into us where it is subjectively an inherent necessity of our cognitive constitution. There is a missing step in this sketch, the notoriously fugitive “Schematism of the Pure Concept of the Understanding” (B 176 ff.). It is the crux of the crux of the positive Critique, and its brevity should warn us that something is the matter. Schematizing is the work of the imagination; it is not the capacity for fantasy but a “transcendental” faculty, one that makes knowledge possible. It is, in its depths, responsible for the mystery of conjoining the unconjoinable. It effects this by bringing forth a general diagram (Kant calls it a “monogram”) intended to draw together the absolutely disparate effects of the formally functioning understanding and the formatively receptive intuition. Thus time and space are to be conceptualized or, if you like, the concepts of the understanding are to be time- and space-affected. Kant hurriedly carries out this “dry and boring dissection” for the case of time. For example, the concept of cause, when time-imbued, becomes the necessary succession of one BRANN 65 thing upon another according to a ruling concept. At this moment the possibility of a causal science that has certainty is grounded. (Here “possibility” does not refer to what might happen but to that which enables knowledge to become real.) Kant silently and completely omits the schematizing of space. I had always supposed that, whatever difficulties I might have, Kant thought it was too easy. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Förster shows that it was too hard, and thereby hangs the tale of the Opus Postumum (59). 2. First to me among those deep perplexities that gives the Critiques their philosophical poignancy have been the space puzzles already alluded to (the underprivileging of space in the Schematism) along with other, related ones. In the second edition of the first Critique Kant inserted a sort of time bomb, the famous section called the “Refutation of Idealism” (B 274, xxxix), in which he aimed to show that time itself can only be perceived as a determined phenomenon by us when observed against “something permanent in space,” that is, against matter: “The consciousness of my own existence is at the same time a consciousness of other things outside me” (B 276). Where, I ask myself, has the first function of the “inner” sense gone? What is now particularly internal about my self-perception? But so is the very meaning of space as “outer sense” a puzzle. Outerness seems to mean three things at once: It means extension, the way a spatial dimension consists of parts outside of each other, stretching away from themselves. It means, second, externality, the way objects are experienced as outside of the subject. And it means, third, outside and “going beyond” us—the literal sense of “transcendent” (as distinct from “transcendental”), though this is a region in principle unreachable. For what we know, we know in us. That is, after all, what Kant intends to show in the negative part of the Critique, the “Transcendental Dialectic” which exposes the illusions reason falls into in going beyond the �66 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW limits of our experience”—and is thus the critique of pure reason proper. There is, second, a puzzle that arises incidentally from the multivalence of Critical terms. The categories, Kant repeats emphatically, have no being on their own and achieve meaning only as they grasp intuitive material. Take then the category of unity which imposes oneness on manifolds of sense. There is, however, also the unity that reason strives for as an ideal but can reach only illusorily. And there is “the synthetic unity of apperception,” the unifying work of the subject deep beneath appearance, its chief theoretical effect. Whence, we might ask, does Kant get the notion of unity to begin with? Is there not something suspect about this transcendental notion—and others, for example, “thing”—which are necessary to establish the transcendental terms of the Critiques but which are in traditional metaphysics terms of transcendence, the attributes of Being that are beyond sensory experience? How does Kant come to know these terms of Critical thought that are antecedent to properly certified knowledge? A third enigma is immediately connected with the space puzzles. The dialectic of reason is intended to clear the decks for human freedom and for the exercise of practical reason, which expresses itself in deeds. But the system of nature grounded in the positive part of the Critique is deterministic. There are no loose joints. How then does moral action appear in the natural world? How does it actually change events determined by natural laws? How do we as moral beings insert ourselves into, intervene in, nature? Further, where, in fact, are we in the world as phenomenal, perceiving subjects? In the Critique of Pure Reason there is matter, but no bodies, human or natural—nor in the second Critique, that of Practical Reason. The simultaneous actuality of moral deed and natural events is a mystery: How does the practical reason make our muscles do the right thing? The fourth open question is this: How far is nature specified by the Critical grounds and their ensuing principles? Are the types of forces necessarily operating in nature BRANN 67 specifiable, and are their mathematical laws determinable a priori? How thoroughgoing are the grounds of possibility, or in Kant’s terms: Can a complete metaphysical doctrine of nature be worked out such as will descend to and determine the actual laws of physics? But then, what of observation, what of contingency? Is anything not under our own rules? Is the world nothing but our mirror? Thence arises the fifth question, truly a mystery. Whence comes the matter of sensation which fills our space with its quantities and qualities and reflects to us our time by being the permanent material background against which motions appear? Is the occasion for the appearance of this matter infused into us transcendently, from beyond, or are we its authors not only formally, formatively, but really, substantively? I would say that this is the most unregarded, the totally unregarded, question in Kant’s writing—and in his thought as well: Are we, after all, buffeted by transcendent influxes? Or are we, when all has been worked out, shown to be our own authors in every respect—which would be brute solipsism, the philosophy of solus ipse “I alone, by myself ”? But then what becomes of the ideal republic of mutually respectful moral beings and of the real political community of embodied human beings? What access do we then have to each other’s subjectivity? Finally, the sixth problem, not of doctrine but of argumentation: In the first Critique God is an ideal of reason, a required hypothesis or postulate if we are to act morally, an “as if ” representation whose existence is to us a necessary thought though its actuality is provably unprovable. As Kant works on the Opus Postumum the thought of a necessary God is increasingly sharpened and the claim more pointed, as shown in III: There are reasons that drive us to think that God is necessary; thus God’s existence must be first postulated and then acknowledged as real. He is actual for us: Est Deus in nobis, “There is a God—in us” (my dash and italics, O.P. 209, 248). And: “Everything that thinks has a God.” That is to say, thinking requires a divinity and what thinking �68 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW requires it must have—but only for the thinker. I simply cannot make out whether this God really exists or is after all what Kant himself would call a “subreption,” a surreptitious rustling of Being by a needy reason, or perhaps some third being I am too literal-minded to comprehend. To me it is marvelous how scintillatingly ambiguous the severely systematic Kant really is at great junctures. Whether the above items are enigmas, questions, problems, puzzles, they each open up abysmal depth for the inquiry concerning human knowledge, action, and faith. Except for the spectacularly absent fifth question, concerning the origin of sensation and its stimulating matter, the Opus Postumum will show Kant grappling with these problems, sometimes only to focus them the more pressingly. 3. The early title of the Opus Postumum was “Transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to Physics.” The final title is “The Highest Standpoint of Transcendental Philosophy in the System of Ideas: God, the World, and Man in the World, Restricting Himself through Laws of Duty” (Förster xliii). The distance between the titles betokens Kant’s winding himself from system-driven, downward doctrinal specification into ascending, comprehensive speculation. An obvious question will be whether these speculations in the main confirm or undermine the Critical enterprise. I want to say here that either way it is a thrilling business. If the gaping holes in the architecture of the system can be stopped and the foundations reinforced, the edifice will surely be the more magnificent and rivaled only by Hegel’s system. (I omit Aristotle, not so much because his philosophizing historically preceded the notion of philosophic system-making, but because he would in any case have thought that first philosophy should be problem- rather than system-driven.) But if Kant is impelled to let his own system implode the outcome surely glows with the sober glory of thought outthinking itself. In the event, it seems to be a little of both. BRANN 69 The first question that has occupied students of the Opus Postumum concerns the project of the title. Why was a transition needed, where was there a gap? The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of 1786 seemed to provide a doctrinal transition from the general principles of the first Critique (which ground the laws of action and reaction, of causation in time and of the conservation of matter, “Analogies of Experience,” B 218 ff.) to the specific Newtonian Laws of Motion. That is to say, Kant has “constructed” these proto-laws, which means he has exhibited them in the intuition so as to display their necessary characteristics. Why, then, does this transition require another Transition? Förster gives a thoroughly satisfying answer (59 ff.). As we saw, the spatial schematization of the categories is missing in the first Critique. The Metaphysical Foundation is in fact this missing schematism, the spatialization of the categories; I omit the details of Förster’s proof, but the argument is on the face of it convincing. At this point matter comes in: Kant must analyze empirical matter and its motion and then “construct” or “exhibit” the concept so obtained in space. (This is an epicycle in the so-called Critical circle: Kant analyzes the object, here matter, he intends to certify cognitively and then provides its transcendental conditions of possibility.) But in order for matter not just to occupy and traverse space but to act dynamically (as it is empirically observed to do), to compact itself into bodies capable of moving each other, the forces of matter must be established. But forces are not to be observed as appearances (as Hume insisted) and are thus not constructable, that is, exhibitable as configurations in the intuition. The Metaphysical Foundations do not succeed in solving the problem of cohesive bodies (as opposed to shapeless matter) held dynamically within their boundaries and exercising attractive as well as repulsive force on each other. Thus this metaphysical transition cannot present physics with its basic concepts. A gap bars the way to the �70 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW categories’ objective validity, that is, to their empirical applicability; the attempted schematism is incomplete. So a large part of the early work on the Opus Postumum is devoted to the Tantalus-labor of finding, a priori, the kinds and ratios of forces that will underwrite our natural world of dynamically moving cohesive bodies. Clearly Kant now intends (or always did) for the Critical grounding to reach very far into empirical, supposedly adventitious (unpredictable) cognition. We may wonder what will survive that passage between the Scylla of complete systematicity and the Charybdis of empirical science. Now come the ether proofs, a huge and weighty presence in the Opus Postumum. From a certain point on, Kant regards it as established that ether (or caloric), an “imponderable, incohesible, inexhaustible,” medium that is “universally distributed, all-penetrating, and all-moving” (O.P. 98, 92) is the condition of possibility of all the mechanical forces of matter whose effects (if not they themselves) are apparent in the making and the motions of bodies. Förster has lucidly reconstructed the intricate essential proof from its many sites and disparate approaches in the text (89 ff.). It is worth attending to in spite of the negative Michelson-Morley ether experiment of 1881, not merely because it makes vivid the exigencies of the transcendental system (a system which someone—not myself—might indeed regard as having merely historical interest), but because it is the result of a deep meditation on the conditions of spatial experience. To begin with, Förster points out that the Opus Postumum reverses the first Critique on the source of the unity of all appearances (84). In that Critique it was an ideal of reason to bring unity into our necessarily piecemeal perception. Then, in the third Critique, the Critique of Judgment (1719), a new source of unity comes on the scene: Nature herself is purposive and systematic. Under the influence of this reversal from reason ideally unifying nature to nature herself really unifying its forces into a system, a strange new situation arises. (The ultimate possibility of its BRANN 71 arising I would trace back, without having worked it out sufficiently, to the above-mentioned ambivalence of the term “unity” in the first Critique: Is unity a subjective function or a transcendent characteristic of beings?) This situation is that nature herself must now contain a priori principles of its objective possibility; no longer are all a priori conditions of experience in the subject. Or are they? Förster is inclined to think that the ether, as a condition of possibility of a system of nature (and hence of its science, physics) is an ideal of our reason, hence subjective (91-92). But he does not deny that Kant himself wavered and sometimes speaks of the underlying medium as existing “outside the idea” (O.P. 82); this oscillating effect is not unlike that of Kant’s treatment of God’s existence (see below). The chief elements of the existence proof for the ether are as follows. From the subjective side: Empty space is not perceptible; a single space filled with moving forces is the condition of the possibility of unified experience which is knowledge of connected perceptions; hence we must form the idea of an elementary material that is in space and time and has the characteristics listed above; thus we get a subjective principle of the synthetic unity of possible experience such as must underlie physics. From the objective side: Nature is the complex of all things that can be the objects of our senses and hence of experience, and we do have experience of outer objects. But experience requires that its objects form, for our judgments, a system which has a necessary unity according to one principle. The ether, distributed through space yet forming a collective whole, is the one and only candidate for such a system. Therefore, as making the whole of experience possible, it is actual. Thus the ether is a unique—and very peculiar—external object that really exists in the—to my mind—oscillating way of Kant’s existence proofs, which argue from the enabling grounds of knowledge to the real existence of the object. As a ground of possibility it is not itself perceptible or �72 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW observable. Thus Kant might have replied to MichelsonMorley that, since the ether hypothesis was the condition of all experiments, it was itself not falsifiable by experiment. But they, as presumably positivist physicists, would have turned this reply around and said that what is not falsifiable is not positive knowledge. To me, too, the transcendental ether is, as I said, illuminating less as a real ground of science than as a reflection on the nature of our experience of space and its contents. For isn’t it the case, after all, that the material ether having been eradicated from physics, other fillers of space had to be found, such as fields of force and geometric conformations of space itself? In any case, Kant considers that the specific dynamic properties he assigns to his ether solve the problem of systematizing the mechanical forces, attraction, repulsion, cohesion, whose effects are mathematicized in the Newtonian manner. The—surely superseded—details of this grounding are obscure to me and I can summon interest in the argument about them only insofar as they realize that “transition,” announced in the early title of the Opus Postumum, from the metaphysical doctrine of perceptible matter in motion to bodies subject to an a priori determinable system of forces. And now Kant realizes that a question looms that will have made a reader of the Critique of Pure Reason and of the ensuing Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science uneasy all along: However does a scientist get wind of this now systematically embodied nature? How does the subject come to know its now exhaustively knowable external object? This realization brings on a pivotal moment in the later fascicles of the Opus Postumum, when the Selbstsetzungslehre, the “doctrine of self-positing,” comes to the fore. Again, Förster is a much-needed guide through the text (101-116). The terms of the first Critique are, all in all, wellmarshalled—systematic and precise—within the work; it is when we think beyond it that they become scintillatingly obscure. We might worry that we are undercutting Kant’s explicit intention in thus thinking outside the box. The later BRANN 73 Opus Postumum shows us Kant doing it himself. One might go so far as to say that the older he got the more radically he thought (which, rightly considered, is the way it ought to be). The late work reconsiders self-consciousness, at first in the spirit of the Critique, but then in increasingly more boldly enunciated ways. Everything begins with “I think,” the self-recognition of the subject. It is a piece of mere logical analysis (since no intuition is involved) by which I make myself into an object to myself (O.P. 182). So stated this first transcendental event makes me ask myself: Can so momentous a self-diremption, that of exercising my autonomy in making myself into my own object, occur by a merely logical act, the analysis of the meaning of “I think”? Doesn’t it require some onto-logical activity? Kant answers this question, though along Critical rather than metaphysical lines. The first act can occur only together with a second one: This is an act of synthesis, meaning one in which thought grasps and unifies something given that goes beyond mere logic—to begin with, pure time and space. In space and time the subject posits itself, or better the subject posits itself as an “I.” This is the doctrine of self-positing. To appreciate how astounding this doctrine is we must look at the notion of positing. For Kant, to posit is to assign existence, the one and only way to realize existence (an identification that goes way back to an essay on the proofs of God’s existence of 1763). Thus in self-positing I bring myself into existence. It is an act of self-creation. This way of putting it tells me that existence is a subordinate condition depending on a somehow prior subject which is, however, itself not—or is not knowable as—a being that has an essence, an actuality, or, so far, personhood. The I-subject is a mystery into which Kant himself proscribes inquiry in his critique of dialectical reason. So far, however, though I exist, I have not yet made it into the natural world. This is where the ether does its service. It makes space real to the senses, filled as it is with a universal proto-matter that is the condition of connected perceptions �74 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW wherever I find myself in it. Space is thus not only the subjective form of sensation but a real unified object outside me, unified by the ubiquitous presence of a weightless, unbulkable ether. And yet I, in turn, am in it. For as space becomes perceptible because of the ceaseless dynamism of its system of ethergrounded forces, so I can perceive it since I myself am an organic body that is sensitive to forces because this body is itself a system of organized forces: To get sensation I must be sensitive, to get sensations from a dynamic system I must be such a system myself—I must be continuous with nature. Here at last is the embodied subject in the world. Selfpositing thus has a second phase. As I made myself exist within my pure cognitive constitution, so I posit myself as affected by forces that I have organized to enable me to experience nature: “Positing and perception, spontaneity and receptivity, the objective and subjective relations are simultaneous because they are identical as to time, as appearances of how the subject is affected—thus are given a priori in the same actus” (O.P. 132). Förster observes that the last phrase means that the same original transcendental act brings about the duality of empirical self and material world. Because in apprehending the undetermined material manifold I insert into it certain fundamental forces I can simultaneously represent myself as an affected body and as so affected by an external cause (107). So it seems that the system finally has closed in on the human body from the inside out through the transcendental spatial intuition and from the outside in through the “hypostatized” forces of nature (meaning forces “supposed, but as real”): the elementary dynamical ether and the mechanical forces of physics known against its ethereal ground. Better late than never, though this body be merely a self-moving machine, which, incidentally, responds to impinging outside forces as would a system of rigid and moving parts. The subject has now called into existence not only itself but also its world and its body—has made itself aware of itself as a BRANN 75 certified knower and simultaneously as a participating inhabitant of perceptible space. Perceptibility, however, is just what existence means for Kant: existence is a by-product of the relation between a cognitive subject and the object it posits for itself, even outside itself. I would put the puzzle here thus: How real can such existence be, in the ordinary meaning of the word, that is, indefeasibly and self-assertively independent of me? Yet Kant would find, had found, such a question offensively obtuse since it voids the whole Critical enterprise and its compelling motives. Nonetheless, it does seem that in setting the limits of reason Kant has abolished the finitude of human autonomy, the finitude that implies something beyond me which I am not. Förster interprets the doctrine of self-positing as a schema for (perceptible) outer space (114) since a schema brings together the spontaneous understanding with the receiving sensibility, in this case, matter- or sensation-filled space. This schema completes the conditions for a science of nature— though something else is missing. There is as yet no personhood. But since persons are subjects to which deeds can be imputed, since they are moral, that is, free and responsible beings, and since one purpose of the whole enterprise was to ground human freedom and with it morality, Kant is driven to a second, a moral self-positing and, hard upon it, yet beyond, to a focusing of the idea of God. More precisely, from the start of this final part of Kant’s last work these two topics, human morality and God, are more intimately related than they ever were in the Critique of Practical Reason. For there God is merely a postulate of practical reason (2.2.5), a kind of by-thought, required because nature by herself offers no ground for assuring us of happiness commensurate with our deserts. So we must believe that there is a cause, working outside of nature, that will bring about such a reward. But the moral necessity of God is subjective, that is, it is a need, not an objective ground of duty or belief. In the Opus Postumum it is as if man, �76 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW having brought himself, his world, and himself-in-the-world into existence, was now ready to posit God as well. But there are more serious, systematic reasons for Kant to turn to God in his last work. The said postulate of the second Critique calls upon God as a condition of making moral actions achievable for humans. Förster traces the various functions God is assigned (summarized on pp. 134-135). The last of these, stemming from Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), is that of God as founder of an ethical commonwealth. But in the Opus Postumum Kant says repeatedly that the divine power cannot make a man morally good: “He must do it himself ” (O.P. 249). So here opens what Kant himself calls an “abyss of a mystery”; Förster interprets this phrase as Kant’s realization that human moral autonomy and God as founding father of an ethical commonwealth are in contradiction (133). Kant finds a way out, adumbrated in Religion and sharpened in the late Opus Postumum. The self-positing so far described had been theoretical, cognitive. But now Kant introduces a second, moral-practical self-positing, analogous to the first in having its own a priori moving forces: the ideas of right that unite all persons, as expressed in the Categorical Imperative (which commands, unconditionally, the subjection of individual inclination to laws acknowledged as universal, O.P. 198); the difference is only that the first involves being affected by outer, spatial forces, the second consists of obedience to one’s own rationality—self-forcing, one might say. Self-positing, recall, was bringing oneself into existence by becoming conscious at once of oneself as thinking and as being affected by objects determined by oneself. So too moral self-positing is self-consciousness together with the consciousness that I can subjugate my inclinations and can myself determine my will, that is, choose morally—which is what Kant calls freedom. Kant now argues that the idea of human freedom, whose force is formulated in the Categorical Imperative, brings with it immediately, analytically, the concept of God. For the BRANN 77 imperative is a command, which, like the law of a civil commonwealth, unites all rational beings, and therefore it requires a law-giver and enforcer. Thus God must exist, and to do as we ought (that is, our duty) is a divine command. But God’s existence is not that of a being independent of human reason (Förster 142). Rather just as we postulated an ether to make a system of forces possible, so we postulate God as real to give the idea of duty a moving force. Thus the contradiction of human freedom and divine imposition certainly seems to be resolved. There is one more step to be taken. God is now an ideal of practical reason, said, however, to exist—in some way. What is the divinity’s relation to nature, particularly human nature? This is Kant’s “abyss of a mystery,” mentioned above: God and the world are heterogeneous ideas; as God cannot make men better, for that would abrogate their moral freedom, so he cannot interfere with nature, for that would abrogate its lawful determinateness. Kant reaches for the solution we would now expect: The unification of God and nature lies in the human subject. It is to be found in “Man in the World, Restricting Himself Through Laws of Duty,” as the penultimate title page puts it (O.P. 244). He is an ideal, an archetype; the wise man, the philosopher, who knows God in himself and the laws of nature and the imperative of action. Kant has been, significantly it now turns out, in the habit of using the term Weltweisheit, “world-wisdom,” for philosophy. With the human ideal Kant has reached “The Highest Standpoint of Transcendental Philosophy.” Förster says he has therewith solved one of the oldest problems of philosophy, how to unify theoretical and practical reason (146). And so he has—if we can comprehend this solution. From Religion on through the Opus Postumum Kant has been emphasizing the importance of a human ethical community, superintended by God to the realization of morality. In the latter work, it is this union of rational beings that makes the force of moral law analogous to the unifying ether of the natural system. Since now man has finally turned up in �78 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the body, a major enigma of the Critique of Practical Reason appears to be resolved: How transcendental subjects, each, moreover, locked within its own self-constituted natural world, can ever appear and speak to each other. I say the enigma appears to be solved because the subject is now embodied and has material appearance. But that doesn’t really help: How does my appearing body enter your self-posited world—unless we hypostasize, very seriously, a true outside, a transcendent Beyond, through which I can come to you by infusing your intuition with a sensory manifold expressing my person in an appearance? But this is language so alien to Kant that I am almost abashed to use it. Nonetheless, the grounds of that intersubjective communication without which Kant cannot conceive an ethical community—a human one, at least—are missing from the Transcendental System. This enigma is clearly conjoined to that of another’s body, because before we apprehend each other as rational beings we must appear to each other as material bodies. For we have no way (short of entering each other’s minds) of conveying thought except in embodied form. Nor is the God implied in our recognition of “human duties as divine commands” intelligible to me. This subjective God induces in me a desire to get down to brass tacks: Is a god who is “the inner vital spirit of man in the world” (O.P. 240) a God who exists in any ordinary sense, that is, a God who is a stand-alone substance, who is there, in his realm, whether I exist or not? Kant refuted, more than once, Anselm’s proof that God exists (e.g., in the Critique Of Pure Reason B 626) because it depends on regarding existence not as the subject’s positing of an object but as a property of the object itself; thus Anselm argues that in conceiving God we must necessarily include his existence in his essence. Yet it seems to me that Kant has accepted a precondition of Anselm’s proof, namely that when thought necessarily conceives of (and therefore conceives necessarily) the object as existing, then it must exist—only BRANN 79 where Anselm would say “beyond me,” Kant says “in my thought.” Is this an argument that gains anything as it goes? I think the final pages of his life’s work, preoccupied though it is with God-positing, show no sign that this question oppressed Kant, that he felt an insufficiency in the thought that the unifier of all realms is the dutiful man who has God within but is otherwise left on his own, is “his own originator” (O.P. 209) and also the maker of Heaven and Earth— except that once he says this: “There is a certain sublime melancholy in the feelings which accompany the sublimity of the ideas of pure practical reason” (O.P. 212). 4. Here, to conclude, is a summary review of the perplexities that I found in the Critiques and of the bearing the Opus Postumum has on them. First, the space puzzles. The Opus Postumum acknowledges what the transcendental Critiques had, ipso facto, no place for: that if the transcendental subject is to be affected by sensation through, or better, in its sensibility, it must be embodied. Kant now puts the subject’s body in space so that through its own forces it may interact with the forces of nature. This somatic positing quite literally fleshes out the system, and it does so by fixing on one of the several meanings of “external” that “outer sense” seems to carry in the first Critique: As one would expect, Kant now sometimes speaks as if the ether-filled space, where my body meets nature’s bodies, was in some real sense outside of myself as subject. That cannot be, however, since space never ceases to be what it was in the first Critique, the pure content (so to speak) of our receptive outer sense, the spatial intuition. But that fact results in this strangely involuted condition: The body, through which the world affects me, is within this Kantian sensorium, the intuition, the spatial sensibility; so we project a body within ourselves to receive sensations from an “outer” world we have ourselves created (Kant’s own term, e.g., O.P. 235). I keep asking myself how Kant would have �80 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW responded to this construal of the post-Critical layout. Would we could raise the dead! On the second, more general, question concerning the origin and fixing of the transcendental terms that stake out the system, the Opus Postumum is silent, though Kant asks himself over and over what transcendental philosophy is—his very last proposed title (at least in Förster’s selection) is “Philosophy as a Doctrine of Science in a Complete System.” The question I am asking could be put like that: Where does the philosopher stand when he establishes “The Highest Standpoint of Transcendental Philosophy”? If Kant considered this question he does not say—perhaps he would have thought it madness—much as Aristotle thinks it is ridiculous to try to show that there is nature (Physics 2.1). The third question, “How is moral action actually inserted into a deterministic natural world?”—is in fact answered in the Opus: The rational subject exerts a moral force analogous to natural forces. But is it an answer? How exactly does the force of reason move bodies? Psychokinetically? My fifth question, “Whence comes adventitious sensation and hence that contingency of nature which makes science empirical in detail?,” is simply and spectacularly untouched in the Opus Postumum, as it was in the Critiques. Yet it is not an unreasonable problem to raise, because, though Kant likes to describe what it is that comes to us as a mere “manifold” (manyness simply), sensation is in fact the material of specific appearances; hence, as it seems to me, some sort of evidence for its origin must be forthcoming (for from antiquity on, appearance is appearance of something, that is to say, is evidence and screen at once of something beyond it). One motive for drawing sensation more and more into the subject is precisely the principled specification of natural science: The more detail comes under the subject’s control the more transcendentally grounded physics becomes, that is, the more it can anticipate its findings and make laws by analogy. As it is, the ether theory goes pretty far in prescribing, a priori, the types of mechanical force whose effects are to be BRANN 81 noticed in bodies, even up to dictating some of their mathematical laws, for example the inverse square law of attraction: Kant explains that the following argument holds for any force that is diffused from the center of force through concentric spherical shells. Since the spherical surfaces vary as the square of their radii, the larger the sphere, that is the more distant from the center, the less will be the force distributed over each unit surface. Thus the effect of the force will vary inversely as the square of the distance or as 1/r2 (Met. Found. ¶ 519). Could it be that Kant might be driven to say that we ourselves are the creators of our sense material? In the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) he distinguishes bounds that are positive in having an enfolding Beyond, from limits that are mere negations. In that work he says that metaphysics leads to bounds beyond which lie the “things in themselves,” which are inaccessible to experience and cognition because they are beyond our cognitive faculties, but which it is nonetheless necessary to assume as sources, presumably, among other things, of sensation (¶ 57). In the Opus Postumum that Beyond seems to have receded; then must we ourselves be the generators of sensation? Might we be driven to suppose that the unknowable transcendent noumenal I is itself the source of the sensations that affect me? And if so, how is Kant’s system in that respect different from Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, in which the subject is completely self-posited, including its sensory affects, and of which Kant says that he regards it “as a totally indefensible system . . . for the attempt to cull a real object out of logic is a vain effort” (O.P. 264)? Call it absolute idealism or solipsism, in putting the world in man it leaves him solus, a subject alone without a confronting object, and Kant seems to find that insupportable in the Fichtean system. Recall from hints above that the first Critique itself was already vulnerable to the charge of solipsism. Sartre, for example, in the chapter “The Reef of Solipsism” in Being and Nothingness (3.1.2), raises it with respect to time, insofar as it is an inner �82 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW sense: How then can a Kantian “I” be synchronous with any “Other”? I want to insert a reflection here. Philosophers pride themselves on following wherever honestly consequential thinking leads, even into the insufferable. There came generations after Kant who took a kind of unholy joy in their desperate conclusions. But Kant is the philosopher of “conditions of possibility,” of finding the terms that enable the satisfaction of rational humanity. So I imagine him to be open to the question: Quo vadis?, “Where are you going?” For that the love of wisdom should turn out to be totally self-love seems indeed to be insufferable. Finally, the sixth perplexity, the proof, no, rather the positing of the existence of God: In the first Critique the understanding, our faculty for organizing given material into experience, sets the starting terms; the theoretical reason is considered mainly as a faculty for attempting, indefeasibly, to marshal judgments connecting these terms into inevitably illusory syllogistic conclusions. In the Opus Postumum, however, the practical reason is paramount, for its requirements come to be dominant. It leads the way in the positing of self, body, and finally God. This God-positing is no longer the “as-if ” postulation of Kant’s moral works, which entitles us to act merely as if there were a God who sanctions and rewards. In the Opus Postumum reason is compelled to posit God as actual—though in me and not as a substance. Actual though not substantial, subjective but an object—I seem to lack the intellectual wherewithal for entertaining these conjunctions. Indeed, one of the benefits of entering into the ratiocinative preoccupations of a Kant, who explores and pushes his own concepts to their limits and who is moreover—as I think—incapable of mere invention or simple confusion, is that one is confronted in precise and compelling terms with the limits of intelligibility. 5. The Kant we study as a community is and will continue to be the Kant of the two Critiques of Pure and Practical BRANN 83 Reason, and so it will be, I think, for most students of philosophical works. Thus Kant’s influence on the thinking world (where attention to Kant is growing rather than waning, for example in cognitive science and in ethics) will be mostly Critical. That Kant had a living post-Critical afterlife is in itself a source of fascination, which the review has tried to express. The Opus Postumum, however, though it may never, and probably should not, exert the direct influence of the Critiques, also contributes to Kant’s posthumous afterlife, not so much, as I said, in directly influencing the thinking of people now alive, as in projecting a drift that is being realized among us. I am referring primarily to the topic of subjectivity. In many departments of life the outcome of a venture is an advance over the beginning—which is called progress. In philosophy, however, the working-out of the origin is often a shallowfication, to coin a term. One reason is precisely that philosophy is treated as progressive, which entails either contracting the deep open questions of original inquiry into more effectively resoluble tight problems, or, on the contrary, loosening the precisely significant terms of a coherent philosophy to connote its bowdlerized, or at least more relaxed, possibilities. Kant’s terms are more liable to the latter fate. For Kant expands, late in life, and late in the Opus Postumum, on what he had asserted earlier: “Philosophy is to be regarded either as the habitus of philosophizing or as a work: through which there arises, proceeding from it, a work as a system of absolute unity” (247; I can’t resist quoting a neighboring entry, which shows Kant in what he would call a “technical-practical” mode, that is, displaying mundane practicality—always an index of mental alertness: “N.B. The melon must be eaten today—with Prof. Gensichen—and, at this opportunity, [discuss] the income from the university.”) Consequently Kant’s terms are from the beginning welldefined and well-seated in a system, and thus apt to descend �84 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW to the public by acquiring more diffuse rather than narrower usages. System-building is out of style at the present moment; the mood is anti-foundationalist. Particularly out of favor in philosophy are the two great Critical assumptions, the one so deep beneath Kant’s thinking that there is no overt reflection on it in the Critiques, the other perhaps the central preoccupation of the Opus Postumum. The former is representationalism, the apprehension of thinking as the activity of putting objects before the cognitive faculties; the German for “representation” is Vorstellung, literally “setting [something] before [oneself].” (I should mention that representationalism at least is alive and well in the cognitive sciences, as opposed to philosophy.) The latter assumption is the one expressed in the quotation above, that the work of philosophy is “architectonic,” the building of a well-grounded, completely unified, and thoroughly detailed edifice representing the activities and aspects of the rational subject, the “I.” (To be sure, Kant’s system is only the penultimate great Continental system; in the ultimate one, however, that of Hegel, the dialectic of concepts supersedes representational thinking, and the system is not constructed architectonically but develops organically.) Three hugely influential shapes that the “I” as an object of reflection has taken are: the Cartesian Ego, a thing that knows of its existence as it thinks and can apply itself to mathematicizable spatial extension; the Rousseauian Self, a pure interiority that knows and revels in its mere sense of existence; and a Kantian Subject, an I that knows itself in two capacities, as theoretical (the subject of formal thinking and of a formative sensibility which together give laws to external nature), and as practical (an autonomous person that gives the law to itself as a moral actor). All three, Cartesian quantification, Rousseauian selfconcern and Kantian personhood, have been absorbed and naturalized into contemporary thinking. The subject of the Critiques, however, being the most complex and comprehen- BRANN 85 sive of these ideas, has also been most liable to second-hand connotations. For example, the word “subjective” evidently got into general philosophical and hence into common use through the Critiques, though when we say something is “purely subjective” we tend to mean it in a denigrating sense: lacking hard, public objectivity. But the expanded terms of the Opus Postumum are not, as far as my reading goes, known to our contemporaries—the work has, after all, been available for barely a decade— neither to the proponents of human self- and world-construction nor to the post-Nietzschean value-relativists who hold some version of the idea that man himself is the creator of values, or the religious thinkers who regard God as a selfgranted response to human need. Yet all these notions are in a more disciplined, systematic form adumbrated in the Opus Postumum: in the self-positing of the subject and its worldconstruction, in the autonomy of its moral life, and in the required postulation of its God. But in what mode, to return to a question asked in the beginning, has Kant thus become the occulted projector of our modernity? Did he succumb—Förster thinks this implausible (76)—to the then-current craze of “posito-mania” (Setzkrankheit)? Is he spinning out the deep implications of the Critical enterprise, perhaps into originally unintended consequences and to his own uneasy amazement? Or has he, in adventurous old age, leapt beyond the Critiques into the stormy oceans that he once said surrounded the land of the pure understanding, an island of truth enclosed by the unchangeable bounds of nature (Critique of Pure Reason, B 294)? These questions I am in principle unable to answer for myself, because I am not sure whether there can be a philosophical system with joins so tightly fitted that its inherent necessities are unambiguously fixed, and in particular, because the transcendental system of the Opus Postumum offers surprises (the ether), superadded requirements (the specification of empirical physics), shortfalls of closure (the �86 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW source of sensation). Nor am I certain in general whether, when a philosopher takes a structure of thought to a new level either by fine-tuning its technicalities or by driving it to its ultimate conclusions, he is doing the work of interpretation or of deconstruction. Instead I want to express this, my sense of Kant’s late unfinished work: If “awe” signifies a mixture of admiration and unease, here is the occasion to recall a good word to its proper use, and to say that the Opus Postumum is indeed awesome. 87 Odysseus’s World of the Imagination Paul Ludwig Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments teaches where and how to find hidden delights in the Odyssey and the Iliad. The book aims to be a companion to Homer that can modestly step out of the way after pointing out “moments,” those episodes or imaginative visions within episodes that achieve vibrant stasis and are therefore at once stations and peaks in the narrative flow—an idea based on Aristotle’s distinction between episodes and bare plot. The slow or static parts such as long similes and apparent digressions, which many readers wish to skip over in order to get on with the story, Homeric Moments regards as affording the intellectual pleasure peculiar to reading epic. Brann’s interpretative assumptions are provokingly face up on the table, and her conclusions are surprising and radical: there is no archaic “mentality” by which heroes think differently from us or which enables them to see a world full of gods rather than natural causes. A world populated by gods is superior to most of our own modern accounts of the world: Odysseus’s tales of his adventures, like Homer’s gods, are imaginary but true, factually false but better than a recounting of material facts because they are spun from Odysseus’s imagination, an imagination that practically requires that he lose or destroy his men. Epithets, Similes, and Gods Homeric “moments” are primarily visual snapshots, including word-paintings such as Hephaestus’s shield and many Homeric similes as well. Their meanings, like the meanings of paintings, are not simply told to the reader. At issue is the Eva Brann. Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad. Paul Dry Books, 2002. Paul Ludwig is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. �88 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW place of surmise—including, for Brann, wild surmise like that of Cortez’s men—in literary interpretation. What sorts of surmises Brann makes about moments can be seen from her treatment of an actual painting, Ajax’s suicide as depicted on a sixth-century amphora. The vase painter’s huge but delicate Ajax squats over his task of fixing into the ground the hilt of the sword he will fall upon. A few choice words explain the difference between black-figure and red-figure techniques of vase painting: in the earlier genre, figures appeared as black silhouettes on red clay backgrounds, but in the later genre figure and ground were reversed. “Rather than black bulks blocking the light, [figures] will appear as sunlit openings in the lustrous black glaze” (Moments 73). For Brann, the blackfigure genre “seems made to depict a Hades-bound soul, a prospective shade,” for example Ajax leaving the light. Few classicists in their right minds would venture such a claim. Since the painter is thought to have died around the time redfigure was invented, to give him a choice flirts with anachronism. The lack of clear historical evidence that the blackfigure artist ever worked in red-figure dictates that his genre left him no recourse but to paint Ajax black. Since it is safer to posit only one cause per event (shades of Occam’s razor), and this generic explanation is sufficient, scholars discipline themselves to refrain from speculating further. Brann by contrast “surmises” that the black-figure artist intended to exploit that unique resource of his genre (blackness of figures) that made it peculiarly appropriate for this depiction (a soul in shadow). The crucial thing about interpretative surmises is that they can never be conclusive. Here, the generic cause screens or hides the existence of another cause, the artist’s intention. Doubt, in the historical or critical methods Brann opposes, takes on a life of its own, and lack of a proof effectually becomes proof of a lack. Unconfirmed means untrue. As with vase painting, so it is with Homer’s epithets and the issue of their significance: Brann freely admits that some epithets are scarcely significant and are governed by metrical convenience, but that admission does LUDWIG 89 not stop her from investigating each epithet or cause her to doubt the appropriateness, irony, or other significance she finds in many of them (28-9). Of course it remains obvious that an epithet can both fill the meter and signify (i.e., fulfill two purposes at once, thus having two “causes”) since even the weakest epithet performs better than any random word would have done. It would seem to follow that epithets may sometimes have further significance; the issue is whether it is more sophisticated to ignore these or to point them out. Vision becomes double in Homer’s similes. First the reader is presented with a visual background (“like a poppy”), against which the vision of the thing or event described (“he let his head droop”) can be seen afresh. The insight that similes usually work better when the background comes first can be substantiated simply by trying out some Homeric similes backwards (139). The real situation quickly entrenches itself and the comparison becomes mere embellishment (“he let his head droop like a poppy”). Such natural occurrences are often the likeness made for manslaughter in the Iliad; Brann concludes that the function of the simile is to mitigate the horror of war. The Odyssey, with less gruesomeness to mitigate, specializes in uglier similes and tends to magnify rather than mitigate. If, however, the horror is worsened and Nature seems all the more peaceful when the two are juxtaposed, the sharpness of the contrast might work against alleviating the pain in the Iliad. Homer’s observing the horrific together in one vision with peaceful nature is a “dry truth” akin to when economic considerations obtrude on Diomedes’ and Glaucus’s exchange of armor, a truthfulness which Schiller thought “naive” and said often gave an impression of insensitivity (Moments 122). The modern taste prefers to concentrate on one side of life at a time: sweeping the other temporarily under the rug becomes sensitivity. Gods do the same work as similes and therefore they, too, can make Homeric moments: they transfigure human life. “Faith” is a term misapplied to the Homeric deities because, unlike the invisible one God of the Abrahamic faiths, no one �90 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW believes or disbelieves in them; rather, everyone senses their presence unless or until the gods themselves choose to withdraw (36). Brann thus overcomes a misleading dichotomy of the gods as either superseded objects of a naive faith or background machinery created by the sophisticated agnostic Homer. A third alternative not considered might be Herodotus’s claim that Hesiod and Homer essentially gave the Greek gods their birth, honors, arts, and shapes (Histories 2.53). If Homer is telling a story of a fictional past time when belief was not necessary because the gods were accessible, this would not eliminate the possibility that belief might become necessary in “latter” days, e.g., for Homer’s audience. Every so often a Greek did opine that the Olympians were fabrications: Xenophanes said that if horses could draw, they would draw gods shaped like horses. It is here that Brann proudly declares her radicalism: Homer’s gods are both imaginary and true, or at least truer than many a world without them. Their manifestation to us through the faculty of our imagination says nothing about whether they originate in the imagination alone; rather, the denigration of that faculty would seem to be the only motive for dismissing the gods on the grounds that they manifest themselves through our imagination. Because the gods transfigure the human, we are better off with them than without them. Brann uses Athena’s visual transfigurations of Odysseus to make this clear. Whenever the goddess is upon him, Odysseus is most himself. His beautiful moments are bestowed by the goddess yet are totally his own. Homer observes something natural and calls it a divine gift. “Nothing happens to [Odysseus] that does not happen to us all; we too glow and crumble and have our alternating moments. What is wonderful about that? Or rather when is it ever less than a wonder?” (49-50; emphasis added). Thus the gods are a mode of access to the all-important appreciation of the wonder in everyday life. We are measured by our ability to see gods, but what we mainly see them doing is watching us. Nothing would change in result if the gods ceased to look on, but LUDWIG 91 everything would change in significance (43): we would no longer be dignified by the respect—literally “regard”—of being watched, and we would no longer be blessed, or cursed since it still dignifies life to have a Poseidon who curses us). There could be none of that magnification and beautification that Thucydides warned against (1.20). In a contrasting way, the gods also bring gravity to mortal life by their own lightness of being. Because they do not die, nothing is serious for them, and as a result, they lack seriousness. The gods, for whom the living is easy, achieve a vulgarity in their bickering, favoritism and one-upmanship that only the wealthiest and most independent mortals can dream of, and they lead parodies of lives. This amounts to magnification, too, because the “ability to lose one’s life is magnified by the divine inability” (41). The gods represent the pinnacle of ordinary human desire, and while for some Greeks the gods simultaneously act as their own reductio ad absurdum to show why no one should desire immortality, in Homer the grace and elegance with which the gods carry through their vulgarity make it possible for mankind to take a “proud delight” in them (42). Like black-figure painting, their lightness and brightness form a backdrop against which the dark shapes of mortals act. If one grants that the gods, as products of the imagination, are more true or genuine than the brute or material facts of the world, one still feels cornered into a false choice between materialism and imagination. Could the gods be propaedeutic to wonder at the cosmos and man’s place in it, a wonder also devoted to the use of the imagination, as in geometry or philosophy? Mentality The question of whether the gods cause events or merely observe them involves an interpretative surmise governing much of Homeric scholarship, namely, that Homer or his heroes have a “mentality” different from our own. For Brann, the issue comes down to exhibiting a passage in which Homer or his heroes “think in an alien mode” rather than merely �92 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW thinking about different things than we do (27). Some previous scholars have seen the alien mentality at work when the gods cause events which nature also causes. Two causes then exist for the same effect, and Occam’s razor says that should not be. A Homeric event is “overdetermined” if it has two or more causes. The simplest physical occurrences such as a spear’s ceasing to quiver in the ground can be attributed to the gods (“Ares took away its impulse”; Iliad 13.442-4 with 6.611-13). Brann is nuanced on the issue. In the seaside meeting with Nausikaa, “[n]othing happens that does not happen to us all; balls get tossed wide and land in the drink; people are woken up by shouts. Yet nothing happens that is not under Athena’s aegis—both at once” (221). “Both at once” sounds like overdetermination, but Brann provides an avenue of escape from mentality, which she regards as a trap. Homer and his characters see the wonder in everyday occurrences and accordingly ascribe to divine interference what would have happened anyway. Hence no miracles occur in the strict sense of events running contrary to nature. Nothing unnatural occurs, even at surprising moments, such as when Eurycleia recognizes the scar and drops Odysseus’s foot in the bathwater. Though he seizes her by the throat to keep her silent, the old woman seeks out Penelope with her eyes trying to tell her the stranger is Odysseus. Penelope, however, “‘is unable to meet her glance or to pay it any mind, for Athena had turned her mind away’” (280). Brann interprets: on the merely mundane or unimaginative level, Penelope is exercising tight self-control; she refrains from even glancing in the direction of the husband she knows is sitting disguised in her house. Brann’s Athena represents—or is—the evocation of our wonder at Penelope’s control, her mindfulness, Athena’s specific province. Thus Athena does not cause the event in any way that would compete with natural causes. A reading that allowed for miracles might assume that Penelope has not recognized Odysseus yet. The occurrence which, in the ordinary course of events, would have been the occasion of her recognizing him is LUDWIG 93 miraculously taken away by Athena’s interference. The goddess intervenes causally; she prevents nature from taking its course. This miraculous reading, too, can avoid overdetermination, since there are many ways of being a cause, with the proximate efficient cause being the least of these. The hand which threw the spear could be one kind of cause, while Ares’ will is another (and Zeus’s plan a third). To find a Homeric mentality in causal overdetermination would entail meeting a higher bar of evidence, showing two causes of the same type simultaneously causing the same event in the same way. For Brann, modern critics have thought their way into a mentality: the only people with a mentality are those who think they have one. But Brann’s rejection of Homeric mentality goes further and seems to entail rejecting the weaker, epistemologically less radical assumption of ethical alienness. For many years, an anthropological approach has been looking for “difference” in Homeric society. Brann asks students to see the similarity between the heroes’ hunger for beautiful gifts and their own patronage of department-store gift counters; she uses the students’ own suppressed longings for recognition to help them understand the glory-seeking of the heroes (26-7, 179-80). Here one wonders whether the vastness of the difference in degree does not cover over ethical differences that could be historical or social developments. Few of Brann’s students would enter the Cyclops’s cave to see if he would give them gifts. Brann’s objection that societies as wholes do not think and that only individual humans can do the thinking seems answered by the lemming or herd instinct. Societies do tend to produce recognizable types; notwithstanding that many individuals remain free to think their way out of their society’s prejudices, a majority could be left (perhaps including or composing the sovereign) who thoughtlessly imitate one another. Ethical alienness could then be responsible for protagonists’ behaving in ways that modern readers do not instinctively find admirable. �94 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW The ethically alien preoccupation with fame is at issue in Brann’s controversial interpretation of Penelope (see also below). When, if ever, does Penelope consider remarriage, and what constitutes faithfulness toward the husband she has every reason to believe is dead? Penelope like the male heroes—with the possible exception of Odysseus himself— appears to be motivated primarily by a desire for fame. Brann acknowledges this glory-seeking when she quotes the line with which Penelope explains her motivations to the suitors: “If Odysseus were to come home and be handmaid to my life, my glory would be greater and finer that way” (Odyssey 18.254-5). But the primacy of fame over fidelity has broad implications for Penelope’s intention to remarry. For Brann, Penelope’s sudden announcement that Odysseus told her to remarry once Telemachus had his beard is Penelope’s way of signaling to the husband she knows is in the room that she is mindful of his instructions. But what is alleged to be Odysseus’s instruction could also be Penelope’s own newlyminted invention, designed not only to save what is left of the throne for Telemachus (she says she will “leave the house” to make clear that marrying the queen does not bring the kingship with it; 273), but also to recoup or secure such fame as remains possible for a famous widow. This widow says privately that the Olympians ruined her magnificence or splendor the day Odysseus went away (18.180-1). That splendor depends on her beauty and cosmetics (18.178-9; 192-6). So too in their speeches to her, the suitors exhibit what they think she wants to hear: “You excel women in looks and stature and the balanced mind inside you” (18. 248-9; cf. 19.124-6, 108). Her rejoinder scarcely denies that what she wants is to excel other women, although she subtly changes the bill of goods by starting with aretê: “my prowess and looks and figure the immortals destroyed, when the Argives embarked for Ilion and with them went my husband Odysseus” (18.251-3). A husband like Odysseus is required for feminine magnificence or splendor. Penelope has a conventionally acceptable motivation, then, for setting up LUDWIG 95 the Bow contest: her fame has been diminished by Odysseus’s delay or demise. Her fame can be partially recouped by remarriage, but she needs a husband who approaches the stature of Odysseus (one who can string his bow) so that her fame will not be diminished further than necessary. In the event, Odysseus’s successful return takes her fame to new heights, but that is irrelevant to her motivations now. If these motives were not sufficient, the suitors also appear capable of forcing Penelope into marriage: since she has no protector to prevent strong-arm tactics so long as the suitors feign obedience to the convention, she herself breaks the convention by extending the courtship indefinitely. Brann admits that Penelope may at times have seriously considered the unthinkable (262-3). If sometimes, why not now, with Odysseus unrecognized in the room? The difficulty with imputing this “alien” social ethic to Penelope is that it makes her into a woman unlike any we could admire under modern assumptions (though the still, small voice of assumptions like ours is also present in Ithacan assumptions: 23.149-51). Brann in another context rebuts Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” perceiving the futility of the attempt studiously to “cancel” our instincts (36). Intellectual honesty at its best would assume the fault lies with us: our current prejudice prevents us from seeing the good in Penelope’s acceptance of a remarriage that is “hateful” to her. The ascription of alienness, like the ascription of mentality, renders interpretation at once easy (they were different, that is all) and difficult since we implicitly assume that our receiving equipment has a flaw. Artificially canceling and correcting for our alleged flaws can produce monstrous chimerical interpretations that say more about ourselves than about Homer. For Brann, the fame-talk is mainly a screen, a likely story Penelope tells about what another woman in her circumstances might want, behind which she hides her true intentions. But the likely story proves the rule for Homeric woman generally. We tolerate Achilles’ desire for fame in the Iliad, why not Penelope’s in the Odyssey? Brann thus �96 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW rehabilitates fame-seeking but hesitates to ascribe it wholeheartedly to Penelope. Does she perhaps surmise a Penelopean analogue of the conclusion Odysseus himself arrives at—that fame is empty? Penelope Penelope penetrates Odysseus’s disguise the moment she sees him. Moments supports this surmise with a host of small details. Odysseus himself understands her beguiling the suitors into a more standard gift-giving courtship to be a sneaky Odyssean way of getting material wealth out of men not long for this world (18.281-3; 273). The Bow contest itself is all her own genius, a perfect way of getting a weapon into the hands of the disguised Odysseus. Brann shows that, in the foot-washing scene, Penelope’s thought pattern stumbles over both caesura and diaeresis, as she catches herself so as not to betray her knowledge to Eurycleia. “Wash your lord’s—agemate; and perhaps Odysseus/ By now has such feet and such hands” (19.358-9; 279-80). The dash is the caesura, the semi-colon the diaeresis. Penelope was about to say “Wash your lord’s feet,” but caught herself, hesitated only an instant and hastily substituted “agemate.” Then during the diaeresis she thought up how to cover her faux pas with speculations about how Odysseus’s feet—and hands—must have aged. This is beautifully observed. Yet the thesis that Penelope helps orchestrate Odysseus’s retaking of the palace would have to explain away a soliloquy (hence without guile) in which Penelope imagines Odysseus far away or in Hades, wishes to join him there, and states that the oblivion of sleep will help her to endure pleasing an inferior husband (20.79-83). Brann’s thesis would also have to explain away a good deal of weeping. During her interview with the disguised Odysseus, the word used for her “weeping” is that used for the lamentation made for the dead (19.210). Homer says explicitly that Odysseus hid his own tears of sympathy with a trick (19.212). Why not construe this small deception as a part of a successful overall LUDWIG 97 deception? Perhaps Penelope’s tears at recognizing the “sure signs” that the stranger met Odysseus long ago might be explained as tears of relief that Odysseus is home rather than as tears of renewed loss (19.249-50). But why go to bed and weep for Odysseus until Athena throws sweet sleep upon her eyelids if she has just met him (19.602-4)? Likewise she weeps as she retrieves the Bow from its closet, and weeps for Odysseus when sent away from the Bow-contest she herself devised (21.55-7, 356-8). Is it tension about the long odds against his successfully killing all the suitors with it? Or is it grief over a cherished marriage that is finally coming to an end? Which is artistically more satisfying: to show that Odysseus can fool even his nearest and dearest, or to show that Penelope’s deviousness is the equal of, and hence a match for, his own? Brann finds a number of telling ironies in the dialogue between Penelope and the disguised Odysseus. Would we rather hear innuendo in such lines as “Odysseus will never again come home” (sc. “because you’re already here now”; 276) or is it more poignant to make such lines examples of her talking against her own hope? Brann points out that he calls himself polystonos [much-groaning], intending that she hear odyssamenos [hated], directly after signaling his name with odynaon [feeling pain] (244, 278); he is transmitting, but is she receiving? Irony there is for sure, but whose irony is it: Homer’s or one of the two protagonists’, that is to say, is the irony dramatic or verbal? If the ironies in her own speech remain dramatic, Penelope could remain ignorant that she is speaking to Odysseus in disguise, and Homer would be teasing us with how close their conversation comes to admitting his presence without her knowing it. It would elevate Odysseus’s deviousness to read this teasing as analogous to his later teasing of Laertes. Here as in a host of other ways Moments shares assumptions with Seth Benardete’s The Bow and the Lyre even while arriving at different conclusions. Both authors see in Queen Arete of the Phaeacians what a female ruler can be and that �98 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW her co-ruler husband can defer to her (Moments 223). Benardete accepts that Odysseus deceives Penelope and deprecates his shutting her out of the power struggle to retake Ithaca. Brann refuses to accept what she too would deprecate and pushes on with a thesis of equality: Penelope cannot be a match for Odysseus if her cleverness is only a diminutive version of his. For her worth to rest elsewhere and not be defined by his, is not fully entertained (258-60), probably because Penelope is in fact clever, self-possessed, and steadfast—all virtues Odysseus has too. Brann finds it more satisfying intellectually if the Bed-test shows recognition in a fuller sense than mere factual identity; this fuller recognition can only be premised on Penelope’s already knowing Odysseus is Odysseus. The “mutuality of their memory” is at stake: has Odysseus changed, or is he the same person he was before (283-4, 287)? Perhaps a “return of Martin Guerre” situation, in which suspicions about imposture could exist in tandem with worries about forgetfulness, would be too confusing. The crucial passage occurs where Penelope tricks Odysseus into an anger that betrays his selfsameness. Odysseus feels betrayed by Penelope, but in what way precisely? He may think Penelope herself has forgotten the rootedness of the bed, but more likely it is a “How could you think I thought” situation: he blows up at the injustice of her gambit. “How could you think I would forget and fall for a trick like that!” Penelope’s trick would then be two-pronged, with her test of (or pretense about) his imposture also being exactly the right instrument to test mutuality of memory. Odysseus Brann finds for Odysseus a motive to destroy his men still more shocking than Benardete’s motive of prideful anger at their opening the bag of winds (The Bow and the Lyre 83). For Odysseus to be what he is—the soul of imagination—he must rid himself of their unimaginative minds (Moments 175). Odysseus’s separate goals for his men and for himself (striving for their homecoming but for his own soul, in the LUDWIG 99 fifth line of the poem) prove to be incompatible aims (116). Where many readers would say Odysseus indulges a reckless curiosity, Brann stresses his imagination. The emphasis on imagination makes better sense of how he transforms his experiences into the concrete and tangible. If he is curious to view the towns of mortal men and to know their mind, his imagination transforms this mental intercourse with mortal men in towns into carnal knowledge of immortal women who live in isolation (249). To his men, the captain must seem to be plunging ever deeper into a world of his own, losing his grip on “reality.” Ordinary concerns such as security and profit fade for him as he pushes them into greater and greater dangers for smaller and smaller hopes of plunder. Companions are required for the early experiences, for example, six to serve the Scylla. But as he retreats ever deeper into his imagination, the issues become utterly private. The choice Calypso offers between mortality and immortality is a choice offered to a solitary (171). A self-referential narrative opens up, in which the men are extras in a plot which has decreasing need for them and so Homer must invent ways to kill them off (175). But Brann insists that Odysseus is culpable of nothing worse than neglect leading to mutiny—he lets them die, opportunistically passive (for example, asleep) at the right times. Striving for his soul means externalizing his own soul through the exercise of his imagination. For Brann, the fictional Wanderings are the progress of his mind (31, 177); they unfold Odysseus’s true self or identity. By contrast, Benardete’s Odysseus must cease to be himself and become the anonymous universality of mind, living up to the pun on one of the pronouns of negation in the Cyclops episode: mêtis means “no one” but also “mind.” By struggling to maintain his identity as king of Ithaca and husband of Penelope, Odysseus succumbs to the temptation of pride and self-glorification, and fails to sustain the peak of humanity he achieved on Circe’s isle: knowledge of nature rather than desire for fame. For Benardete, learning means becoming no one in �100 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW particular. For Brann, learning entails being an “I” who learns (51); Odysseus’s flexibility is all about using tricks to endure or be steadfast, that is, to stay himself. Brann’s idea of learning saves Odysseus’s desire to return home from being overwhelmed by the wanderlust that overwhelms Dante’s and Tennyson’s Odysseus. But it may be significant that domestic bliss remains a promissory note at the end because of the prophesied final journey. Brann admits that Odysseus prays (like Augustine): help me return home, but not yet (116). The encounters with Scylla and Charybdis never happened; nor did any of the tall tales Odysseus tells, such as the Cyclops, Circe and the rest. What Odysseus was really doing during the decade he says he was having these adventures can be gleaned from the lies he tells upon his return in disguise to Ithaca. The mundane events that actually made up his journeys consisted of piracy and marauding, trading, and the giving and receiving of gifts, all on known sea-routes and in known countries such as Crete, Cyprus, and Egypt (182, 242, 247). Nymphs like Calypso are fairyland versions of the prostitutes whom sailors dream about and find in port (1923). The lies Odysseus tells in the persona of a Cretan are “lies like the truth” (19.203). They may not have happened, but they are the kind of things that do happen. By contrast, the adventure tales are lies of a different order: they are like nothing that ever happens. The truth about Scylla and Charybdis is that they are a fanastically-rendered image of a universal human dilemma: the Choice of Dangers, when neither alternative is good (211). Odysseus may have experienced several mundane versions of this choice, but none could have captured the essence of the Choice like the fantastic story he eventually relates. Therefore, the tall tales are true, while the underlying trip is merely real (183-4). The reader may consult his or her own experience: Scylla and Charybdis are as proverbial today as the devil and the deep or the rock and the hard place. And if that is what Scylla and Charybdis are now, why not also for Homer’s first audience and ever since? Brann dares to read our modern experience LUDWIG 101 back onto the poem. Lotus-eating is equally proverbial, as is the sirens’ song. Meeting a man with one eye? Readers will have to savor this brief foray into postcolonial theory for themselves. Homer It is especially daring to disbelieve the factualness of Odysseus’s tales (while accepting their essential truth) in a poem where Homer himself recounts equally mythical occurrences such as conversations in Hades, as well as vouches for Calypso’s magical island (169). Distinguishing between fairyland adventures (made up by Odysseus) and “real” places like Hades (known to all Greeks) introduces an odd literalism into Brann’s interpretations. To declare, on behalf of the Greek people, that Hades is “as real a place as there ever was” comes close to attributing a mentality to the Greeks. Hades is real until some Greek finds out differently. But Brann means to draw a distinction between what Homer appropriates from (or for) the tradition, and what he adds. Even if Homer is making it all up, he presents some of it as made up by Odysseus and pretends the rest is real. Brann’s Homer subtly makes concrete to the imagination the way his epic brings Greek mythology to the Greeks: Odysseus’s return from Hades (the treasure house of memory) represents the poet bringing the tales of great women and men back with him (17, 200, 204-7). The mundane reality is that we remember the dead, but the imagined truth is that the dead remember. The poet tells us that none of the people in Hades are fictions; they live down there and he heard of them through the Muses. Brann is at pains to take Homer at his word: she thus avoids rationalizing away her chance to engage with his claim. But this feels odd because Brann permits no looking behind that claim. Her refusal to know Homer better than Homer knows himself could lead her into the trap of conflating Homer’s poetic persona with the real Homer. “The Author” is a character in his own right in novels like Tom Jones or Don Quixote, which are episodic and picaresque �102 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW (and therefore comparable to the Odyssey although still generically different). It would be a mistake to identify “The Author” with the author of such a novel, or the intentions of “The Author” with those of the author, who wishes us to penetrate his persona in order to have access to yet greater delights. The humor or absurdism in these modern novels vitiates the comparison because the self-referentiality of an authorial persona also generates humor. But it is unclear in principle why, in a poem with the complexity Brann attributes to it, Homer might not have employed a similar subtlety, giving glimpses of himself that are equally important but equally contrived. Surely the road to understanding Homer’s intention runs through Brann’s careful distinctions, but she does not base many surmises on those distinctions. A related literalism is Brann’s insistence that Odysseus’s tales were never meant for publication (notwithstanding the fact that she has published a book about them). Observing that the tales’ first audience, the Phaeacians, is cut off from the world (though if Odysseus did not anticipate the enclosure of their land, he might have expected these seafarers to carry his fame to all lands; 226), and their second audience is Penelope in the privacy of home, Brann preserves the possibility that Odysseus is exceptional among heroes: he truly seeks something other than fame. Odysseus cannot know that the Muses will find out about his private tale and tell Homer, who will publicize it. The fact that Odysseus prefaces his account to the Phaeacians by saying his fame reaches heaven does not imply a hero’s desire for more glory but rather that he rests secure in the fame he already has (180). Odysseus learned his lesson when he shouted his name to the Cyclops, from which deed he earned the undying enmity of Poseidon (189). Brann sums up: Odysseus’s adventures “will never become a myth among public myths” (300; cf. 205). And yet they did. Odysseus’s exceptionality may be indicated by the fact that Homer in the Odyssey never calls him a hero; only Circe does, after his return from Hades (180, 196). Odysseus hears from Achilles that it is not better to reign in LUDWIG 103 Hell than serve on earth. The discovery that fame is empty may help Odysseus to transcend heroism. Yet Odysseus ends up with a poem of comparable (though shorter) length to the one Achilles gets, a poem which furthermore has acquired a title which names it securely after Odysseus, an honor Achilles is denied. Odysseus is very lucky to have won maximum fame after ceasing to seek it. His alleged eschewal of fame is rewarded with fame. Virtue rewarded always entails the problem of whether the virtue was sought for its own sake or only for the reward. But Brann would never let such skepticism essentially eliminate the possibility of true virtue rewarded; to allow that would be to fall into a mentality. As we saw, Brann’s Penelope also chooses what could be called the path of least fame—to remain in widowhood—but thereby gains the greatest fame possible. If Odysseus learns to demote fame, then Homer portrays a character who thinks his way out of a central tenet of his society’s ethics, thereby giving the lie to the inevitability of mentality. Moments opens up many more windows on Homer than can be discussed here. Not the least of these are the myriad quotations of modern lyric poets—from Keats to H. D.—who interpret Homer. Each of these, too, provides a moment in which readers can lose themselves. Not to be missed are the Helen chapter and the chapters laying out the structures of the Odyssey and Iliad. Brann is particularly wonderful with time, and many delightful intricacies come into focus when she juxtaposes the order of occurrences with the order in which they are narrated. The simple device of generous crossreferencing, so lacking in most books, enables the ripples to spread. The accomplishment of Homeric Moments is to progress from the visual to the invisible, but observation remains its greatest virtue. �104 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 105 The City: Intersection of Erôs and Thumos? Michael Dink Ludwig takes us on a tour of sex and politics in Greek political theory, focusing largely, but not exclusively, on the political effects of the practice of homoerotic pederasty as understood by certain Greek thinkers, using as his principal texts Plato’s Symposium (primarily Aristophanes’ speech), Aristophanes’ plays, and a few selected passages from Thucydides. The ultimate goal seems to be to investigate how these thinkers understood the political relevance of erôs in its various forms. Not surprisingly, Ludwig finds that, at least in its political manifestations, erôs is always mixed up with thumos. The path taken by the exposition can seem labyrinthine, as Ludwig moves back and forth among different texts, and takes up in sequence various loci of the intersection of erôs and politics, while at the same time trying to develop an account of what erôs is, what different forms it takes, how it is related to thumos and its forms, and which aspects of it are natural and which are conventional or “socially constructed.” For a reader like myself, primarily interested in the intertwining of erôs and thumos, it is helpful to have a clear, even if initially oversimplified, statement of the distinction between erôs and thumos as a thread with which to negotiate the labyrinth. Since Ludwig himself does not provide this thread, I have spun my own, which I will share with you. Let us define erôs as the striving to fulfill a perceived lack in oneself and thumos as the striving to assert something present in oneself, perceived as good. In erôs, one feels an Paul Ludwig. Erôs and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Michael Dink is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. �106 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW emptiness of self in need of fulfillment; in thumos, one feels a fullness of self in need of expression. The striving of erôs tends to seek possession of some object outside of the self, in the expectation that this will fill its lack. The object sought is usually regarded as being high, exalted, or beautiful; the lack is considered to be grave and its fulfillment of the greatest importance because tantamount to finding happiness, and thus the striving is accompanied with great intensity of feeling The striving of thumos tends to be in opposition or antagonism to some object other than the self, either one that threatens the self or one that is in some way in opposition to the goodness that the self strives to assert. The sense in which goodness is perceived in the self and the sense in which it is asserted may vary widely: as existence asserted in selfdefense; as, excellence asserted in the striving for recognition; as rule over others asserted in the pursuit of conquest. Ludwig begins with Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, in which he finds two manifestations of erôs. The one which Aristophanes explicitly calls erôs and makes the object of his praise is the desire of each split half of the original circle people to rejoin with its former other half in order to recover its (their?) original wholeness. The other impulse which Ludwig identifies as a form of erôs is whatever motive caused these original circle people to ascend into the heavens and seek to displace the gods, thus provoking the splitting that brought into being the first kind of erôs. Aristophanes himself does not even name this second impulse, much less call it erôs, and he does not give any explicit characterization of its object. Ludwig names it ‘Ur-erôs’ and characterizes it in a number of different ways. He argues that it is more original and natural than the erôs of the split halves and that the latter is the result of efforts to restrain ‘Ur-erôs’ in most people, an effort originally made by a tyrant in the service of better fulfilling his own ‘Ur-erôs.’ While Ludwig has not yet introduced the distinction between erôs and thumos at this point, it seems to me that the DINK 107 erôs of the halves does fit the definition of erôs, insofar as it strives to fill a perceived lack, even if there is lack of clarity about what constitutes this lack and its fulfillment. Ludwig, however, treats this aspect of Aristophanes’ account as a romantic dressing up of a less attractive reality: a desire for what is like oneself, which uses the self as the criterion of likeness. Ludwig calls this “horizontal erôs,” twisting it in a direction that strikes me as more thumotic: he makes it into a kind of assertion of the goodness of the self, as if what it seeks is only more of the same. The other form of erôs, which Ludwig calls ‘Ur-erôs’ or ‘vertical erôs,’ is an impulse implied in Aristophanes’ very brief statement that the original circle people made an ascent into the heavens and launched an attack upon the gods. I find both thumotic and erotic aspects in this impulse. The antagonistic and assertive aspect of thumos is manifest in the attempt to overthrow or displace the gods by a violent struggle, as if they were a hindrance to be overcome. Nevertheless, the erotic component emerges insofar as the circle people are attempting to gain something high and exalted that they lack. Ludwig does not initially thematize this duality or relate it to thumos, but later adumbrates it in the phrase “violent admiration.” He gives a wide range of characterizations of the goal sought by the circle people without an explicit attempt either to unify these or to choose among them: tyrannical domination of others; equality with or superiority to an admired object; becoming a more grandiose version of oneself; higher status; self-aggrandizement; self-apotheosis; an inhuman wholeness and perfection. In many of these phrases, I find the peculiar implication that the one who seeks to fulfill a lack nonetheless manages to suppress his recognition of this lack, by somehow believing that what he does not yet possess is rightfully his own or is the fitting external expression of what he really already is. Ludwig reads Aristophanes’ speech as covertly acknowledging the natural character of this “Ur-erôs” while recognizing that it is dangerous and needs to be restrained, both by �108 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW laws and by civil religion. The other kind of erôs is derivative from the restraining effects of convention, but is safer. Aristophanes tries to make it more attractive by playing up the romantic and idealistic side of it and covering up its dark and selfish side. Ludwig, however, identifies a particular problem in Aristophanes’ strategy. He has included male homosexual love as one of the forms of the convention-tamed erôs. Yet in noting that the political men come from lovers of this kind, he recognizes that Ur-erôs is less tamed in them, and that they represent a tendency to reconstitute the original whole at the political level, rather than at the private level. As a consequence, they tend toward the dangers of internal tyranny and external imperialism. This question of the political effects of the Greek practice of homosexual pederasty forms one of the main strands of the book’s analysis. The practice combines erotic neediness on the individual level with ambition to rule and conquer on the political level. Ludwig identifies a basic internal contradiction in the practice as one of the principles of its dynamism. While the relationship of older lover to younger beloved was in part understood as a path to political power for the beloved, the acceptance of the passive sexual role by one male in relation to another was regarded as shameful and as a disqualification from the exercise of citizen rights (technically only if in exchange for money). Hence the threat of such hubris on the part of the lover was guarded against by a convention that encouraged the pursuit of young males by older ones, while at the same time discouraging sexual consummation. Ludwig argues that this convention fostered the sublimation of sexual desire into a kind of love that expressed itself largely in an attempt to educate the beloved so as to win the favor of his recognition. But Ludwig points to a number of elements in this education that strike me as thumotic: the lover first seeks to cultivate and display his own excellence in rivalry with other lovers, and then to impress the stamp of his own excellence on the beloved. Insofar as this excellence has a political DINK 109 character, and insofar as erotic energy is directed away from heterosexual love and the private household and is denied sexual satisfaction, it tends to spill over into ambitious political activity. Insofar as this pederastic relationship was an aristocratic or oligarchic practice, the political activity tended to be oligarchic, and to be viewed as a threat by the democrats. In his plays Aristophanes often satirizes the pederastic proclivities of Athenian politicians, and suggests that heterosexual desire is more compatible with contentment with private life and avoidance of dangerous political ambition and the wars brought on by imperialism. Yet Ludwig finds evidence in the plays that Aristophanes is aware that heterosexual desire and the pleasures of private life may have their own admixture of thumos, in a kind of belligerently possessive and even randomly cantankerous behavior. In connection with the practice he calls “civic nudity,” in which Greek males exercised and engaged in athletic competition in the nude, Ludwig explores politico-erotic phenomena along a different axis, stretching from shameinduced covering of the body to its shame-free (but not shameless) uncovering. He seems to want to argue, on the one hand, that some degree of covering up out of shame or modesty is a necessary condition of the emergence of love as distinct from sexual desire, but on the other hand, that an obsession with covering up is an over reaction that generates a vicious cycle of “modesty—sensitization—predation—modesty.” Ludwig argues that Thucydides, at least, regarded Greek civic nudity as a sign of civic trust and a display of “conspicuous moderation,” in contrast to what is reported of modern nudist colonies, that universal nudity of itself suppresses sexual desire. In treating this as a single axis, he may not give sufficient attention to the distinction between the shame or modesty involved in covering and uncovering the body and that involved in the desire for privacy for sexual intimacy. In a bold extrapolation, he claims that a “structural feature of erôs” emerges from this dialectic of covering and �110 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW uncovering. What erôs really desires is not the consummation of sexual desire, much less the naked body, but rather the transgressive motion from one degree of covering to the next lower degree, ad infinitum, albeit per impossible. He even suggests that beauty itself may somehow have a structure that lures us on to such transgressive unveiling. If his claim is that this is a structural feature of all erôs, he has not substantiated it by showing how it is present in all the cases he has examined. Although he does not make this explicit, the transgressive character that he finds in this kind of voyeuristic erôs bears traces of the aggressive and antagonistic features of thumos. In his final chapter, Ludwig both introduces new political manifestations of erôs and tries to sort out some of the possibilities he has surveyed. The augmented range of possibilities includes the narrow attachment to and preference for one’s own because it is one’s own; the attempt to extend this to the city as a whole in part by weakening it at the family level; homoerotic pederasty, as a practice which diverts erotic energy from love of one’s own into a relationship with civic consequences both beneficial and dangerous; Periclean love of the city because of its grandeur or merit, along with a desire to be honored by it, shadowed by the ambition to possess it as sole tyrant and/or to leave one’s stamp on it; love of seeing things exotic and alien, which undermines the effort to conquer them; and love of acquiring foreign things, which, when assimilated, undermine loyalty to and defense of one’s own. Ludwig tries to marshal this motley crew into a single orderly column or spectrum, with the narrow, possessive love of one’s own on one end, and the selfless love of beauty on the other end. He further suggests that Sparta and Athens each marched gloriously over the cliff at one end of the spectrum, Sparta staying too close to the narrow love of one’s own, although transferred from family to city, and Athens flirting dangerously with love of the beautiful as detached from one’s own. DINK 111 Ludwig’s book does much valuable work in uncovering and exploring many aspects of erôs in Greek political phenomena and theory. His tone is always judicious and non-polemical, and his mastery of a wide range of material, primary and secondary, ancient and modern, philological, sociological, and philosophical, is impressive. From the point of view of explicating the intertwining of erôs and thumos, however, the organization of the book presents a significantserious structural impediment. His discussion of the two kinds of erôs in Aristophanes’ speech in the early chapters precedes his introduction of the distinction between erôs and thumos. When he introduces thumos in chapter 4, his discussion focuses almost exclusively on ways in which it shows up in combination with “horizontal erôs.” His primary example is a character from the Wasps, Philocleon. An old man who loves to serve on juries, his attitude is one of punitive moralism, ostensibly in response to threats against the common good of the city. In contrast, Ludwig’s discussion of Peisetairos, a character from the Birds, who resembles the circle people in making an ascent into the heavens that turns out to be tyrannical, is couched entirely in terms of erôs. In other words, despite a brief allusion to the connection of thumos to the ascent of the circle people, Ludwig never makes an explicit attempt to assess the thumotic elements in “vertical erôs.” Thus we are left with the impression that verticality and violence belong together intrinsically, and that this togetherness is the most fundamental form of erôs. In contrast, when he lines up the many manifestations of erôs along a spectrum in the final chapter, he seems to put the violence together with the selfish and the possessive on the horizontal end of the spectrum, which is therefore regarded as more thumotic than erotic, and to put self-forgetting in the presence of the beautiful at the other, vertical, end, which is therefore regarded as more erotic than thumotic. We can’t help wondering where on this spectrum to fit vertical erôs as the aspiration to tyranny. �112 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Perhaps this apparent inconsistency could be resolved if we said that the violence and assertiveness in the aspiration of the circle-people are due to an admixture of thumos with the erotic desire for a certain kind of perfection. This would still leave us with a number of questions. Are erôs and thumos halves of an original, natural whole, which are only split from one another by convention? Or are they intrinsically distinct principles, whose co-presence in any phenomenon is in need of explanation? If the latter is the case, is one more natural than the other? Is the impulse to ascend more fundamentally due to one rather than to the other? Is the desire to acquire a perfection that one finds lacking in oneself necessarily linked to an impulse to displace others who are seen as possessing this perfection? If erôs and thumos are mixed along both horizontal and vertical axes, what determines the difference between these axes? 113 � 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2004/3 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Carey, James Ruhm von Oppen, Beate Sachs, Joe Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Coleman, Shanna Sachs, Joe Sinnett, Mark W. Painter, Corinne Ludwig, Paul Dink, Michael Description An account of the resource Volume XLVII, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 2004. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_47_No_3 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/45709523ddccdeb799588a8848abb06e.pdf 35c2cecd076ac303d83387b733342e0d PDF Text Text The St. John’s Review Volume XLVIII, number one (2004) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Audra Price The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year. Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are .O. available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2004 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Classical Mathematics and Its Transformation St. John’s College, Annapolis June 5-6, 2004 Foreword.......................................................................5 Harvey Flaumenhaft Why We Won’t Let You Speak Of the Square Root of Two..................................................................7 Harvey Flaumenhaft The Husserlian Context of Klein’s Mathematical Work.....................................................43 Burt C. Hopkins Words, Diagrams, and Symbols: Greek and Modern Mathematics or “On the Need to Rewrite the History Of Greek Mathematics” Revisited............71 Sabetai Unguru A Note on the Opposite Sections and Conjugate Sections In Apollonius of Perga’s Conica.....................91 Michael N. Fried Viète on the Solution of Equations and the Construction Of Problems.........................................115 Richard Ferrier �4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 Foreword Harvey Flaumenhaft On the weekend of June 5-6, 2004, the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College hosted a conference on the topic of classical mathematics and its transformation. This is a pivotal topic in the program of instruction here at St. John’s, where classes consist in the discussion of great books ancient and modern, and where approximately half of the entirely prescribed curriculum may be classified as either mathematics or heavily mathematical natural science. The topic was made truly pivotal at St. John’s by Jacob Klein, who joined the faculty in the second year of the New Program (1938-39) and became Dean eleven years later. Just a few years before arriving at St. John’s, Klein had published Die Griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra (later translated by another Dean—Eva Brann—as Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra). In a letter written just a few weeks after arriving at the College, Klein said, “It is almost unbelievable to me that all the things that occupied me for years, that is, the whole theme of my work, are realized here. The people don’t do quite right, very much is superficial and they are not quite right about certain fundamentals. But it….is clear that I am in the right spot.” Klein’s presence, and his book because of his presence, had a deepening and correcting effect on the life of this college, and through this college, on intellectual life far beyond our halls. The effects of his work pervade the conference papers, which are printed as this issue of The St. John’s Review. The conference took place through the generosity of the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, as the culminating event . under a large grant supporting faculty study groups led by me, over several years, on the topic of the conference. The Harvey Flaumenhaft is Dean at the Annapolis Campus of St. John’s College. �6 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW grant also supported groups on the same topic on the Santa Fe campus, with participation by faculty members from Thomas Aquinas College. Grateful acknowledgment is due to Sus3an Borden, the college’s Manager of Foundation Relations in Annapolis, who did a great deal of work, under very severe time constraints, to set up the conference. 7 Why We Won’t Let You Speak of the Square Root of Two Harvey Flaumenhaft Part One Progress and Preservation in Science We often take for granted the terms, the methods, and the premises that prevail in our own time and place. We take for granted, as the starting-points for our own thinking, the outcomes of a process of thinking by our predecessors. What happens is something like this: Questions are asked, and answers are given. These answers in turn provoke new questions, with their own answers. The new questions are built from the answers that were given to the old questions, but the old questions are now no longer asked. Foundations get covered over by what is built upon them. Progress can thus lead to a kind of forgetfulness, making us less thoughtful in some ways than the people whom we go beyond. We can become more thoughtful, though, by attending to the thinking that is out of sight but still at work in the achievements it has generated. To be thoughtful human beings—to be thoughtful about what it is that makes us Harvey Flaumenhaft is Dean at the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This paper was delivered in the form of a Friday-night formal lecture at St. John’s College in Annapolis on 27 August 1999. The first part of it is adapted from the “Series Editor’s Preface” in the volumes of Masterworks of Discovery: Guided Studies of Great Texts in Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993-1997). The last part is adapted from the “Introductory Note on Apollonius” in Apollonius of Perga, Conics: Books I-III, new revised edition, Dana Densmore, ed. (Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 1998). The three parts placed between them are adapted from the manuscript How Much and How Many: The Euclidean Foundation for Comparisons of Size in Classical Geometry (forthcoming from Green Lion Press), which is part of the larger manuscript Insights and Manipulations: Classical Geometry and Its Transformation—A Guidebook: Volume I, Starting up with Apollonius; Volume II, From Apollonius to Descartes (also forthcoming). �8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW human—we need to read the record of the thinking that has shaped the world around us, and still shapes our minds. Scientific thinking is a fundamental part of that record, but it is a part that is read even less than the rest, largely. That is often held to be because of the opinion that books in science, unlike those in the humanities, simply become outdated: in science, the past is held to be passé. Now science is indeed progressive, and progress is a good thing; but so is preservation. Progress even requires preservation: unless there is keeping, our getting is little but losing— and keeping takes plenty of work. Precisely if science is essentially progressive, we can truly understand it only by seeing its progress as progress. This means that our minds must move through its progressive stages. We ourselves must think through the process of thought that has given us what we would otherwise thoughtlessly accept as given. By refusing to be the passive recipients of ready-made presuppositions and approaches, we can avoid becoming their prisoners. Only by actively taking part in discovery—only by engaging in re-discovery ourselves—can we avoid both blind reaction against the scientific enterprise and blind submission to it. We and our world are products of a process of thinking, and truly thoughtful thinking is peculiar: it cannot simply outgrow the thinking it grows out of. When we utter deceptively simple phrases that in fact are the outcome of a complex development of thought—phrases like “the square root of two”—we may work wonders as we use them in building vast and intricate structures from the labors of millions of people, but we do not truly know what we are doing unless we at some time ask the questions which the words employed so casually now were once an attempt to answer. The education of a human being requires learning about the process by which the human race gets its education, and there is no better way to do that than to read the writings of those master-students who have been the master-teachers. FLAUMENHAFT 9 Part Two Manyness: The Classical Notion of Number The first great teachers of the West, and subsequently the rest of the world, were the classical teachers who wrote in Greek some two-and-a-half millennia ago. In their language the word for things that are learned or learnable is mathêmata, and the art that deals with the mathêmata is mathêmatikê— the English for which is “mathematics.” In mathematics, the first and fundamental classic work is the Elements of Euclid. From its Seventh Book we learn that a number is a number of things of some kind. When there are more than one of something, their number is the “multitude” of them. It tells how many of them there are. Suppose, for example, that in a field there are seven cows, four goats, and one dog. If we count cows, then the cow is our unit, the cow being that according to which any being in the field will count as one item; and there is a multitude of seven such units in the field. If we count animals, however, then the animal is our unit; and now there is a multitude of twelve units. Of cows, there are seven; but of animals, there are twelve. Of dogs as dogs, there is no reason to make a count (as distinguished from including them in the count of animals). There is no reason to count dogs, for the field does not contain dogs. It contains only one dog, and one dog alone does not constitute any multitude of dogs. If what we were thinking was “There is only one dog in the field,” we might say “There is one dog in the field”; but if we were not thinking of that single dog in relation to some possible multitude of dogs, we would simply say “There is a dog in the field.” Of pigs, there is no reason to make a count, for the field does not contain a single pig, let alone a multitude of pigs. If there had earlier been six horses in the field, which were then lent out, the field might now be said to lack six horses; but while six is the multitude of horses that are lacking from the field, there is not any multitude of horses in the field. �10 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW If we chop up one of the cows, arranging to divide its remains into four equal pieces, and we take three of them, then we have not taken any multitude of cows. We have taken merely three pieces that are each a fourth part in the equal division of what is a heap of the makings for beef stew. And so when we have several items, each of which counts as one of what we are counting, then what we obtain by counting is a number. The numbers, in order, are these: two units, three units, four units, and so on. The numbers, we might even say, are these: a duo, a trio, a quartet, and so on. To us, nowadays, that seems strange: a lot seems to be lacking. “One” does not name a multitude of units: although a unit can be combined with, or be compared with, any number of units, a unit is not itself a number—so “one” does not name a number. “Zero” also does not name a number, for there is no multitude of units when there are no units for a multitude to be composed of. Neither does “negative-six” name any multitude, although “six” does; “six” names a number, but there is no number named “negative-six”—and hence there is no number named “positive-six” either. Although “three” names a number of units, and so does “four,” “three-fourths” does not name a number of units— for if the unit is broken up, then, being no longer unitary, it ceases to be a unit. The Latin word for breaking is “fraction.” A fraction is not a number. (Of course we can, if we wish, take a new unit—say, a fourth part of a cow’s equally divided carcass—and then take three of these new units.) As for “the square root of two,” it is not a number; indeed, as we shall soon see, it is not even a fraction. And neither is “pi” a number. To say it again, the numbers are: two units, three units, four units, and so on—taking as many units as we please. That is what Euclid tells us; and, after telling us, Euclid goes on to speak of the relations among different numbers. We learn, for example, that because fifteen “measures” sixty—that is to say, because a multitude of fifteen units taken FLAUMENHAFT 11 four times is equal to a multitude of sixty units—fifteen is called “part” of sixty, and sixty is called a “multiple” of fifteen. But fifteen is not “part” of forty, because you cannot get a multitude of forty units by taking a multitude of fifteen units some number of times. That is to say: the multitude of fifteen units does not “measure” forty units. Both fifteen units and forty units are, however, measured by five units; and five units, which is the eighth part of forty units (the part obtained by dividing forty units into eight equal parts), is also the third part of fifteen units, so fifteen units is three of the eighth parts of forty units. This is to say that fifteen units, which is not a “part” of forty units, is “parts” of it. Indeed, a smaller number, if it is not part of a larger number, must be parts of it, since both numbers must—just because they are numbers—be measured by the unit. After that, Euclid goes on to tell us about sorts of numbers, and the ways in which they are related, numbers such as those that are “even,” or “odd,” or “even-times-even,” or “even-times-odd,” or “odd-times-odd,” or “prime,” and so on. Numbers are thus of interest not only with respect to their relations of size, but also with respect to their relations of kind. Even and odd are distinguished by divisibility into two equal parts (or by odd’s differing from even by a unit), and the more complex terms here are distinguished with respect to “measuring by a number according to another number”—which nowadays would be stated thus: “dividing by an integer so as to yield another integer as quotient without a remainder.” Euclid thus defines some kinds of numbers by employing notions such as being greater than or equal to or having a certain difference in size. However, he also sorts numbers into kinds by referring to shape. What might lead to doing that? We might use a dot to represent a unit, and then represent a number by dots in a line. For example, four would be represented as it is at the top of Chart 1. We might then rep- �12 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW resent in a shape the number produced by taking a number some number of times. For example, the number produced when four is taken three times would be represented as it is in the middle of the chart, where we see that the numbers four and three are “sides” of the “plane” number twelve; and similarly, six and four are “sides” of the “plane” number twenty-four. But the number twenty-four can also be represented as a solid, as it is at the bottom of the chart: the numbers four and three and two are “sides” of the “solid” number twenty-four. So Euclid speaks of numbers that are “sides,” “plane,” and “solid,” and also of the multiplication of a number by a number, and then of the sorts of numerical products of such multiplication—such as the numbers called “square” and “cube,” whose factors are called “sides.” But he does not represent numbers by dots in lines. To use dots would force us to pick this or that number. To signify not this or that number, but rather any number at all, it is more convenient to use bare lines, without indicating how many dots are carried on each line, although it might be confusing that we then also have to represent by a line the unit. FLAUMENHAFT 13 On the other hand, since the unit does have a ratio to any number, as does any number to any other number, and since the product of multiplying any number by any other number is also a number, it might make everything more convenient if we represent as lines not just the numbers that are “sides,” as well as any “side” that is a unit, but also all the figurate numbers that we can produce. After all, though the sort of number called a “square” number may be somehow different from the sort of number called a “cube,” it is nonetheless true that any “square” number has a ratio to any “cube” number (since any number has a ratio to any other number), whereas a square cannot have a ratio to a cube (since they are not magnitudes of the same kind). If we go along with speaking in this way, however, we must take care to keep in mind that when it is numbers that are called “sides” or “squares” or “cubes” we are not engaged in speech about figures; we are using figures of speech. Several of the books of Euclid’s Elements deal with what would nowadays be called “number theory” rather than “geometry.” The numbers in the classical sense—the multitudes two, three, four, and so on—tell us the result of a count, and nowadays we often speak as if those numbers, the countingnumbers, are merely some of the items contained in an expanded system that we call “the real numbers.” Whenever we put numbers of things together we get some number of things, and whenever we take a number of things a number of times we get some number of things; but only sometimes can we take a given number of things away from a given number of things, and even when we can, only sometimes can we get some number of things by doing so. For example, we cannot take seven things away from five things; and although we can take six things away from seven things, we will not have a number of things left if we do, but only a single thing. It is also only sometimes that we can divide a given number of things into a given number of equal parts. A multitude of ten things can be divided into five equal parts, but a multitude of eight things cannot. In dividing a many- �14 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW ness, there is constraint from which we are free in dividing a muchness. We often measure a muchness to say just how much of it there is compared with some other muchness: having chosen some unit of muchness, we count how many times such a unit must be taken in order to be equal to the muchness that we are measuring. A line, for example, is a kind of a muchness: there is more line in a longer line than in a shorter line. If two lines are not of equal size, one of them is greater than the other. Lines are magnitudes. If we measure them, we obtain multitudes that tell their sizes—their lengths. But magnitudes are not multitudes. Whereas the size of a magnitude has to do with how much of it there is, the size of a multitude has to do with how many units it is composed of. Not only magnitudes, but multitudes as well are often measured: we measure these by using other multitudes to measure them. Thus, we say that twelve is six taken two times, or is twice six. We say, moreover, that eight is twice the third part of twelve, or—to abbreviate—that eight is twothirds of twelve. “Two-thirds” does not name a multitude (unless we say that we are merely treating a third part of twelve as a new unit) but “two-thirds” is nonetheless a numerical expression. If we therefore begin to treat it like the name of a number, we are on the road to devising a system of fractions. “Two-thirds” of something is less than one such something, but it is not fewer. Two-thirds are fewer than three-thirds—but to say this, we must have broken the unit into three new and smaller units. The numerator of a fraction is a number or else it is “one.” The denominator is also a number: it is the number of parts that result from a division (although we will allow a denominator as well as a numerator to be “one.”) With a fraction, we divide into equal parts and then we count them. A fraction is not itself a number (a multitude), but it may be the counterpart of a number. “Twelve-sixths” is not the number “two”; but it is a counterpart, among the fractions, of the item “two” among the numbers. Another counterpart of the number “two” is the fraction FLAUMENHAFT 15 “eight-fourths.” Those counterparts are really the same counterpart differently expressed, since they are both equal to the fraction whose numerator is the number “two” and whose denominator is “one.” As with division, so with subtraction. In taking things away, we may get a numerical expression that we can treat like a number in certain respects. When we have twelve horses and eight of them are taken away, there is a remainder of four horses. But if eleven are taken away, then there are not horses left; only a single horse remains. And if twelve horses are taken away, then not even a single horse is left: none remain. But twelve horses can be compared with a single horse: the twelve are to the one as twenty-four are to two. “Twenty-four” and “two” are numbers, and “twelve” is also a number—so “one” is like a number in being comparable with a number as a number is. Moreover, “one” can be added to a number as a number can be, and “one” is sometimes what we reply when asked how many of some kind of thing there are. “One” is therefore a numerical word even if it is not a number. But in that case, so is “none”: if twelve horses are taken away, leaving not a single horse, and we are asked how many remain, we can then say “none.” Now suppose that Farmer Brown owes fourteen horses to Farmer Gray, but has in his possession only ten horses. Farmer Gray takes away the ten. How many horses does Farmer Brown now own? None. But he might be said in some sense to own even less than none, for he still owes four. If we did say that, then we would have to say that he owns four less than no horses, or that fourteen less than ten is four less than none. But then we would be counting, not horses-owned, but horses-either-owned-orowed. We would be letting the payment of four-horses-owed count as wealth equal to no-horses-either-owed-or-owned. Again, as with the fractions, we have numerical expressions that we are beginning to treat like numbers. We are on the road to devising a system of so-called “rational numbers,” which includes “negative” items as well as such non-negative items as “zero” and “one” in addition to fractions (which �16 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW include the counterparts of those multitudes that were first called “numbers”—namely, two, three, four, and so on). We must say “counterparts” because the multitude “three,” for example, while it corresponds to, is not the same as “the positive fraction nine-thirds” or “the positive integer three.” We have not brought about an expansion of a number system by merely introducing additional new items alongside old ones; rather, we have made a new system which contains some items that correspond to the items in the old system, but that differ from the old items in being items of the very same new sort as are the new items that do not have correspondents in the old system. For example: although the number “three” is a multitude, “positive three” is not a multitude; it is an item defined by its place in a system where, among other things, “positive six” takes the place belonging to the item that is the outcome of such operations as multiplying “negative two” by “negative three.” We have just taken a look at part of the road that leads from numbers in the classical sense to what we nowadays are used to thinking of as numbers. We have looked at some steps on the road to the so-called “rational numbers,” the so-called numbers that have something to do with ratios. But the system of what we nowadays are used to thinking of as numbers is the system of “real numbers,” only some of which are items that have counterparts among the items in the system of “rational numbers.” The system of what we nowadays are used to thinking of as numbers is replete with “irrational numbers,” some of them “algebraic” (such as “the square root of two”) and some of them “transcendental” (such as “pi”). Classically, numbers are multitudes, and there may be some number-ratio that is the same as the relation in size of some one magnitude to another. But there does not have to be a number-ratio that is the same. If there did have to be such a ratio of numbers for every ratio of magnitudes, then there would not have been a reason for devising a system of “real numbers.” The reason for taking the step from “rational FLAUMENHAFT 17 numbers” to “real numbers” has to do with the difference between multitudes and magnitudes. The difference between how we can speak about multitudes (that is, numbers in the classical sense) and how we can speak about magnitudes classically manifests itself in the statements with which Euclid begins his treatment of magnitudes in the Fifth Book of the Elements and his treatment afterwards of numbers in the Seventh Book. Although Euclid says what number is, he does not say what magnitude is. Examples of magnitudes can be found in his propositions, however. After the Fifth Book of the Elements demonstrates many propositions about the ratios of magnitudes as such, these are used by later books of the Elements to demonstrate propositions about such magnitudes as straight lines, triangles, rectangles, circles, pyramids, cubes, and spheres. Such magnitudes correspond to what we nowadays call lengths, areas, and volumes. Weight is yet another sort of magnitude. Though weights are not mentioned in the Elements, what Euclid says there about magnitudes generally is applied by Archimedes to weights in particular. At the beginning of the Fifth Book, Euclid defines ratio for magnitudes; but at the beginning of the Seventh Book he does not define ratio for numbers. There in the Fifth Book he also defines magnitudes’ being in the same ratio, and only after doing that does he define magnitudes’ being proportional. But here in the Seventh Book he does not define numbers’ being in the same ratio: he goes directly into defining numbers’ being proportional, which he needs to do in order to define the similarity of numbers that are of the sorts called “plane” or “solid.” The Greek term translated as “proportional” is analogon. After a prefix (ana) meaning “up; again,” the term contains a form of the word logos. This is the Greek term translated as “ratio.” Logos is derived from the same root from which we get “collect” (which is what the root means); and in most contexts, it can be translated as “speech” or as “reason.” Proportionality is, in Greek, analogia (from which we get �18 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW “analogy”), a condition in which terms that are different may be said to carry or hold up again the same articulable relationship. Later in the Elements, in the enunciation of the fifth proposition of the Tenth Book, for example, Euclid does use the term “same ratio” in speaking of ratios that are numerical. In the definitions with which the Tenth Book begins, Euclid says that lines which have no numerical ratios to a given straight line are called “logos-less”—that is, alogoi. This Greek term for lines lacking any articulable ratios to a given line is translated (through the Latin) as “irrational.” Such a line and the given line to which it is referred cannot both be measured by the same unit, no matter how small a unit we may use to try to measure them together. They are “without a measurement together”—that is, asymmetra. This Greek term is translated (through the Latin) as “incommensurable.” Because magnitudes of the same kind can be incommensurable, magnitudes are radically different from multitudes, and so we must speak of them differently. Part Three Muchness Not Related Like Manyness: Incommensurability Let us turn now to the classic example of incommensurability: let us consider the relation between the side of a square and its diagonal. If a square’s diagonal were in fact commensurable with its side, then the ratio of the diagonal to the side would be the ratio of some number to some other number. But it cannot be that. Why not? Because if it were, then it would have two incompatible properties: one property belongs to any ratio whatever which a number has to a number, and the other property follows from that particular ratio which a square’s diagonal has to its side. Let us convince ourselves that there is such a contradiction. First, let us look at that property which belongs to any ratio whatever that is numerical. It is this: any numerical ratio whatever must either be in lowest terms already, or be FLAUMENHAFT 19 reducible to them eventually. Consider, for example, the ratio that thirty has to seventy. Those two numbers have in common the factors two and five; so, dividing each of them by ten, we see that the ratio that thirty has to seventy is the same as the ratio that three has to seven. The ratio of three to seven is the ratio of thirty to seventy reduced to lowest terms. If a ratio of one number to another number were not reducible to lowest terms, then the two original numbers would have to contain an endless supply of common factors, which is impossible: any number must sooner or later run out of factors if you keep canceling them out by division. This property of every ratio that a number has to a number cannot belong to the special ratio that a square’s diagonal has to its side. To see why this is so, consider a given square. If you make a new square using as the side of the new square the diagonal of the given square, then the new square will be double the size of the original square. Chart 2 shows that doubling. In the left-hand portion of the chart, the diagonal of a square divides it into two triangles, and it takes four of these triangles to fill up a new square which has as its own side that diagonal. In the right-hand portion, the chart also shows what happens if we now make another new square, using as this newest square’s own side a half of the diagonal of the original square. The original square, now being itself a square on the newest square’s diagonal, will itself be double the size of this newest square— since this newest square is made up of two triangles, and it takes four of these triangles to make up the original square. �20 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Let us suppose that it were in fact possible to divide a square’s diagonal as well as its side into pieces that are all of the same size. Let us count the pieces and say that K is the number of pieces into which we have divided the diagonal, and that L is the number of pieces into which we have divided the side. By taking as a unit any of those equal pieces into which we have supposedly divided the diagonal and the side, we have measured the two lines together: the ratio which the number K has to the number L would be the same as the ratio which the square’s diagonal has to its side. Now, disregarding for a moment just what ratio the number K has to the number L, but considering only that it is supposed to be a ratio of numbers—which, as such, must be reducible to lowest terms—we can say that there would have to be two numbers (let us call them P and Q) such that (1) P and Q do not have a single factor in common and (2) the ratio that P has to Q is the same ratio that K has to L. Since the ratio that K has to L is supposed to be a ratio of numbers, there cannot be any such pair of numbers as K and L unless there is also such a pair of numbers as P and Q. (If the ratio of K to L is already in lowest terms, then we will just let K and L themselves be called by the names P and Q.) So now we have P being the number of equal pieces into which the square’s diagonal is divided, and Q being the number of such pieces into which the square’s side is divided. And now we will see that there just cannot be any such numbers as P and Q because this pair of numbers would have to satisfy contradictory requirements. The first requirement results from the necessities of numbers; the second, from the consequences of configuring lines. Because (as has been said) the ratio of P to Q is a ratio of numbers reduced to lowest terms, P and Q are numbers that cannot have a single common factor; but (as will be shown) because the ratio of P to Q is the same ratio that a square’s diagonal has to its side, P and Q must both be numbers divisible by the number two. That is to say, P and Q are such that they cannot both be divisible by the same number, and yet FLAUMENHAFT 21 they also must both be divisible by the number two—a direct contradiction. Now we must see just why the latter claim is true. We ask: why is it, that if any pair of numbers are in that special ratio which a square’s diagonal has to its side, then both numbers must be divisible by the number two? In order to see why, we must first take note of another fact about numbers: if some number has been multiplied by itself and the product is an even number, then the number that was multiplied by itself must itself have been a number that is even. (The reason is simple. A number cannot be both odd and even—it must be one or the other—and when two even numbers are multiplied together, then the number that is the product is also even; however, when two odd numbers are multiplied together, then the number that is the product is not even but odd.) That said, we are now ready to see why it is that if any two numbers are in that special ratio which a square’s diagonal has to its side, then they must have the factor two in common. The numbers P and Q have the factor two in common because both of them must be even. They must both be even because each of them when multiplied by itself will give a product that must be double another number—and therefore each must itself be double some number. Why? Look at the left-hand portion of Chart 3, and consider why P must be an even number. Because the square on the diagonal is double the square on the side, the number produced when P is taken P times is double the number produced when Q is taken Q times. Hence (since any number which is double some other number must itself be even) the multiplication of P by itself produces an even number, and hence the number P itself must be even. And now look at the right-hand portion of the chart, and consider why Q also must be an even number. Since it has already been shown that P must be an even number, it follows that there must be another number that is half of P—call this number H. But because the square on the side is double the �22 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW square on the half-diagonal, it follows that the number produced when Q is taken Q times is double the number produced when H is taken H times. Hence (since, as we said before, any number which is double some other number must itself be even) the multiplication of Q by itself produces a number that is even, and hence the number Q itself must be even. Since both P and Q must therefore be even numbers, they must have the number two as a common factor, even though they cannot have any number as a common factor. It is therefore absurd to say that there is a pair of numbers like P and Q. And hence there cannot be a pair of numbers like that K and L which we supposed that there could be. If a pair of numbers did in fact have the same ratio that the square’s diagonal has to its side, then no matter how many times we halved both numerical terms in the ratio, both terms that we got would have to remain even. But no pair of numbers can be like that. Each number of the pair would have to contain the number two as a factor in endless supply. Such a ratio would be irreducible to lowest terms, because no matter how many common two’s we were to strike as factors from the terms of the ratio, there would still have to be yet FLAUMENHAFT 23 another two in each. No number, however, can contain an endless supply of factors. It is therefore self-contradictory to say that any ratio can be a ratio of one number to another and also be the ratio of a square’s diagonal to its side. To avoid being led into absurdity, we must say that a square’s diagonal and its side are incommensurable. The diagonal of a square and its side are not the only pair of lines that are incommensurable. In the tenth proposition of the Tenth Book of the Elements, Euclid begins to show us how to find many incommensurable lines. After presenting thirteen sorts of them, he concludes the Tenth Book by saying that from what he has presented, there arise innumerably many others. That makes it hard to say what we mean when we say that one pair of lines is in the same ratio as another pair of lines. Even if we could somehow ignore the difficulty with the ratio of a square’s diagonal to its side, other ones like it would still keep popping up all over the place, since the ratio of a square’s diagonal to its side is only one of innumerably many ratios of incommensurable lines. And it is not only with lines that the difficulty arises. Whatever the kind of magnitudes that are being compared, whatever it is with respect to which they are greater or smaller, comparisons of muchness are not as such reducible to comparisons of manyness. The sizes of magnitudes cannot always be compared by comparing counts obtained by measuring. Magnitudes of any kind can be incommensurable. It is true that one cube may have to another, or one weight may have to another, the same ratio that three has to five, for example; but the one cube may have to the other, or the one weight may have to the other, the same ratio that a square’s diagonal has to its side. Magnitudes are called “incommensurable”—incapable of being measured together—not when they are of different kinds, but rather when they are not measurable by the same unit even though they are of the very same kind. Two magnitudes may be of the very same kind and yet it may be true that �24 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW whatever unit measures either one of them will not measure the other one too. By a unit’s “measuring” a magnitude, we mean that when the unit is multiplied (that is, when it is taken some number of times), it can equal that magnitude. Therefore, when magnitudes of the same kind are incommensurable, one of them has to the other a ratio that is not the same as any numerical ratio. The demonstrable existence of incommensurability means that comparisons of size can only be approximated by using numbers. We can, to be sure, be ever more exact—even as exact as we please—but if we wish to speak with absolute exactness, numbers fail us. For the ancient Pythagoreans, who were the first to conceive of the world as thoroughly mathematical, knowledge of the world was knowledge of numerical relationships. In the world stretching out around us, the Pythagoreans saw correlations between shapes and numbers, such as we encountered when we considered kinds of numbers, “square” numbers and “cube” numbers, for example. The Pythagoreans noted also that the movements of the heavenly bodies take place in cycles. Their changes in position, and their returns to the same configuration, have rhythms related by recurring numbers that we get by watching the skies and counting the times. With numbers, the world goes round. We are surrounded by a cosmos. (Cosmos is the Greek word for a “beautiful adornment.”) The beauty on high appears to us down here in numbers. But even the qualitative features of the world of nature show a wondrous correlation with numbers: numbers make the world sing. It is not merely that rhythm is numerical, it is that tone or at least pitch, is too. If a string stretched by a weight is plucked, it gives off some sound. The pitch of the sound will be lowered as the string is lengthened. If another string is plucked (a string of the same material and thickness, and stretched by the same weight) then the longer the string the lower will be the pitch of the sound produced by plucking it. Now, what set the Pythagoreans thinking was the rela- FLAUMENHAFT 25 tion between numbers and harmony. (Harmonia is the Greek word for “the condition in which one thing fits another”; a word from carpentry thus is used to describe music.) When the lengths of two strings of the sort just mentioned are adjusted so that one of them has to the other the same ratio that one small number has to another, or to the unit, then there is music. With the Pythagoreans’ mathematicization of music, mathematical physics begins. Thus not only were the sights on high seen to be an expression of mathematical relationships, so were the sounds down here that enter our souls and powerfully move what lies deep down within us. Thinking that nature is a display of numerical relationships, and that human souls are gotten into order by attending to those relationships, the Pythagoreans formed societies that sought to shape the thinking of the political societies of their time by being the givers of their laws. It is said that when the discovery of incommensurability was first revealed to outsiders, thus making public the insufficiency of number, the man who thus had undermined the Pythagorean enterprise was murdered. But never mind the whole wide world; even the relationships of size in mere geometrical figures cannot be understood simply in terms of multitudes. If geometry could in fact be simply arithmeticized; if we could just measure lines together, getting numbers which we could then just multiply together, and thus simply express as equations all the relationships that we have to handle, then much in Euclid, in Apollonius, and in the other classical mathematicians that is difficult to handle could be handled much more easily—and Descartes in the seventeenth century would not have had to undertake a radical transformation of geometry. Instead of manipulating equations, however, we must in the study of classical mathematics learn to deal with non-numerical ratios of magnitudes, and with boxes that are built from lines devised to exhibit those ratios. However, before we can freely deal with ratios, we must learn what can be meant by calling two ratios the same—even �26 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW when they are not the same as some numerical ratio. Euclid tells us that in the Fifth Book of the Elements. That is long before his discussion of number, which does not take place until the Seventh Book, thus raising a question about what kind of a teacher he is: after all, is it not a principle of good teaching that questions should be raised before answers are presented? Incommensurability is responsible for the difficulty of Euclid’s definition of sameness of ratio for magnitudes, as well as for the difficulty that modern readers encounter in the classical presentation of relationships of size generally. Let us now look at that definition. Part Four Muchness Related After All: Euclid’s Definition of Same Ratio We insist that even when two magnitudes are incommensurable, their ratio can be the same as the ratio of two other incommensurable magnitudes. For example, we insist that the ratio which one square’s diagonal has to its side is the same ratio which another square’s diagonal has to its own side. Sameness of ratio for magnitudes is therefore not to be defined in terms of measuring magnitudes: we could so define it only if we could divide each of the magnitudes into pieces, each equal to some magnitude that is small enough to be a suitable unit, and then, when we counted up all of those small equal pieces, we found no left-over unaccounted-for evensmaller piece of either of the magnitudes; but we cannot do that with magnitudes that are incommensurable. Although we can say that two ratios of magnitudes are the same as each other if they are both the same as the same ratio of numbers, we will not say that they are the same as each other only if they are both the same as the same ratio of numbers. What, then, is to be said instead? According to Euclid, this: “Magnitudes are said to be in the same ratio, the first to the second and the third to the fourth, when, if any equimultiples whatever be taken of the first and third, and any equi- FLAUMENHAFT 27 multiples whatever of the second and fourth, the former equimultiples alike exceed, are alike equal to, or alike fall short of, the latter equimultiples respectively taken in corresponding order.” When Euclid says for ratios of magnitudes, what sameness is, it is very difficult at first to understand just what he means. While his definition may be the proper departure point on a road that we need to travel, for a beginner it seems to constitute a locked gate. A key to open that locked gate, however, is this fact: while there is no ratio of numbers that is the same as a ratio of incommensurable straight lines, nonetheless every ratio of numbers is either greater or less than such a ratio of straight lines. That is to say: whatever ratio of numbers we may take, we can decide whether the ratio of one line to another is greater or less than it. For example, we might ask: which is greater—the ratio of the one line to the other, or the ratio of seven to twelve? We would divide the second line into twelve equal parts, and then take one of those pieces in order to measure the first line. Suppose that this first line, although it may be longer than six of these pieces put together, turns out to be shorter than seven of them. We would conclude that the first line has to the other line a ratio that is less than the numerical ratio of seven to twelve. Let us consider the ratio of lines that has been of such concern to us, the ratio which a square’s diagonal has to its side. And let us take the following ratio of numbers: the ratio which that three has to two. As we have seen, the ratio of lines that we are considering cannot be the same as any ratio of numbers whatever; so it must be either greater or else less than that ratio of numbers which we have taken. Which is it? It must be less—because if it were greater (that is: if the diagonal were greater than three-halves of the side), then the diagonal taken two times would have to be greater than the side taken three times. But if that were so, then a new square whose side was the diagonal of the original square would �28 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW have to be more than double the original square, as is shown in Chart 4. Having thus shown that the ratio of a square’s diagonal to its side is less than the ratio which three has to two, we could in like manner also show that the ratio of those two lines is greater than the ratio that, say, four has to three. And we could go on showing, for the ratio of any pair of numbers which we choose, that the ratio of a square’s diagonal to its side is greater or is less than the ratio of the pair of numbers chosen. Indeed, although no ratio of numbers is the same as the ratio of a square’s diagonal to its side, we can nonetheless confine this ratio of lines as closely as we please by using pairs FLAUMENHAFT 29 of ratios of numbers, as follows. (The results are shown in Chart 5.) Let us divide the square’s side into ten equal parts, and take such a tenth part as the unit; then the diagonal will be longer than fourteen of these units but shorter than fifteen of them; then let us consider what we get when we take as the unit the side’s hundredth part, and then its thousandth. We can go on and on in that way, eventually reaching numbers large enough to give us a pair of number-ratios that differ from each other as little as we please; we can show it to be greater than the ever-so-slightly-smaller number-ratio, and smaller than the ever-so-slightly-greater number-ratio. So, although the ratio of a square’s diagonal to its side cannot be the same as any number-ratio, it can be confined between a pair of number-ratios that differ from each other as little as we please. �30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW The question that we want to answer, however, is not when it is that ratios of magnitudes are almost the same, but rather when it is that they are the very same—even when they are not both the same as the same ratio of numbers. The key to the answer, restating what we said, is this: given any ratio of magnitudes, any ratio of numbers that is not the same as it must be either greater than it or smaller. That gives us the following answer: given two ratios of magnitudes, they will be the same as each other (whether or not they are the same as some ratio of numbers) whenever it is true that—taking any ratio of numbers whatever—if this ratio of numbers is greater than the one ratio of magnitudes, then it is also greater than the other; and if it is less than the one, then it is also less than the other. Euclid’s definition seems much more complicated than that, however, because it emphasizes “equimultiples.” Why does it do that? Because that makes it simpler to compare ratios of magnitudes with ratios of numbers: taking multiples is a way to make the comparisons without performing any divisions. We could in fact get a definition by using division, but the definition would be clumsier if we did. Let us put the notion of equi-multiples aside for a moment, and consider multiples simply, in contradistinction to divisions into parts. Suppose, for example, that the ratio of some magnitude (A) to another magnitude (B) is greater than the ratio of nine to seven but less than the ratio of ten to seven. This means that if we divide B into seven equal parts and we use as a unit (for trying to measure A) one of those seventh parts of B, then A will turn out to be greater than nine of those parts of B, but less than ten of them. If A and B happen to be incommensurable, then, no matter how many equal parts into which we divide B—that is, no matter how small we make the B-measuring unit with which we try to measure A, we will find that we cannot divide A into pieces of that size without having a smaller piece left over. FLAUMENHAFT 31 So, in comparing the ratio of A to B with the numerical ratio of some multitude m to some multitude n, it is less awkward to speak of A-taken-n-times and of B-taken-m-times than to speak of the little piece of A that may be left over when we divide A into m pieces that are each equal to the nth part of B—or, in other words, the little piece that may be left over in A, no matter how small are the equal parts into which we divide B. To make the requisite comparisons, we must consider multiples of magnitudes, but we need not consider parts of them; we have to multiply, but we do not also have to divide. Instead of trying to measure magnitudes together, by dividing them and counting the parts, we can speak merely of multiples of the magnitudes. What we have just now seen is this: to say that the ratio of magnitude A to magnitude B is either the same as the numerical ratio of m to n, or is greater or less than it, is to say that A-taken-n-times is either equal to B-taken-m-times, or is greater or less than it. Let us take that and put it together with what we saw earlier—which was this: to say that the ratio of A to B is the same as the ratio of C to D is to say that whatever numerical ratio you may take (say, of m to n) this ratio of numbers will not be the same as, or greater than, or less than one of the ratios of magnitudes unless it is likewise so with respect to the other one. All that remains is for multiples of a certain sort to be brought in—namely, “equi-multiples.” Equimultiples of two magnitudes are two other magnitudes that are obtained by multiplying the two original magnitudes an equal number of times. Here, as Chart 5 shows, both ratios’ antecedent terms (namely, A and C) are each taken n times, and their consequent terms (namely, B and D) are each taken m times. In other words, equimultiples (nA and nC) are taken of the first and third magnitudes (A and C); and also equimultiples (mB and mD) are taken of the second and fourth magnitudes (B and D). And m and n are any numbers at all: we are interested in all the equimultiples of the first and third magnitudes, and also of the second and fourth ones. �32 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Now at last we are in a position to see that Euclid’s definition is not so bewildering as might have seemed at first glance. There are several ways of saying what we can do with what we have seen. In abbreviated form, they are exhibited in Chart 7. FLAUMENHAFT 33 Now in interpreting the chart, just remember that whenever we say “IF something, THEN something else,” that is equivalent to saying “NOT something UNLESS something else.” So, the ways laid out in the chart are these: First way: Staying with ratios, we can say that two ratios of magnitudes (call them the ratios of A to B, and of C to D) are the same if, and only if, whatever numerical ratio we may take (say the ratio that some number called m has to some other number called n) the following is true: that numerical ratio which m has to n will not be the same as, or greater than, or less than one of the two ratios of magnitudes, unless it is likewise so with respect to the other one. Second way: We might want to get more explicit by making divisions into equal parts—that is, divide B into n equal parts and do the same to D (these, B and D, being the conse- �34 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW quent terms of the two ratios). Then the ratios would be the same if the following is true: antecedent term A will not be greater than, or less than, or equal to m of those nth parts of its consequent term B unless the other antecedent term C is likewise so with respect to that same number m of those nth parts of its own consequent term D. Third way: Someone who was willing to do all that (namely, willing to divide magnitudes into equal parts and then count them up and compare sizes) might insist on using fractions to restate that as follows: A will not be greater than, or less than, or equal to m/nths of B unless C is likewise so with respect to that same fraction (m/nths) of D. Fourth, and final way: Rather than getting into the complicated business of dividing, counting divisions, and comparing sizes, even though we can briefly restate it all by using fractions, we might simply take multiples alone; and then we would say that the ratios are the same if the following is true: A-taken-n-times will not be greater than, or less than, or equal to B-taken-m-times unless C-taken-exactly-as-manytimes-as-A is likewise so with respect to D-taken-exactly-asmany-times-as-B. Those are several ways to determine, despite incommensurability, when we may say that the ratio of one magnitude to another is the same as the ratio of a third magnitude to a fourth one. The first way formulates our initial insight, and the final way formulates Euclid’s definition of same ratio for magnitudes. Euclid’s definition, like the others, covers all ratios of magnitudes, whether or not they are the same as ratios of multitudes; but, unlike the others, it manages to do so by speaking simply of multitudes of magnitudes. Magnitudes and multitudes are not the same as each other, nor is either of them the same as ratios of them, but magnitudes and multitudes and their ratios are all, in a way, alike. How? In the first place, any two magnitudes of the same kind are equal, or else one of them is greater than the other; and likewise, any two multitudes are equal, or else one of them is FLAUMENHAFT 35 greater than the other. Moreover, any magnitude has a ratio to any other magnitude of the same kind, just as any multitude has a ratio to another multitude. Finally, any two ratios (whatever it may be that they are ratios of, whether magnitudes or multitudes) are the same as each other, or else one of them is greater than the other. This last fact supplies the insight that enabled Euclid to define same ratio for magnitudes regardless of whether the magnitudes are commensurable. Euclid’s definition can help us to understand what enabled Dedekind several thousand years afterward to define “the real numbers” in terms of “the rational numbers.” Dedekind found himself in the following situation. In modern times, after proportions containing magnitudes and multitudes had given way to equations containing “real numbers,” there was still some difficulty in saying just what “real numbers” were. To say much about the matter, it seemed necessary to refer not only to multitudes to which we come by counting (that is, numbers in the strict sense) but also to magnitudes that we visualize (namely, lines). If we place the counting numbers along a line (as in the top portion of Chart 8), it is then clear not only where to put all the “rational numbers,” including those which are fractional and those which are non-positive (as in the middle portion of the chart)—but also where to put such “irrationals” as “the square root of two.” To put “the square root of two” in its place, for example, (as in the bottom portion of the chart) just erect a square that has a side that is a unit long, and swing its diagonal down. �36 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW But if “the square root of two” is a number, it should be definable without appealing to visualization. After all, we need not visualize in order to count, or even to go on to think up fractions and negatives. That thought troubled Dedekind as he taught calculus in the nineteenth century, relying upon appeals to a number-line. He finally saw how to treat “real numbers” (the modern counterpart of Euclidean ratios of linear magnitudes) in terms of collections of “rational numbers” (the modern counterpart of Euclidean ratios of numbers), thus making it more plausible to speak of the “real numbers” as really numbers. Reading Dedekind is one way to think about what it means to rely on a system of “real numbers.” Unless we do think through the meaning of relying on a system of real numbers, many of the things we take for granted in the modern world are without foundation. But does Dedekind’s work simply represent progress beyond Euclid’s, or are very important differences covered over by the important similarities between what Dedekind had his mind on and Euclid his? Ratios relate multitudes, or magnitudes. Ratios (like multitudes) have homogeneity, and also (like magnitudes) have continuity; but magnitudes do not have homogeneity, and multitudes do not have continuity. Ratios themselves are FLAUMENHAFT 37 therefore not things of the very same sort as the things that they relate. Ratios are not things of the same sort as quotients either. To be sure, ratios are like quotients in that they are quantitative. Like any two magnitudes of the same sort, or any two multitudes—or any two quotients—any two ratios (whether of magnitudes or of multitudes) have an order of size. But quotients, unlike ratios, are like what they are quotients of: a quotient is itself a “real number” that is obtained through the operation of dividing a “real number” by a “real number”; if A and B are “real numbers,” then the quotient A/B is a “real number” also. Yet, although ratios and “real numbers” are things of different sorts, they do have a similarity—and not merely that they are both quantitative. Although the magnitudes are not homogeneous, and the multitudes are not continuous, the ratios are both homogeneous and continuous—and so also are “the real numbers.” Part Five Mathematics and the Modern Mind In all this, we have been considering the classical handling of numbers and lines in its difference from modern notions which conflate the two, but we have not considered what it was that led to the conflation. That is, indeed, an immensely important matter, but it is too long a story to be told now. To tell that tangled tale, one must traverse much of the road that constitutes the Mathematics Tutorial at St. John’s College. Along that arduous road, it is easy to be overwhelmed, however, and thus to lose sight of why it is worth our while to traverse it at all—so perhaps at least something should be said about it now. Euclid’s Elements prepares us for a higher study in geometry, the Conics of Apollonius. This was, for almost two-anda-half millenia, the classic text on the curves which—following the innovative terminology of Apollonius—came to be called the “parabola,” the “hyperbola,” and the “ellipse.” �38 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Apollonius’ conic sections were lines first obtained upon a plane by cutting a cone in various ways; they were then characterized by relative sizes and shapes of certain boxes formed by associated straight lines standing in certain ratios. After Descartes, although the names of those curves persisted, and they continued to be called collectively “the conic sections,” they nonetheless eventually ceased to be studied as such: they came to be studied algebraically. But although Descartes’ Geometry may be in fact what it has been called—the greatest single step in the progress of the exact sciences—no one could clearly see it as that without studying Apollonius, for Cartesian mathematics has shaped the world we live in and shapes our minds as well. Apollonius tells his tale obliquely. He does not give us questions, but rather gives us only answers that are too hard to sort out and remember unless we ourselves figure out what questions to ask. About Apollonius as a teacher we must ask whether his work is informed by wisdom and benevolence. Descartes did not think so. In his own Geometry, and in his sketch of rules for giving direction to the native wit, Descartes found fault with the ancient mathematicians. Descartes severely criticizes them—for being show-offs. He says that they made analyses in the course of figuring things out, but then, instead of being helpful teachers who show their students how to do what they themselves had done, they behaved like builders who get rid of the scaffolding that has made construction possible. Thus they sought to be admired for conjuring up one spectacular thing to look at after another, without a sign of how they might have found and put together what they present. Descartes also suggests, however, that they did not fully know what they were doing. They did not see that what they had could be a universal method. They operated differently for different sorts of materials because they treated materials for operation as simply objects to be viewed. Hence they learned haphazardly, rather than methodically, and therefore they did not learn much. Mathematics for them was a matter FLAUMENHAFT 39 of wonderful spectacle rather than material for methodical operation. The characteristic activity of the ancient mathematicians was the presentation of theorems, not the transmission and application of the ability to solve problems. They had not discovered the first and most important thing to be discovered: the significance of discovery. They had not discovered the power that leads to discovery and the power that comes from discovery. They were not aware that the first tools to build are tools for making tools. They were too clever to be properly simple, and too simple to be truly clever. They were blinded by a petty ambition. Too overcome by their ambition, they could not be ambitious on the greatest scale. Were the ancient mathematicians as teachers guilty of the charges set out in that Cartesian critique? Were they guilty of the obtuseness of which Descartes in his Geometry accused them—were they guilty of the desultory fooling-around and disingenuous showing-off of which Descartes had accused them earlier, in his Rules? You cannot know unless you study them. In any case, the study of Euclid and Apollonius gives access to the sources of the tremendous transformation in thought whose outcome has been the mathematicization of the world around us and the primacy of mathematical physics in the life of the mind. Scientific technology and technological science have depended upon a transformation in mathematics which made it possible for the sciences as such to be mathematicized, so that the exact sciences became knowledge par excellence. The modern project for mastering nature has relied upon the use of equations, often represented by graphs, to solve problems. When the equation replaced the proportion as the heart of mathematics, and geometric theoremdemonstration lost its primacy to algebraic problem-solving, an immense power was generated. It was because of this that Descartes’ Geometry received that accolade of being called the greatest single step in the progress of the exact sciences. To determine whether it was indeed such a step, we need to �40 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW know what it was a step from as well as what it was a step toward. We cannot understand what Descartes did to transform mathematics unless we understand what it was that underwent the transformation. By studying classical mathematics on its own terms, we prepare ourselves to consider Descartes’ critique of classical mathematics and his transformation not only of mathematics but of the world of learning generally—and therewith his work in transforming the whole wide world. It is in the study of Apollonius on the conic sections that the modern reader who has been properly prepared by reading Euclid can most easily see both the achievement of classical mathematics and the difficulty that led Descartes and his followers to turn away from it. It all has to do with ratio, and with notions of number and of magnitude. For Apollonius, as for Euclid before him, the handling of ratios is founded upon a certain view of the relation between numbers and magnitudes. When Descartes made his new beginning, almost two millenia later, he said that the ancients were handicapped by their having a scruple against using the terms of arithmetic in geometry. Descartes attributed this to their not seeing clearly enough the relation between the two mathematical sciences. Before modern readers can appreciate why Descartes wanted to overcome the scruple, and what he saw that enabled him to do it, they must be clear about just what that scruple was. Readers must, at least for a while, make themselves at home in a world where how-much and how-many are kept distinct, a world which gives an account of shapes in terms of geometric proportions rather than in terms of the equations of algebra. For a while, readers must stop saying “AB-squared,” and must speak instead of “the square arising from the line AB”; they must learn to put ratios together instead of multiplying fractions; they must not speak of “the square root of two.” Mathematical modernity gets under way with Descartes’ Geometry. By homogenizing what is studied, and by making the central activity the manipulative working of the mind, FLAUMENHAFT 41 rather than its visualizing of form and its insight into what informs the act of vision, Descartes transformed mathematics into a tool with which physics can master nature. He went public with his project in a cunning discourse about the method of well conducting one’s reason and seeking the truth in the sciences; and this discourse introduced a collection of scientific try-outs of this method, the third and last of which was his Geometry. For those who study Euclid and Apollonius in a world transformed by Descartes, many questions arise: What is the relation between the demonstration of theorems and the solving of problems? What separates the notions of how-much and how-many? Why try to overcome that separation by the notion of quantity as represented by a number-line? What is the difference between a mathematics of proportions, which arises to provide images for viewing being, and a mathematics of equations, which arises to provide tools for mastering nature? How does mathematics get transformed into what can be taken as a system of signs that refer to signs—as a symbolism which is meaningless until applied, when it becomes a source of immense power? What is mathematics, and why study it? What is learning, and what promotes it? With minds that are shaped by the thinking of yesterday and of the days before it, we struggle to answer the questions of today, in a world transformed by the minds that did the thinking. We will proceed more thoughtfully in the days ahead if we have thought through that thinking for ourselves. Our scientific past is not passé. �42 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 43 The Husserlian Context of Klein’s Mathematical Work Burt C. Hopkins I have to begin my remarks with the admission of my ignorance about their ultimate topic, which is neither Edmund Husserl’s nor Jacob Klein’s philosophy of mathematics nor, for that matter mathematics itself, but numbers. I do not know what numbers are. To be sure, I can say and read, usually with great accuracy, the numerals that indicate the prices of things, street addresses, what time it is, the totals on my pay stubs, the typically negative balance in my checkbook at the end of each month, and so on. Moreover, I know how to count and calculate with them, though usually with less accuracy no matter how much I try to concentrate on what I am doing. But if I am asked or try to think about what they are when, for instance, I say my address is six hundred fifty-three Bell Street, or that my house has two bedrooms, or that I only have twenty bottles of wine left, it is obvious to me that I do not know what I am talking about. Of course, I know that my address refers to my abode, that my bedrooms are the rooms in the house with beds, and that my wine is something I drink solely for its medicinal purposes. But the six hundred fiftythree, the two, or the twenty, what are they? I do not know. Likewise, if I am asked or try to think about what the numbers are with which I calculate, when for instance I think that because I need one-half pound of steak per person to feed each of my dinner guests, that I expect five guests, and that therefore I need two and a half pounds to feed my guests, Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and is Secretary of the International Circle of Husserl scholars. He is the author of a book, forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press, entitled Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein on the Origination of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics: An Inquiry into the Historicity of Meaning. �44 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW or when I think that the price of two and a half pounds of steak, at eight ninety-nine per pound is twenty-two dollars and forty-seven and a half cents, I know well enough what dinner guests, steak, and dollars and cents are. But the one half and the eight ninety-nine with which I calculate, and the two and a half and twenty-two and forty-seven and a half that are the results of my calculations, what are they? I do notknow. Some among us will say and, indeed have already said for a long time, that numbers, any numbers, are amounts of things, specifically, amounts of whatever it is that we count in order to answer the question how many of the things in question there are. In my examples above, to talk or think about two as the amount of my bedrooms, twenty as the amount of my bottles of wine, five as the amount of my dinner guests, eight ninety-nine as the amount of money it takes to buy a pound of steak, twenty-two and forty-seven and a half as the amount of money it takes to buy two and a half pounds of steak, certainly does seem to make sense. But what about my house address? Is six hundred fifty-three the answer to the question of how many of my house? Or is the one half pound of steak needed to feed each dinner guest the answer to the question how many of pounds of steak? The numbers here do not straight away appear to be telling us how many houses my house is, since the answer to that question is that it is not many at all but one; neither do numbers tell us how many pounds of steak are needed to feed each dinner guest because each does not need many pounds at all but only a half a pound. And, to complicate things deliberately, let us consider what it means, numerically speaking, if I have a negative balance in my checkbook at the end of the month. Whatever the amount of the negative number, let us hypothetically say it is an even negative one hundred six dollars, that certainly does not seem to provide the answer to the question of how many dollars and cents I have. For the moment, however, let us push these concerns aside and assume that a number really is the amount of some- HOPKINS 45 thing. Moreover, let us suppose that the amount of something or its number first makes sense to us when we count more than one of something. Finally, let us suppose that any group, that is, any collection of more than one of something, no matter how big, has a number, which is to say, an exact or definite amount that answers the question how many with respect to the things in the group, and that this can be arrived at by counting. Does this really answer the question what a number is? Or, more precisely, does this really answer the question what numbers are? I say numbers because when we count we always use more than one number to arrive at the exact amount of something, even though once we arrive there we conclude the count by saying a single number. What, then, are the numbers two, three, seven, or, if I have a lot of enumerative stamina, five hundred eighteen, that I say when, having nothing better to do, I count the grains of sand I have decided to put into separate piles? Or, what are the numbers two, three, seven, five hundred eighteen, that I say when I count the crystals of salt that I use to duplicate the numbers of grains of sand I previously put into piles? The things counted and therefore their amounts are not the same; that is to say, an amount of grains of sand and an amount of salt crystals are different things. But are their numbers the same? Is the two that is the amount of grains of sand the same two that is the amount of crystals of salt? If number is supposed really to be the amount of something, and if the stress is placed on the of something, then number, as its (the something’s) amount, would be nothing more or less than the two grains of sand, or, the two crystals of salt, both of which, being different somethings, would also be different numbers. This situation would be illustrated were I to say that there are a number of people I do not know in the room. If I proceeded to count them, whatever number I came up with would be not just an exact amount of anything whatever, but precisely the exact amount of people I do not know in the room. �46 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW On the other hand, if the stress were placed on the how many of the amounts in question, then two would indeed be how many grains of sand and crystals of salt there are in my smallest piles of each, and therefore their amounts and hence numbers would indeed be the same. This situation would be illustrated were I to say all dogs, if they are naturally formed, have the same number of legs, namely, four. The exact number is the same, though the legs are not, because, silly as it sounds to say this, different dogs have different legs. Now some might want to put an end to this whole line of inquiry, but especially to my last question about whether numbers of different things are different or the same, by saying that the obvious answer is that what numbers are are abstract concepts. Hence they are really ideas, ideas that we can relate to different things when we want to count or want to apply the results of our calculations. But we do not have to. Thus I can add 4 to 6 and get 10. I can multiply 10 times 10 and get 100, and so on, without having to think or answer anybody’s question about 4 of what, or 6 of what, or 10 of what, and so on. Just as it makes perfect sense to say that 2 plus 2 is 4, it does not make any sense to say 2 plus 3 is 4, because everybody who can count knows 2 plus 3 is 5. Perhaps. But perhaps not. And this is where Husserl and then eventually Klein come in. But first Husserl. It is generally known that Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher who, as the founder of the so-called phenomenological movement in philosophy, was responsible for one of the two dominant approaches to philosophy in the last century (the other being so-called analytic philosophy), was originally a mathematician. Known likewise is that his first book, published in 1891, is titled Philosophy of Arithmetic.1 However, the contents of this book are not so well known, because, among other reasons, soon after its publication both its author and Gottlob Frege had some very critical things to say about them. For our purposes, however, the contents of the book are more important than their criticism of them. From beginning HOPKINS 47 to end, the book concerns the answer to the question whether numbers are really abstract concepts that make perfect sense without saying or thinking what they are numbers of; or whether to make sense as numbers, numbers have to be spoken or thought about as being numbers of something. Husserl began his answer to this question by first distinguishing between two kinds of numbers, one of which he called “authentic” and the other “symbolic.” We will discuss the latter first, because even though, as its name suggests, it is the less authoritative kind of number, it is also the one with which we are usually more familiar. A number is symbolic in Husserl’s understanding when the number and the sign used to designate it are indistinguishable. For example: 3. Most of us have no doubt been taught or learned that this is the number three rather than what it really is, which is a number sign or numeral. Indeed, even though most of us are also aware of other numerals, for instance, Roman numerals, my suspicion is that when we see such numerals we immediately interpret what they really mean in terms of our numeral system, a system that was actually invented by the Arabs. A symbolic number, then, is a number that most of us—with or without thinking about it—identify with the sign that we either write or read. Most of us, that is, unless we have thought about the fact that the signs used to designate numerals, and therefore these numerals themselves, are based on what were originally and still remain conventions, even if they are no longer recognized as such. Different conventions mean different numerals, as we have just seen. But what about the numbers? Do different numerals mean different numbers? Many when faced with this question conclude no. Their thinking here is that numbers remain the same, however different the numerals that express them, because numbers are really concepts. Hence, no matter what numeral or word is used to express the number three, ‘three’ is a concept that remains the same because it is not identical with some numeral (which is subject to change) or with a word from some language (which is �48 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW subject to variability). Moreover, for just this reason number is a properly abstract concept: it remains identical with itself no matter what sign or word is used to express it. Despite the sophistication of this view of number, it is dead wrong according to Husserl, because if numbers were really abstract concepts in this sense, then the most basic operation of arithmetic—addition—becomes unintelligible. For instance, if in adding the number two to the number two, what we are really adding is the abstract concept of the number two to another (!) abstract concept of the number two, then arriving at their putative sum, the abstract concept ‘four’, becomes a great mystery. Most obviously, there is the problem of how a concept that is supposed to remain identical can nevertheless change into another concept that is also supposed to remain identical. That is, the abstract concept ‘two’ is not supposed to be able to change as words and signs can and do, but to remain what it is, namely, the number two. Yet precisely this supposition has to be abandoned if talk of adding the concept of two to the concept of two to get the concept of four is to make sense, since when the number two is added to the number two the sum is not two number twos but the number four. Indeed, it is precisely this consideration that led Husserl to the realization that authentic numbers are not abstract concepts. This is, admittedly, a difficult thought. What, then, are they, these authentic numbers, if they are not abstract concepts? Husserl’s answer is that they are the definite amounts of definite things that have been grouped together by the mind. What kind of things? Literally any kind. What definite amounts? Pretty much the first ten, namely two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Why are zero and one not among these? Because they are not definite amounts, which in the case of zero is obvious, while in the case of one is less so but still fairly obvious, since one is not an amount; it is not many. What has the mind to do with authentic numbers? Plenty for Husserl, since not only do authentic numbers first show up in counting, but also, only those definite things can HOPKINS 49 be counted that have been grouped together by it to compose what Husserl, and as we shall also see, ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians, called a multiplicity. Moreover— and this is the most important consideration for our purposes—an authentic number really is something that manifestly cannot be found in either the reality of the definite things that are counted or in any relationship among them. This last point requires closer scrutiny. If we ask how is it that the first authentic number, two, is able to register a definite amount of definite things as ‘two’, in the sense that in saying or thinking the number two, the things in question are recognized as being exactly two with regard to their number, we are then asking about something that is different from the things that this number numbers as two. Husserl, following a long philosophical and mathematical tradition, refers to what is asked about in this question as the unity of this number. In asking it, we are asking how it is that distinct things, in this case two of them, can nevertheless be brought together as precisely this, namely, the two that is articulated by the number two. This all-important question about the unity of authentic numbers becomes more explicit when we consider Husserl’s reason for thinking that only the first ten or so definite amounts can be authentic numbers. Husserl’s reason is deceptively simple: the mind can only apprehend—all at once—each of the definite items that are numbered in a number when these things do not exceed ten. When the amount of definite things in a multiplicity of things exceeds ten, each one of them cannot be apprehended all at once by the mind as when, for instance, it counts thirty of them. These considerations, do not provide us yet with Husserl’s answer to the question of the unity of authentic numbers, but only address what is at stake in it. What is at stake is that in registering the definite amount of definite things, an authentic number is bringing them together in a way that cannot be explained by each of the things so brought together, no matter whether these are considered by themselves or as each relates to the other things. Each considered �50 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW by itself cannot explain it for the simple reason that authentic numbers are always amounts of something that is more than one. Considering the relations among things cannot explain it either—they may be side by side, or on top of, or bigger and smaller than one another, and so on, because none of these relations is even remotely numerical. Each definite thing, as one thing, can only be registered as having a number by being brought together with other definite things, each of which is also one, a bringing together which does not apprehend the things brought together singly but precisely as all together. Husserl’s explanation of how the mind does this is as simple as it is remarkable. The mind combines things into groups or collections in such a way that what is grouped or collected forms a whole that is different from the group members or collected items, even though as the whole of just these members or items, it is clearly related to them. For example, in a row of trees, a gaggle of geese, or a flock of birds, what is named by the row, gaggle, and flock is the whole Husserl has in mind, a whole that cannot be separated from what it is a whole of any more than it can be identified totally with it. Authentic numbers for Husserl are also comprised of wholes like this, so that the whole of the number three is clearly related to each of the things it registers as three, without, however, its being totally identical with them. Two distinct but related things are involved for Husserl here. One is the fact that there are groups and collections of this kind, and the other is that they have their origin in the mind. The talk about the mind’s involvement in originating groups and collections of things does not mean that these things are only figments of the mind. Husserl only mentions the mind to explain something very specific, the fact that the unity, the whole of authentic numbers that we have been talking about, is neither an abstract concept nor something that can be explained by the definite things it registers as to their exact number. Once this is recognized, and only once it is recognized, are we then in a position to understand why Husserl HOPKINS 51 tried to explain this unity—this being a whole—of authentic numbers by the way the mind organizes and grasps things as groups and collections. Husserl is very specific about this. The mind considers each thing that it groups or collects as something that belongs to the whole of whatever it is grouping and collecting. In the case of authentic numbers, it considers each as something, a certain one, without attending in the slightest to any other qualities that belong to what it collects. This is the case because unlike other groups and collections, which are groups of something specific, for example, geese or trees, authentic numbers are wholes of quite literally anything whatever. The moons of Jupiter, Homer’s psyche, the city of Annapolis, etc., can be collected together and the collection registered as an authentic number—so long, of course, as the amount in the collection does not get too big. The process of forming authentic numbers, as well as other kinds of groups and collections, is expressed in language according to Husserl by the word “and,” although both this process and the wholes it generates are for him most decidedly not anything linguistic. Hence the formation of a group, such as the group or whole of students in a room, comes about when one student and one student and one student and one student, and so on, are collected by the mind. Note well, however, that in this example not just anything can be grouped together, but only what belongs to the whole that is being grouped, namely, students. Likewise, the formation of a collection, the whole of which is the red objects in a room, comes about when one of any kind of red object and one of any kind of red object and one of any kind of red object, and so on, are collected by the mind. Again, as in the whole that is a group, not just anything can be collected. Finally, the formation of a collection, the whole of which is its number, comes about when something and something are collected, and then the process is stopped. More precisely, when the process of collecting is stopped after something and something are collected, the first authentic number, two, is the result. Likewise, when something and �52 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW something, and something are collected, the authentic number three is the result, and so on, until the limit of authentic numbers, ten, comes about. Authentic numbers, then, are just such collections of something, which is to say, of anything that can be considered as simply one thing, without any other qualities or determinations of it being relevant to its belonging to a collection that is numbered. Since its being just one is the only thing relevant here, Husserl follows a long tradition and refers to these collected ones as “units.” Because authentic numbers are amounts of units, Husserl can explain on their basis what the understanding of numbers as abstract concepts cannot, namely, addition. Adding two and two involves the combination of ‘one unit and one unit’ with ‘one unit and one unit’, and hence, there is no mystery here, since ‘one unit and one unit, added to ‘one unit and one unit’, yields ‘one unit and one unit, and one unit, and one unit’, which is the authentic number four. Before considering what Husserl thinks happens to numbers when their number exceeds ten and they are no longer authentic, let us step back for a minute. I have been talking now for some time about something I have acknowledged my ignorance of, namely, what numbers are. After considering two common views of them—one that considers them to be amounts of something and the other that considers them to be abstract concepts—I have turned our attention to the contents of Husserl’s book on the philosophy of arithmetic. The very question it attempts to answer is which of these two views of number is correct. So far I have pointed out that Husserl begins this investigation by distinguishing between authentic and symbolic numbers, both of which we have now discussed in some detail. Indeed, at this point it might seem that Husserl’s answer to the question of whether numbers are amounts of something or abstract concepts is pretty obvious, since authentic numbers can explain what abstract conceptual numbers cannot, namely, the basic operations of arithmetic. However, things are not that simple because when we con- HOPKINS 53 sider numbers greater than ten, Husserl thinks that they become inauthentic, as they cannot be authentic. They cannot be authentic, it will be recalled, because the mind cannot grasp more than ten things all at once. Symbolic numbers on Husserl’s understanding are therefore also in this sense inauthentic. Even though they are inauthentic, however, symbolic numbers are not inferior, mathematically speaking, to authentic ones for Husserl. On the contrary, because they deal with numbers larger than ten, they come in handy any time calculation with large numbers is required, since without them, we would be reduced to counting units when we calculate with such numbers, which no doubt would be both tedious and time consuming. At the time Husserl wrote his first book, mathematicians and philosophers wanted an explanation how it was possible to do what no one denies can be done: to calculate with inauthentic numbers, which are symbolic and so in some sense are abstract concepts. In the first ten chapters of The Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl attempted to prove that authentic numbers and symbolic numbers are logically equivalent because each refers to the same objects, specifically, the collections of more than one unit that authentic numbers register the first ten amounts of. He argued that authentic numbers do this directly and symbolic numbers indirectly. When Husserl reached chapter eleven, however, he realized something that shook him to his depths, quite literally. (He later recounted a decade-long depression that ensued as a result.) He realized not only that symbolic numbers did not refer to the same objects as authentic ones—to collections of units—but also that the basic operations with quantities that are known, what he called general arithmetic, could only be explained on the basis of the very opposite of what he had argued in the first ten chapters. General arithmetic only makes sense if the numbers it uses are symbolic in the sense I discussed above, wherein the sign and the numerical concept are identical so that a number is interpreted to be the sign that we write or read—what Husserl called “sense- �54 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW perceptible” signs. Husserl also realized he had no idea of how this is possible. As he described it some two decades later, “how symbolic thinking is ‘possible’, how...mathematical...relations constitute themselves in the mind...and can be objectively valid, all this remained mysterious.”2 Thus we can say that, while recognizing that some numbers are clearly definite amounts of units and others are abstract, symbolic concepts because they do not refer to such units, Husserl came to see that he did not know what either of them really is. Husserl eventually thought he could solve this mystery by explaining the manipulation of symbolic numbers, or, more precisely, number symbols, as well as all mathematical symbols, in terms of what he called “the rules of a game,” rules that were invented not by mathematics but by logic. Mathematics thus came to be understood by Husserl as a branch of logic. Moreover, Husserl thought that all the rules invented by logic have their foundation in concepts that are true of other concepts, these other concepts, in turn, being true of anything whatever, that is, anything that can be experienced and therefore thought of as an individual object. As a consequence, Husserl’s eventual explanation of how symbolic mathematics is possible, in The Crisis of European Sciences, was really not so far from his failed first attempt at explanation. To be sure, his later explanation does not characterize number symbols as referring to the same objects that authentic numbers do, namely to units, but it did trace the truth of the logic that invented the rules for manipulating them to a basis in individual objects. This, we shall soon see, is a problem if we follow Jacob Klein’s mathematical investigations, which I am going to suggest can best be followed by first considering their Husserlian context. The bulk of Klein’s mathematical investigations are contained in his Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, which as many of you know was originally published in German as two long articles in 1934 and 1936 and translated into English in 1968 by St. John’s tutor and former Dean of the College, Eva Brann.3 The historical nature of the HOPKINS 55 topic announced by its title might initially seem to be far removed from what we now know is the systematic nature of Husserl’s topic in Philosophy of Arithmetic. However, one does not need to read very far in Klein’s book to discover that he understands the key to the historical investigation of his topic to lie precisely in the distinction between symbolic and non-symbolic numbers. Specifically, he expresses the view from the start not only that the symbolic number concept is something that makes modern, algebraic mathematics possible, but also, that symbolic numbers were entirely unknown to ancient Greek mathematicians and philosophers. The very point of departure for Klein’s investigation of the origin of algebra is therefore informed by his view that unless the nonequivalence of ancient Greek numbers and modern symbolic numbers is recognized, the change in the nature of the very concept of number that took place with the transformation of classical mathematics into modern mathematics in the sixteenth century will go unrecognized. Klein’s thought here can be made clearer by closely considering precisely how he characterizes the difference between the ancient Greek numbers and the modern symbolic ones. Ancient Greek numbers or arithmoi are manifestly not abstract concepts, but rather beings that determine definite amounts of definite things. In contrast, symbolic numbers are characterized by him to be abstract concepts that do not refer to anything definite except that which is referred to by their sense-perceptible signs. When we consider the fact that Husserl articulated the difference between authentic and symbolic numbers in precisely these terms, the resemblance between Klein’s and Husserl’s view of the distinction between symbolic and non-symbolic numbers is striking. So striking is it in fact that some have drawn the conclusion that Husserl should be given precedence in this matter, as either the source or the major influence on Klein’s formulation of the distinction in question.4 These matters, however, are not so simple. To begin, it is important to keep in mind that Husserl sought in Philosophy of Arithmetic to demonstrate the logical �56 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW equivalence of non-symbolic and symbolic numbers, whereas Klein’s book begins with the insight that this is impossible, an insight, as we have seen, Husserl arrived at only reluctantly. Moreover, subsequent to his first book Husserl explains the relationship between symbolic and authentic numbers as a matter of logic. In his Logical Investigations (1900) and Formal and Transcendental Logic (1927), the relationship is explained as a matter of the translation of logical truths into rules for the manipulation of symbols. Logical truths for Husserl are rooted in concepts that are true of other concepts, other concepts that, in turn, can be traced back to truths that are rooted in individual objects. Husserl calls the rules established on the basis of this logic the “rules of a game,” because even though they permit calculational operations on symbols that yield mathematically correct results, these operations and hence the very process of symbolic calculation have nothing to do with insight into concepts that pertain to the objects to which they are ultimately related, and therefore nothing to do with real knowledge. In a word, Husserl thought he resolved the issue of symbolic and authentic numbers by exposing symbolic calculation to be a “technique” whose cognitive justification can only be provided on the basis of the conceptual knowledge of individual objects that logic provides. Klein, however, thought otherwise. He thought that it is impossible to explain the sharp distinction between non-symbolic and symbolic numbers on the basis of the knowledge— logical or any other kind—of individual objects. He conducted an historical investigation into how an aspect proper to ancient Greek arithmoi was transformed into modern symbolical numbers and concluded that the objects referred to by each kind of number are fundamentally different. The objects referred to by arithmoi are definite, which is to say, individual. The objects referred to by symbolic numbers are indefinite. They refer neither to individuals nor to their qualities and are therefore indeterminate. Individual objects, both Husserl and Klein agree, are objects that we encounter in our HOPKINS 57 experience of the world and thus, they can be pointed to. Moreover, their qualities, which either some (general qualities) or all (universal qualities) individual objects share, are qualities that, even though they are not individual, can nevertheless be spoken about in connection with the individual objects that we do encounter in the world. For instance, we can point to dogs and cats, each one of which is therefore individual. We can also talk about their general or universal qualities and relate these to the individual dogs and cats that we encounter in the world. Indeterminate objects, on the contrary, can never be encountered in our experience of the world, and therefore they cannnot be pointed to. Husserl and Klein also agree that because their objects are not determinate in this very precise sense, symbolic numbers cannot have a direct relationship to any individual objects in the world or to their qualities. Finally, both Husserl and Klein agree that symbolic numbers themselves, and not their indeterminate objects, are nevertheless encountered in the world: namely, they are encountered as the sense-perceptible signs that, we mentioned earlier, many of us interpret as numbers. Where Husserl and Klein disagree, or more accurately, where Klein would have had to express his departure from Husserl’s understanding of the relationship between symbolic and non-symbolic numbers, had he chosen to do so, has to do with the possibility of theoretically clarifying the philosophical meaning of symbolic numbers. Husserl thought this could be done—indeed, he thought he did it in his two books on logic. Klein did not think it could be done. In fact, as we shall see, Klein’s mathematics book explains why the very attempt to clarify theoretically the philosophical meaning of symbolic numbers and mathematical symbolism generally is doomed to failure. It is so doomed because all the concepts available to provide such a theoretical clarification, without exception, only make sense when the philosophers or anyone else using them are talking about individual objects and their qualities. Klein explains why this is the case by establishing a fundamental difference in what he calls the “conceptuality”5 of �58 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the concepts that belong to ancient Greek and modern science. He uses this term to articulate both the way in which the concepts proper to these respective sciences are structured and the status of their relationship to the non-conceptual realities of both the mind and the world. Klein thinks that despite the continuity discernable in the technical vocabulary of ancient Greek mathematics and philosophy and their modern counterparts, the mathematical and philosophical significance of each of the words in it is nevertheless radically divergent for the ancients and moderns. Thus in his view the fundamental significance of words like knowledge, truth, concept, form, matter, nature, energy, number, and so on is completely different for the ancient Greeks and the moderns because of the differences in the respective conceptualities of each. In other words, Klein thinks that these conceptualities shape the meaning of words, rather than the other way around, that is, rather than the significance of words shaping the structure of the conceptualities. Klein locates the key example of the shift from the ancient Greek to the modern conceptuality in the transformation the concept of number undergoes in the sixteenth century. Prior to Viète’s invention of the mathematical symbol, the concept of number according to Klein always only meant a definite amount of definite things, a meaning that was established by the ancient Greeks and that remained operative in both European mathematics and the Europeans’ everyday praxis of counting and calculation until the invention of algebra. Klein claimed in his book—but did not elaborate—that this transformation is paradigmatic for the conceptuality that structures the modern consciousness of the world. Before considering in more detail Klein’s account of this exemplary transformation of the conceptuality of number, a few words about the potentially misleading talk of the “concept” of number are in order. Klein engages in such talk when his investigation is comparing what he refers to as the different “number concepts” of ancient Greek and modern mathe- HOPKINS 59 matics. It is potentially misleading because for Klein the most salient difference between in these number concepts is located in the fact that the ancient Greek “concept” of number is precisely something that is not at all a concept, but a being, while the modern “concept” of number is precisely something that is not a being but a concept. The object of the word “concept” in these comparative contexts is, I think, clearly the “conceptuality” of ancient Greek and modern numbers, which means it would be a mistake to attribute to Klein in such contexts the thought that in ancient Greek and modern mathematics numbers are concepts, albeit different in kind. Klein, however, also talks about the ancient Greek “arithmos-concept” (arithmos-Begriff or Anzahl-Begriff) and the modern “number-concept” (Zahl-Begriff), which again is potentially misleading, for the same reasons. Yet here, too, careful consideration again discloses that such talk always occurs within the context of his comparison of what he presents as the different ancient Greek and modern characterizations of numbers, only one of which formulated them as concepts. Before elaborating Klein’s account of these different characterizations, I want to raise and then answer one more question. From what perspective was Klein able to compare the ancient Greek and modern numbers? Klein, after all, was neither ancient nor Greek but, by his own admission, thoroughly modern. How, then, was he able nevertheless to get sufficient distance from the presuppositions that inform his modernity, from his modern outlook and consciousness, such that he could encounter and investigate what, again by his own admission, are the radically different presuppositions of the ancient Greeks? I think the answer to this question can be found in the single reference in Klein’s published work to Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic.6 It occurs in “Phenomenology and the History of Science,” an article Klein wrote for a memorial volume of essays on Husserl’s phenomenology published in 1940, two years after Husserl’s death. In this article Klein did �60 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW not at all hesitate to articulate the philosophical significance of his 1934 and 1936 investigations of ancient Greek mathematics and the origin of modern algebra in terms of Husserl’s last writings, which were published in 1936 and1939.7 In these writings Husserl traces the cause of the crisis of European sciences to their failure to grasp properly the scope and limits of scientific methods that are rooted in modern mathematics for understanding the non-physical, which is to say human spiritual reality together with the world of its immediate concerns. I will come back to this theme at the end of my remarks. I want to focus for now on Klein’s reference to what he characterizes in this article as Husserl’s “earliest philosophical problem,” namely “the ‘logic’ of symbolic mathematics.” He asserts, “The paramount importance of this problem can be easily grasped, if we think of the role that symbolic mathematics has played in the development of modern science since the end of the sixteenth century.” Klein concludes his remarks on “Husserl’s logical researches” by saying that these researches “amount in fact to a reproduction and precise understanding of the ‘formalization’ which took place in mathematics (and philosophy) ever since Viète and Descartes paved the way for modern science.” Klein’s qualification that Husserl’s logical researches “amount . . . to” both a “reproduction” and “precise understanding” of the “formalization” in mathematics initiated by Viète contains the key to my answer to the question. It indicates that Klein, but not Husserl, was aware of the historical significance of these researches. The result of the “formalization” in mathematics referred to here by Klein concerns the “indeterminacy” of the object of mathematical symbols that I called attention to earlier, the absence of any direct reference to both individual objects and their general and universal qualities that is the mathematical symbols’ most salient characteristic. Because Klein thought Husserl’s logical researches in Philosophy of Arithmetic amount in fact to the reproduction and precise understanding of the historical genesis of this formalization, it would follow from this that Klein under- HOPKINS 61 stood that work’s investigation of the relationship between authentic and symbolic numbers to mirror what his own research presents as the relationship between the ancient Greek arithmos and the modern symbolic number. This being the case, the question of image and original suggested by my mirror metaphor arises, namely, did Husserl’s investigations mirror Klein’s or Klein’s Husserl’s? Here I think chronology is relevant, which would suggest that what enabled Klein to encounter the presuppositions of both his own modern as well as the ancient Greek conceptuality was Husserl’s reluctant discovery in Philosophy of Arithmetic that the formal conceptual status of symbolic numbers cannot be rendered intelligible in terms of authentic numbers. By saying this, however, I want to emphasize in the strongest terms possible that I am not suggesting what some others have suggested, namely, that what makes Klein’s comparison of the conceptuality of the ancient Greek and modern numbers possible is his projection of Husserl’s “concepts” of authentic and symbolic numbers back into the history of mathematics.8 On the contrary, I want to suggest and then develop a much more subtle and more radical claim. Husserl’s failure provided Klein with the guiding clue that enabled him to trace and illuminate certain historical dimensions of that very failure. Klein detected an historical transformation of non-symbolic numbers: an aspect of their conceptuality was transformed into symbolic numbers. This discovery resulted in a more definitive philosophical account of both kinds of numbers. Moreover, Klein discovered something of which Husserl had not the slightest inkling, namely, that the formal conceptuality of symbolic numbers, and symbolic conceptuality in general, cannot be made intelligible on the basis of theoretical concepts traceable to ancient Greek science. And that discovery highlighted something more ominous: built into symbolic cognition is the misguided selfunderstanding that evaluates its own cognitive status as the ever-increasing perfection of ancient Greek science’s theoretical aspirations. �62 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Klein’s account of the origination of algebra is really the story of the simultaneous invention of the mathematical symbol, the symbolic formulae it makes possible, and the resultant novel art of symbolic calculation. It is a story with a such a complex array of intricate subplots and such a diverse cast of characters that it is not always easy to follow the action, especially given its approximately two-thousand-year time span. It is also a difficult story to follow, since not only are there really no good and bad guys to identify with or to dislike, but its beginning as well as its ending is obscure. The action takes place, for the most part, in the realm of pure beings and pure concepts, a realm that is invisible to the eyes and in which all the actors are likewise invisible and therefore, with some justification, referred to by many as “abstract.” Despite its otherworldly aura, it is a story well worth trying to follow because what it is about is the origin of the mistaken identity of the very technique that has enabled mathematical physics and the technology spawned from it quite literally to transform the world. Unraveling the plot is an exercise in discovering the true identity of this technique and, in the process, rediscovering something essential about our relation to the world that the events surrounding the technique’s origination continue to make it easy for us to forget. Turning now to the story: we have already seen that nonsymbolic and symbolic numbers are key players in Klein’s tale. Guided by our discussion of Husserl’s account of them, we are in a position to see what it means to say with Klein that the non-symbolic numbers of the ancient Greeks are not concepts, let alone abstract concepts: being definite amounts of definite things, arithmoi were initially understood not only to be inseparable from things but also to be what is responsible for the well-ordered arrangement proper to all their parts and qualities. In other words, they were understood by the Pythagoreans as the very being of everything that is. To be is to be countable, and because to be countable each thing has to be one, the one was very important, as was the odd and the HOPKINS 63 even, since whatever is counted ends up being odd or even. The one or the unit (monas), as something without which counting is impossible, is therefore the most basic principle (archê) of arithmos. The odd and the even, which order the arithmos of everything countable, insofar as it has to be one or the other, manifest the first two kinds (eidê) of arithmoi. Moreover, since the even can be divided without ever arriving at a final arithmos, while the odd cannot be divided evenly at all, because a one is always left over, these two kinds are understood, respectively, as unlimited and limit. It is important to note here three things, according to Klein: (1) the arithmoi are inseparable from that which is countable; (2) the most basic principle as well as the kinds of arithmoi are not themselves arithmoi. In other words, they are not numerical if by numerical we understand, as the ancient Greeks did, number to be a definite amount of definite things; and (3) the arithmoi, being inseparable from what is countable, are not abstract entities, and because they are different from both their most basic principle and their kinds, they are not even remotely “conceptual,” assuming for the moment that it is even appropriate to use this adjective to refer to the archê and eidê of arithmoi. It is important to note these three things because, on Klein’s telling, no matter how much the ancient Greek characterization of the mode of being of arithmoi changes in what become, in Plato and Aristotle, the two paradigmatic ways of its understanding it, these three things about the arithmoi remain constant. In Klein’s words, “All these characterizations stem from one and the same original intuition [Anschauung], one oriented to the phenomenon of counting.”9 While the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes brought to an end the Pythagorean dream of a world in which being counted was identical with being measured, Plato’s positing of the invisible, indivisible, and therefore sensibly pure mode of being of the archê of arithmoi brought into being another dream, the dream of what Klein calls an arithmological ordering of the eidê responsible for arithmoi as �64 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW well as anything else that is a being. As Klein relates it, Plato realized that the Pythagorean account of the archê of arithmoi, the one or the unit, as something that is quite literally inseparable from the sensible things that are countable on its basis, presented an obstacle to understanding the true relation of arithmoi to the soul when it counts. This is the case because Plato must have noticed that even before, the soul counts each one of the definite things that it perceives, it already has some understanding of the arithmoi it employs in arriving at the arithmos of such things. According to Klein, Plato must have thought this possible because prior to counting sensible things the soul has available to it arithmoi that are definite amounts of intelligible (noêta) units, intelligible in the sense that they cannot be seen with the eyes, cannot be divided like the things seen with the eyes, and cannot be unequal like the things seen by the eyes. Just like the Pythagoreans’ sensible arithmoi, these intelligible arithmoi are either odd or even, though unlike the Pythagorean eidê, those belonging to intelligible arithmoi are likewise intelligible, and thus cannot be seen with the eyes. Now it has to be stressed here that absolutely nothing is either abstract or general about Plato’s intelligible arithmoi. They are not abstract because they are not lifted off anything. They are not general because they are precisely definite amounts of definite things, albeit in this case the things are noeta. Moreover, they are not general because, just like the Pythagorean arithmoi, they are not concepts: each arithmos is a definite whole, the unity of which is exactly so and so many intelligible units. What allows intelligible numbers to be used in the counting of anything whatever is what Plato’s Socrates never tired of pointing out to his interlocutors, namely, that the true referents of our speech, in counting off amounts of things or in anything else, are not sensible but intelligible beings. Thus in counting what the soul is really aiming at when it counts off in speech, the definite amounts of definite sensible things, things that in being counted are treated as sensible units, are definite amounts of intelligible units. Indeed, it HOPKINS 65 is precisely this state of affairs that allows the soul to count anything that happens to be before it, since the true units of its counting are not those that can be seen but precisely those that can only be thought. Plato’s way of explaining how the availability of intelligible arithmoi to the soul enables it to count anything whatever means that these intelligible units are manifestly unlike the units in Husserl’s authentic numbers. Plato’s intelligible units explain the ability of arithmoi to count anything whatever because they, and not the “whatever,” are each arithmos’ true referent. In other words, for Plato—and for that matter, for all the ancient Greeks including Aristotle10—there is no such concept of any thing, or any object, or any being whatever. Such a concept, as we have seen, is explained by Husserl in terms of an abstracting activity of the mind that is so powerful it is powerful enough to create a concept so general that literally anything whatever (Etwas überhaupt) can “fall under it.” This is to say, for Husserl the mind is able to create a formal concept that has absolutely no determinate reference to any individual thing in the world or to the general and universal qualities of such things. Klein’s point, and in my judgment the point is the fulcrum upon which the story told in his math book pivots, is that until Viète invented algebra, the power behind this abstraction—what Klein calls a symbol generating abstraction—was something that the world had never seen before. Husserl’s concept of the units in authentic numbers is therefore modern, which is something Klein was not only no doubt aware of, but it is also no doubt the reason why Klein silently passed over in silence Husserl’s investigations of the logic of symbolic mathematics. Indeed, Klein’s book also bypassed any reference to Husserl’s concept of intentionality when he articulated the difference between the conceptuality of non-symbolic and symbolic numbers in terms of the mediaeval concept of intentionality, and, again, no doubt it was for the same reason: a part of the composition of Husserl’s concept of intentionality was already determined by the very for- �66 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW mality that Klein was investigating the origin of, in the shift from non-symbolic to symbolic numbers. Once this is realized, Klein’s use of the medieval concepts of first and second intentional objects, rather than Husserl’s concepts of straightforward and categorial intentional objects, to talk about the difference in the mode of being of non-symbolic and symbolic numbers makes perfect sense. The transformation of an aspect of the ancient Greek arithmoi into the modern, symbolic numbers, however, does not make perfect sense. That is, Klein’s account of the shift in the referent of ancient Greek and modern symbolic numbers is something that does not, and indeed cannot, render theoretically transparent the philosophical meaning of either the shift or the different numbers in question. The characterization of ancient Greek arithmoi in terms of their direct encounter with either sense perceptible objects encountered in the world or with intelligible objects encountered in the soul—what Klein reports the medievals called first-intentional objects—does not explain what such arithmoi are, in the precise sense of how it is that the different arithmoi render intelligible the different definite amount that characterizes each arithmos. Indeed, Klein never suggests that the concept of a first-intentional object can do this. Likewise, the characterization of symbolic numbers as having their referent in the mind’s conception, a conception the medievals called the object of a second intention, does not render theoretically perspicuous what symbolic numbers are, either. To characterize symbolic numbers as pertaining to that aspect of arithmoi that concerns the “how many” of something, while at the same time no longer pertaining to its exact determination that each arithmos brings about, does not clarify theoretically what a symbolic number is. In other words, pointing out that the conceptuality of symbolic numbers disregards both the units of the something whose definite amount it is the province of arithmoi to determine and the exact amount of these units that each arithmos registers, does not explain what a symbolic number is—and neither does Klein’s account HOPKINS 67 of how more than this shift is involved in its conceptuality. Klein affirms that what is required in order for us to be dealing with a symbolic number is that the second-intentional mode of being of the “how many,” which brings into the world for the first time a formal concept because it is now shorn of any connection to either first-intentional objects or the exact determination of their amount, be expressed in a sense-perceptible sign that is grasped by the mind as the object of a first intention. What Klein’s talk of objects of first and second intentions accomplishes is to call attention to something that nobody else in the twentieth century had seen, namely, that the invention of symbolic cognition represents nothing less than a reversal of the pre-modern relationship between concepts and objects: what were concepts for the ancient Greeks are now objects and what were objects for them are now concepts. Modern “theoretical thinking,” being symbolical, is thus necessarily blind to this reversal. Ancient “theoretical thinking,” not being symbolical, is likewise necessarily blind to it. It does not follow from this, however, that thinking per se must remain blind to it. On the contrary, for a thinking that is on its guard against falling victim to the most shameful ignorance, that is, to thinking it knows what, in truth, no mortal can know, not only is the shift in conceptuality articulated by Klein something that can be seen, but once seen, it is something that the soul’s phronesis can never forget. If we had more time, I would continue my remarks by calling attention to what I think is the key to Klein’s account of how something like a symbol generating abstraction was able to come into the world, namely on the basis of Viète’s, Stevin’s, Descartes’s, and Wallis’s formulating the method of an art that permits calculation with what the ancient Greeks characterized not as arithmoi but as their eidê. And, indeed, I would call attention to the fact that, for Klein, with this not only do the true objects of mathematics become conceptual, that is, formal, but also, such concepts at the same time become numerical. Finally, I would call attention to the par- �68 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW allel Klein draws between the breaking of the bounds of the intelligibility proper to the logos that is the result of Plato’s formulation of the eidê of beings as having an arithmological structure and the similar breaking of these bounds by Viète’s numerical formulation of the symbolic calculation with the species of numbers in symbolic cognition,11 and then ask the following question: Do both of these attempts to comprehend beings theoretically transcend the limits of what can be spoken of intelligibly for the same simple reason, namely, that their theories presuppose a knowledge of what no mortal can claim in truth really to know, namely that most wondrous gift of the gods to humans—one and number? Before I conclude, I would like to return very briefly to Klein’s memorial essay on Husserl that I mentioned earlier and to the matter of his articulation in that essay of the philosophical meaning of his mathematical investigations in terms of Husserl’s of last writings, the so-called crisis texts. It is important to draw attention here to the chronology of Klein’s mathematical investigations and Husserl’s last writings, because it is only in these writings that Husserl connects the two themes that had already informed Klein’s earlier investigations of the history of mathematical concepts. Prior to 1936, when the second part of Klein’s investigations were published, Husserl therefore had not yet recognized what Klein had already recognized, and indeed investigated extensively, guided as I have suggested by Husserl’s first—and failed—investigation of the relationship between non-symbolic and symbolic numbers. Klein recognized the connection between the philosophical meaning of mathematical concepts and the history of their origination. Notes Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik, ed. Lothar Eley, Husserliana XII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), 245; English translation: The Philosophy of Arithmetic, trans. Dallas Willard (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003). 1 HOPKINS 69 Edmund Husserl, Introductions to the Logical Investigations, ed. Eugen Fink, trans. Philip J. Bossert and Curtis H. Peters (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 35. German text, “Entwurf einer ‘Vorrede’ zu den ‘Logischen Untersuchungen’ (1913),” Tijdschrift voor Philosophie (1939): 106-133, here 127. 2 Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969; reprint: New York: Dover, 1992). This work was originally published in German as “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra” in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, no. 1 (Berlin, 1934), pp. 18–105 (Part I); no. 2 (1936), pp. 122–235 (Part II). Hereinafter referred to as GMTOA. 3 See the following: Hiram Caton, who claims that “Klein projects Husserl back upon Viète and Descartes,” (Studi International Di Filosophia, Vol 3 (Autumn, 1971): 222-226, here 225; J. Phillip Miller, who writes “Although Husserl’s own analyses move on the level of a priori possibility, Klein’s work shows how fruitful these analyses can be when the categories they generate are used in studying the actual history of mathematical thought,” (Numbers in Presence and Absence [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982], 132; Joshua Kates’ account is more circumspect, as he notes “[i]t is difficult to capture adequately . . . how much of Klein’s understanding of Greek number is already to be found in Husserl, despite the important differences between them,” (“Philosophy First, Last, and Counting: Edmund Husserl, Jacob Klein, and Plato’s Arithmological Eidê,” (Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. 25, Number 1 (2004), 65-97, here 94. 4 This is the literal translation of the word in question here, “Begrifflichkeit,” which is rendered for the most part as “intentionality” in the English translation GMTOA. Because of this, the point I make below about the “concept of number” and “number concepts” will be more familiar to readers of Klein’s original German text. 5 Jacob Klein, “Phenomenology and the History of Science,” in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin Farber (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940), 143–163; reprinted in Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert 6 �70 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis, Md.: St. John’s Press, 1985), 65–84, here 70. Edmund Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970). The German text was originally published in a heavily edited form by Eugen Fink as “Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-historisches Problem,” Revue internationale de Philosophie I (1939). Fink’s typescript of Husserl’s original, and significantly different, 1936 text (which is the text translated by Carr) was published as Beilage III in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana VI (The Hague: Nijhoff, 11954, 21976). Edmund Husserl, “Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie,” Philosophia I (1936), (the text of this article is reprinted as §§ 1–27 of the text edited by Biemel). 7 8 See note 4 above. 9 GMOT, 54. Aristotle’s dispute with Plato over the mode of being of the arithmoi studied by the discipline of mathematics was about the origin of the units that they are the definite amounts of, and not whether theoretical arithmoi are definite amounts of units. 10 “As Plato had once tried to grasp the highest science ‘arithmologically’ and therewith exceeded the bounds set for the logos (cf. Part I, Section 7C), so here [in Viète’s invention of symbolic calculation] the ‘arithmetical’ interpretation leads to . . . the conception of a symbolic mathematics,” the implication being, of course, that such a conception exceeds the same bounds as did Plato’s attempt to grasp dialectic in terms of the arithmoi eidetikoi (GMOT, 184). 11 71 Words, Diagrams, and Symbols: Greek and Modern Mathematics or “On the Need To Rewrite The History of Greek Mathematics” Revisited Sabetai Unguru Mademoiselle de Sommery, as Stendhal tells us in De l’Amour, was caught “en flagrant delit,” i.e., in flagranti, by her lover, who was shaken seeing his “amante” bedding down another man. Mademoiselle was surprised by her lover’s angry reaction and denied brazenly the event. When he protested, she cried out: “Oh, well, I can see that you no longer love me, you would rather trust your eyes than what I tell you.” The historian of mathematics should behave like Mademoiselle’s lover: believe his eyes and not what mathematicians-turned-historians tell him about the texts he studies. There are optical illusions, it is true, but they are to be preferred to the illusionary mental constructs of the mathematical historians. A text is a text is a text. Moreover, metaphors aside, not everything is a text and it behooves the cultural critic, and surely the historian, to relate only to written records as texts. Furthermore, texts are about something definite and not every conceivable interpretation suits them all. The Conica is about conic sections not about women. It deals with three (or four) kinds of lines obtained by cutting a Sabetai Unguru is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Cohen Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at the University of Tel-Aviv. He is the author of a controversial study with the title “On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics,” as well as of a two-volume introduction to the history of mathematics. He is (with Michael Fried) the co-author of Apollonius of Perga’s Conica: Text, Context, Subtext. �72 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW conic surface with a plane, lines baptized by Apollonius as parabolas, ellipses, hyperbolas, and opposite sections. It does not deal with a classification of women according to their degree of perfection, as seen by a male chauvinist pig, hiding his true intentions behind the cloud of mathematical jargon. Texts are made of words, sometimes accompanied by illustrations; in the case of Greek geometry, the texts are made of words and diagrams, C’est tout. And the diagram is, in a very definite sense, the proposition. The words accompanying it serve to show how the diagram is obtained; they provide us the diagram in statu nascendi. But in principle it would be possible to supply the absent words to an extant diagram, though I doubt the possibility of understanding a reasonably sophisticated geometrical text in the absence of diagrams. If there is a manipulative aspect to Greek geometry, and I think there is, it resides in the construction, the bringing into being of the diagram, while the steps of the process are supplied by the words accompanying the diagram, typically in the kataskeue (construction). There are no true symbols in a Greek mathematical text. What looks like symbols to the untrained modern eye are actually proper names for identifying mathematical objects. They are not symbols, and cannot be manipulated, as algebraic symbols are. Even in Diophantus, which is a late and special case, his so-called symbols are actually verbal abbreviations, making his Arithmetica an instance of syncopated, not symbolic, algebra, in Nesselmann’s tripartite division (Die Algebra der Griechen). In modern, post-Cartesian mathematical texts, on the other hand, there are words and diagrams and symbols, but the actual necessity of the first two ingredients is minimal, serving heuristic, pedagogical, and rhetorical needs that can be dispensed with, leaving the text in its symbolic nakedness. It is no exaggeration to see modern mathematics as symbolic, while ancient mathematics cannot be seen historically in symbolic terms. This being the case, interpretations of ancient mathematical texts relying on their symbolic transmogrifica- UNGURU 73 tion are inadequate and distorting. They are ahistorical and anachronistic, making them unacceptable for an understanding of ancient mathematics in its own right. An ancient text—mathematical, philosophical, literary, or whatever—is the product of a culture foreign to ours, whose concerns, values, aims, standards, ideals, etc., are, as a rule, as alien to ours as can be. Though, inescapably, all history is retrospective history, the approach described and decried by Detlef D. Spalt, in his Vom Mythos der mathematischen Vernunft (1981), as Resultatismus, or, “Orwellsche 1984Geschichtsschreibung für den grossen Bruder Vernunft,” that takes its bearings and criteria from what it sees as the modern outcome of a lengthy, linear, and necessary evolution of concepts and operations, looking always back at the past in light of its modern offspring, is necessarily a highly distorting approach, since it adopts unashamedly the perspective of the present to (in this order) judge and understand the past. Taken at face value, Percy W Bridgman’s statement that the . past has meaning only in terms of the present is simply not true. The historian’s stance is rather the opposite: the present has meaning only in terms of the past. Prima facie and on principled grounds therefore, an interpretation of any written, reasonably extensive document belonging to an ancient culture that results in its totally unproblematic and absolute assimilation to our own is suspect. That this is so is, more or less, acceptable when it comes to cultural artifacts other than mathematical ones, which seem to enjoy the privilege of perdurablility and universality. The immunity from cultural specificity that mathematical truths command stems from the prevailing view that their outward appearance—their packaging, as it were—and their purely mathematical content—the packaged merchandise, as it were—are neutral, unrelated, and mutually independent items. It is a calamitous view and the root of all evil in the historiography of mathematics. But there is another entrance into an ancient text, mathematical or not, one that does no violence to it, that does not break the inviolable unity of form and content and then enter �74 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW victoriously through the shambles it created, with the claim that the text is now understood; it is rather an ingress that accepts willingly and respectfully the unity of the text without pulverizing its inseparable aspects, bringing to its understanding both critical acumen and full acceptance of its outward appearance. This is the historical approach. The mathematical and historical approaches are antagonistic. Whoever breaks and enters typically returns from his escapades with other spoils than the peaceful and courteous caller. Let me be more specific. Faced with an ancient mathematical text, the modern interpreter has an initial choice. First is the mathematical approach. It consists of two steps: (1) try to find out how one would do it (solve the problem, prove the proposition, perform the construction, etc.) and then (2) attempt to understand the ancient procedure in light of the answer to step (1). Instead of this preeminently mathematical approach, however, the modern interpreter can refuse to decipher the text by appealing to modern methods, using for its understanding only ancient methods available to the text’s author. This is the historical approach. Needless to repeat, the spoils of interpretation differ according to the two approaches followed. The longstanding traditional approach has been the mathematical, though in the last three decades or so the historical approach is gaining increasingly more and more ground and, at least in the domain of ancient Greek mathematics, seems to be now the prevailing one. What seems certain is that in practice no compromise is possible between the mathematical and historical methodological principles. Adopting one or the other has fateful consequences for one’s research, effectively determining the nature of the results reached and the tenor of the inferences used in reaching them. What I am saying, then, is that despite the numerous and varied styles of writing the history of mathematics throughout the centuries, it is possible to group all histories of mathematics into two broad categories, the “mathematical” and the “historical.” The former sees mathematics as eternal, its UNGURU 75 truths unchanging and unaffected by their formal appearance, and sees the mathematical kernel of those truths as being independent of their outward mode of expression; the latter denies this independence and looks upon past mathematics as an unbreakable unity between form and content, a unity, moreover, that enables one to grasp mathematics as a historical discipline, the truths of which are indelibly embedded in changing linguistic structures. It is only this approach that is apt to avoid anachronism in the study of the mathematics of other eras. To make this a historical talk, what is needed are specific, historical examples, supporting the preceding generalizations. I have offered numerous such examples in my published work, most recently in the book I published with Michael Fried, Apollonius of Perga’s Conica: Text, Context, Subtext (2001). However, I would like now to enrich my offerings by drawing illustrations from historical sources less drawn upon in the past. One such source is Euclid’s Data. In one of the attacks launched against a notorious article of 1975, “On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics,” Hans Freudenthal argues that, had its author been aware of the existence of the Data, he “would never have claimed there were no equations in Greek geometry.” For Freudenthal, and not only for him, the Data is a “textbook on solving equations.” He summarizes the 94 propositions contained therein in a succinctly and strikingly epigrammatic statement: “Given certain magnitudes a, b, c and a relation F(a, b, c, x), then x, too, is given.” But the fact remains that Greek geometry contained no equations. One cannot find even one equation in the entire text of the Data. Proof (as the Hindu mathematician would say): “Look!” Unless one has at his disposal the algebraic language and the capacity to translate into it, it is impossible to sum up this little treatise of rather varied content as offhandedly as Freudenthal has done, Indeed, had Euclid at his disposal Freudenthal’s functional notation, it is rather easy to infer �76 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW that he would not have needed 94 propositions to get his point across. Each case in Euclid’s Data is unique, having its own method of analysis, and none is subsumable under or reducible to other cases, though, of course, later propositions rely on earlier ones. Thus, “The ratio of given magnitudes to one another is given” (proposition 1) and “If a given magnitude have a given ratio to some other magnitude, the other is also given in magnitude” (proposition 2)—to use perhaps the simplest illustration possible—are not for Euclid both instances of “Given a, b, c and y=F(a, b, c, x), x is also given,” but are two different problems, interesting in their own right, having their own solutions. Of course, Freudenthal’s description is mathematically correct. Historically, however, it is wanting. Heath is much more to the point when he says: The Data…are still concerned with elementary geometry [my italics], though forming part of the introduction to higher analysis. Their form is that of propositions proving that, if certain things in a figure [my italics] are given (in magnitude, in species, etc.), something else is given. The subjectmatter is much the same as that of the planimetrical books of the Elements, to which the Data are often supplementary. This is what the Data is, not a textbook on solving equations, but a treatise presenting another approach to elementary geometry—other than that of the Elements, that is. As an example of this characterization of the Data, I shall present proposition 16, in the new translation of C. M. Taisbak [Euclid’s Data or The Importance of Being Given, (Copenhagen, 2003)]: If two magnitudes have a given ratio to one another, and from the one a given magnitude be subtracted, while to the other a given magnitude be added, the whole will be greater than in ratio to the remainder by a given magnitude (p. 75). 77 UNGURU First we must clarify the meaning of the expression “greater than in ratio...by a given.” Definition 11 of the Data reads: A magnitude is by a given greater than in ratio to a magnitude if, when the given magnitude be subtracted, the remainder has a given ratio to the same. (p. 35) The meaning of this definition is, according to Taisbak, as follows (p. 57): “M is by the given G greater than the magnitude L which has to N a given ratio;” in other words, M=L+G and L:N is a given ratio. Back to the proof of prop. 16: Let two magnitudes AB, CD have a given ratio to one another. From CD let the given magnitude CE be subtracted and to AB let the given magnitude ZA be added. Then, the whole ZB is greater than in ratio to the remainder DE by a given magnitude. Z C A E H D B Now, since the ratio AB:CD is given and AH can be obtained, by Dt. 4, from AH:CE::AB:CD, i.e., AH:CE is also given, it follows that CE is also given. Hence, AH is given (by Dt. 2). But AZ is given; therefore the whole ZH is given (by Dt. 3). Since AH:CE::AB:CD, the ratio HB:ED of the remainders is also given, by V 19 and Def. 2, i.e., HB:ED::AB:CD. But HZ . is given; therefore, ZB is by a given greater than in ratio to ED (Def. 11), Q.E.D. No algebra appears here, and although the language of givens, the idiosyncratic concept “by a given greater than in ratio” and the sui generis concatenation of inferences burden the understanding, the proposition is clear and rather simple. It is graspable as it stands, without any appeal to foreign �78 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW tools. And yet, Clemens Thaer, in his Die Data von Euklid (1962), proceeds as follows to its clarification: Let a:b=k , then the proposition claims that if x=ky, then (x+c)=k(y-d)+(c+kd), which is, of course, correct mathematically, but this blatantly algebraic procedure betrays the Data. It is a betrayal since ratios in Greek mathematics are not real numbers, i.e., the initial substitution a:b=k is not kosher. Though there is some controversy about the status of ratios in the Elements, with respect to their being two, or four-place relations, their status in the Data is uncontroversial: a ratio P:Q is an individual item “however impalpable. A and B are magnitudes, most often (and least problematically) understood to be line segments; one may think of them as positive real numbers, that is as lengths of line segments, while remembering that the Greek geometers could not think like that, for want of such numbers” (Taisbak, Euclid’s Dedomena, p. 32). Taisbak claims that distorting “clarifications” like the one above characterize all of Thaer’s algebraizations. He goes on to say: About the following four theorems (Dt 17-20) he maintains that they prove that all linear transformations, {ax+b a, b ℜ} form a group (‘dass die ganzen linearen Substitutionen einer Veraenderlichen eine Gruppe bilden’). I am not sure I understand what he means to say, and the Data certainly does not help me,—so probably Euclid would not understand either. (p. 77) Let us take our next example from Archimedes. Against Freudenthal’s assertion, Archimedes’ works are not “instances of algebraic procedure in Greek mathematics.” Heath’s edition of The Works of Archimedes (1897) is “in modern notation.” It is faithful only to the disembodied mathematical content of the Archimedean text, but not to its form. And this is crucial. If one abandons Archimedes’ form and transcribes his rhetorical statements by means of algebraic symbols, manipulating and transforming the latter, then UNGURU 79 clearly “the algebraic procedure” appears. But this procedure itself is not “in Greek mathematics.” It is a result, as Freudenthal himself states it, of “replacing vernacular by artificial language, and numbering variables by cardinals, a quite recent mathematical tool.” Indeed! Archimedes’ text is anchored securely in the terra firma of Greek geometry. If one is not willing to compress wording, to replace “vernacular” by artificial language, to introduce variables and number them by cardinals, and to apply all the other technical tricks which are “quite recent mathematical tools,” then Archimedes’ proof of Proposition 10 of Peri Helikon is geometric, not algebraic. This was discerned in a curious way even by Heath, who justified his algebraic procedure and the use of the symbols , “in order to exhibit the geometrical character of the proof” (p. 109, my italics). Dijksterhuis himself in his Archimedes said: “In a representation of Greek proofs in the symbolism of modern algebra it is often precisely the most characteristic qualities of the classical argument which are lost, so that the reader is not sufficiently obliged to enter into the train of thought of the original.” So let us oblige ourselves to enter into the train of thought of the original by having a look at the 10th proposition of Peri Helikon. I shall give you the full enunciation and then set at its side Heath’s algebraic variant: If any number of lines, exceeding one another by the same magnitude, are set one after the other, the excess being equal to the smallest, and if one takes other lines in the same number, each of which is equal to the magnitude of the greatest of the first lines, [then] the squares on the lines equal to the greatest, augmented by the square on the greatest, and by the rectangle the sides of which are the smallest line and the sum of all lines exceeding one another by the same magnitude are equivalent to thrice the sum of the squares on the �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 80 lines which exceed one another by the same amount. The enunciation is geometrical and it is accompanied by simple, linear diagrams. And here is Heath’s enunciation: If A1, A2, A3, ..., An be n lines forming and ascending arithemetical progression in which the common difference is equal to A1, the least term, then (n+1) An2+A1 (A1+A2+...+An)=3(A12+A22+...+An2)........ …the result is equivalent to 12+22+32+...+n2=n(n=1)(2n+1) 6 The proof is not difficult, but very long (more than three pages in Mugler’s edition of Archimedes’ works, if one includes the porism), and I think we can dispense with it, but not before pointing out the fact that it lies squarely within the realm of traditional Greek geometry, relying on Elements 2.4, it is true, which, as is well known, belongs to the so-called geometric algebra, but which, as I have argued elsewhere, is strictly geometric; additionally, the porism relies on Elements 6.20. As in the enunciation, Archimedes formulates consistently his statements in terms of lines squares, and rectangles, which he manipulates à la Grecque, and his diagrammatic notation is not at all perspicuous to a modern eye, making his transformations opaque, or at least cloudy, to a mind spoiled by the easy mechanics of algebraic manipulations and their immediate visual transparency. This makes following his elementary inferences quite difficult and almost forces upon the reader recourse to algebraic notation. Such a procedure, how- UNGURU 81 ever, easy, pellucid, and revealing as it is, is not legitimate historically. What I have said about the proposition applies in its entirety to the porism following it, out of which Heath makes two corollaries! Let us, again, limit ourselves to the enunciations of Archimedes and Heath, which substantiate our characterization. Archimedes first: It is manifest from the preceding that the sum of the squares on the lines equal to the greatest is inferior to the triple of the sum of the squares on the lines exceeding one another by the same magnitude, because, if one adds to it [the former] some [magnitudes], it becomes that triple, but that it is superior to the triple of the second sum diminished by the square on the greatest line, since what is added [to the first sum] is inferior to the triple square of the greatest line. It is for this [very] reason that, when one describes similar figures on all the lines, both on those exceeding one another by the same magnitude, as well as on those which are equal to the greatest line, the sum of the figures described on the lines which are equal to the greatest line is inferior to the triple of the sum of the figures described on the lines exceeding one another by the same magnitude, but it is superior to the triple of the second sum, which is diminished by the figure constructed on the greatest line, because similar figures are in the same ratio as the squares [on their sides]. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 82 Now Heath: Cor. 1. It follows from this proposition that nAn2<3(A12+ A22+...+An2), and also that nAn2<3(A12+ A22+...+An-12). Cor. 2. All the results will equally hold if similar figures are substituted for squares. The differences between Archimedes and Heath are blatant. Faithfulness to the Archimedean way of doing things demands, therefore, the rejection of an edition of his works “edited in modern notation.” There is no escape for the historian but to take texts at their face value. One last example I shall draw from Diophantus’s Arithmetica. Diophantus is an exception in the long tradition of Greek mathematics, which is largely geometric. Living probably in the third century A.D., his preserved work is an instance, the only one of its kind in Greek mathematics, of what we call algebra. It is a sui generis algebra, however, in which the notations are properly nonexistent, except for the unknown, arithmos, which is itself most likely an abbreviation, and a few abbreviations for powers of the unknown and for the unit, monas. That is all. This is what makes his rhetorical algebra syncopated, according to Nesselmann’s classification. It is an algebra in which there is a total lack of true, operative symbols, including symbols for operations, relations, and the exponential notation, with the exception of a symbol for subtraction, in which the exceptional skill of Diophantus enables him somehow to overcome with great dexterity the built-in drawbacks of his Arithmetica. This Greek algebra, however, is most emphatically not geometric algebra. If anything, it is conceptually a far away relation to what has been traditionally called Babylonian algebra, perhaps not even this, in light of the recent researches of Jens UNGURU 83 Hoyrup, who identifies the geometrical roots of the Babylonian recipes [Lengths,Widths, Surfaces, (Springer, 2002)]. Whatever it is, it is largely a collection of problems, to be solved by means of skilful guesses and less by systematic methods (though one also finds methods, for example, a general method for the solution of what we call determinate equations of the second degree and another for double equations of the second degree), involving specific known numbers. It is not a book of propositions to be proved, but rather of exercises to be solved, leading mostly to simple determinate and indeterminate equations, by means of which one finds the required numbers, which are always rational, quite often non-integral. Still, despite what I just said, one finds in the treatise also some “porisms” and other propositions in the theory of numbers, which proved themselves influential in the history of the theory of numbers, especially in Fermat’s work. Thus, Diophantus knew that no number of the form 8n+7 can be the sum of three squares, and that for an odd number, 2n+1, to be the sum of two squares, n itself must not be odd, which means that no number of the form 4n+3 or 4n-1 can be the sum of two squares. Now, some simple illustrations from the Arithmetica, to get the flavor of the true Algebra der Griechen: Problem 1. To divide a given number into two numbers, the difference of which is known. Let the given number be 100, and let the difference be 40 monads; to find the numbers. Let us assume that the smaller number is 1 arithmos; hence, the greater number is 1 arithmos and 40 units. Therefore, the sum of the two numbers becomes 2 arithmoi and 40 units. But the given sum is 100 units; hence, 100 units are equal to 2 arithmoi and 40 units. Let us subtract the like from the like, that is, 40 units from 100 and, also, �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 84 the same 40 units from the 2 arithmoi and 40 units. The two remaining arithmoi equal 60 units and each arithmos becomes 30 units. Let us return to what we assumed: the smaller number will be 30 units, while the greater will be 70 units, and the validation is obvious. And here is Heath’s faithful version of the solution: Given number is 100, given difference 40. Lesser number required x. Therefore 2x+40=100 x=30. The required numbers are 70, 30. Problem 2. Diophantus: It is necessary to divide a given number into two numbers having a given ratio. Let us require to divide 60 into two numbers in triplicate ratio. Let us assume that the smaller number is 1 arithmos; hence, the greater number will be 3 arithmoi, and thus the greater number is thrice the smaller number. It is also necessary that the sum of the two numbers be 60 units. But the sum of the two numbers is 4 arithmoi; hence 4 arithmoi are equal to 60 units, and the arithmos is therefore 15 units. Hence, the smaller number will be 15 units, and the greater 45 units. Heath: Given number 60, given ratio 3:1. Two numbers x, 3x. Therefore x=15. The numbers are 45, 15. UNGURU 85 Finally, an example of what is called indeterminate analysis of the third degree: Problem 4.8. Diophantus: To add the same number to a cube and its side and make the same. Let the number to be added be 1 arithmos and the side of the cube be a certain amount of arithmoi. Let this amount be 2 arithmoi and it follows that the cube is 8 cubic arithmoi. Now if one adds 1 arithmos to 2 arithmoi, they become 3 arithmoi, while if one adds it to the 8 cubic arithmoi, they become 8 cubic arithmoi and 1 arithmos, which are equal to 27 cubic arithmoi. Let us subtract 8 cubic arithmoi, and it follows that the remaining 19 cubic arithmoi will become equal to 1 arithmos. Let us divide all by the arithmos, and 19 squared arithmoi will be equal to 1 unit. But 1 unit is a square, and if 19, the amount of square arithmoi, were a square, the problem would be solved. But the 19 squares find their origin in the excess by which 27 cubic arithmoi exceed 8 cubic arithmoi; and 27 cubic arithmoi are the cube of 3 arithmoi, while 8 cubic arithmoi are the cube of 2 arithmoi. But the two arithmoi are taken by hypothesis, and 3 arithmoi exceed by one the amount taken arbitrarily as the side. Therefore, we are led to finding two numbers which exceed one another by one unit, and the cubes of which exceed one another by a square. Let one of those numbers be 1 arithmos, and the other 1 arithmos plus 1 unit. Hence the excess of their cubes is 3 square arithmoi plus 3 arithmoi plus 1 unit. Let us set this excess equal to the square the side of which is 1 unit less 2 arithmoi, �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 86 and the arithmos becomes 7 units. Let us return to what we supposed, and one of the numbers will be 7 and the other 8. Let us now return to the original question and assume the number to be added to be 1 arithmos, and the side of the cube to be 7 arithmoi. This cube will be then 343 cubic arithmoi. Hence, if one adds the arithmos to each of these last numbers, one will become 8 arithmoi and the other 343 cubic arithmoi plus 1 arithmos. But we wanted this last expression to be a cube the side of which is 8 arithmoi; hence 512 cubic arithmoi are equal to 343 cubic arithmoi plus 1 arithmos, and 1 the arithmos becomes 13. Returning to the things we assumed, the cube will 343 7 1 be 2197, the side 13, and the number to be added 13. I assume you could follow, at least in outline, Diophantus’s solution procedure, though this is not essential for my main purpose. (For those of you who could not follow after all the details, which, as I said, is not really necessary, a glance at Heath’s, or Ver Eecke’s, Diophantus would clarify matters.) My purpose is to compare Diophantus to his modern editors. This time, instead of Heath, I shall take, however, Nesselmann. Nesselmann: It is necessary that x3+y=(x+y)3, i.e., 3x2+3xy+y2=1. Solving for y, we get y= 1 2 2 [-3x±√4-3x ]. 4mn Putting 4-3x2=(2-=m x)2, one gets x= 3n2+m2. n Hence, y= -6mn±(m2-3n2) 3n2+m2 . Taking only the + sign, 87 UNGURU for y to be positive, it is necessary that m2-3n2>6mn, or, m2 -6 m n n2 >3, or, ( m -3)2>12, or ( m >3+√12. n n Diophantus’s solution corresponds to m=7, n=1. Now this is historical faithfulness! Time to conclude. Historians must take the past seriously. For historians of science and mathematics, this means taking texts seriously. How does one do this? By reading them as they are, in their nakedness, as it were, in the language in which they were written, without shortcuts and transmogrification, resulting in their translation into scientific and mathematical languages which became historically available only long after they were written. It is, therefore, crucial that the form of those texts remain inviolable. Without this, anachronism, i.e., historical misunderstanding, becomes rampant and the resulting interpretation is misinterpretation. As Benjamin Farrington put it, History is the most fundamental science, for there is no human knowledge which cannot lose its scientific character when men forget the conditions under which it originated, the questions which it answered, and the function it was created to serve. A great part of the mysticism and superstition of educated men consists of knowledge which has broken loose from its historical moorings. In 1975 an article appeared in the Archive for History of Exact Sciences, arguing for the need to rewrite the history of Greek mathematics. In one of its many footnotes, namely the one numbered 126, attention is called to an important book, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. The footnote in question contains a parenthesis, saying: [L]et me urge those readers who have a choice and wish to read [this] highly interesting study to refer back to the original German articles: somehow the �88 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW pomposity, stuffiness, and turgidity of the author’s style are better accommodated by the Teutonic cadences than by the more friendly sounds of the perfidious Albion. This was a nasty and uncalled for remark, attributable to the author’s hubris. How pleasantly and embarrassingly surprised must he have been, then, when, a few weeks after the article’s appearance in the Archive, a postcard from the slighted author of the book (to whom no reprint was sent!) arrived, saying: “Dear Dr.,… Thank you very much for your important article in the Archive.…” In character, you may say. Indeed. As a belated, and highly inappropriate atonement for that unsavory footnote, its author would like to finish this lecture with a highly pertinent and lengthy quotation from an article written by the great scholar he so carelessly slighted: [T]he relation between ancient and modern mathematics has increasingly become the focus of historical investigation… Two general lines of interpretation can be distinguished here. One— the prevailing view—sees in the history of science a continuous forward progress interrupted, at most, by periods of stagnation. On this view, forward progress takes place with ‘logical necessity,’ accordingly, writing the history of a mathematical theorem or of a physical principle basically means analyzing its logic. The usual presentations, especially of the history of mathematics, picture a rectilinear course; all of its accidents and irregularities disappear behind the logical straightness of the whole path. The second interpretation emphasizes that the different stages along this path are incomparable.…it sees in Greek mathematics a science totally distict from modern mathematics.…Both interpretations, however, start from the present-day UNGURU condition of science. The first measures ancient by the standard of modern science and pursues the individual threads leading back from the valid theorems of contemporary science to the anticipatory steps taken towards them in antiquity.… The second interpretation strives to bring into relief, not what is common, but what divides ancient and modern science. It too, however, interprets the otherness of ancient mathematics...in terms of the results of contemporary science. Consequently, it recognizes only a counter-image of itself in ancient science, a counter-image which still stands on its own conceptual level. Both interpretations fail to do justice to the true state of the case. There can be no doubt that the science of the seventeenth century represents a direct continuation of ancient science. On the other hand, neither can we deny their differences…above all, in their basic initiatives, in their whole disposition (habitus). The difficulty is precisely to avoid interpreting their differences and their affinity one-sidedly in terms of the new science. The issues at stake cannot be divorced from the specific conceptual framework within which they are interpreted.… We need to approach ancient science on a basis appropriate to it, a basis provided by that science itself. Only on this basis can we measure the transformation ancient science underwent in the seventeenth century—a transformation unique and unparalleled in the history of man.… This modern consciousness is to be understood not simply as a linear continuation of ancient επιστημη, but as the result of a fundamental conceptual shift which took place in the modern era, a shift we can nowadays scarcely grasp. 89 �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 91 The name of the man who wrote these lines is, as I am sure you know, Jacob Klein. Yehi Zichro Baruch! May his memory be blessed! A Note on the Opposite Sections and Conjugate Sections in Apollonius of Perga’s Conica 90 Michael N. Fried Introduction To a careful reader of Apollonius of Perga’s Conica, the difference between Apollonius’ view of conic sections and ours ought to be evident on nearly every page of the work. Yet this has not always been the case. Indeed, it has not always been easy to persuade readers that there really is something Greek about Apollonius’ mathematics. Partly to blame is the seductive power of the algebraic framework in which we study conic sections today and in which historians of mathematics have interpreted the book in past years.1 Viewed algebraically, for example, all of Book 4 of the Conica—the book concerning the number of points at which conic sections can meet— can be reduced to a single proposition, namely, that a system of two quadratic equations in two unknowns can have at most four solutions. This tremendous power allowing one to obtain results corresponding to ones in the Conica makes it all too easy to think that Apollonius’ own text, in effect, can be bypassed and replaced by an updated algebraic version of it. However, there are things in the Conica that are refractory to this kind of modernization of the text and show its essentially geometric character. One of these, surely, is that most peculiar entity in the Conica, the opposite sections; it is they that I shall turn my attention to in this note. In particular, I want to show something about status of the opposite sections in the Conica and show, among other things, why their status, Michael Fried teaches mathematics education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author of a translation, with introduction, of Book Four of the Conics of Apollonius, and is the co-author (with Sabetai Unguru) of Apollonius of Perga’s Conica: Text, Context, and Subtext. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 92 why their place in the Conica, is different from that of the conjugate sections. The Absence of the Opposite Sections from the Modern View The reason why looking at the opposite sections is a good way to re-focus on Apollonius’ text, rather than on an algebraic reconstruction of it, is simply that the opposite sections do not exist in modern mathematics. For us, there is only the hyperbola. Our view of the hyperbola, on the other hand, is that it is a curve consisting “of two open branches extending to infinity.”2 That we are not bothered by one curve consisting of two is directly related to our defining the hyperbola, as we do the other conics, by means of an equation. Defining it this way, the hyperbola becomes merely a set of points given by coordinates, say the Cartesian coordinates (x, y), satisfying an equation such as this: x2 - y2 =1 a2 b2 Hence, there is nothing shocking when we discover that this set of points consists of two disjoint subsets, one containing points whose x coordinates are less than or equal to –a (where a is taken to be a positive real number) and one containing points whose x coordinates are greater than or equal to +a; the only relevant question to ask is whether the coordinates of a given point satisfy or do not satisfy the given algebraic relation.3 The equation, in this view, tells all; it contains all the essential information about the object; in a sense, the equation of the hyperbola is the hyperbola (see Fried & Unguru, 2001, pp. 102-103; Klein, 1981, pp. 28-29). To speak about opposite sections in addition to the hyperbola is unnecessary because they are not distinguished by different equations. FRIED 93 The Opposite Sections in the Conica The point of view above has also been the point of departure for an older, but still much listened to, generation of historians of mathematics. Zeuthen (1886) and Heath (1921, 1896), leaders of that generation, had no doubt that Apollonius’ achievement was in the uncovering and elucidation of the equations of the conic sections and that Apollonius understood the conic sections in an algebraic spirit. For them, Apollonius’ view was the modern view. Thus Zeuthen writes: An ellipse, parabola or hyperbola is here [in Book 1] planimetrically determined as a curve which is represented by the equation (3), (1) or (2) [the Cartesian equations for the ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola, respectively] in a system of parallel coordinates with any angle between the axes. Thus, apart from the determination of the position of these curves, they seem to depend on three constants, namely, that angle [between the axes, or, equivalently, the ordinate angle], p [latus rectum], and a [the length of the diameter] (Zeuthen, 1886, p. 67). And Heath, echoing Zeuthen, writes: Apollonius, in deriving the three conics from any cone cut in the most general manner, seeks to find the relation between the coordinates of any point on the curve referred to the original diameter and the tangent at its extremity as axes (in general oblique), and proceeds to deduce from the relation, when found, the other properties of the curves. His method does not essentially differ from that of modern analytical geometry except that in Apollonius geometrical operations take the place of algebraic calculations (Heath, 1896, p. cxvi) �94 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW As for why Apollonius notwithstanding referred to both opposite sections and hyperbolas, Heath remarks that, “Since [Apollonius] was the first to treat the double-branch hyperbola fully [emphasis added], he generally discusses the hyperbola (i.e., the single branch) [Heath’s emphasis] along with the ellipse, and the opposites [Heath’s emphasis], as he calls the double-branch hyperbola, separately” (Heath, 1921, p.139). Zeuthen simply says that, as a matter of terminology, “What [Apollonius] calls an hyperbola is always only a hyperbola-branch” (Zeuthen, 1886, p. 67). But these remarks are hardly satisfying. First, while it is most likely that Apollonius was truly the first to treat the “‘double-branch hyperbola”’— that is, the opposite sections—fully, the opposite sections were not so completely unfamiliar to his contemporaries that he had to continually remind them of their existence; indeed, in the preface to Book 4 he refers to the opposite sections as if they were known and discussed, at least by Conon of Samos and Nicoteles of Cyrene. Second, although Zeuthen’s remark is not meant to explain Apollonius’ use of both terms, it still begs the question: if what Apollonius called the hyperbola is truly represented by the Cartesian equation and therefore, is the modern double-branched hyperbola (as Zeuthen unambiguously implies throughout his book), why cause confusion by referring to a branch of the hyperbola as the hyperbola and the two branches together as something else, namely, the opposite sections? Zeuthen himself never speaks of “opposite sections” but only of the “two (or “corresponding”) branches of the hyperbola” the “whole hyperbola” (vollständige Hyperbel), and, most often, simply the “hyperbola.” In this way, he and his followers, including Heath, merely push aside as if nugatory the obvious fact that in the Conica, from start to finish, there are hyperbolas and there are opposite sections. The opposite sections (hai tomai antikeimenai) are quite prominent in the work. They figure in 24 of the 53 propositions in Book 2; 41 of the 56 propositions in Book 3, and 38 of the 57 propositions in Book 4. In all these propositions, Apollonius treats opposite sections as something apart from FRIED 95 hyperbolas. A sign of this is that the opposite sections are separated from the hyperbola in the enunciations of propositions. For example, the statement of proposition 3.42 is: “If in an hyperbola or ellipse or circumference of a circle or opposite sections [emphasis added] straight lines are drawn from the vertices of the diameter parallel to an ordinate, and some other straight line at random is drawn tangent, it will cut off from them straight lines containing a rectangle equal to the fourth part of the figure to the same diameter.” 3.44 reads, “If two straight lines touching an hyperbola or opposite sections [emphasis added] meet the asymptotes, then the straight lines drawn to the sections will be parallel to the straight line joining the points of contact.” If one knew nothing about the opposite sections, these statements would suggest that the hyperbola and the opposite sections were as different from one another as the hyperbola is different from the ellipse.5 The proofs of these two particular propositions make little distinction between the hyperbola and opposite sections. In 3.44 a separate diagram for the opposite sections is needed to bring out a case that applies to the two sections together, but in 3.42 not even that is needed, despite Heiberg’s insistence on adding an extra diagram for the opposite sections anyway (fig. 1). Nothing from the logical rigor would be lost if Apollonius referred only to the opposite sections in these propositions. So even where the logic does not require it, Apollonius makes a point to separate, in words verbally, the hyperbola from the opposite sections. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 96 Fig. 1: Conica 3.42 (Heiberg) Α Ζ Μ Η Θ 97 FRIED Fig. 2: Diagram for Conica 1.14 H Ε N Ξ Δ Κ P O Θ Γ Α Y K Λ Β T Μ Η Ζ Θ Ε Δ Κ Β A Λ Γ Of course this is not to say there is no connection between the opposite sections and the hyperbola, for the central property of the opposite sections is that they are composed of two hyperbolas. Apollonius proves this in the proposition that introduces the opposite sections, proposition 1.14: If the vertically opposite surfaces are cut by a plane not through the vertex [see fig. 2], the section on each of the two surfaces will be that which is called the hyperbola [emphasis added]; and the diameter of the two sections will be the same straight line; and the straight lines, to which the straight lines drawn to the diameter parallel to the straight line in the cone’s base are applied in square, are equal; and the transverse side of the figure, that between the vertices of the sections, is common. And let such sections be called opposite (kaleisthôsan de hai toiautai tomai antikeimenai) Π E Z B M Λ Σ Γ Δ This is also the way he refers to the opposite sections later, especially in Book 4, where he consistently speaks of “an hyperbola and its opposite section.”7 The genitive in those phrases suggests that the opposite section belongs to the given hyperbola, that is, every hyperbola has its very own opposite section. The most striking instance in which Apollonius refers to the opposite sections as two hyperbolas is in his construction of the opposite sections in 1.59. It is worth reviewing how this construction is carried out. Apollonius asks, specifically, for the following: �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 98 Fig. 3: Diagram for Conica, 1.59 Δ A E B H Γ K Z Θ Given two straight lines perpendicular to one another, find opposite [sections], whose diameter is one of the given straight lines and whose vertices are the ends of the straight line, and the lines dropped in a given angle in each of the sections will [equal] in square [the rectangles] applied to the other [straight line] and exceeding by a [rectangle] similar to that contained by the given straight lines.8 Let BE and BΘ be the given lines and let H be the given angle (see fig. 3). Choosing BE to be the transverse diameter (plagia) and BΘ to be the upright side of the figure (orthia), Apollonius says to construct an hyperbola ABΓ, adding, that “This is to be done as has been set out before (prosgegraptai).” For the latter, he has in mind 1.54-55 where he shows how an hyperbola is constructed having a given diameter, upright side, and ordinate angle. Next he says: let EK have been drawn through E perpendicular to BE and equal to BΘ, and draw an hyperbola ΔEZ having BE as its diameter, EK its upright side, and H its ordinate angle, again, presumably, relying on 1.54-55. With that, he concludes: “It is evident (phaneron dê) that B and E [i.e., ABΓ and ΔEZ] are opposite [sections] and they have one diameter and equal upright sides.” I shall return to the question whether it truly is evident that B and E are opposite sections, but for now what is important to understand is that Apollonius constructs the FRIED 99 opposite sections by constructing one hyperbola and then another. Hence the opposite sections are two hyperbolas but not any two hyperbolas; they are two hyperbolas somehow linked together; they belong to one another the way identical twins do.9 In a sense, then, Apollonius, as I understand him and as Zeuthen understands him, begins with the hyperbola; however, we disagree about the direction in which he proceeds. Whereas Zeuthen begins with the hyperbola as the two-branched curve given by the Cartesian equation and then focuses on the single branch, which Apollonius calls the hyperbola, my view is that Apollonius begins with the single connected curve, which he calls the hyperbola, and then investigates the opposite sections in terms of it. Although Ockham’s razor would probably fall on the side of the latter view, we need to get a better grasp of this peculiar situation wherein two well-defined curves, the two hyperbolas, become together a distinct geometrical entity, the opposite sections. To do this, let us consider the ways in which two conic sections are juxtaposed in the Conica, that is to say, let us consider how Apollonius treats pluralities of curves. Pluralities of Curves Surely, the juxtapositions of conic sections are to be found in Book 4 of the Conica. The very point of that book is to investigate the ways in which conic sections can come together— whether they touch, whether they intersect, at how many points can they touch, at how many they can intersect, and so on. The variety of configurations Apollonius considers can be seen in the diagram for, say, 4.56: �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 100 Fig.4: Diagram for Conica 4.56 Δ Δ Γ Γ Γ FRIED 101 straight lines drawn to either of the curved lines parallel to some straight line…and I call that straight line the upright diameter which, lying between the two curved lines, bisects all the straight lines intercepted between the curved lines and drawn parallel to some straight line.” An illustration for the upright and transverse diameter can be seen in fig. 5 below, which is not a diagram from Apollonius’ text. Δ Fig. 5 The upright and transverse diameters Δ Γ Δ Δ Γ Γ As discussed elsewhere,10 one of the fundamental facts explored in Book 4 is the ability of conic sections to be placed arbitrarily in the plane, as Euclid postulates for circles and lines—a fact partially justifying Book 4’s inclusion into what Apollonius terms a “course in the elements of conics.” But it is this arbitrariness that makes the question of the plurality of conic sections in Book 4 the exact opposite of the one we are trying answer about the opposite sections; for the opposite sections are not thrown together; they belong together. The first indication that a pair of curves may be associated with one another as the opposite sections is given by Apollonius in the definitions at the start of Book 1. Among these definitions are those for the transverse and upright diameters (diametros plagia and diametros orthia). Having defined the diameter of a curved line, Apollonius continues, “Likewise, of any two curved lines (duo kampulôn grammôn) lying in one plane, I call that straight line the transverse diameter which cuts the two curved lines and bisects all the These definitions prepare us for the transverse diameter of the opposite sections introduced in the same proposition in which the opposite sections themselves are defined, 1.14; that the two hyperbolas making up the opposite sections have a common diameter is one of the things that links them together. Interestingly enough, the upright diameter, which is the diameter explicitly defined for two curves and that which is most clearly applicable to the opposite sections,11 is rarely used by Apollonius: it is used twice in Book 2 (2.37, 38) and once in Book 7 (7.6); and even in those cases Apollonius is quick to identify it as one of a pair of conjugate diameters (suzugeis diametroi), which are good for both two curves and one. So while Apollonius provides for the possibility of distinct curves linked together, he seems almost to avoid the idea, at least with regards to the opposite sections. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 102 The Conjugate Sections But the opposite sections are not the only curves linked together in the Conica. What Apollonius calls the conjugate sections (hai tomai suzugeis) consist of four hyperbolas, or, to be precise, two pairs of opposite sections.12 The very word Fig.6: Conjugate Sections K H Γ B A Δ Λ Θ suzugeis refers to a couple yoked together, a married pair.13 What links them together? First, by the definition given them in 1.60, the diameter of the one pair is the conjugate diameter of the other, that is, if the diameters of AB and ΓΔ are D and d, respectively, then lines drawn in AB parallel to d will be bisected by D, and vice versa; moreover, D is equal in square to the rectangle contained by d and the latus rectum with respect to d (this rectangle being the “figure” or eidos of the opposite sections), while d is equal in square to the rectangle contained by D and the latus rectum with respect to D. Second, as Apollonius shows in 2.17, “The asymptotes [lines HΘ and ΛΚ in fig. 6] of conjugate opposite sections are common.” This is also shown for the opposite sections in 2.15; these shared asymptotes are certainly a crucial unifier not only of the conjugate sections but also of the two opposite sections themselves.14 Compared to the arbitrary juxtapositions of conic sections presented in Book 4, the opposite sections and the conjugate sections seem to be quite similar in that their component curves are bound by means of asymptotes and diameters. Indeed, Apollonius often treats the opposite sections and conjugate sections in analogous propositions for instance: 2.41 states, “If in opposite sections two straight lines not through FRIED 103 the center cut each other, then they do not bisect each other”; and 2.42, states that “If in conjugate opposite sections two straight lines not through the center cut each other, they do not bisect each other.” Yet this close connection between the opposite sections and conjugate sections raises the question about why the opposite sections nevertheless enjoy a status in the Conica that the conjugate sections do not? Why, in particular, are the conjugate sections never mentioned in conjunction with the other conic sections as are the opposite sections? Why are only the opposite sections included in the clique, parabola, hyperbola, ellipse, and opposite sections?15 For this, we must return to the beginning of the Conica, for the answer has very much to do with beginnings. The Genesis of the Opposite Sections The Conica opens not with the definition of the conic sections, but with the definition of the conic surface (kônikê epiphaneia) from which arises the figure of the cone. Here is Apollonius’ definition: If from a point a straight line is joined to the circumference of a circle which is not in the same plane with the point, and the line is produced in both directions, and if, with the point remaining fixed, the straight line being rotated about the circumference of the circle returns to the same place from which it began, then the generated surface composed of the two surfaces lying vertically opposite one another, each of which increases indefinitely as the generating straight line is produced indefinitely, I call a conic surface, and I call the fixed point the vertex…..And the figure contained by the circle and by the conic surface between the vertex and the circumference of the circle I call a cone. The definition is vivid and visual owing in large part to its motion-imbued language. Motion, as is well known, is �104 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW avoided in Greek mathematics. Thus, much has been made of the hints of motion in Elements, 1.4. But avoiding motion seems to be a desideratum chiefly for propositions and demonstrations, for motion in definitions is not all that unusual. Besides this one from the Conica, Archimedes gives similar kinematic definitions for conoids and spheroids in the letter opening On Conoids and Spheroids, and Euclid himself defines the cone, sphere, and cylinder in Book 11 of the Elements by means of rotating a triangle, semicircle, and rectangle, respectively. The presence of motion in these definitions gives one the sense that one is witnessing the very coming to be of the objects being defined. In this way, such definitions take on a mythic quality; one almost wants to see the demiourgos turning the generating line about the circumference of the base circle. Fig.7: The Conic Surface Following the definitions, Apollonius proceeds in ten propositions to develop the basic properties of sections of cones and, in particular, to show (in 1.7) how a cone may be cut so that the section produced will be endowed with a diameter. When the reader arrives at 1.11, which begins the series of four propositions defining the parabola, hyperbola, ellipse, and opposite sections, one is ready to see how these sections arise within the cone. I do not use the word “see” lightly. In these propositions, Apollonius dedicates considerable space both in the enunciation and in the body of the FRIED 105 proof to describe the sequence of geometrical operations undertaken to produce the particular sections; just as one witnesses the coming to be of the conical surface and cone, now one witnesses the coming to be of the conic sections. Of all the sections presented in 1.11-14, the one that is most obviously related to Apollonius’ cone is in fact the opposite sections. The reason is clear when one considers Apollonius’ definition of the conical surface and cone. When Euclid, by contrast, defines a cone in Book 11 of the Elements, he does it by describing the rotation of a right triangle about one of its legs. Hence, Euclid begins by defining the figure of the cone; moreover, Euclid’s cone, from the start, is right, that is, its axis is perpendicular to its base, and it is bounded. Apollonius begins by defining a conic surface, which is generally oblique (since the line from the fixed point to the center of the circle about whose circumference the generating line turns is not necessarily perpendicular to the plane of the circle), unbounded, and, significantly, double. The cone arises from this surface as the figure (schema) contained by the base circle and the vertex. Later, in proposition 1.4, Apollonius shows that by cutting the conic surface with planes parallel to that of the base circle any number of cones may be produced from the conical surface. In this way, the two vertically opposite surfaces (hai kata koruphên epiphaneiae) of the conic surfaces give rise to cones on either side of the vertex. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 106 Fig. 8: Conica 1.4 Η Δ Ε Θ A A Α Θ Δ Κ Β E H K B Z Γ Z Κ Θ Γ Δ H Β Ε Ζ Γ The doubleness of the conic surface and the double set of cones that arise from it is (together with its obliqueness) surely one of the most striking aspects of Apollonius’ definition. So, when Apollonius defines the opposite sections in 1.14, the definition is not entirely unexpected; it has been prefigured in the definition of the conic surface itself. Indeed, while the hyperbola is defined in terms of the figure of the cone, which is defined by means of the conic surface, the opposite sections are defined in terms of the conic surface, and in this sense, the opposite sections are prior to the hyperbola. It is worth observing in this connection that 1.14 is the last proposition in the book in which the conic surface appears, as if to say that it no longer has to appear, having served its purpose. But here a little more needs to be said. For while it is true that the conic surface does not appear again in the Conica, the cone does: it reappears in Book 6, where it is used to carry out various constructions connected with similar and equal conic sections, and, most importantly, at the end of Book 1, where Apollonius constructs conic sections in a plane having given diameters, latera recta, and ordinate angles. In the latter constructions, Apollonius generally proceeds by taking the given plane as the cutting plane and then constructing the cone cut by that plane so that the section pro- FRIED 107 duced is the section required. One might expect, therefore, that when in 1.59 he set out to construct opposite sections, he would similarly have constructed the conic surface cut by the given plane to produce opposite sections. But, as we saw above, this is not what he does. Applying 1.54-55 in the same sequence, he constructs one hyperbola and then another. Furthermore, if one follows 1.54-55 to the letter in constructing the hyperbolas on both sides of BE, which involves constructing cones as I have remarked, one does not arrive at the two vertical opposite surfaces composing the conic surface without significantly altering the construction in 1.5455. Can Apollonius truly say, then, as he does, that “it is evident” (phaneron de) that opposite sections are produced in 1.59? I think he can. For when he produces the first hyperbola in 1.59, he does so by producing a cone, in accordance with 1.54-55; but the cone is only a figure cut off from a conic surface, and we know from 1.14 that when the plane of the first hyperbola cuts the opposite surface of the conic surface it will produce the opposite section of the first hyperbola. What remains for Apollonius is only to produce that second hyperbola so that it has the right diameter, latus rectum, and ordinate direction, which is precisely what he does.16 So, although the conic surface does not appear explicitly in 1.59, it is still there implicitly. In fact, this is the case with all the constructions at the end of Book 1: the initial construction of the parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola, in which the ordinate direction is right, is carried out by explicitly constructing a cone, but in the continuation of the constructions, that is, in the cases in which the ordinate directions are not right, the cone does not appear. In this way, I think it is wrong to think Apollonius is trying to break away from the cone; the conic sections are rooted in the cone. Indeed, it is like the roots of a tree: although the roots are unseen, the leaves, even those at the very summit of the tree, will not survive without them. Thus we can still say with confidence that the opposite sections have the special status that they do because of their immediate origin in the double conic surface. They inherit �108 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW their doubleness directly from the doubleness of the conic surface; their unity they obtain from the single plane that cuts the surface. This geometric birth of the opposite sections sets them apart from the conjugate sections and puts them in the same class as the parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola. Summary and Concluding Remarks Apollonius’ treatment of the opposite sections tells us much about his mathematical world—mostly because these sections are not found outside of it. In modern mathematics there is only the hyperbola, and the hyperbola has two branches. In Apollonius’ geometry there is an hyperbola and there are opposite sections. The hyperbola is produced by cutting a cone; it has an opposite section since the conic surface from which the cone arises extends not only below but also above the vertex of the cone. The opposite sections are linked by their common asymptotes and common diameter. The conjugate sections are linked similarly by common asymptotes and, though not a common diameter, by conjugate diameters. However, this kind of linkage seems to be less compelling for Apollonius than the linkage arising from the single plane cutting the conic surface, for only the opposite sections, and not the conjugate sections, are spoken of in conjunction with the other conic sections. Earlier I referred to Apollonius’ definition of the conic surface as having a mythic quality. This was to give some explanation of the motion-filled description constituting the definition and to highlight the possibility that the development of the conic sections from the conic surface and the figure of the cone was, for Apollonius, nothing short of a spectacle of mathematical genesis. The use of the word “myth” in a mathematical context is jarring for modern ears; mathematics, if to anything, should be related to logos not muthos. But in the Greek world, it must be recalled, muthos and logos overlapped as well as being opposed (Peters, 1967, pp. 120121), so that relationship between the two was one of tension rather than exclusion. Cassirer has gone far to show that the FRIED 109 myth-making function is fundamental to human experience, and I rather agree with him when he says: The mythical form of conception is not something superadded to certain definite elements of empirical existence; instead, the primary “experience” itself is steeped in the imagery of myth and saturated with its atmosphere. Man lives with objects only in so far as he lives with these forms; he reveals reality to himself, and himself to reality in that he lets himself and the environment enter into this plastic medium, in which the two do not merely make contact, but fuse with each other. (Cassirer, 1946, p. 10) Be that as it may, the use of the word “myth” in the context of the Conica does suggest a view of Apollonius as one very much engaged with the being of his objects and where they come from; indeed, the distance we feel between myth and mathematics is partly the result of an overly pragmatic view of mathematics in which properties take precedence over origins, a view which is characteristically modern. In this paper, I have tried to show that if we disregard visible geometrical origins and focus only on abstract relations, such as are captured in an algebraic equation, it becomes difficult to understand why the opposite sections enjoy the status they do in the Conica as conic sections different from the hyperbola, and why their status is different from that of the conjugate sections—and, conversely, I have tried to show that the opposite sections bring us back to the importance of geometrical origins in the Conica and, in so doing, allow us one key to the character of classical mathematics. Bibliography Apollonius. (1891, 1893). Apollonii Pergaei quae Graece exstant cum commentariis antiquis. Edited by I. L. Heiberg. 2 volumes. Leipzig: Teubner. �110 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Apollonius. (1998). Apollonius of Perga Conics Books I-III. Translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro. Santa Fe: Green Lion Press. Apollonius. (2002). Apollonius of Perga Conics Book IV. Translated with introduction and notes by Michael N. Fried. Santa Fe: Green Lion Press. Cassirer, E. (1946). Language and Myth. New York: Harper and Brothers. Fried, Michael N. and Unguru, Sabetai. (2001). Apollonius of Perga’s Conica: Text, Context, Subtext. Leiden: Brill. Goodwin, W W & Gulick, C. B. (1992). Greek Grammar. New . . Rochelle: Aristide D. Caratzas. Heath, Thomas L. (1896). Apollonius of Perga, Treatise on Conic Sections. Cambridge: At the University Press. Heath, Sir Thomas L. (1921). A History of Greek Mathematics, 2 vols., Oxford: At the Clarendon Press (repr., New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1981). Klein, Jacob (1981). “The World of Physics and the Natural World.” The St. John’s Review, 33 (1): 22-34 Peters, F. E. (1967). Greek Philosophical Terms. New York: New York University Press. Sommerville, D. M. Y. (1946). Analytic Conics. London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd. Toomer, G. J. (1990). Apollonius Conics Books V to VII: The Arabic Translation of the Lost Greek Original in the Version of the Banu Musa. 2 vols. (Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, 9), New York: Springer-Verlag Toomer, G. J. (1970). Apollonius of Perga, in DSB, 1, 179-193. Youschkevitch, A. P (1976). The Concept of Function up to the . Middle of the 19th Century. Archive for History of Exact Sciences 16, pp. 37-88. Zeuthen, H. G. (1886). Die Lehre von den Kegelschnitten im Altertum, Kopenhagen, (repr., Hildesheim:Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966). FRIED 111 Notes The algebraic reading of the Conica as an historical interpretation has, of course, Zeuthen (1886) as its greatest representative; indeed, Zeuthen’s view of the Conica was completely adopted by Heath (1896) and, to some extent, by Toomer as well (Toomer, 1990, 1970). 1 From Sommerville (1946), but, needless to say, a similar description can be found in any other textbook of analytic geometry. 2 In this connection, it is worth recalling that the sense in which functions such as f(x) = a/x (whose graph, of course, is also an hyperbola) are to be considered continuous or not has itself an interesting history, one that shows again how history rarely moves in straight lines. For Euler, “continuity” referred to the rule, so that a function, like f(x) = a/x, governed by a single analytic equation should called “continuous.” Although this view still echoes in our calling the hyperbola one curve with two branches, Euler’s approach to the continuity of functions gave away to a more geometrical view of continuity, that is, where continuity has much to do with connectedness in the work Cauchy and Bolzano (For a detailed discussion of these shifts in the meaning of continuity in the history of the function concept, see Youschkevitch, 1976). 3 They are less prominent, however, in the extant later books, Books 5-7 and in Book 1, where they appear in only 9 propositions. 4 The same argument also shows the difficulty in maintaining that, for Apollonius, the circle was a kind of ellipse. The relationship between the ellipse and the circle has been discussed extensively in Michael N. Fried & Sabetai Unguru, Apollonius of Perga’s Conica: Text, Context, Subtext, chap. 7. 5 Unless stated otherwise, all translations from Books 1-3 are from R. Catesby Taliaferro in Apollonius of Perga Conics: Books I-III (Green Lion edition). 6 For example in 4.48 (although any proposition from among 4.4154 could be taken as an example) we have in the ekthesis: estôsan antikeimenai hai ABΓ, Δ, kai huperbole tis he AHΓ...kai tês AHΓ antikeimene estô he E. 7 8 My translation. �112 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW For this reason, one might expect the dual to be used in referring to the opposite sections instead of the simple plural. The dual was used for denoting “natural pairs” (see W W Goodwin & C. B. . . Gulick, Greek Grammar, §§ 170, 838, 914). But, as Christian Marinus Taisbak has pointed out to me, it seems that by Hellenistic times “the dual had become more or less obsolete.” 9 Fried & Unguru, op. cit., chap. 3; Fried, M. N., Apollonius of Perga: Conics Book IV, pp. xxi-xxvii. 10 Thus, it is not at all surprising that the figure Eutocius uses to illustrate Apollonius’ general definition of the transverse diameter is evidently a pair of opposite sections (Heiberg, 2.201), and not, say, a pair of circles, which would have served as well and which I have used above. 11 12 The conjugate sections are introduced in the last proposition of Book 1, proposition 60. Besides 1.60, the conjugate sections appear also in propositions 2.17-23,42-43; 3.13-15,23-26,28-29, as well as in a very striking proposition in Book 7, 7.31. For the verb suzeugnumi, from which suzugeis is derived, Liddell and Scott give the definitions, “to yoke together, couple or pair…esp. in marriage.” It is worth noting that in 4.49, 50, 51 Apollonius uses the same adjective suzugeis to refer to opposite sections. 13 14 See Fried & Unguru, op.cit., pp. 123-124. In Book 4, particularly in 4.25 (which is the central theorem of the book: “A section of a cone does not cut a section of a cone or circumference of a circle at more than four points”) the opposite do seem to be separated from the other conic sections. In this specific case, however, Heath’s argument above might be correct, namely, that the cases involving the opposite sections, as Apollonius stresses in the preface, were new and needed to be highlighted. It may also be that 4.25 does actually intend the opposite sections, even though the proof for the opposite sections comes latter; that kind of nexus is not unusual in the Conica. Whatever the case, it still remains that, unlike the opposite sections, the conjugate sections do not appear at all in Book 4. 15 One might argue here that he is using a result here from Book 6, namely, that two hyperbolas having the equal and similar figures are 16 FRIED 113 equal (6.2), but this could be argued regarding all the constructions at the end of Book 1. �114 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 115 Viète on the Solution of Equations and the Construction of Problems Richard Ferrier Introduction I wish to do two things in this paper, first to review the grounds for taking François Viète as a pivotal figure in the history of thought, and second to clarify an interesting technical aspect of his work, namely, what he called the “exegetical art.” This clarification will show Viète to be a traditional thinker as well as a revolutionary one, by showing how he stops short of writing symbolic formulae or solutions to problems in geometry. The second part is much longer, and will take us through some proofs, none terribly difficult, I hope. The mathematical climax is the analysis of the inscription of a regular heptagon in a circle, an example of the exegetical art in action taken from Viète’s work. The Importance of Viète According to Jacob Klein, the man chiefly responsible for interest in Viète in the last 70 years, “The very nature of man’s understanding of the world is henceforth, (that is to say, after Viète’s work), governed by the symbolic number concept. In Viète’s ‘general analytic’ this symbolic concept of number appears for the first time, namely in the form of the species.” Now this last remark needs clarification, particularly in its use of the term “species,” that is “form” or “eidos,” but also, perhaps, in the notion of symbolic mathematics that Mr. Richard Ferrier teaches at Thomas Aquinas College. He has written, but not yet published, a study of Viète’s transformative work on the analytic art. �116 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Klein is drawing upon (Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, p. 185). I will give a very brief account of what I think he means. It comes to something like this. The letters upon which we operate when we do algebra are not signs of the same order as the words of common speech. They do not immediately intend or signify anything. They are ciphers related to each other by rules of connection analogous to syntax in a spoken language. It is by those rules alone that they acquire what “meaning” they have. That meaning is now called “syntactic” as opposed to “semantic” meaning. The equals symbol in an equation does not mean, “is the same in magnitude or number.” It is rather a relation between two other terms, say A and B, which happens to be a convertible relation, so if the first relation holds, A = B, so also the second, B = A holds. If you give this symbol enough of the behaviors or of the characteristics that ordinary equality has, then what will be valid for its use, that is, what will be consistent to say of it once you have posited the suitable rules governing its role in a system of such symbols, will also be true of arithmetic or geometry. This presumes, of course, that you interpret all the symbols as the kind of beings that arithmetic considers, relations of inequality and equality, numbers themselves, and so forth. But prior to this interpretation, the set of symbols does not signify numbers, magnitudes, equalities, additions, divisions, or any other determinate kind of mathematical being. Moreover, the indetermination in the single letter symbols gives rise to the notion of a variable, which in turn underlies modern mathematical or formal logic. Such mathematics is symbolic mathematics. Mr. Klein claims that the symbolic concept of number originates in the work of François Viète, and that this concept comes to dominate modern mathematical thought and to influence modern conceptuality altogether. Now I do not intend to demonstrate these larger claims or to argue for them, but rather to look into some particulars connected with Klein’s view of Viète. First let us note this FERRIER 117 aspect of his view: Klein says, “The symbolic concept of number appears for the first time . . . in the form of the species.” How can that be? How is it that the term “species” can be the entry point for the modern notion of number, and in general for a mode of cognition, symbolic cognition, to enter mathematics? This is what I understand Mr. Klein to mean, and I think he is correct: Viète found a use of the word “eidos” in a text of solutions to number problems, an ancient text, the Arithmetica of Diophantus, where the word is used for the unknown number. That is, Diophantus calls the unknown a “species.” Viète conjoined this use to a discussion of a method of finding unknown magnitudes in geometry. This method is called analysis. In geometrical analysis, authors such as Archimedes and Apollonius operate on unknown or not actually given lines and figures as though they were given. Viète, then, brought these two together: (1) the name “species” or “eidos” for the unknown or, as we would say, variable; and (2) operating or calculating without making any distinction between unknown and known quantities. But he went further. He replaced the given quantities, numbers, or magnitudes with more species, and so produced the first modern literal or non-numerical algebra, which he called “species logistic,” that is, computation in forms. A very elementary example may serve to clarify this idea somewhat. You are familiar with the problem of finding a fourth proportional. Now if you express that in algebra you would come up with something like this: let ‘x’ stand for the unknown. x is to a as b is to c. In that expression the letter ‘x’ does not stand for something you now have or know. It is not clear how you should add or multiply or in any way deal with something that you do not yet have. Let us ignore this mystery of operating on what is not there for you, what is not given. Writing x is to a as b is to c, you take the product of means and extremes, and you wind up with x times c = a times b. Then you divide both products by c and you have x = a times b divided by c, where a, b, and �118 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW c are the givens that will determine x, and when you have that you have a formula for making x be given to you. Of course, you cannot compute x unless a, b, and c are actual numbers, say 4, 5, and 10. If these are the given numbers, then x is given as well, and it is the number 2. Neither can you construct x, unless you have determinate magnitudes, say straight lines, as the three givens. If you keep the letters a, b, and c and you allow a, b, and c to be equally indeterminate with x, then you no longer have a definite x so much as a kind of relation between a, b, c, and x. In algebra, we stop with this relation, calling it both the formula and the solution to our problem. That is what happens when the particular numbers of an ordinary problem— to find the fourth proportional—are replaced by signs for the possibility of finding such a number. You no longer can take a times b and divide it by c, because a, b, and c are just as indeterminate as the original unknown. This is what I mean when I say that Viète used Diophantus’ term species to designate not only the unknowns but also the knowns. He called the resulting field of calculations and operations, and the consequences of performing them according to laws set out, “species logistic,” that is, calculation in species. If we take two easy steps beyond what Viète did, writing a formula for quadratics and using two unknowns as axes in a plane, his work leads directly to negative, irrational and complex numbers, to the idea of a variable, and to analytic geometry. All this stems from letting the symbol, the “species,” stand in for the determinate number or magnitude of classical mathematics. Viète himself puts it this way, (he uses the term “zetetic,” which I will discuss later). “The zetetic art does not employ its logic on numbers, which was the tediousness of ancient analysts, but uses its logic through a logistic which in a new way has to do with species. This logistic is much more successful and powerful than the numerical one.” So Viète commands our attention as the originator of the modern algebraic number concept, and the notion of mathematics as a symbolic FERRIER 119 science not immediately about anything but the arrangements of its own terms into systems. I say Viète commands our attention as the originator. Now it is of course the case that however revolutionary Viète thought he was and however proud he was of his accomplishment, he did not see all the things that came from it, for example, imaginary numbers, or co-ordinate geometry. How did he think of his work? He considered his work largely a restoration of a way of seeking that went back to Plato. I say he considered it largely a restoration because there is an addition to the restored analysis that Viète expressly claims as his own, which he calls exegetic, and it is this part that I would like to set out next. The principal ancient text from which Viète formed his view of analysis is the Seventh book of the Collectio of Pappus. Pappus distinguishes between seeking, or “zetetic,” and providing, or “poristic” analyses. This difference answers to the difference between the propositions in the Elements that end “Q.E.D” and those that end “Q.E.F.,” that is, between theorems and problems. There are two types of analysis, since there are two types of propositions with which geometers are ordinarily concerned. Viète, for reasons too subtle to lay out here, read Pappus in another way, making zetetic and poristic parts of one procedure, a procedure ordinarily applied to a problem, not a theorem. Still, he conceived of his work as a restoration of the lost art—or perhaps the partially lost art—of analysis, that is, as a renovation, not an innovation. That is a striking characteristic of Viète and his contemporaries. You find in them a preference for the lost or partially recovered sources in antiquity, for Democritus over Aristotle, and when Plato is not fully available, for Plato over Aristotle, for Archimedes over Euclid, and in general for whatever the schoolmen did not hand on over what the schoolmen did hand on. They sought the key to the deepest truths in the arts and sciences in a correct restoration of the faultily preserved sources of antiquity in preference to accepting the ones that they had received more perfectly intact from their teachers. �120 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW This is what Viète says: “And although the ancients had set forth a two-fold analysis, the zetetic and the poristic, it is nevertheless fitting that there be established also a third kind, which may be called ‘rhetic’, [telling] or ‘exegetic’, [showing or exhibiting], so that there is a zetetic art by which is found the equation or proportion between the magnitude that is being sought, and those that are given, a poristic art, by which from the equation or proportion the truth of the theorem set up is examined, and an exegetic art, by which from the equation set up or the proportion there is exhibited the magnitude itself which is being sought.” As if to emphasize his own achievement in completing the method of analysis, he says, “And thus the whole threefold analytical art, claiming for itself this office may be defined as the science of right finding in mathematics.” As to the importance of the third part, rhetic or exegetic, he says in another place, “Rhetic and exegetic must be considered to be most powerfully pertinent to the establishment of the art, since the two remaining provide examples rather than rules.” He emphasizes the importance of the third part in the remarkable concluding words of the introduction to the analytic art: “Finally, the analytical art, having at last been put into the threefold form of zetetic, poristic, and exegetic, appropriates to itself by rights the proud problem of problems: To leave no problem unsolved.” What exactly is the third part of the analytic art, the showing or exegetic part, the part that Viète himself emphasized and considered his own invention? One way to proceed to answer would be to read or re-read the parts of Viète’s Isagoge that touch on exegetics. If your experience is like mine, though, you know that it is one thing to have someone describe a procedure, especially a mathematical procedure, another to know it from having carried it out. Accordingly, I propose to explicate Viète’s notion of exegesis by doing some geometry. To prepare for the example of exegetics taken from Viète, we will look at a problem of my own. FERRIER 121 Viète’s Exegetic Art Analysis Bootcamp Our practice will be the analysis of the construction of a regular polygon, the pentagon. Problem: to inscribe a regular pentagon in a circle. Figure 1 Inscription of a regular pentagon in a circle Now the analysis of a construction always starts this way: suppose you already have what you want to make. Let it be done, or rather as they say, “let it have been done.” Our figure is, then, given not really but hypothetically. ABXCY is supposed to be a regular pentagon in a circle. All the sides are equal, equal sides subtend equal arcs, equal arcs subtend equal angles at the circumference, and therefore angle ACB is precisely half the angle ABC, and is also half the angle CAB. The triangle CAB is therefore an isosceles triangle, CA equaling BC, with the vertex angle half the angles at the base. Next let the angle at A be bisected by AD. The two half angles then will each be equal to the angle ACD and the triangle ADC will also be an isosceles triangle. �122 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Since the angle BAD is equal to the angle ACD, if a circle be described through the three points A, D, C, the line AB will be tangent to that circle, for the angle that a tangent makes with a chord is equal to the angle subtended by the same arc at the circumference. But the square on a tangent is equal to the rectangle contained by the whole secant and the part outside the circle, that is BC and BD, i.e., the square on AB = rectangle BD, BC. But inasmuch as AB = AD = DC, then the square on DC = the rectangle BD, BC. Well, then, if I had this pentagon in this circle, I would have this line BC cut at a point D so that the square on DC, the greater segment, is equal to the rectangle contained by the whole line and the lesser segment. But there is a proposition that tells me how to do that, the eleventh proposition in the second book of the Elements. So, let it be done and then prove “forwards,” or synthetically, all the connections that I just established “backwards,” or analytically, and at the end we will really have our pentagon in a circle. Now, that is a classical geometrical analysis and synthesis of the sort you would find in the second book of Apollonius, numerous places in Archimedes, and in Pappus. I have not used anything algebraic. But, let us indulge ourselves in some algebra, and look at the equation here: the square on DC = BD, BC. Calling BC ‘a’, and DC ‘x’, the equation is x2 = a(ax). “And,” you could say to yourself, “if I could only solve for x, then I would know how long to make DC, and if I could make DC then I could do the problem. But this is a quadratic equation, and I can solve it.” That is the method of analysis. I include here what came to be called the ‘resolution.’ We began in the classical mode by looking at the angles and finding a proportion, which we resolved into an equality between a square and a rectangle. When we reach this point, we can either continue in the classical mode by thinking of the equality in geometrical terms, and do the synthesis as a construction, which would be the answer to the problem. Or we can examine the equality alge- FERRIER 123 braically and work with it in that mode to reach a formula for x, and consider the formula the solution of the problem. Recall what Viète said about exegetics: it is supposed to provide the unknown magnitude itself, to exhibit or construct it. One would expect exegetics to provide the way for finding such an unknown as we had in the present problem, that is, it would seem to be some sort of procedure for cutting the line BD at a point like D that will produce the requisite properties. One is tempted to think that the procedure intended is to use the quadratic formula to solve for x, and then interpret the right hand side as a series of simple geometric constructions. As we shall see later, though, this is an error. Viète’s exegetic art is not the mechanical exploitation of the formulae of solved equations. Analysis with Live Ammunition Next, we will see what Viète does in a real problem that is considerably more complex but of greater interest. The problem is to inscribe a regular seven-sided polygon, a heptagon, in a circle. It is taken from Viète’s published work and is a real instance of the kind of solution Viète promises in the introduction, that is, it is a real instance, I think, of exegetics. To solve it we will need a postulate and two lemmas. Postulate: To draw a straight line from any point to any two lines so that they cut off on it any possible predetermined interval. (I have illustrated this in the next figure. See figure 2.) �124 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Figure 2 Postulate FERRIER 125 Figure 3 First Lemma: Trisection of an angle: First Lemma: To trisect a given angle. Let the given angle be DCE. The point called the pole is the “any point” of the postulate. “To draw a straight line from any point”: so the straight line must pass through the pole. “To draw it to any two lines”—those two lines are the curved line and the straight line below—“so that they cut off on it any possible predetermined interval”—the interval is up there above; it is given in advance, predetermined, and what I would like you to grant me in this postulate is the power to put a line through that pole so that between those two other lines, that interval is cut off. Now I must say, “Any possible predetermined interval” because as is obvious to the eye, I guess, in this figure, if I made that interval too short, I could not fit the line through the pole so as to have that interval cut off on it no matter what. If the two given lines were, for another example, concentric circles, and if the pole were the center of the circle, then this postulate would be of no use at all because the only distance between those two lines on lines drawn from the center of the circle is the difference between their radii; that is all I could have. So I must say, “any possible predetermined interval.” If it is possible, I would like the right to place that line passing through the pole so as to have that distance intercepted on it. This postulate is mentioned in the Isagoge. To the reader who has not read more of Viète than the Isagoge, it is not clear why that is in there at all—but he asks for that postulate for certain purposes, and I ask for it, too. Let a circle be described with C as center and radius CD. With pole D and interval = CD we use the postulate to insert line ABD, so that the interval falls between the circle and the line CE extended. I say that angle BAC is 1/3 of angle DCE. Since AB = BC = CD, the triangle BCD is isosceles, with equal angles at B and D. But each of these is double the angle at A. And the one at D together with A is equal to angle DCE. In the case where the angle to be trisected is greater than 135 degrees, we use the equal exterior angles at B and D, which are again each twice the angle at A, as in the second figure. Q.E.F. Second Lemma: In the first figure for Lemma 1, if we construct DE=CD, the following equality holds: The cube on AC, minus three times the solid contained by AC and the square on AB, is equal to the solid contained by CE and the square on AB. �126 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Figure 4 Lemma 2: cube AC - 3 times solid (AC, sq. AB) = solid (CE, sq. AB) Looking at the figure (figure 4), if I drop perpendiculars BI, DK, and erect a perpendicular CH and extend it, on the vertical line FHCG I have the situation presented in the Elements 2.5, that is, I have a straight line bisected and cut somewhere else, and therefore the square on the half will equal the sum of the rectangle contained by the unequal segments and the square on the segment between the bisection point and the point making the unequal cut. And looking at the straight lines BHD and FHG, I have the situation of 3.35, namely two lines in a circle cutting each other. When two lines in a circle cut each other, the rectangles contained by the segments are equal. I will use those properties and the Pythagorean Theorem and a few other elementary truths to FERRIER 127 demonstrate the lemma, but the key ones are the ones I just indicated. The proof is given next to the figure. The square on AB, which, since AB = BC is the same as the square on CG, is equal by that proposition in the second book of the Elements to the square on CH and the rectangle contained by the unequal segments FH, HG. But the square on AB minus the square on CH will be the rectangle which is in turn equal to the rectangle BH, HD by the other proposition from the third book, namely that rectangles made of the segments of two intersecting lines in a circle are equal. Now the square on CH, by the Pythagorean Theorem, will be equal to the difference between the square on the hypotenuse AH and the square on AC. But since BI is a perpendicular drawn from the vertex of an isosceles triangle, it will bisect the base AC, and, BI being parallel to HC, the line AH will also be bisected at B, so that the square on AH is four times the square on its half, AB. Then the square on CH is the difference between four times the square on AB and the square on AC. Next, from that and the line above, namely, that the difference between the square on AB and the square on CH is equal to the rectangle BH HD, the square on AC minus 3 times the square on AB will be equal to the rectangle BH HD. Now that is almost where I want to be because I am interested in the cube on AC, and the difference between that and—I am looking at the conclusion now—three times the solid contained by AC and the square on AB. I have those solids with the height removed, as it were, I just need the height AC and I have those solids. That is my next goal. Then BH is to HD as IC is to CK, since any two lines cut by parallel lines are cut proportionally. And if BH is to HD as IC is to CK, then it is also in the same ratio as their doubles AC and CE. So that BH is to HD as AC is to CE. Then, taking the common height, BH, the square on BH is to the rectangle BH, HD as AC is to CE. But BH is equal to AB so that the square on AB is to the difference between the square on AC and three times the square on AB—that was what we �128 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW found equal to the rectangle BH, HD—in the same ratio, namely as AC is to CE. Then taking means and extremes, the solid contained by the means is equal to the solid contained by the extremes, namely the cube on AC, minus three times the solid contained by AC and the square on AB is equal to the solid contained by CE and the square on AB. Q.E.D. I would note at this point that everything we have gone through in these preliminaries is strictly classical, synthetic geometry. It could all have been done by Archimedes or Apollonius, and some of it, in fact, was done by them. Now let us see what interest this second lemma might hold. It seems to me the easiest thing would be to look at this figure given below (figure 5) which removes all the middle steps and just looks at the result. Figure 5 If you have two isosceles triangles with equal sides p and unequal sides q and x, then you get an equation answering to the equality that I gave in the geometrical mode namely that x3 – 3xp2 = qp2 or, in short, this is a geometrical configuration that answers to a cubic equation. If you have ever gone back and looked at things in Euclid, trying to express them in equations, you will know that cubics are unusual. You almost always get squares. This theorem answers to a cubic equation. And that is why Viète proves it. He proves this theorem in order to give a geometrical counterpart to that cubic equation. If the terms in the equations are interpreted as the sides and bases of the triangles in this theorem, then the solution FERRIER 129 of the interpreted equation would reduce to the construction of this figure. That is, if you could construct the triangles set up this way, and in particular if you could give yourself x, then you would have solved this equation, this interpreted equation, as I would like to speak of it. To put this another way, if x3-3xp2+qp2, then x can be found as the base of an isosceles triangle whose equal sides are p and whose base angle is 1/3 the base angle of an isosceles triangle with sides p and base q. Now the angles of such a triangle, namely the one with two sides p and a base q, are given. Why? Because the whole triangle is given. If you have three sides you have a determinate triangle, and so the angles are given. And given two equal sides and any one angle in an isosceles triangle, the remaining side and the remaining angles are also given. Consequently the base of the flatter triangle would be given. Thus all we need to do to solve for x is to trisect a given angle. This is easily done by means of our first lemma. To review: we have a postulate that allows us to insert a rotating line through a given point across two lines so as to have cut off on it any interval. We have found a figure that answers to a certain cubic equation, namely, paired isosceles triangles with a 3:1 base angle ratio, that answers to a certain cubic equation, and we obtained this figure by trisecting an angle. Those are the preliminaries. Last, let us see how Viète inscribes a regular seven-sided polygon in a circle. This problem, incidentally, is Viète’s own final problem in his Supplementum Geometriae, his completion of geometry. I have chosen it not only for its intrinsic interest but also because I think Viète, who calls the Supplementum a work in exegetics, gave this problem as a specimen of the workings of his exegetic art. Problem: To inscribe a regular heptagon in a circle. Let it have been done. (See figure 6.) �130 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Figure 6 Inscription of a regular heptagon in a circle And let BE be one side of the heptagon; then the angle ECB will be 1/7 of two right angles. Then the angle at E, CEA, will also be 1/7 because that is an isosceles triangle, EAC. Then the angle EAB will be 2/7 because it is the sum of those. Now from the point E let ED be drawn equal to the radius of the circle, and where it cuts the circle at F let the line FA be FERRIER 131 drawn to the center. Then we have two isosceles triangles of the sort in the trisection lemma from which it follows that the angle FAC is three times angle EDA. It is the same figure that we had in the trisection lemma. In the triangle EAC the two smaller angles each being 1/7 of two right angles, the remaining angle at A is 5/7 of two right angles, but the whole angle FAC being triple the angle at D, which is itself 2/7, will be 6/7. The remaining angle FAE will be 1/7 of two right angles. It will be equal then to the angle AEC, so that the lines FA and EC will be parallel. Since those two lines are parallel they cut the sides of the triangles DEC and DFA proportionately, so DE is to DC as DF is to DA. But, by another proposition from book 3 of the Elements, the book of circles, the rectangle contained by the segments of a secant, that is, the whole secant and the part outside, DF, DE, is equal to the rectangle contained by the segments of any other secant drawn from the same point outside. So DB, DC equals DE, DF. Then, turning that equality into a proportion: DE is to DC as DB is to DF, but as DE is to DC as DF is to DA, therefore DB, DF, DA are continuously proportional. Then, in a continuous proportion the first is to the third in the duplicate ratio, or as the squares, on any terms in the ratios and also any terms having the same ratio as those terms. So DB is to DA as square DE is to square DC. But DE was by construction made equal to the radius so DB is to DA as square AB is to square DC. Here we stop. How does one know when to stop in an analysis? Well, here is one way I know in this one. You stop when you have projected the ratios you know in various parts of the figure down to ratios on one line. It happens in the synthetic proofs of Apollonius, too. You take a number of ratios in the figure and when you transform them into a proportion all on a single line, that tells you how the lengths in that line are related. That is where we are now. We have taken the ratios that exist through the figure because of its shape and we have turned them into a proportion among the parts of one line. That is also beautifully adapted for conversion into an equation. �132 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW That line, of course, is the diameter extended, DBAC, and our proportion is DB is to DA as square AB is to square DC. Let us turn this into species logistic, or algebra. What do we need to construct the heptagon that we do not know? Is it not clear that we need to know DB? If we knew DB, we could locate point D and since DE is equal to a radius, we could just swing a radius out from D and cut off the other end of the side of the heptagon, and we would be done. So DB is the unknown, and that is the only term we need to find on this line, on the diameter extended. So call DB ‘x’, and the radius ‘r’. DA will then be (r+x), and DC will be (2r+x). The proportion then may be written: x: (r+x) :: r:(2r+x). Means and extremes can be taken, yielding the equation: x3 + 4rx2 + 3r2x = r3. This does not look very promising. It is a cubic, and we have a pattern for solving a cubic, but not this cubic. Happily, there is an algebraic gimmick that Viète invented called “plasma,” which will do the trick. (Almost none of Viète’s technical terms passed into common use, by the way. Accordingly, it is like reading ancient law-books to read him talking about his procedure. One of the few Viètean terms that did last was “coefficient,” but “plasma” did not.) “Plasma” is the technique of getting rid of an unwanted term in an algebraic expression by taking a substitute variable. In a way you might say that is what you do when you complete the square in solving a quadratic. You find the right thing to remove the middle term, the term that is just an x, and then it is just a simple square; it is no longer a three-term expression. Now in cubics if you could remove two terms at once, then all you would have to do is take cube roots and you can solve them in much the same way you solve quadratics. Plasma gets rid of one term, a term in x or x squared, but unfortunately only one. The substitution that you make to do it is y = x + 4/3r, or x = y – 4/3r. Let that substitution have 7 been made, and you get the equation in y:y3 – 7 r2y= 27r3. 3 FERRIER 133 Now if we let p = r √7/3, and r/3 be q, this equation transforms into our pattern y3 – 3yp2 = qp2. Point D gives x and y, and hence one side of our heptagon. Since we have the side, we can just go around the circle six more times and the problem is done. I omit a slight digression in Viète’s analysis here. It is done for reasons of elegance and does not substantially change the argument. This is the pivot point of the argument, where we move from analysis to synthesis. Viète’s synthesis runs through the analysis backwards: first the analysis in the equations and proportions, and then the analysis in the angles, until he has a proof that the figure that he had made in the circle is a regular seven-sided figure. I will omit the synthesis. It must be noted, however, that not only would every ancient geometer have provided a synthesis, but that Viète, too, gives it in the Supplementum Geometria, the text from which this all comes. Indeed, it is all that he gives. What I have laid out here is a reconstructed analysis following his remarks on how to do these sorts of problems. That is, he says that the proof will be the reverse of the analysis and that the analyst dissimulates and does not show you everything he did. This seems to me to be a kind of challenge to readers of those texts to find out what he did do. Descartes says just that in his Géométrie. So that is what I have given you: it is a reconstructed analysis of his problem. Like Descartes, Viète complains that the Ancients covered their tracks and then does the same himself! Conclusion A survey of our procedure is now in order. First, we did not do something that the discussion of exegetics in the Isagoge might suggest. I think also it is what Mr. Klein’s book suggests, and I know it is what I thought when I first read the Isagoge myself. We did not, using algebra, or as Viète calls it, species logistic, solve the equation to which we had reduced our problem. That equation would be the first one that had �134 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the fours in it, and that we later on reduced by plasma to another equation. At no point in working with that equation did we solve for the unknown in the shape of a formula. There is not an algebraic or analytic solution to that equation; it is not to be found. You perhaps may wonder if I misspoke my thought there: absolutely not. In fact, the cubic equation involved here is the so-called “irreducible cubic,” which means that it cannot be solved by algebra. If you try to solve it by algebra, you involve yourself with imaginary quantities, and every attempt you make to get rid of them is like stepping on the bump in the rug: they pop up again elsewhere. They cannot be gotten rid of. So it is not just that he failed to do it. He cannot do it; no one can do it. Exegetics, then, does not mean performing the geometric counterpart of an algebraic solution as it is laid out in a formula. It does not mean getting -b±√b2-4ac for example, and then 2a going through the squaring, adding, subtracting, and so on in geometry, with the formula laid out for you as a kind of blueprint. This is something to which the opening pages of Descartes’ Géométrie point. I say “point” because I am not sure even Descartes does it; you have to think for awhile to see whether he intends his figures to be the simple exploitation of his operation or not. Perhaps they are not exploitations of the quadratic formula, but independently given geometrical constructions. As is so often the case with the foxy Descartes, he does not say enough to help us be sure what he has in mind. It is defensible, though, in the light of what he does say, that he intends you to have a geometric counterpart for each algebraic operation, and just to exploit the formula directly. That is at least defensible in Descartes. In Viète it is not so. So what did we do if we did not do that? Well, first we performed an ordinary geometrical analysis of the sort Archimedes might have done. This ended in a proportion. That proportion was then treated as an item in logistic. We forgot that it was about lines and just regarded it as a number of items in a logistic relation. It was transformed until it FERRIER 135 reached a certain form. What form? A form we knew in advance from our first lemma to have its geometrical counterpart in a constructable figure—that is, constructable if you grant our postulate. Then, after we had noted certain proper elegances pertaining to this particular problem, we proceeded synthetically (or rather, we would have if we had gone through all of the steps), first constructing the requisite line and then the whole polygon, and then, via the resulting equation and other relations, proving that it is indeed a regular seven-sided figure in a given circle. Zetetic is Viète’s name for the first two parts of this procedure, both the geometrical part terminating in the proportion and the algebraic analysis in which we reach an equation in standard form. Zetetic ended when the equation to which the problem had been reduced fit one of a number of standard forms, our lemma for cubics being one such form. This lemma provides the principal exegetical part. By means of this lemma, we can now find the unknown, in this case the line DB. Exegetics as a procedure is regular and synthetic. I mean those terms strictly, that is, the construction is a standard, mechanical exploitation of the equation that can be given by a standard construction. The complete synthesis simply runs through the zetetics in reverse order. If your problem reduces to a cubic of another form (this is the same with the one we have been examining, but with the signs on the left side of the equation switched: 3p2x – x3 = p2q) there is, in the Supplementum, another, similar exegetical lemma you can use to start your construction, and the situation is quite the same for problems such as inscribing the pentagon, reducing to quadratic equations. Viète treats quadratics in another treatise, and it is an extraordinarily puzzling little work. Almost everything in it is painfully obvious, at least the first 14 or so propositions are, and it has the rather odd and stuffy title, which I think should now make sense, “The Standard Enumeration of Geometrical Results.” It is a handbook; it is like a carpenter’s manual. When you have one of these, build in this order that, etc. He �136 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW does this for quadratic equations and for certain biquadratic equations. Moreover, in all these cases, the proof, which follows the construction, as in Euclid, is a straightforward reversal of the geometrical and logistic analyses that preceded— now that, I think, fits Viète’s language in his introduction; it makes sense of his language. So exegetics in practice comes to this. It is the provision and employment of a series of standard constructions for finding unknown quantities when such quantities are enmeshed in equations of various degrees, without solving the equations. This is important, since it manifests the way Viète stands in two camps, modern or symbolic, and ancient or constructive. Though species logistic is of profound value to him, he never rests in the fully analytical or symbolic solution to his equations. They must always be perfected by realization in construction or computation, artful synthetic and non-symbolic procedures. I hope we may now see why Viète wrote, “Exegetic comprises a series of rules, and is therefore to be considered the most important part of analytic, for these rules first confer on the analytic art its character as an art, while zetetic and poristic consist essentially of examples.” The analyst who knows exegetics will know what the standard constructable forms in each degree are, and he will accordingly know what to aim at in his zetesis, in his analysis. This will in turn inform his development of the techniques of species logistic, and finally, if he believes, as Viète came to believe, that he has all the exegetics that can be, he may well boast that, “The analytical art, having at last been put into the threeform form of zetetic, poristic, and exegetic, appropriates to itself by right the proud problem of problems, which is to leave no problem unsolved.” � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2004/1 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Price, Audra Hunt, Frank Sachs, Joe Flaumenhaft, Harvey Hopkins, Burt C. Unguru, Sabetai Fried, Michael N. Ferrier, Richard Description An account of the resource Volume XLVIII, number one of The St. John's Review. Published in 2004. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_48_No_1 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c9394d7fbf2c03ad028ff3d073f2229f.pdf 14a6524baee1af4d2d44b1b3edf84d59 PDF Text Text The St. John’s Review Volume XLVIII, number two (2005) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Audra Price The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year. Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are .O. available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2005 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Memorial Pieces Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen.......................... 5 Introduction to “The Tuning Fork”............................. 27 David Stephenson The Tuning Fork..........................................................28 Beate Ruhm von Oppen A Visit to Santayana.................................................... 43 Steve Benedict Essays and Lectures Kant’s Philosophical Use of Mathematics: Negative Magnitudes...................................................49 Eva Brann Four Poems Where the Poet Lives...................................................73 Early Pupil She and the Tree Outlay Elliott Zuckerman Review Platonic Pedagogy? Eva Brann’s The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and Plato’s Writings..................................................... 79 David Roochnik �4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen Introduction: Elliott Zuckerman During her years at the College, Beate brought us her words and her music, and her concern about how words and music ought to fit together. Now we are devoting to her memory some of our words and our music. In many of her writings and in her person, we were reminded of the history of the twentieth century. In a time of exaggeration, she insisted upon accuracy. And by reminding us of war, she enhanced our devotion to the activities of peace. *** Delia Walker I do not want to talk about Beate’s intellectual brilliance, of which you are all aware, but I want to talk about her as my sister and about the time when we were young. She was my big sister, my senior by several years. Because of the difference in our ages and circumstances, we lived apart more than we lived together, but I could always rely on her help and advice. I must often have been a burden and a responsibility, not to say a nuisance, but she was always there for me, especially during the difficult war years. I know she worried about me, and she helped me and gave me courage in tricky situations. She even tried her hand at matchmaking! I didn’t always agree with her advice about things, but in this instance I did, wholeheartedly, and here I am, after fifty years of happy marriage. Thank you, Beate. I know she loved Harlan very much. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 6 In spite of being by miles the brainier of us two, she always had unbounded confidence in my abilities and capabilities, and her belief in me was an enormous help to get me through periods of low self-esteem and depression. Indeed, if she had not been continually rooting for me, I might often have given up. So today I want to say a big “thank you” to her. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my family and Beate’s friends for the tremendous support they have given me in this sad time. She was very enthusiastic about my playing – far more than I deserved – and so, though I really stopped playing seriously some years ago, I have blown the dust off my flute and together with her friend, Chester Burke, we will play some Telemann – a composer of whom she was very fond. [Delia Walker and Chester Burke then played the Flute Duet in G major by Georg Philipp Telemann.] *** Peter E. Quint My first trip to St. John’s College was in the late spring of 1976. I returned from that visit with many vivid memories, but the most lively and impressive were of my conversations with a wonderful and, it seemed to me, exotic person: a German Englishwoman, of profound leaning and extraordinary charm, who—quite amazingly—lived right here in Maryland. Beate Ruhm von Oppen was one of the last of a brilliant generation of scholars—historians, scientists, philosophers, lawyers—who, having escaped Nazi Germany, were obliged to resume their studies or careers in another, more welcoming land. This necessity of perhaps starting anew may have seemed like great misfortune at the outset, but it had the advantage—for them, and certainly for us—that they were perfectly at home in two languages and two cultures. MEMORIAL 7 Yet as with many other victims or opponents of the Nazi regime, the experience left Beate with a certain, let us say, intellectual and emotional distance from her native land. Even in recent years, I believe that Beate thought long and hard before accepting a high honor for her distinguished life’s work from the German government. Some years ago Beate, with her extraordinary linguistic skills and deep knowledge of history, was chosen to be the English translator of the memoirs of Konrad Adenauer, the venerable first Chancellor of post-war West Germany. For some days the English and the French translators actually worked in Adenauer’s house in order to receive his last minute changes on the German manuscript. Beate told me that the translators worked at Adenauer’s dining room table, and apparently because the sun was streaming in, they adjusted a window curtain in a way that made the work most comfortable for them. But Adenauer himself would come in and, seeing the curtain in an unfamiliar position, would firmly move it back to the spot that he approved. A charming and slightly ludicrous tale—but would I be wrong in detecting, in Beate’s telling, a subtle note of disapproval that even in this trivial instance some residual authoritarian attitude survived in the avatar of the New Germany? The work of Beate’s that will most certainly live is her extraordinary edition of the letters of Helmuth James von Moltke sent to his wife Freya, that “beautifully edited” work, in the words of the Stanford historian Gordon Craig. Moltke was a Prussian aristocrat who opposed Hitler and knew from the outset that the war would end in catastrophic shame and defeat for Germany. Moltke sought tirelessly to recruit likeminded Germans of the resistance, and in three meetings at Kreisau, his East Elbian estate, he organized the drafting of detailed principles for a new democratic Germany after Hitler’s defeat. At the same time, Moltke was making strenuous efforts to save whatever lives he could as a legal officer in the German intelligence service, which was, as Beate noted, “the focal point of much opposition to the regime.” The let- �8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW ters reflect this ceaseless work, as well as deep concern for Freya and their two young children, who spent the war at Kreisau. Moltke fell under particular suspicion shortly after the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, and following a trial before the notorious “People’s Court,” he was executed at Berlin-Plötzensee in early 1945. The American diplomat George Kennan, who knew Moltke personally, called him: “the greatest person morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts that I met on either side of the battle lines of the Second World War.” Beate had been led to Moltke through her work on religion and the German resistance, lectures that were delivered at Princeton in 1971, and much of her academic life was focused on the issues and conundrums of resistance to a regime of repression so horrible that it would seem impossible to imagine if it had not actually occurred. In the editions of Moltke’s letters, Beate’s indispensable introductions and notes reflect her remarkable knowledge and understanding of the German resistance, as well as the broader history of the period. Indeed the notes have a sad, elegiac quality of their own. As each new personality of the resistance enters the scene, there is a trenchant summary of his career which more often than not ends—as though a bell were tolling through out the volume—with the words: “executed in August 1944”; “executed 29 September 1944”; “executed,” “executed.” It is fitting and appropriate that the German edition was awarded the Scholl prize, which honors another circle of the German resistance, the Munich University students of the White Rose movement. Beate’s first German edition of Moltke’s letters appeared in 1988, and in 1990 Alfred Knopf, Inc. published an edition in New York—wonderfully translated into English by Beate— which brought this moving document of the human spirit to American and British readers. The English introduction reflects the precision and trenchancy which Beate’s friends 9 MEMORIAL will immediately recall from her brilliant and learned conversation. Moltke’s mother was an English-speaking woman from South Africa, and the story of Beate’s edition of her letters is also noteworthy. When these letters found no American or British publisher, Beate translated them into German for a German edition. So she translated Moltke’s letters from German into English, and his mother’s letters from English into German. Ordinarily one only translates into one’s own native language, but Beate, as we know, had two native languages. In my last telephone call with Beate earlier this summer, she recounted that she was deeply absorbed in choosing books to be given to the St. John’s library. Despite many upheavals, Beate had much good fortune in her life: in getting out of Germany when she did; in finding a subject, Moltke, who was so congenial to her independent spirit; and in reaching a place, St. John’s College, that suited her so well in its uncompromising quest for excellence in the life of the mind. *** Steven Werlin I want to make two separate speeches about Beate. Both will be short. The first begins with an anecdote. Sometime in the 1990s, when I lived in Annapolis, I had the pleasure of driving Beate either to or from the airport. It was a long drive— she preferred Dulles to BWI or National—and I always enjoyed the trip. I valued the chance to chat. One time we were running a little bit late, and it started to rain. I was speeding around the Washington beltway—too quickly, it turned out—and my car went into a skid. Before I regained control, we had scraped the passenger side of the vehicle along the right-side barrier. I pulled to the side of the road in a panic. I asked Beate whether she was all right. I apologized. I asked her whether she was sure was all right. I apologized �10 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW again. I asked her whether she was very sure she was all right and apologized a third time. So much I remember only approximately. I had let my car slide out of control with a passenger who was within a half-dozen years of my grandmother’s age, and I was very upset. Whatever I said, however many times I apologized, I must have gone too far. The following is the part of the story I remember very clearly: Beate finally turned to me and said, “Steven, my dear, I made it through the bombing of London.” I wanted to share this anecdote because I thought it would be important for us all to think about how very funny Beate was. I knew that others this afternoon would speak of her scholarship and her courage. I wanted to point out that she was a pleasure to be around. I got to know Beate at two different dinner tables at 101 Market Street [the residence of the Klein’s], where three different sorts of dinners were served. There were large formal occasions at which I was most often present as a waiter; there were large informal occasions, also in the dining room, where leftovers from formal dinners would be consumed by those whom the hostess lovingly called her “vacuum cleaners”; there were private dinners, for one or two friends, at the small table in the kitchen. Beate was mainstay at all three, because whenever she was around, conversations would be interesting and serious, but also fun. Here’s my second speech: I am now the Dean of Shimer College, a small Great Books school near Chicago. I mourn Beate’s passing for my students’ sake. I had been trying for a couple of years to convince her to give a talk at Shimer. Most recently I asked her to speak at commencement last spring. She refused, saying that she was too old and unwell for the trip. When I heard she had passed away, I decided to try to share my sense of her with my students, and so I invited all who were interested to come to a Friday evening discussion of her essay on the White Rose. It’s a lovely piece: serious and challenging, surprising in its conclusions and beautifully writ- 11 MEMORIAL ten in that English which she enjoyed calling “Standard MidAtlantic.” Moved by some of her stronger claims, our conversation focused on the importance of taking language seriously, of paying close attention to the words that we and others use. Much of what was said was predictable: angry claims about the ways in which words like “terrorist” and “Nazi” and “homeland” can be used too lightly, and the damage that ensues when they are. But the conversation lacked depth of passion, just as Beate said such conversation among those of my generation and those who are younger generally do. At a certain point, however, the conversation turned. In order to explain how it turned, I need to share one fact about Shimer College. At Shimer, teachers aren’t called “tutors.” It’s not that we’re called “professors,” as we would be at most colleges. At Shimer, there is no clear tradition. Lots of words get used—teacher, instructor, facilitator, co-inquirer, and worse. We started to talk about whether it did and whether it should matter to us what teachers are called. That question brought the issue close to all of our lives. Several of my colleagues were present, but there were many more students— first year, sophomore, junior, and senior—and they talked seriously about what various decisions about the consequences that their various decisions about what word to use in this particular instance might have. They were judging their language, taking control of it in a serious way. I think Beate would have been delighted. *** Freya von Moltke Read by Johannes Huessy During the twelve heavy years that we lived under Hitler’s regime in Germany, my husband, Helmuth James von Moltke, wrote hundreds of letters to me. These letters were not only a precious record of my husband’s thought, but also �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 12 a commentary on the events in Germany seen through the eyes of a German and committed opponent of the Nazis. He was executed for his opposition. For many years I kept the letters with me as I first lived in South Africa, then back in Germany, and eventually in the United States. Gradually I came to realize that these letters were of historical importance and should be published. I did not believe, however, that I was the right person to edit the letters. In Vermont, Beate, so committed to German resistance, came into my life. I came to love and admire her, and I entrusted the letters to her. Over many years she edited and translated them, and they were published in both German and English. With Beate our letters were in very good hands. In her work with them lively Beate invested most generously the treasures of her gifts: her character, her mind, and mostly her heart. And I came to cherish her friendship. Later she began work on another collection of letters from our family, the letters my mother-in-law, Dorothy von Moltke, née Rose Innes, sent to her father, the Chief Justice of South Africa from 1905 to 1935. These letters record her life as a British-born wife and mother through World War I and into the Nazi period, again a comment on Germany’s troubled history of the first half of the twentieth century. Beate translated this correspondence from English into German, and part of the letters was published in 1999 in that language. So today, as you are all gathered to celebrate Beate’s life, I want to add my voice to express my profound gratitude and my sadness at her passing. How fortunate for her that she died without having to leave St. John’s College. Since I am not able to be with you in person I am very grateful to have my words conveyed to you by one of your students, Johannes Huessy, class of 2005, a friend of ours, and belonging to the young generation, whom to teach had become so central to Beate’s life. *** MEMORIAL 13 Brother Robert Smith, F.S.C. Beate was and is so many things to so many people that an occasion like the present one is precious. It requires us to sort out diverse strands in our own deeply felt but unsorted allegiances. This clarification has not been needed until now; she was always there and ready to charm, and that was enough. Now one needs to become explicit about what drew us to her so strongly and for so long. That process will take a while, and it begins for most of us now. We cannot judge ourselves unless we fathom our enthusiasms. Beate had an impact on people in public ways and also privately. No generalizations can convey this, and so I rejoice that so many people are here and have and soon will have spoken. I want to begin with an odd bit or two of evaluations others have made of her, principally because at least one such view originally surprised me, but when I thought of it, it seemed true and important. Robert Bart said something that awakened my attention to an aspect of her I had not explicitly noted. Bart was a considerable influence in the College for many years. He was often quite perceptive and articulated his opinions clearly in his own idiosyncratic way. He said he found Beate’s opinions on the work of students and her judgment of their characters to be very deep and accurate. This judgment bears on a central matter in the life of this College. We arrive at grades for Seminar—the central part of our work here—by discussion and consensus between the two leaders who share responsibility for it. We also decide in a similar way on whether a student should be allowed to continue in the College or not, and on whether he or she will be graduated. To show how important a judgment Bart thought he was making about Beate, one has to realize how seriously Bart took the matter of student evaluations. One anecdote will suffice to show this. After an enabling meeting that started at 7 p.m. and did not end until 2 a.m., Bart was heard to say with satisfaction to an exhausted colleague: “I think we really did talk things out tonight.” That very careful man alerted me �14 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW to the real power of judging character Beate undoubtedly possessed. I talked about this someone else who expressed himself as surprised by Bart’s opinion—he imagined Beate would probably have remained rather quiet on such occasions. This shows how many sides there were to her. She was like the man described by Pascal: when the talk turned on poetry, he had lots to say, otherwise one would never have known he had any views on the subject. She was also impressive in other public ways. For many years an important part of college life centered on dinners given regularly by Jacob Klein and his wife. Klein was in the opinion of most a great man and the dean whose thoughts still influence us. People invited to give the Friday night lecture attended by all members of the Community came to those dinners. Faculty members in turn were also invited and, more frequently than most, Beate. It was agreed that when she was present, her wit and general sprightliness helped make the occasion a delight. That was certainly the opinion of the Klein and his wife, both distinguished conversationalists themselves. I want to bring up two more subjects. One of them is unusual, and I think no one else is likely to have considered it or thought it important. The other is a nostalgic look at reasons for a disappointment I have and will continue to feel now that she is no longer reachable by telephone. Let me turn to the first of the two topics. It will surprise most of you. She never attended family reunions because some Oppens had insufficiently kept their distance from Hitler, and she was unwilling to risk having to speak to them. She was proud of one relative, a “parson,” to use her expression, who behaved quite honorably. Later, she did think of going to a family gathering, but finally never did. She wrote an account of herself and her father for a family publication, and she was immensely pleased when some stranger, a man of some distinction, asked MEMORIAL 15 her if she was indeed related to the man who was her father. When she said yes, he told her of his admiration for him and about the memorabilia on him and his career as an actor he had collected. Why am I speaking of this matter? There are, I think, good reasons for doing so. This aspect of her life shows both Beate’s seriousness and her complexity. She paid respect to whatever she thought deserved it, and this trait was balanced by her carefulness in talking to people only about topics she thought appropriate to a given audience. Beate never, or at least very rarely, mentioned the matters I have just spoken about. More importantly, in this very matter she did something else that goes to the heart of who she was. In all the years she was at St. John’s, in the annual directory published by the College, if you look at the entry “von Oppen, Beate” you will find the words “See Ruhm von Oppen, Beate.” She said, “My father gave me life, but my mother’s second husband gave me nourishment and a chance for a long life.” She always spoke of him—and she was not sparing him in doing so—with affection and respect. Consideration for her forbearers went along with a sense of what is important over history. In fact some families were the military bulwark that guaranteed continuity in a country, and they made possible whatever degree of civilization existed there. Beate’s respect for those who embody these claims is of a piece with another worthwhile fact about her. She never became an American citizen, despite her high regard for this country and what it did for the world in two great wars. She remembered, though, that England had helped preserve her life and gave her an opportunity to serve in the second great war. She said, “I swore allegiance to the Queen and Charlie, too.” This last was her translation of “to the Queen and her heirs.” My second reason for talking about her origins is the common sense and respect for herself that she showed in keeping silent about them. Americans in one of their founding documents distanced themselves from titles, and in this �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 16 country mentioning a claim to one seems ridiculous to most. Beate was as far removed from such a taint as possible. She had the respect of all who knew her. She deserved it for her personal and professional qualities. She needed no peacock feather even if their borrowed attractiveness were valued here. Let me now conclude by saying how much one will miss her. For many years I have called her whenever I heard or read something new on any of the topics that interested the two of us. I always wanted to hear her opinion and thereby evaluate my own. One example: I recently read about a musical called, I think, “Quickening” composed for this year’s Edinburgh Festival. It was on a religious subject. I immediately thought of Beate and the fact that she knew by heart every work of every one of Bach’s cantatas. When I read about this piece, I did not quite take the phone down and call her about it, but I automatically thought of doing so. Let that stand for many thoughts about the past and the future that will preemptively summon my attention and stir my gratitude toward someone so recently gone. *** Ben Walker I’d like to say a few words about my aunt Biti on behalf of myself, my siblings, Becca and Philip, and also our partners and children. We all called her Biti rather than Beate, so I’ll continue to call her that throughout this talk. Although Biti lived 4,000 miles away from us, she was a constant presence throughout our childhoods and adult lives. She never felt like “the aunt who lived on another continent,” but a close and trusted friend and confidante. She would come to visit us in England as often as she could, normally twice a year. As we each grew up and left home, her visits started to include trips to our homes in Bristol, London, and Oxford, where she would come and stay with us. She always took a very keen interest in what we were MEMORIAL 17 doing in our lives and greatly enjoyed seeing where and how we lived, at first hand. It was a great pleasure to have her to stay, and you knew there would be no shortage of conversation while she was with you. When she was back in America, we would all enjoy correspondence by letter with Biti. She was the only person with whom I had regular correspondence by mail, and these letters were always much more than just a quick summary of recent events. Her letters to us would be questioning and insightful, full of enthusiasm for whatever she was currently involved with, full of personality and wit. Sometimes she wrote as if she had discovered something or someone that had been a huge secret, like Paul Scott or E.M. Forster, and she had to share the good news with everyone. But her handwriting was terrible; sometimes it would take ages to decipher what she had written. She would complain about mine, and particularly Becca’s, but hers was appalling! Often letters would start in the normal way, but after she had filled the sheet she was writing on, her words would spill out onto the margins, and then on to the margins of newspaper cuttings she was sending us, as if she could never quite tell us everything that she wanted to say. For someone who surrounded herself with books and even referred to her books as her friends, she was an amazingly social person. She had the ability to make friends with people from all walks of life, young and old. She loved to talk and was an entertaining and fascinating raconteur. Discussions with Biti could sometimes be frustrating, as her train of thought would often lead her seemingly miles away from the topic being discussed, only to return twenty minutes later via a very circuitous route; however, these conversations were always fascinating as she would tell us about aspects of her life that we did not know, and also stories about our own childhoods that we had forgotten. Her memory was quite amazing. She had the ability to recall the most minute detail of events in her life that took �18 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW place decades earlier, even to the most mundane detail of doctor’s appointments and dinner menus. Although at times she would do the majority of the talking, conversations with Biti were never “one way.” She took an active interest in all of our lives, our partners and families, our work and hobbies, our passions and thoughts. She could drive you mad with her continual talking at times. So it was easy to forget that Biti was a great listener. She never felt it necessary to give advice, but she drank in all information and would remember it. Months later she would refer to details of a conversation that had taken place on her last visit, and it was very reassuring. I always enjoyed talking to her, she was wise and understanding and I felt terribly close to her. She also had a great sense of humour – laconic and underspoken, but never cruel. She could take you completely by surprise with her turns of phrase, but sometimes you could only tell that she knew how witty she was being from a twinkle in her eye. I’ll never forget her laugh, or her smile. She really helped to form the person I am today – what great passions she had – music and literature, history and philosophy. Such clear views about politics and religion. Good influences for an adolescent to have in the family. I have a copy of an autobiographical short story that she wrote, called “The Tuning Fork,” [reprinted below] in which she describes waiting to cross the border between Germany and Holland in 1936. In it, she describes how, although she was practically penniless, she spent a portion of her last 10 marks on a tuning fork. “It was a modest tuning fork, and cheap,” she wrote, “ but it depleted my minimal resources. I probably realised this, yet probably felt, too, that there was not only practical but also symbolical value in a gadget that gave you true pitch.” At the end of the story, she writes, “I still have it. Tuning forks don’t take up much space.” And it was those small things of symbolic significance that meant the most to her. She wanted little, and she asked for less. Dark chocolate and some photos seemed about it. She MEMORIAL 19 was generous, thoughtful, and unselfish. But the small things were important to her – the correspondence, above all, providing treasured insight into our lives, a strong link back to her family in England, and a true measure of our love for her. I’ve been struck, whilst going through her papers over the last few days, quite how many letters there were from all of us to her: it makes me realise how important a figure she was to the whole family. But there were also letters from so many other people—she had so many friends—people who she maintained contact with for decades and across continents. For the last few years of her life, as many of you will know, Biti was faced with an agonizing decision. She knew that the time had come to move from her lovely home on Wagner Street, and she needed to decide where to go. Should she stay in America, or move back to the United Kingdom after 45 years? She found this decision incredibly difficult to make, and every time she spoke to someone else about it, her feelings would veer from one option to another. When she finally decided to move to a retirement community just a few miles outside of Annapolis, we were all selfishly disappointed. We knew that this meant we would see less and less of Biti as she was finding continental travel more and more difficult. Becca felt it particularly keenly. With two young children, she knew that the opportunities to visit Biti in America would be few. But we all secretly knew that this was the right decision for her to make. We knew what a unique place she had found to live, what an amazing community, providing not only the intellectual stimulation she thrived on, but also the social and emotional support she needed. It was already clear to us before she died, but has become even more so since then, what a special place she had found in the heart of this community, how many very close friends she had, how she had touched the lives of so many people around her. She was every bit as loved and valued by her friends and colleagues in Annapolis as she was by her family, and that’s why the decision was so hard for her to make. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 20 Thank you to all of you here in Annapolis for making this such a happy home to her for the last forty years, so far away from her family in England. And thank you, Aunt Biti, for all the love that you shared with us. We’ll always remember you for the wonderful woman that you were. *** Eva Brann We knew each other for nearly forty-five years and for almost twenty we lived next to each other, with only a thin dry wall between us. We spent a lot of time in each other’s company, eating, talking and, in the earlier years, walking. Beate had a brisk, sometimes even brusque English exterior, a fund of stories ranging from historical happenings to personal mishaps, a far-flung American and transatlantic acquaintance, and a sprightly, occasionally acerbic wit. People, among them the Graduate Institute students she liked so much to teach, were charmed and fascinated. So was I. She was good company, and she seemed well seated in life. But it wasn’t quite that way. If fate had been kinder, she would actually have been – or so I often imagined – a decisive Englishwoman, living in a small village in one of the prettier shires, minding the vicar’s theology and singing in his choir – not herself a housekeeper but well-served by someone who had become attached to her. It wasn’t that way. She wasn’t really English but was born in Switzerland and then, in the starving years after the First World War, had a German childhood; she herself attributed her small stature and some other effects to her undernourishment as an infant. She was rightly proud that because of the complexities of her early years she grew up preternaturally sensitive to the political climate. In the first year of the Nazi takeover, when my own parents’ thoughts were still far from emigration, she, a mere teenager, removed herself to Holland, where, incidentally, she had an unlikely but often remembered experience with a famous Indian guru. She MEMORIAL 21 aided her family in their immigration to England, where life was far harder for refugees than it was for those of us who luckily landed in the States. Her university studies were oppressed and curtailed by lack of money. There was a brief and deeply buried expectation of happiness which ended when the young man died in Africa under Montgomery, a general whose cavalier strategies she despised. Around her, complexity and anomaly accumulated. Though she lived most of her life here, she never became an American citizen but remained a British subject, a resident alien who had endless troubles with the INS over her everlost green cards. She was never a full-time, regular tutor, for she had truly no mind for mathematics. I recall hours in her first apartment on Church Circle trying to persuade her that a geometric diagram could display a truth expressible in words. Nevertheless, the college was her one true home, for her appointments, though made from year to year, were soon made quite routinely, and she served the college well in her own way, not least as long-time editor of St. John’s Review. She had contracted once to write a history of twentieth-century Germany, but had to give it up, laboring, as I thought, under too great an accumulation of detailed knowledge and too overwhelming a sense of the responsibility for telling the inner truth close to her political conscience. She was, one might say, the ultimate historian, with no disposition for universals but a great urge to make the particulars express the moral significance whose burden she so acutely felt. On the other hand she was a good part journalist, with a reporter’s bold inquisitiveness and a jaunty, even daring style, the style of moral exposé. Her completed work was eminently readable and vividly opinionated. At home nowhere and everywhere, she was up to her last trip to see her family this summer – she died four days after her return – an intrepid if overloaded traveler. Something in her life left her a kind of pack-rat, with a propensity for accumulation. We used to go to yard sales together, where I’d come away with a candlestick and she would acquire the �22 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW largest object around, preferably non-functional; computers which she couldn’t use anyway, typewriters of which she had five. I recall that we were walking once in the woods (they were then still to be found around Annapolis), when we came on an overgrown wreck of a truck; seeing her appraisingly eye the seat in the cabin I shouted out a forfending “Absolutely not!” Her religious convictions were in suspension, oddly compacted of adherence and distance. She declared herself an agnostic but had faith only in the faithful. Baptized a Zwinglian, she was Jewish on her mother’s side, and therefore technically Jewish. Yet she had no relation to Judaism and a great distaste for that emotional and academic exploitation of Jewish history which she mordantly called the “Holocaust industry.” In fact every sort of unthinking proprietary position offended her and roused acerbic epithets. For example, she used to call feckless pacifists “peace-mongers.” Yet she herself occupied her special historical territory whose invasion by uncomprehending academic forces troubled her unceasingly. Though she admired the Lutheran theologian and resisting martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (with whose complicated abstractions she could hardly deal), her real sympathy was with the Catholics because of the moral clarity to be derived from the doctrine of works; she had the deepest suspicion of the moral consequences of elevating subjective faith over political deeds. Perhaps the defining emblem of her semi-deliberate convolutions was her very name. She originally had the surname Ruhm from her much beloved adoptive father Ernst Ruhm, the natural father of her sister Delia. Just when a German surname would be least helpful in England she added her own natural father’s name, von Oppen. He was an actor, a minor matinee idol, whom she insisted on visiting when she learned about him in her teens – a meeting at once gratifying and wrenching. She was clearly anxious to carry with her all her connections – all we’ve learned to call “roots” in America. MEMORIAL 23 But the attendant results were confusion: Mail went ever astray, being sent indifferently to all her initials, R, v. or O. The territory she made her own, with the most detailed mastery and avid reading, brought up to date to the very last days, was, I think, deep down another exercise in preserving and exonerating her origins and connections. She was, after all, German, and German was her first language. She was, incidentally, able to translate not only German into English, her language of daily use (which most of us refugees can do), but English into German as well; she was symmetrically bilingual, an unusual phenomenon. Her deep, absolutely persistent interest was in the German resistance to the Nazis. She knew these “resistential” figures (as she called them) minutely; they were her kin, and she worried over them and their reputation (just as, Delia has told me, she worried about her as the little sister). She found her hero particularly in Helmuth von Moltke, who was hanged by the Nazis and to whose surviving family, his wife Freya and their sons, she was close. In publishing his correspondence with Freya in German and in English she did his memory a great service. As all else in her life, this was not so much an ebulliently ardent passion as a held in, tenacious adherence. This mode was, I think, the defining feeling of her life. I have asked myself: What made us life-long companions? I think above all Bach and Language. When we met in 1960 I already owned records of most of the cantatas and instrumental music. She introduced me to the motets. But above all she sensitized me to something utterly new to me and infinitely valuable in listening to sacred music: the relation of the music to the words – music as an exegesis, a gloss, an incarnation of the sacred text. This was a preoccupation which was perhaps even more ingrained, more central, than the Resistance, at once a deflection from and a focusing of feeling. She also taught me, incidentally, that it is therefore barbarous to listen to such music as a background to other occupations – a lesson that left me at least with the grace of qualms about doing it. �24 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW I learned a lot too from her resistential studies. She had an absolutely horrendous writer’s block, stemming, I think, from the plethora of her information, her aversion to generalization, and the oppressive sense of the importance of this work. So I got to work through each prospective publication with her with, I sometimes think, more profit to me than to her – one benefit being that I was able to think somewhat better of the country of my birth. And I learned to admire her for her admirations, for to have true heroes is to me a sign of an underlying soundness of soul. Some part of our frequent dinners together was spent in our common pleasure in language, her British English (to the end a schedule remained a “shedule” for her) and my adoptive American. We rejoiced in the sayings of our German childhood and put them into hilarious English. We tried to find exact renderings of idioms in the other language and rejoiced in silly literalisms. In short we disported ourselves bilingually. Sometimes she would decode for me the affectionate scrawls of alumni letters, for she, who had an almost undecipherable handwriting, was especially good at reading that of others. This handwriting of hers, furiously determinate yet unreadable, always seemed to me to signify something. She was an extremely sociable, communicative being, charming, witty, intriguing, a teller and re-teller of stories, ranging, as I said, from historical circumstance to personal complications. Yet her favorite medium was epistolary: contact through distance. She carried on a far-flung and persistent correspondence, letters whose typed parts were vivacious but which were wreathed about with her hopeless supplementary scribbles. Her niece Rebecca described them lovingly at the funeral in August. I should say here that her niece and nephews, Rebecca, Philip, and Ben, were the human beings she was most straightforwardly fond of, and they returned her affection. Here is a chief, perhaps central trait of Beate’s being that was totally at odds with her incessant, self-circling anxiety – a wonderful phenomenon. When real trouble struck – breast 25 MEMORIAL cancer, heart disease, colitis – she became absolutely serene, reasonable, patient. It was the gallantry of disaster confirmed, and a sign of the strength beneath all the agitation. For the rest, she was completely without pretensions (though rightfully wanting recognition for her righteous labors), quite without malice (except when oppressed by too powerfully impending an opposition), generally without falsehood (though inhibited to the point of furtiveness about her feelings), and, all in all, as devoid of intentional harm as a human being can well be. In the last few years I took to listening through our thin party wall for worrisome thumps that brought me to the phone, for the TV that grew louder as she grew deafer but was a sign of life, and for the ominous silences, the last of which brought me over to find what I had feared. I might say that the silence next door is sounding pretty loud these days. *** Beate Ruhm von Oppenis was a tutor on the Annapolis Campus of St. John’s College. Elliott Zuckerman is tutor emeritus on the Annapolis Campus of St. John’s College. Delia Walker is the sister of Beate Ruhm von Oppen. Peter Quint is Jacob A. France Professor of Constitutional Law at The University of Maryland. Steven Werlin is a graduate of St. John’s College and dean of Shimer College. Johannes Huessy is a student on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. Freya von Moltke is widow of Helmuth James von Moltke. Brother Robert Smith is tutor emeritus on the Annapolis Campus of St. John’s College. Ben Walker is the nephew of Beate Ruhm von Oppen. Eva Brann is former dean and tutor on the Annapolis Campus of St. John’s College. �26 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 27 The Tuning Fork Beate Ruhm von Oppen Introduction by David Stephenson At the memorial service for Beate Ruhm von Oppen, I discovered a literary side to her I had not suspected. On that occasion her nephew mentioned a memoir, “The Tuning Fork,” which recalls Beate’s flight as a teenage girl from Germany, a precarious exodus even in the early days of Nazi domination. Her family gave me a copy on request, and I immediately saw how much it deserves publication in full in The St. John’s Review. The story rings as true as only experience can, neither exaggerating nor belittling the fears or desires of a young student brought up in a time when freedom and truth were dying only bit by bit. It is the personal character of her account that tells me most what I want to know: why were so many Germans persuaded by Hitler’s obvious lies and so few moved to challenge them? Beate juxtaposes her school’s playful complicity in the new racial games against her own ambivalent reaction to the bloody movies and songs that could move even unsympathetic youth to tears. Her family’s reluctance to send their child away requires no explanation; the gradual evolution of her own determination to leave “the fatherland” can best be glimpsed in her own words. Why purchase a tuning fork with money she might need to live in exile? She explains her desire for “a gadget that gave you the true pitch” in a world grown cacophonous, an instrument that she later justifies on the ground that it doesn’t “take up much space.” But her love of music also shines through this act of hope and daring. And that was also something she could take with her wherever she went. David Stephenson is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. �28 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW My own acquaintance with Beate grew primarily out of her musical interests. After she came to St. John’s College, she attended every musical performance and always discovered the most appropriate compliment for every group. She was particularly encouraging to the College’s fledgling orchestra. Yet her comments about professional musicians could be sharply critical. For example, though herself the source of several widely admired translations from German to English and from English to German, she often expressed her disapproval of translation when it pertained to music. She believed that linguistic sonority had to play a significant part of a composition to any text: translation into English inevitably distorted or corrupted its effect. And her sensitivity to the nuance of verbal expression extended well beyond music and poetry: at least some of the power of political propaganda in general she attributed to clever distortions of language. Hitler’s depredation of his native language in Mein Kampf as well as in his speeches did not deceive her more-than-musical ear. She never stopped worrying about the effects of political rhetoric in every language, even our own. The Tuning Fork I was born in Switzerland at the end of the First World War and grew up, or started to grow up, in Germany. I cannot think back to a time when politics was not in the air. I remember the evidence of food shortages in my kindergarten and elementary school days. I remember the feeling of insecurity communicated by all around me when the currency collapsed, and when inflation galloped away in geometric or exponential progression, so that, for instance, a lawyer’s or doctor’s earnings of one day might not be enough to buy a loaf of bread the next day. Some years ago you could see, in the window of an antique shop in our Main Street in Annapolis, an old German 50,000 Mark note, said to have been “used in Hitler’s Germany.” Perhaps it was used as wallpaper. It might be more RUHM VON OPPEN 29 accurate to say that it was used—as money—in pre-Hitler Germany, though I’d hate to refer to the Weimar Republic as just that. It was a specimen of the kind of money that helped to bring about Hitler’s Germany. Fifty thousand Marks now would be worth about $13,000. In “normal” times four Marks were a dollar. The date of issue on that 50,000 Mark note was November 19, 1922. The very fact that such a note was printed and put into circulation was, of course, a sign that inflation had got out of hand. In the summer of 1922 the dollar was worth not four Marks, but over 400. The next summer it was over 4 million. And by November 15, 1923 it was 4 trillion (4,000,000,000,000). If my reckoning is right—but you’d better check it—that 50,000 Mark note issued in November 1922 was worth one-eighty-millionth of a dollar, a year later one eight hundred thousandth of a cent. That was very cheap wallpaper, but expensive too. What it all meant, among other things, was the pauperization and demoralization of the social fabric. It was in that month, November 1923, that Hitler, the leader of a tiny party, staged his abortive putsch or coup d’etat in Munich, when he tried for the first time, and failed, to seize power. That year had also seen communist attempts to seize power in central Germany; they too were foiled. Hitler was sent to a comfortable prison for a while and used his leisure to write his book, Mein Kampf. When he got out again, he adopted a policy of legality and with that he eventually prevailed. By the time I had entered elementary school, in 1924, a new currency had been established and money once more was money, though scarce. But I noticed my teachers were not enthusiastic about the political system, though we dutifully and decorously celebrated the 80th birthday of our President. His name was Hindenburg and he had been a famous field marshal in the First World War, halting the Russian advance in East Prussia. Being, as it were, a personal link between the old, pre-war empire and the new, post-war republic, and loyal to the new constitution, he was a national figure acceptable to �30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the moderate right and moderate left and lasted a decade as head of state, while chancellors, or heads of government, succeeded each other at a breathtaking rate. The country had many political parties and an election system based on proportional representation, so that votes were distributed across a wide spectrum and a large number of parties, and governments had to be formed out of coalitions of several of them. They were correspondingly shaky and short-lived. I remember many elections during my school days and reports of violent rhetoric from left to right, as well as physical violence, street fights, murders, assassinations. Then, after the Wall Street crash of 1929 with its worldwide repercussions, there was another economic crisis a mere six years after the beginning of the recovery from the earlier one, with a growing, and intolerable, rate of unemployment. It grew from 1.3 million in September 1929 to 3 million a year later, to over 6 million in 1931. With a total population of about 65 million, this meant that one in every two families was hit. It was not only working class families that were so affected. There was for instance, much unemployment among academics too. The extremist parties, the Communists and the Nazis, made great gains and finally occupied more than half the seats in the national parliament, where they were now able to paralyze the democratic process. They joined, for instance, in a strike to paralyze the transport system in Berlin. Otherwise they could fight each other to death, and did, with casualties on both sides, despite the general strategy of the Communists at that time to treat the social Democrats— whom they called “social fascists” for the purpose—as their number one enemy and to flirt with the possibility of a Nazi victory as a promising prelude to a communist takeover. All this impinged, of course, on a Berlin school child—the transport strike, the posters, the polarization, the combination of both extremes against the middle, and the weakness and apparent helplessness of the middle. When President Heisenburg appointed Hitler Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, he was acting in accordance RUHM VON OPPEN 31 with the letter and perhaps even the spirit of the constitution. Hitler’s party, the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ (or “Nazis” for short, to distinguish them from the “Sozis” or Social Democrats), was by then the strongest party in the country, with about one-third of the vote; the Social Democrats had only one-fifth; the communists one-sixth; the Catholic Centre Party, together with its Bavarian affiliate, about the same. And there were many others, but all of them had less than 10 percent of the vote, the largest of them the Nationalists, with 8.8 percent; Hitler became the head of a coalition government. I still remember seeing the faces of these gentlemen in an evening paper that carried the announcement. No one knew what it meant. I was somewhat scared, for I had read Hitler’s book. I had had to do it secretly, at night with a flashlight under the bedclothes, for my parents, like many other respectable people, regarded it as pornographic—which indeed in a manner of speaking it was. Also it was very long, and that was probably why very few people read it, though once its author had become ruler of the land, it was widely and compulsorily distributed, for instance, as a present to newlyweds, bound like a bible. But that did not, of course, ensure its perusal. Before saying anything about what I had found in that book, let me, quickly, give you an account of the rest of my Berlin schooldays, to show how life at school changed in the seventeen months before I left. There was much talk of national solidarity and the Community of the People. There were changes in personnel and in the curriculum. And there was a dramatic rate of attrition. My own class was reduced by more than half—probably because girls (it was a girls’ school I went to) or their parents thought that since the new regime had set its face against too much academic education for women (who were not to exceed ten percent of university enrollment), it was hardly worth struggling through more Latin and trigonometry and the rest, up to the rather stiff school-leaving exam, which was normally taken at [age] 18. �32 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW The teaching personnel changed in two ways: there were a few dismissals, of Jews—we had very few Jews at my school; and our English teacher, who was a Jew, was at first said not be subject to dismissal because he had not only served in the war but had even been shot in the head. But eventually he left all the same and the next English teacher was less good; and that one was in due course replaced by an even worse one, a teacher trainee. The other change among the teachers was a change in tone and color. A very few revealed themselves as Nazis which, they said, they had been all along but could only now, at last, openly avow to be. (On the whole the school had been vaguely nationalistic, but hardly Nazi.) Others toed the new line as best they could and exhibited varying degrees of cravenness or caution and dignity, enthusiasm or moderation or reserve. Many new things were required: the Hitler statue at the beginning of classes, attendance at new celebrations that proliferated and at which you had, of course, to stand at attention (with upraised arm) when the new national anthem was played and sung. This was the old marching song of the Nazi movement, with text by Horst Wessel, saying: “Raise the flag, close the ranks, we storm-troopers march in firm and steady tread. Comrades shot by the Reds and Reactionaries are marching on with us.” It was the battle song of the new revolution. So there was all that. And there were changes in such subjects as history and science. Let me take biology, for that is where I had my brief hour of glory. I had not done well with the dissection of tulips and the like. But I shone once biology was converted into race biology. Not only was there Mendel’s law, about which my father had told me before (only that its implication and application were now rather different from what I had gathered from him), but—and this is where the real fun came in—we now learnt about the German races, “Aryan,” of course, all of them. There were six, if I remember correctly, ranging in excellence from the Nordic to the East Baltic. Nordic was best because Nordic man had created almost all the culture there RUHM VON OPPEN 33 was, and he had qualities of leadership. The Mediterranean race was also quite good (for, after all, there had been ancient Greeks and Romans and there were modern Italians, good fascists, full of leadership). The Mediterranean race could most easily be memorized as a smaller, lightweight, and darker version of the Nordic: what they had in common were the proportions of their skulls and faces (long, narrow skull, long face) and the characteristic ways of standing on one leg, with no weight on the other, one standing and one play leg, as a literal translation of the German names for them would have it. Such legs could be seen in Greek statues, and such were the legs of Nordic man. Now the Falic race was next best. It shared many of the sterling qualities of the Nordic— high-mindedness and the rest—but could be distinguished from it by the fact that it stood squarely on two legs. No playleg there. Also its face was a bit broader. That race lacked, somewhat, the fire of Nordic man, or let us say the thumos, but made up for it by solidity and staying power. The color scheme was fairly Nordic, blonde hair, blue eyes. So was that of the East Baltic race whose virtues were less marked than those of the Nordic and the Falic and whose features were less distinguished, including a broader skull and a broadish nose. I could not quite make out the use of this race, unless it was, perhaps, territorial, to keep the Slavs out. The Slavs were not a German race. Then there was German race that looked, we might have said, a bit Jewish or perhaps Armenian, but it was neither. It was Dinaric and seemed to be much the same as what earlier classifications had called Alpine. Indeed, this race dwelt in the mountains. It looked sturdy enough, but not as prepossessing as the Nordic; and its head had awkward measurements: Dinaric man had a prominent nose and not much back to his head. But he had a redeeming feature: he was musical. Now all this, of course, seemed good clean fun, and easy to visualize and memorize. Indeed there were visual aids: pictures of well know personages to help recognition and memorization: Hindenburg for the Falic race, somebody like �34 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Haydn for the Dinaric, Caesar for the Mediterranean. Then there was a picture of Martin Luther, the great German Reformer, and I forget now what race he was said to represent. To me he looked Slavic. But that, of course, could not be. I suppose he was declared a darker type of East Baltic or Falic. All this was child’s play, and this child played it with zest and success. History was harder. You could not inwardly laugh that off and outwardly play it as a parlor game. You had to learn, or appear to learn, appear to make your own—to some extent, in some way, at least— and you had to read, say, and write the things that had been neglected or “falsified” in the Weimar Republic of evil memory, under “the System” (“in der Systemzeit” as the Nazis referred to it). So we were all given a short brochure on contemporary history, the recent and most “relevant” period of German and European and world history. It started with the German surrender at the end of the world war, a surrender brought about by trickery abroad and treason at home, by President Wilson’s 14 Point peace proposal, and the stab in the back of the undefeated German army, a piece of treachery committed by Jews, Marxists, and Catholics—feckless folk with international ties. These traitors then set up their system of abject surrender abroad and iniquity and immorality at home. They accepted the shameful peace treaty of Versailles, which not only saddled Germany with sole responsibility for the war (in Article 231, which Germans called the “war guilt clause” or “war guilt lie”), but also provided for the payment—virtually in perpetuity—of crippling reparations. Germany was unilaterally disarmed (whereas Wilson had envisaged universal disarmament) and was first blockaded by the British—after the cessations of hostilities—to enforce submission, and then, in 1923, invaded by the French, who marched into the Ruhr valley to seize German coal and steel production as reparation payments were in arrears. It was reparations that caused the economic misery during the republic’s fourteen years of shame. Attempts to revise the reparations schedule to make it more RUHM VON OPPEN 35 tolerable were fruitless and fraudulent. The last revision provided for the spreading of payments until 1988, and the country was dying in the attempt to do the victors’ bidding. The nation would have to stand together and rally ‘round the Führer—or the “People’s Chancellor,” as he was then still called—to throw off the shackles of Versailles. The cover of this brochure had a muscular worker on it, stripped to the waist and bursting his chains. We also learned about the parts of Germany that had been taken away by the Treaty of Versailles, which dictated peace, and about the Germans who languished under foreign domination. We learnt that German defenselessness was further aggravated by the geographic position of the country: it was surrounded by hostile powers. Thus a bombing plane could take off from France and fly right across Germany and land in Czechoslovakia, without refueling. The lesson was brought home by air-raid exercises. They were not very realistic, but they were educative. I still remember leading my little troop of classmates to their several homes, staying close to the houses, as instructed, to avoid exposure to imagined falling shrapnel and flying glass. That was in the first year or so of Hitler’s power, five or six years before his war. It was useless, of course, as an exercise in air-raid precautions, but it was useful for fomenting fear and a spirit of national defense. It also showed that the Czechoslovak Republic, even if militarily it amounted to no more than an aircraft base, was the power that enabled France—or planes based in France—to bomb the whole of Germany. And in addition—but this point was not given too much prominence until four years later, in the crisis leading up to the Munich settlement that dismembered the Czechoslovak Republic—the country was a political entity in which six-and-a-half million Czechs held over 3 million Germans in subjection, as second-class citizens. Clearly the Sudeten region had to be united with Germany. So much for what was taught in class and done in extramural exercises under the responsibility of the school. But there was one other thing I should mention. Schools were �36 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW obliged to take their pupils to certain films, propaganda films that were being shown commercially. So, obediently, our class went to see the movie Hitlerjunge Quex, the story of a Hitler Youth of the working class whose father was a communist and whose mother was long-suffering and tried to cope with conditions and her husband, but in the end attempted suicide, by gas, from misery and despair. Quex (who was a very idealized version of an actual Hitler Youth who had been killed) first belonged to a communist youth group, as was natural in view of his home background. But on one occasion, one excursion, he was so revolted by their beastly ways that he ran away through the woods, and came upon the camp of a Nazi youth group which instantly and deeply impressed him as his own and the country’s salvation. (It was a sunrise scene, to make sure we all got the point.) Here were shining faces, clean limbs, real comradeship, purpose, discipline, dedication, and hope. So he joined the Hitler Youth and was active, devotedly active in the distribution of leaflets and all that. He continued, of course, to live with his parents in the working class district of Berlin. And one day, at dawn, the communists took their revenge, and his particular personal enemy, a brute of a man, pursued him through the deserted streets—also through the maze of an amusement park, a very effective, macabre, cinematic touch that, and long before The Third Man—and finally caught up with him and knifed him. But Quex died for the cause, and when his friends found him, on the point of death, and propped him up, he raised his right arm in salute to the German future and the camera swung up to the clouds and the sound track into the marching song of Hitler Youth, with the lines, “The flag leads us into eternity, the flag is more than death.” The trouble was twofold: that the film was most effective and affecting (however corny it may sound as I now tell it) and it was made with terrific competence and with the participation of some very good actors; and, secondly, that the school was under an obligation not only to take us to see it, but also to discuss it with us. So we had our class discussion. RUHM VON OPPEN 37 I do not remember much about it except for the fact that I decided to play the part of aesthetic and dramatic critic, arguing that, powerful though the movie was, it could have been even better if it had been less black and white (metaphorically speaking), if it had had more nuances, more human diversity and verisimilitude. Why did I take that line? In order not to embarrass or endanger our teacher who was leading the discussion, who, I had reason to believe, was very unhappy about the Nazis, and who was a widow with two children for whom she had to provide. Then there was a film about Joan of Arc, replete with horrors of the Hundred Years’ War. It exposed the sadism of the British and the brutality of the Catholic clergy. On that occasion I objected to the screening of atrocities; and that was about as far as one could go and get away with it. On the Saturday when it was announced that the country had left the League of Nations in protest against the continuing discrimination of Germany in the disarmament negotiations, our class of fifteen-year-old girls went off to learn how the peasantry lived, to make us a proper part of the People’s Community. We were to spend two days roughing it with a farmer in Brandenburg. The regime wanted us Berliners to experience the hard life of the rural part of the population. We took a train to the nearest station, then walked the rest of the way to the rather grey and bleak village, to be received by a distinctly unfriendly farmer. We sang to cheer our progress on the country road. Suddenly one of the girls started singing that song about Jewish blood spurting from the knife in a better future. About two other girls joined in. I could hardly believe my ears. The farmer was surly. I spent a restless night with the others, who seemed undisturbed, in the hay in his barn. What with that song and the severing of the connection with the League—and everything else that had happened and was happening—I began to think it might be better to be elsewhere. But my parents and my little sister were in Berlin, our home, �38 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW with no prospect of getting out. I could see no way of leaving the country and leaving them. A way did offer itself some months later. The Quakers were starting an international boarding school in Holland and announced a summer course there. After another disturbing weekend at the end of June 1934, which saw the bloody liquidation of the rebellious S.A. leaders and other enemies and suspects, and when rumors were flying about that men were being shot in the nearby cadet school at Lichterfelde, a little group of children assembled on a platform of the Zoo Station in Berlin, to take the train to Holland. I had just turned sixteen and may have been the oldest. The summer school was a wild success. A bigger group of children came from Hamburg, and many stayed on or came back later. They were mostly Jewish or part Jewish. I was overcome by the feeling of freedom and by meeting grownups you could really talk to freely. And they were devoted to the task in hand, to making us more comfortable and teaching us English. The English lessons were so good that, having been bottom of my class in Berlin—English was our third foreign language after French and Latin, and my classmates had all had some kind of head start—I found that I had overtaken not only them, but also the teacher trainee in charge of them when I returned for a visit. My mother had insisted on my coming back for a secretarial course. She did not think it wise to emigrate without a marketable skill. Then, in January 1935, my parents allowed me to go back to Holland. The months until the beginning of the academic year in October were bridged at the school in Holland by my being maid of all work, baby-sitting and tutoring, even taking a class in music when the music master was ill. Before that I spent Christmas with the family in Berlin and visited my grandmother in Frankfurt. That was the last time I saw her. In December four of us in the top class passed the English university entrance exam. Two, oddly enough, went back to Germany for good—one of them the son of the RUHM VON OPPEN 39 Friends’ Yearly Meeting, who could easily have stayed abroad. But two went back to England. I was one of them. It was spring 1936. They took me off the train after it had crossed the border from Germany. They asked me for my religion, for while they wanted to protect the Dutch unemployed from the competition of foreigners, they also wanted to protect the virtue of young women. I was seventeen. They accused me of coming to work in Holland. I denied it, though they were right. They had no proof; but I had the burden of proof. The fact was that I had in the previous December passed the examination given by Oxford for entrance to British universities. Being penniless and not wanting to be a burden on the American uncle who had paid my school fees for the year it had taken me to prepare for that exam at the International Quaker School in Holland, I had gladly accepted the school’s invitation to stay on as unpaid general dog’s body until it was time to go to England to study, the following October. So I was earning my keep as matron’s assistant, occasional coach or tutor, baby-sitter, and so on. But these services, however unpaid and unperformable by natives, were work prohibited by law or regulations of the land that was, like most European countries, struggling with an economic crisis at the very time when the Hitler regime created large numbers of refugees or would-be refugees, trying to keep such aliens out. To admit my status as a worker, albeit unpaid, would have meant being sent back to the fatherland, with the additional black mark of having tried to flee it. So I denied it. The denial was an automatic reflex. Unfortunately, my response to the question about my religion was equally automatic. I said “Protestant,” having been baptized at birth according to the Zwinglian rite and having attended Protestant religious instruction at my German schools, with even a spell of Lutheran Sunday school thrown in for good measure. It was a mistake. I did have the presence of mind and necessary minutes and pennies to send a cheery postcard about my “good trip” to my Jewish grandmother in Frankfurt from the Dutch �40 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW side. I wanted to reassure; she had a heart ailment, of which she died before the year was out. Now I was put on the next train back to Emmerich, where I was received, not to say taken in to custody, by the Evangelische Bahnhofsmission. (Readers of Günter Grass may remember his remarks about that institution in his Dog Years.) It felt like a half-way house on the way to more serious, more purely political confinement. They were stern and forbidding and had nothing evangelical about them. There was even a touch of Nazism. As I was sitting, somewhat disconsolately, in a dark reception room, a boy of about eight came in and sang one of those Nazi songs—I don’t know why; perhaps it was just youthful exuberance. It grated enough to make me decide to accept no food from this establishment or run the risk of having to sit at the table with these professional Protestants. My grandmother had given me enough provender for the day. What I did not have was money, beyond the ten Marks one was allowed to take out of the country. Yet, when the woman in charge of this Internal Mission house allowed me to go for a short walk in town, I could not resist buying a tuning fork at the window of a small music shop. I went in and bought it. My instrument at the time was the violin, which I played as badly as I had played the piano and would later play the oboe. I may have justified the rash purchase to myself as useful: a violin has to be tuned and there isn’t always a piano or other instrument present to give the pitch. It was a modest tuning fork and cheap; but it depleted my minimal resources. I probably realized this, yet probably felt, too, that there was not only practical but symbolic value in a gadget that gave you the true pitch. Before I went for the walk in the strange town I had telephoned my school and told my friends there what had befallen me. They said they would certify me as a bona fide pupil—I was taking lessons with the music master—and get the local police to put an official endorsement on the document that would impress the Dutch border officials. The doc- RUHM VON OPPEN 41 ument duly arrived by Express mail the next day, but also a message that the police station had closed by the time my friends got there and that they had made their statement sound as persuasive as possible without the police backup. They advised me not to try the same border crossing again, from Emmerich to Zevenaar, where I was now known, but to take another, from Cleve to Nijmegen, where I wasn’t. This meant crossing the Rhine. I boarded the ferry, paid my last Pfennige to the nice conductor, and asked him how far from the landing place on the other side the railway was. It was a fair step, especially with the luggage. He found me a free ride to the station. This turned out to be a local butcher, who gave me the seat beside him in his van, with the carcasses behind us. He wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He sounded like a Nazi or at least a loyal citizen of the Third Reich. In the absence of money I gave him my last German postage stamps and signed a document acknowledging my debt to him for the additional small amount it cost to connect my old rail ticked with the new stretch from Cleve to Nijmegen. So off I went, crossed the frontier without further incident, and reached the school safely. The tuning fork came in handy when we played Haydn quartets. I still have it. Tuning forks don’t take up much space. �42 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 43 A Visit To Santayana Steve Benedict Three years after graduating from St. John’s, I spent some time in Europe traveling and studying languages and music. In the summer of 1950, while in Rome, I persuaded a friend, Tilghman B. Koons, to accompany me up the steep incline of the Via San Stefano Rotondo to the Convent of the Blue Nuns, where I knew George Santayana was living out his final years. I had read a magazine piece a year or so earlier by Gore Vidal reporting on an unannounced visit he had paid Santayana two years earlier, and I brashly decided to see if we, too, could pay our respects. Several hours after the visit, which turned out to be more than brief, I made detailed notes, which languished in my files for nearly 52 years. Last July, I finally sat down to reconstruct the visit. While many of Santayana’s philosophical observations doubtless appear in his writings and interviews in more extended and coherent form, I thought St. John’s readers might enjoy these late-inthe day fragments that seemed to tumble out of him with little prompting. Not exactly a conversation, it was more like listening in to a monologue of memories and observations, in no particular sequence, that happened to surface at the moment. Readers more familiar with Santayana’s work than I will doubtless be able to flesh out gaps and identify certain allusions that remain obscure in my transcription of this longago encounter. *** Upon arriving at the Convent on the afternoon of September 19, 1950, we were received by a nun who told us that Steve Benedict is a 1947 graduate of St. John’s College. He retired in 2000 and is living in Spencertown, New York. His career was spent in government, philanthropy, and education, with a primary emphasis on arts funding and administration. �44 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Santayana had not been well for some time and was seeing very few visitors. Even so, she agreed to tell him that two American students hoped to be able to greet him. She returned in a few minutes and told us Mr. Santayana would see us briefly, but cautioned us not to tax his energy. She led us into the Convent and down a long hallway on the ground floor. Santayana was already standing at the end of the corridor in a long robe, which only partially covered his striped pajamas. He greeted us with a handshake, looked at us with large glistening eyes I have never forgotten, and led us into his apartment. It was a modest space, sparely furnished, with a cot-like bed partially screened off. He issued a firm instruction to sit down, motioning to two straight-backed chairs –“you here, you there.” With no introductory chit-chat or questions about who we were, he began speaking. He told us he had recently been reading Terence for the first time and found him very amusing and much indebted to his predecessors. He remarked that he had re-read Virgil and that Lucretius, along with Virgil, had been important for him. He spoke of them quite casually, as though they were contemporaries. In fact, he brought this quality of immediacy to all of the philosophers he mentioned. Santayana spoke of writing an article for an English book entitled Why I Believe in What I Believe. He hadn’t intended to contribute to it, but an Englishman pestered him with three letters and had agreed to hold off publication for a year if necessary in order to include his contribution. That was very flattering, he commented. “After all,” he added, “I might be dead in a year.” Preoccupation with the article was probably a good part of the explanation for the torrent of remarks and opinions that followed. Mr. Santayana had been reading a book by an Englishman, O.F. Clarke, entitled Introduction to Berdyaev, and added that he did not agree with Berdyaev: “Everything is creative. There is no room [in Berdyaev] for imagination, for reason, for spirit.” He said the article he was writing discusses what scientists call “energy,” using the figure of wind, BENEDICT 45 which seemed better to him than other terms and images for matter. “Wind is invisible. It can’t be touched. It ‘acts,’ causes things to happen.” He mentioned that he has often used a quotation on wind from Genesis: “‘The spirit of God moved across the waters.’ Or, as the Cockney would say, ‘a devil of a wind’–but I won’t use that in the article.” Santayana insisted that his ideas about matter had not changed. His only objection to his earlier books was that he wished he had written them differently and waited until later to write The Life of Reason. Nonetheless he thought he had remained logically consistent. He now felt he had nothing more to say–he had finished his work and would not write any more books, only articles. We asked Mr. Santayana how America looked to him after 40 years. He replied, “I don’t want to go back. There is too much going on there and I am kept busy enough here. No, I don’t want to go back.” Friends had sent him Time and Life magazines. He was amused by the advertisements–“slick, well-groomed people coming out of their houses, buying new cars.” But he enjoyed the pictures. This led him to reminisce about Harvard, where he had studied for four years and then taught: “I am completely a Harvard man,” he said. “I have been accused of making too many rich friends. But I didn’t seek them. They just happened to be rich.” He told us that his best friends had big houses in the country and were able to invite people for weekends. His most intimate friend married a rich Washington widow. He went to dinner with them once and found his friend at the head of the table, his friend’s mother-in-law at the other end, his wife buried at the side between two daughters. He was asked to stay on at the house but declined after this experience. “I never intended to go into philosophy and teaching. It was all an accident,” he went on. This led him to muse on the accidents of his life: If he had gone to England, he would have done much more Plato, if to Germany, more German philosophy. With a chuckle, he added that he did not have much kinship with Goethe. �46 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Mr. Santayana then remarked that had just re-read T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party and didn’t understand why it is successful in performance. He thought the conversion of the girl unconvincing. The play was too much of a tract. He thought “Four Quartets” and the essays were much better, in his opinion. He recalled Eliot as a student of his at Harvard in his course, “Three Philosophical Poets.” Eliot wrote an essay for him, he said, and it was “very good–that’s an understatement.” Then came an abrupt switch. “It is interesting that the two most intelligent men in the history of the Western mind, Plato and Leibniz–were dishonest. If you abstract Plato from his mise-en-scène, which is so attractive, you don’t know what he is saying. Plato has never been a favorite of mine, but of course I owe him something. The Symposium, for instance, I find very attractive. But I owe more to Aristotle and Lucretius and others.” Leibniz, he elaborated, tried to manipulate ideas as well as people. He tried to bring the church together–“very difficult”–and to make peace between states, and he had a certain amount of success. The dishonesty revolves around his assertions on matter (calculus, by implication, is dishonest) and the rearrangement of the elements (energy, mind, matter, potentiality, etc.) into forms by imposing a new idea from without. The Leibnizian calculus asserts that an infinite number of points–which are only positions–in a line reduces and expands them as if they were material. Leibniz tried to manipulate people and institutions in the same way; however, Santayana concluded, he had the right idea about spirit as developing action, as did Hegel. The action or energy is not internal, but occurs with respect to its history and experience–its relations with other forms and ideas. Hegel, he said, knew this clearly. Mr. Santayana said he had been praised by the English critic, Collingwood, an Hegelian, for having held up the idea as a crystal, examining all of its faces. In believing that the spirit does not change but only moves on from experience to BENEDICT 47 experience, Santayana concluded that the highest theoretical and practical ideal is therefore passivity–the reception and assimilation of experience, the “digesting” of action. I brought up Gandhi and without hesitation Santayana said that Western Buddhism and some of the Upanishads especially are very much akin to his beliefs. He added that he did not mean to include Oriental Buddhism, which is different: “I believe in the existence of an absolute truth,” not that man can achieve it necessarily, but that human opinion strives toward absolute truth. Others, he said, put it in different terms: “God is truth,” or “The truth is everywhere.” I had been smitten by Plotinus in my sophomore year at St. John’s and was emboldened to ask if this wasn’t a form of pantheism akin to that of Plotinus. He replied, “I should think not. All creation has a direct causal relation with respect to God or the truth, but creation is different in Plotinus.” This led him to criticize a French translation of Plotinus, which he called “verbally accurate,” but added that the translator did not really understand ideas. “He compares important passages with the Greek, but never learned Greek properly, despite three years at Boston Latin School.” No more books after this, Santayana said. As for his autobiography, he hoped it could be published after his death in one volume. Marginal notes were impossible to include during the wartime printing shortage, but he hoped they could be restored, as in his earlier books. He commented that he’d had to dispose of many of his books because of space. He said the room next door is crammed with books, but the nuns also use it. “Now I never read Shakespeare. The room was always full of nuns. And now the new Mother General is doing the whole place over. Anyway, I probably only have a year or two more to live.” As he was saying this, a nun glowered at us in the doorway. We rose to depart, shook hands and asked if we could come see him next time we were in Rome. Looking straight at us with those penetrating eyes, he said, “Yes, please do.” �48 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW He paused for a moment and added, “Come and see....” and his voice trailed off. **** George Santayana died at the Convent two years later, on September 26, 1952, at the age of 89. 49 Kant’s Philosophical Use of Mathematics: Negative Magnitudes Eva Brann I hope that this consideration of a peculiar little work of great interest will appeal to readers who want a taste of Kant’s early work as well as to those who like to ruminate on the meaning of the simplest mathematical notions. My text is an essay called “An Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (Weltweisheit).” Its date is 1763. Its appeal to me has these three aspects: First there is the tentative mode expressed in the title; here we hear Kant’s pre-critical voice—not yet the magisterially conclusive notes of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) but a tone at once spiritedly daring and gropingly uncertain. A second and more specific aspect is the inchoate appearance of major elements of the first Critique; not only can we see its elements come into being, but we can watch at their incipiency topics that Kant will return to all his life. The third appealing aspect of the essay is its pedagogic suggestiveness; for a teacher seeking to help students reflect on mathematical formalisms, it is a useful source. The piece on negative magnitudes has been eclipsed by its much longer contemporary, “The Only Possible Basis of Proof for a Demonstration of God’s Existence (Dasein),” dated 1763. This essay was subjected to an extensive and deep analysis by Heidegger in his lecture course of 1927 (The Problems of Phenomenology, translated and edited by Albert Hofstadter, Indiana University Press, 1982, ¶8); his elucidation of Kant’s use of the term “reality” is particularly relevant to the essay on negative magnitudes. Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College, Annapolis. �50 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW What evidently drew Heidegger’s attention to this particular essay, however, was its brisk definition of Dasein—his central word—as “absolute position.” When the verb “is” is used not as a copula to relate a subject to its predicate as in “God is omnipotent” but is asserted abruptly, absolutely, as in “God is” or “God exists,” it signifies, Kant claims, a mere positing of an object. By this, in Heidegger’s interpretation, Kant means that the object is affirmed by a knowing subject as available to perception. (I observe, incidentally, that in order to express the character of existence as non-attributive absolute position more adequately, Kant proposes language that anticipates the existential quantifier of propositional logic: We should say not “A narwhal is an animal” but “There exists an animal, the narwhal, which has unicorn-attributes.”) In other words, existence is not a predicate and adds no objective attribute to God’s essence. Since it is the crux of what Kant first called the “ontological argument” (whose best known proponent is Anselm), that existence is a necessary attribute of God’s essence, Kant’s understanding of existence as a non-predicate seems to be a rejection of that proof. Kant’s own demonstration calls on the concept of a “realground” (Realgrund), a concept that emerges in the essay on negative magnitudes, to be discussed below. This concept in turn involves the postulate that essence is prior to existence and actuality to possibility. Since Heidegger’s thinking is dominated by the reverse claim, he is a severe if respectful critic of Kant’s understanding. He regards Kant’s exposition of existence as a half-way house, situated between the notion of existence as one predicate among others and his, Heidegger’s, own understanding of Dasein as “extantness,” i.e., “being-at-hand,” with respect to things and “being in the world” with respect to human beings. There is yet another contemporary essay that has bearing on the essay about negative magnitudes, the “Enquiry Concerning the Evidence of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality, in Answer to a Question Posed by the Royal Academy of the Sciences at Berlin for 1763.” The aim BRANN 51 of this essay (which did not win the prize) was to establish what evidence and certainty natural theology is capable of; it is thus a discourse on method. It begins with an investigation of the difference between mathematics and metaphysics (a difference that plays a major role especially in Kant’s last work, the Opus Postumum). Thus both pieces, the one on God’s existence and the other on theological certainty, illuminate the essay on negative magnitudes, the former through its concept of an ultimate reality and the latter through its restrictions on the use of mathematics in first philosophy. I will draw on them in my exploration. ***** Anyone who has stepped out for a moment from the routine familiarity of operations with signed numbers will have wondered just how, say, 5, +5, |5| and -5 differ from each other, and, furthermore, whether +5 and -5 are operations on or qualifications of the number 5. Although his essay concerns numerable magnitudes, especially those discovered in nature, questions of that sort seem to have been going through Kant’s mind, as he considered the illuminations that the actual quantification of experience might offer to philosophy. In the essay on natural theology Kant sets out four definitive reasons why the mathematical method is inapplicable to philosophy and is not the way to certainty in metaphysics (¶14): 1. Mathematical definitions are “synthetic,” in the sense that the mathematician does not analyze a given concept, but first synthesizes or constructs it, i.e., puts it together at will. (In the first Critique synthesis will have acquired a deeper meaning; it will no longer mean arbitrary construction but an act of the understanding expressing in the imagination the formative givens of the intuition.) In philosophy or, as Kant says interchangeably, Weltweisheit, “world-wisdom” (as distinguished from the scholastic philosophy of mere, unapplied concepts, see Logic, Intro. 3), on the other hand, definitions �52 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW are analytic, in the sense that concepts are given to, not made by, the philosopher, and he then endeavors to analyze them into their implicit elements. (In the Critique a way will be found for the philosopher too to form pure synthetic judgments.) 2. Mathematics is always concrete, in that the arithmetician symbolizes his numbers and operations perceptibly, and the geometer visibly draws his figures. (In the Critique these inscriptions will be within the field of the imaginative intuition.) Philosophers, on the other hand, use words exclusively, and these signify, in Kant’s understanding, abstractly, non-pictorially. (In the Critique this rift between word and picture is closed.) 3. The mathematician tries to employ a minimum of unproved propositions (i.e., axioms and postulates), while the philosopher makes indefinitely many assumptions, as needed. (In the Critique the principles of experience will be systematically restricted.) 4. The objects of mathematics are easy and simple (!), those of philosophy difficult and involved. In the Preface of “The Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” Kant accordingly eschews the introduction of mathematical method into philosophy, but censures the neglect of the application of mathematical matter to the objects of philosophy. The really useful mathematical doctrines are, however, only those that are applicable to natural science. (This restriction prefigures the use of mathematics in the Critique, where its role is the constitution and understanding of the system of nature, i.e., of matter in quantitative and qualitative change.) As a preliminary example, Kant gives the continuity of space, which is, if inexplicitly, postulated in the Euclidean geometry he assumes. The concept of continuity will give insight, he thinks (but explains no further), into the ultimate ground of the possibility of space. (The claim does prefigure the arguments for the establishment of a spatial intuition in the Critique.) The main example in this piece will, of course, be the concept of nega- BRANN 53 tive magnitudes, which Kant now proceeds to clarify and apply. I shall follow his arguments through the three sections of the essay. First Section There are two types of opposition: logical, through contradiction and real, without contradiction. If contradictories are logically connected, the result is a “negative nothing, an unthinkable” (nihil negativum irrepresentabile; now as later in the Critique, representabile = cogitabile, i.e., to think is to represent in the cognitive faculty). Thus a body in motion is a “something” (which is in the Critique the highest objective concept, i.e., that of an object in general); so is a body at rest. But a body at the same time in motion and at rest is an unthinkable nothing. It is not so much a non-object incapable of being as a less-than-nothing incapable of being thought. Real-opposition (Realentgegensetzung), on the other hand, involves no contradiction and thus no unthinkability. For this opposition does not cancel the being of the object thus qualified; it remains a something and thinkable (cogitabile). Suppose a body impelled in one direction and also driven by a counterforce in the other. The resulting motion may be none = 0, but the body so affected is not a no-thing. Kant calls this result nihil privativum representabile, where privativum has a dynamic sense, as of an achieved condition. This nothing is to be termed zero = 0. (The distinction of “logical” and “real” underlies the Critical difference between merely analytic and synthetic, i.e., ampliative, judgments.) Kant also refers to real-opposition as real-repugnance (Realrepugnanz) because two precisely antagonistic predicates of an object cancel each other, though they do not annihilate the object they qualify. Moreover, it is somewhat arbitrary (or rather, determined by extraneous human interests) which pole is called negative. For example, ”dark” may seem to us intrinsically negative, but it is cancelled by its own negation “not-dark” (which might, of course, actually be light). Thus �54 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW one may say that in real-repugnance both opposing predicates are affirmative. Kant gives, among others, the following example. Suppose a person owes 100 dollars and is, at the same time, owed this sum. This debtor-lender is worth 0 dollars, since the two conditions cancel each other, but this fact does not cancel him, the bearer of these modifications. Kant then offers an example (slightly adjusted by me) that expands the concept of real-opposition. Suppose a vessel going from Portugal to Brazil is carried due west by an east wind with an impelling force that would cause it to run 12 miles on a certain day, and is also subject to a countervailing current retarding it by 5 miles; the boat’s total progress is seven miles a day. Here the result is not = 0. It is clear that Kant regards real-opposition as taking place along a scaled spectrum of quantifiable qualities at whose center there might be (though there is not always) a neutral fulcrum, 0. If there is an “origin,” then on one side there are the positive quantities, on the other those that can be regarded either as the relative negatives of the former, or as opposed positives in their own right. Thus the opening question, what is really meant by +5, -5 and |5|, might be answered by Kant like this: The plus or minus sign is neither an implicit operation nor a qualification of the number as itself inherently positive or negative, for the number is, like its “absolute” expression |5|, always positive. The plus and minus signs signify rather the relation of numbers to each other: -5 is the negative of +5; it is negative only in relation to a positive five. To be sure, since Kant is not speaking of bare numbers but of magnitudes symbolizing quantified properties such as are representable along one dimension, magnitudes in real-opposition, the application to pure numbers is conjectural. Objects in real-opposition have, of course, many negations besides those directly opposing a positive: a ship sailing westward is also not sailing southward, but its course is in real-opposition only to the eastern direction. Moreover, there are cases, say of lack of motion, which are not the result of BRANN 55 real opposing forces but of a total absence of impelling force. Negation that is the result of real-opposition Kant calls privatio, that which has no positive ground is called defectus or absentia. His example of an absent or null result is what we would call potential energy (not to be confused with “potential-opposition,” see below): “Thus the thunder that art discovered for the sake of destruction lies stored up for a future war in the threatening silence of an arsenal of a prince, until, when a treacherous tinder touches it, it blows up like lightning and devastates everything around it.” Aside from Kant’s pacifistic poetry, this example shows that Kant is considering only the magnitudes of actualized forces. It is pretty clear that what Kant is struggling to do is to present a conceptual underpinning for what we call directed magnitudes as they occur in the world, including signed numbers insofar as they represent natural qualities, whose plus or minus tells us whether we are to move respectively to the right or the left along the line-spectrum (conceived as a straight line, where left is negative by convention). Not that Kant is thinking of our mathematical number line—he does not even mention an origin (=0), and his opposition-spectra are evidently not necessarily infinite in either direction. While he does insist on the relative directionality of negative numbers, insofar as they countermand their positives, he also reiterates that the negatively directed magnitudes are not negative numbers insofar as these are regarded as being less than 0. For the use of directed magnitudes in philosophy it will in fact be essential that the opposed quantities are indeed inherently positive, as will be shown in Section Three. Hence a debt can be called negative capital, falling negative rising, and so on, where it is our perspective that gives a negative emotional tint to one of the terms. Kant sums his view up in a basic law and its converse: 1. Real-repugnance takes place between two positives, power against power, which cannot be contradictories but must be of the same kind (while the complement class in a contradiction, e.g., “non-dark objects,” is �56 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW not necessarily of the “same kind” as “dark objects”; they might be invisible objects). 2. Where a positive opposes its proper positive, a real cancellation will occur. Furthermore certain rules of operation follow. For example, if the opposites are quantitatively equal, their sum will = 0, or A – A = 0, which shows, Kant explains, that both A’s are positive (since A = A). Also A + 0 = A and A – 0 = A, since no oppositions are involved. But 0 – A is philosophically impossible since positives cannot be subtracted from nothing: There are no inherently negative qualities and so, as was said, no directed magnitudes inherently less than 0 (!). This oddsounding but unavoidable consequence will have important metaphysical implications. Real-repugnance, strange though its label be, has an Aristotelian antecedent. It is, I want to argue, a dynamic version of the logical opposition Aristotle calls contrariety (Metaphysics 10.4). Kant himself says as much in his Anthropology of 1798; he there contrasts contradiction or logical opposition (Gegenteil) with contrariety or real-opposition (Widerspiel, ¶60). As a formal logical opposition contrariety occurs in the Square of Opposition, which is a tabulation of the Aristotelian doctrine on the subject: If the basic proposition is “Every S is P its contradictory is “Some S is not P” and its ,” contrary is “No S is P Contradictories cannot both be true .” nor can they both be false, but contraries, though they cannot both be true, can both be false; for if not every S be P yet , might it be false that no S is P Contrary propositions bear a . certain formal relation to contrary terms, for these cannot both at once belong to an object but they might both fail to belong to it. Thus an object could not be at once pitch black and pure white, but it need not be either, which is untrue of contradictories, such as black and not-black. The above paragraph is really a digression to show that it is not contrary propositions but contrary terms denoting qualities that are related to Kant’s real-opposition. Contraries are qualities that are not simply in abrupt polar opposition BRANN 57 (though their extremes delimit a maximum difference) but are connected through a spectrum of gradations. Aristotle makes privation a particular case of contrariety, and for Kant negation, interpreted as privatio, in German Beraubung, meaning “deprivation,” introduces into some of the ranges of opposition a kind of null point or zero through which the quality goes by degrees into a negative or oppositional mode. (As was noted, not all the spectra have such a center; for example when bodies are brought to rest = 0 by countervailing forces this 0 is not an origin in the spectrum of forces but is a net effect in the bodies’ position, measured in spatial extension rather than as qualitative intensity.) Some of Kant’s examples will be given below. What turns contrariety into real-repugnance is the dynamic view Kant takes of this opposition: It means not just being supinely, matter-of-factly opposed; it means being antagonistically, aggressively opposed. Moreover, this striving in many different dimensions of quality is quantifiable in degrees of intensity, as Kant’s examples will show. Second Section Kant now calls for examples from 1. physics, 2. psychology, 3. morality. 1. In physics his prime example is impenetrability, which is a positive force, a true repulsion that might thus also be called “negative attraction.” For attraction is a cause, contrarily directed, by which a body compels others to push into its own space. 2. From psychology (Seelenlehre) come Kant’s most pungent examples of real-opposition. He raises the question whether aversion could be called “negative pleasure.” The fact that in German aversion, Unlust, looks like a direct contradictory of pleasure, Lust, gives him pause, but he observes that in “real-understanding” (Realverstand), meaning in actual psychic perception, aversion is not just a negation of desire or even its diminution, but a real-repugnance, a positive perception. Then, to illustrate, comes an almost comical �58 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW quantification: A Spartan mother hears of her son’s heroism; a high degree of pleasure ensues, say of 4 degrees. Then comes the news of his death. If the resulting Unlust were a mere negation, a mere negation of the Lust, it would equal 0. But 4 + 0 = 4, as if the death made no difference to her delight. Kant concedes however (some notion of a mother’s feeling!) that the positive Unlust of his death, the real-repugnance, will diminish the mother’s Lust at her son’s bravery by one degree; it will therefore = 3. In the same vein, disgust is negative desire, hate negative love, ugliness negative beauty, error negative truth, and so on. Kant warns against regarding this terminology as mere word mongering: It is a philosophical pitfall to regard the evils of positive privation as mere defects. Thus Kant is denying, surely quite incidentally, the theological doctrine (found in Plotinus, Augustine, Thomas) of evil as privation of good (privatio boni), for in Kant’s view in this essay evil, though a relative negation, is yet a positive force. 3. Kant naturally regards his concept of real-opposition as having important uses in philosophy insofar as it is “practical prudence” (Weltweisheit), that is, applied morality. Nonvirtue (Untugend) is, in human beings, not a mere denial of virtue (Tugend), but a positively negative virtue, vice. This is the case because humans, unlike animals that are morally unendowed, have an “inner moral feeling” that drives them to good actions. For instance they harbor a law of neighborly love. To do bad deeds, human beings have to overcome this natural inclination to good. (A quarter century later, in the second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, Kant will, on the contrary, see the test of true morality in the overcoming of natural inclinations.) Thus certain people must make a noticeable effort to engage even in sins of omission (such as neglecting to offer neighborly help), which differ from sins of commission (hurting one’s neighbor) only in degree; hence the slide from the one to the other is all too smooth, though the beginning is effortful. BRANN 59 Kant apologizes for what may seem to enlightened readers the prolixity of his exposition. He is writing for a “indocile breed of judges, which, because they spend their lives with a single book, understand nothing but what is contained therein.” The book is, I imagine, the Bible. In an appended Remark, Kant forestalls the notion that the world conceived in such a dynamic balance is capable neither of augmentation nor perfection. He points out (1) that in potential oppositions (to be explained below) though the total quantity of effect may = 0, yet there may be an increase in apparent change, as when bodies widen the distance between them; (2) that it is the very antagonism of natural forces that keeps the world in its perfectly regular courses; and (3) that though desire and aversion do balance each other considered as positive quantities oppositely signed, who would claim that aversion is to be called a perfection? Moreover, though the net quantity of moral action in two people may be the same, yet the quality of the one who acted from the better intention is to be more greatly valued. Kant adds that these calculi do not apply to the godhead, which is blessed not through an external good but through itself. Third Section Kant introduces this section, which contains his startling application of the concept of real-opposition to metaphysics, by insisting once more that it is a mere attempt, very imperfect though promising: It is better to put before the public uncertain essays than dogmatically decked-out pretenses of profundity. This section is accordingly called “Containing Some Reflections Which Can Be Preparatory for the Application of the Concept Here Thought Out to the Objects of Philosophy.” I dwell on this language because it is not a tone familiar to those of us who have spent time with the three Critiques. 1. Everyone easily understands how it is that something is not—the positive ground for its being is absent; there is no reason for it to be. But how does something cease to be? The �60 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW question arises because we must understand every passingaway as a negative becoming. As such it requires a real or positive ground. In the first two sections Kant had spoken of real-opposition or real-repugnance, by which were meant normally apprehensible contrarieties. Now, in the third section, he introduces real-grounds (Realgründe). As far as I can make out from the examples, real-grounds are natural, including psychic, causes: forces, powers, and acts exercised by material or psychic agents. “Real” here is used not as in real-opposition, which is opposed to logical contradiction, but it seems to mean “affecting perceptible existence.” Real-grounds seem to be a first-level, underlying causal reality, apprehended through its effects. Thus Kant uses “reality”—and, as we shall see, “existence,” “being” (Wesen), as well as “actuality” (Wirklichkeit)—quite loosely in these exploratory essays; Heidegger shows that Kant’s later systematic meaning of reality is the “whatness” of a thing, all its possible predicates, its essence, while existence is perceptibility. Kant’s examples are mainly from the soul. It costs real effort to refrain from laughing, to dissipate grief, even to abstract from a manifold representation for the sake of clarity; thus abstraction is negative attention. Even the apparently random succession of thoughts has real grounds, which are “hidden in the depths of the mind (Geist),” i.e., in what we call the subconscious. Whether the change is in the condition of matter and thus through external causes, or of the mind and thus through inner causes, the necessity for a causal realopposition remains the same. Kant is focusing here, it seems to me, on a partial converse to, and a kind of complement of, a question, evidently not asked by the ancients, which is to become a modern preoccupation: “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” It was first raised as a metaphysical problem with a theological answer by Leibniz (The Principles of Nature and Grace, Founded on Reason, 1714), and was repeatedly taken up by Heidegger (especially in the end of What is BRANN 61 Metaphysics, 1949), who treated it as “the basic question of metaphysics,” though to be resolved without recourse to theology. Leibniz asks for a reason, sufficient and ultimate, to account for the existence of a universe of things in progress and finds it in God. Kant, on the other hand, asks for an adequate reason why a present condition in the world should go out of existence and finds real-opposition as the cause. It is, however, an unexplained cause, which, Kant says at the end of the essay, he has been and will be thinking about and will in the future write about. This appears to be a harbinger of Critical works not to appear for almost two decades. Meanwhile the metaphysical consequences are exceedingly strange: The sum total of all real grounds equals zero, and “the whole of the world is in itself Nothing.” More of this below. 2. Kant says that the theses to be here proposed seem to him “of the most extreme importance.” First, however, he distinguishes real-opposition, or as he now calls it, “actual” opposition, from “possible” or “potential” opposition. The latter type of opposites are also each other’s negatives, real to be sure, but not, as it happens, in conflict. Thus two forces, each other’s opposites, may be driving two different bodies in opposite directions: They have the potential to cancel each other’s motion but do not actually do so in the given situation. So also one person’s desire may be the other’s aversion, yet their ability to stymie each other is only a possibility. Kant then offers the following first general thesis: In all natural changes of the world their positive sum, insofar as it is estimated by the addition of agreeing (not opposed) positions and the subtraction from one another of those in real-opposition, is neither increased nor diminished. Recall Newton’s Third Law of Motion (Philophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687): �62 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW To every action there is opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. It is pretty evident that Kant is struggling to ground in metaphysics and apply to the human world the most dynamic of Newton’s Laws of Motion or perhaps the Law of the Conservation of Momentum, which is implied in (or, some argue, implies) the law of equal action and reaction; it states that when the forces acting on bodies in the same and in contrary directions are summed (over time) the quantity of motion (i.e., the mass compounded with velocity = mv) is not changed. Kant says without proof that although this rule of mechanics is not usually deduced from the metaphysical ground from which his first thesis is derived, yet it could be. (The first Critique will be partly devoted to giving the transcendental grounds of the laws of motion and conservation.) Not only bodies in motion but souls in emotion obey the law of conservation, and so do humans in action. Astoundingly, Kant really means this: For every “worldchange,” i.e., every “natural” change (which includes the psychic realm) there is an equal and opposed change, so that the sum of measured final positions, i.e., states of existence taken globally, is equal to what it was before the change, or the total effect = 0. Every becoming, then, induces an actual or potential counter-becoming or cessation. It can now be seen why Kant introduced potential real-opposition: Kant’s forces not only act in opposed pairs but they may act on different objects, i.e., the real-opposition may not be actualized in one body or one soul or even in the same mode in one soul. Nevertheless these potential oppositions enter into the summed effects of the world-total. Kant then goes on to give more concrete non-mechanical examples—though these are not non-natural, because (as will still be true in the Critiques) the soul, excepting in its practi- BRANN 63 cal-moral employment of reason, is subject to natural dynamic forces. The examples of this third section differ from the ones in the previous section exactly as the course of the exposition requires: They are cases not of actual but of potential real-opposition. Thus if one person’s pleasure and displeasure arise not from the same object, but the same ground that caused pleasure in one object is also the true ground for feeling displeasure in another, then in analogy to two bodies moving in contrary directions by repulsion, there is one potential real-ground and cause for the positive and the negative feeling. These feelings oppose but also bypass each other; they may cancel each other but need not do so. This is why the Stoic sage had to eradicate all pleasurable drives— because they always engender an associated but diverse displeasure that affects the final value of the pleasure, though perhaps not the actual pleasure itself. Even in the use of the understanding, we find that to the degree that one idea is clarified, the others may be obscured, though surely not by the clarification. Kant adds that in the most perfect Being the zero sum result does not hold, as will be shown. Now comes the second thesis, which is simply the translation of the first thesis into its causative grounds: All real-grounds of the universe, if one sums those similarly directed and subtracts those opposed to one another, yield a result which is equal to zero. Kant immediately states: “The whole of the world is in itself nothing, except insofar as it is something through the will of someone other.” Regarded by itself, the sum of all existing reality = 0; the world is an almost Heraclitean system of balanced oppositions, of mutually negating positivities. In relation to the divine will the sum of all possible reality, of the world’s existence, is, however, positive. But it itself is not therefore in real-opposition to the divine will; it is not the godhead’s relative negation. Consequently existence, i.e., whatever is perceptibly there in the world, is through its internal relations nothing, but in relation to the grounding �64 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW will of the divinity it is something; it is positive. For there can be no real-opposition of the world to the divine will. (This thought is still to be found in the Opus Postumum; there too the real-opposition of forces is metaphysically exploited.) The nullity of the physical and psychical world in its summed effects, the nothingness of the underlying universe of summed causes, and the positivity of creation only in relation to God—Kant presents these results without any discernible pathos, without acknowledgment that this cancellation of the world-whole of effect and cause might bear a religious or moral interpretation beyond the intellectual proof of God’s existence. Nor can I discover that he ever reverted to this nullifying construal of the laws of conservation. Perhaps it is to be regarded as a passing notion that served as a spur to further inquiry into the world’s relation to its ground. (Kant does hold on to the “law of the antagonism in all community of matter by means of motion”; any divergence from its reciprocity would, he now argues, move the very center of gravity of the universe, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of 1786, ¶563. In this essay too the notion of realopposition is put to work in the specific antagonism of repulsion and attraction, forces which between them are responsible for the way matter, i.e., “the movable,” fills space. However, the explanation of these forces in their specificity remains an unsolved problem for Kant into the Opus Postumum.) So Kant concludes by making explicit the heretofore tacitly assumed converse of the proposition that the realgrounds are responsible for the null-ity of existence: Because the internal sum of existence is zero, it follows that the “realgrounds,” i.e., the forces and powers producing effects in the world, must be in a corresponding opposition: The realm of existing and possible reality is in itself shot through with grounding polarities that cancel existence, though in respect to the divine will (Kant does not speak of “God” in this context) it has positive being (Wesen). This overt conclusion of the last section is surprising since it follows close on the asser- BRANN 65 tion that the zero sum of all existence flows necessarily from the grounding being (Wesen) of the world; it is hard to tell whether we are to infer from the zero sum of effects to the underlying real-opposition of causes or whether these causes are posited first. I hesitate to detect Kant in unwittingly circular reasoning here. (He is, to be sure, the master of intentional circularity in the Critique, where the grounds of the possibility of experience are inferred from experience while experience is certified by the grounds. Perhaps the apparent circle in the above paragraph is a precursor of critical thinking.) The metaphysical intention is however quite clear: (1) The world exists as a complex of quantifiably opposed effects; negative magnitudes express such relative opposition; when summed with their positives they yield zero. (2) Underlying these existences, there is a realm of grounds; these are forces, powers and actions; they are also in mutually cancelling opposition, and, like their effects, they are so only relative to each other. (3) In respect to an ultimate ground they are positive, but since no real-opposition to it is possible their positivity is not a relation of opposition to the divinity. Kant himself knows that he has not yet sufficiently clarified the character of real-grounds, nor their relation to the divine will. His first definition of a real-ground actually occurs in a General Remark appended to the third, final section of the essay. A logical ground is one whose consequence can be clearly seen through the law of identity; for example composition is a ground of divisibility, i.e., it is identical with part of the meaning of the concept and can be educed from it analytically. A real-ground, by contrast, has a relation to its effect which, although quite truly expressed as a concept, yet allows no judgment, no true understanding, of the real-ground’s mode of action. In other words, the relation of a real cause to its effect is not apprehensible by mere logical analysis. (Here, of course, is formulated the problem that Kant will solve in the Critique by means of the “synthetic judgment a priori”— �66 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the cognition in which real connections are made—not, of course, by the logical law of identity but through our cognitive constitution.) In this essay, this understanding of a real-ground raises— for the first time for Kant—the fundamental question of causation: “How should I understand it THAT, BECAUSE THERE IS SOMETHING, THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE?” The will of God is something. The existing world is something else altogether. Yet the will of God is the ultimate realground of the world’s existence. Kant says that no talk of cause, effect, power and act will help: God and world are totally each other’s other and yet through one of them the other is posited. And the same holds on a lower level for the natural causes in the world, be they of an event or its cancellation. Kant promises an explication in the future, but for now he remarks only that the relation of real-ground to what is posited or cancelled through it cannot be expressed in a judgment, i.e., a mental “representation of the unity of a consciousness of different representations,” but is in fact only a mere, non-analyzable concept, that is, a general representation or a thought (Logic ¶1, 17). Kant is saying that the relation of an effect to its cause cannot be articulated as an affirmed attribution of a predicate to a subject. It is his way of expressing Hume’s rejection of empirically grounded causation. (In the Critique the attempt to make God’s causal relation to the world comprehensible to reason will be shown to be hopeless, but causality within the world will be grounded in the very constitution of the spatial intuition.) So ends the essay in which the reflection on negative magnitudes has led, through the concept of real-opposition, directly to the problem of causal connection and indirectly to God as ultimate cause. I have not done justice to the exploratory tone of the essay, to Kant’s witty derision of those who get stuck in premature dogmatism, and to his sense of having made a mere, even insufficiently explicated, beginning, but a beginning of something very important: the inquiry into causation. BRANN 67 ***** An elucidation of some of the matters left unclear in the essay on negative magnitudes occurs in the essay on “The Only Possible Grounds of Proof for a Demonstration of God’s Existence” of the same year (1763), and it seems to me so daring that I cannot resist carrying this exposition a little further. The reflections I shall refer to are not those that most interested Heidegger, the ones concerning existence as position, but those dwelling on the relation of possibility to actuality (or as Kant says, to existence) and on an absolutely necessary “existent” (Dasein; First Part, Second and Third Reflections). Possibility, Kant says, depends entirely on the law of contradiction: That is a possible something the thought of which accords with what is thought in it. This “comparison” of a subject with its predicates through the law of contradiction is to be called logical or formal possibility; a triangle cannot have other than three angles, for that would contradict its definition. But it also has something additional, a given character as a triangle in general or in particular, say a rightangled triangle; these are the data of its material or real possibility. Therewith possibility without prior existence is abolished. For a thing is not impossible—a “no-thing”—only when contradictory predications are made of it, when it is formally impossible, but also when it offers no real material, no data, to thinking. For then all thinking ceases, for everything possible must be something thinkable, must offer stuff for thought. It follows that for Kant possibility is conditioned on actuality. There is, to be sure, no formal inner contradiction in the brute negation of all existence, since nothing has been posited to begin with. But that there be a possibility and that nonetheless nothing actual exist—that is contradictory. For if nothing exists, nothing material is given to be thought about. Therefore to say that nothing exists is, according to the previous analysis of existence (Dasein) as a positing act of �68 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW thought, to think and say that there is absolutely nothing. And then to add that something is possible is clearly self-contradictory, for no material for thinking at all is given. Thinking involves material givens; without them it contradicts its own character. Thus the cancellation of the material data of possibility also cancels possibility. It is absolutely impossible that nothing should exist. I understand Kant to mean that one can—logically—deny all existence, but having denied it one cannot then retrieve its possibility. The only really elucidating example of a necessary existence is, Kant says, that of the unique Subject (i.e., God), to be touched on below. Meanwhile, if we ask, for example, how existence precedes possibility in respect to “body,” we may grant that the concept body contains no logical impossibility, yet to call on its predicates of extension, impenetrability, force, to be the data of possibility (either assumed or experienced) in the absence of actually existing, given bodies, is quite unwarranted. Without such data the concept “body” is empty. (We see here the forerunner of the dictum in the first Critique that the mere functions of the understanding are empty without the givens of intuition.) Then Kant explains the concept of an absolutely necessary existence. To say that it is that whose contradictory is in itself impossible is a merely nominal explanation. Since existence is no predicate, its denial can never conflict with other predicates. However to deny the positing of the thing itself is not a denial of predicates but of something else, and hence is not contradictory. Kant is looking not for logical but “realnecessity” (Realnotwendigkeit), for what cannot be denied in any “real-explanation” (Realerklärung). This is it: “What I am to regard as absolutely nothing and impossible must be that which eradicates all thinking.” Now total nonexistence in fact cancels all the material and data of thought, and hence it is impossible. It follows that there is an absolutely necessary being. For all possibility assumes something actual, whose cancellation would itself cancel all inner possibility, i.e., the real coherence BRANN 69 of predicates. That part of existence, on the other hand, which does not provide the material for all that is thinkable, but without which there would still be matter for thought— and thus possibility—that part is, although in a real sense possible, yet in the same sense conditionally possible, i.e., contingent; not all existence is necessary. (In his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 Kant will say that all worldly substances are in fact contingent since they maintain reciprocal relations, while necessary beings are independent, ¶19; an earlier version of this existence proof is to be found in Kant’s Nova dilucidatio of 1755.) Kant now goes on to show that the one necessary, noncontingent existence is God, a being that is one, simple, unchangeable, eternal, and a spirit. But its philosophically most important attribute is that it is (in scholastic terms) the ens realissimum, the most real being, that which contains the highest reality. For it contains all the givens, the data, of possibility either as directly determining other existences or as being the real-ground of which they are the consequences. (In the Critique, the ens realissimum will be relegated to the status of an ideal of reason, a regulative idea that marshals our thoughts of the world; in the Opus Postumum God is once more the most real existence, though one reason necessarily posits for itself.) Does the attribution to God of the most and the highest reality mean that all realities, i.e., all real attributes, must be assigned to God? Here the concepts of the essay on negative magnitudes come into their own: It is common doctrine that one reality can never contradict another reality, since both are truly affirmed. But this assertion leaves out of account the notion of real-repugnance, i.e., of real-opposition. Realities may, indeed must, oppose each other without one of them being in itself negative. That was the essay’s main finding. In God, however, even real-opposition cannot take place, because that would result in privation or defect and would contradict God’s maximal reality. Thus God contains no realities in opposition to his positive predicates; for example, the �70 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW real-oppositions attributable to bodies, such as being subject to contrary forces, cannot without contradiction belong to a being that has intellect and will; hence the ens realissimus has clear positive determinations. It is, it seems to me, implicit in these pre-Critical essays that neither existence (Dasein) nor actuality (Wirklichkeit) is as yet convertible with subjective perceptibility, though both will indeed be so later, as Heidegger observes. Instead these terms mean objective givenness, thereness, be it sensorily received or essentially apprehended. The road to the first Critique will be the development of this conversion from the object of experience as given to the subject to its being constituted in the subject. The roots, however, of the primacy of the subject are already present in one respect, now to be shown. ***** There is, then, necessarily a God, a being comprehending not all, but all the highest positive reality. He is a real-ground of the world; the world, in turn, amounts quantitatively to a self-cancelled nothing, though it may well be qualitatively positive. One way to get hold of this—by Kant’s own frequent confession—still inchoate complex is to ask just how daring a departure from tradition it is. Kant, who without naming Anselm is attempting to rebut his argument for the existence of God, calls his own proof “ontological” (later in the Critique that is what he will call Anselm-type proofs). Anselm argues (Proslogium 2, 4) that God is a maximal being whose essence is to be thought as largely and inclusively as possible; thus it must include the predicate existence. This—that existence is a predicate—is what Kant denies, but he accepts something that seems to me even deeper in, or rather behind, Anselm’s argument: that when I must think that God exists, he exists. But this is thinking of the type Kant himself engages in when he makes God’s existence follow from the existential necessities of thinking: What is required for thinking to be possible must necessarily exist. (This type of proof becomes explicit in the Opus BRANN 71 Postumum.) Here Anselm and Kant are brothers under the skin. I can think of counterarguments to their assumption (though without being quite persuaded by them): Is it utterly impossible that a being that must exist in thought fails to exist in fact—is it so totally unthinkable? Is it not possible to think that thinking can do utterly without the material, the data grounded either in a highest reality, as in the essay on God’s existence, or in some sensory influx from a transcendent outside, as in the first Critique? Is it unthinkable that possibilities do not disappear when actualities fail, but that there is spontaneous, autonomous, self-generated, worldless thinking? Kant has, it seems, levered the Cartesian-type certification for personal existence; Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” into a proof of God’s existence: Cogito ergo Deus est, “I think therefore there is a God.” But what if “I think” entails instead: “I make the world,” if I myself give myself the data? Such misgivings and intimations aside (they will become Kant’s own in the Opus Postumum), he has found an approach to a question that seems never to have occupied the ancients and was, as was mentioned, first formulated by Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace, 7): “Why does something exist rather than nothing?, especially since ‘nothing’ is simpler and easier than ‘something.’” Leibniz finds the answer in the ultimate sufficient reason called God. Kant argues the other way around: Nothing is harder than something, indeed impossible for thought, and God becomes necessary not as a sufficient reason inferred from the world’s existence but as a necessary being implied by human thinking. In 1763, having proved in one essay the necessary existence of the highest and most real ground and so (for the time being) answered Leibniz’s question, Kant is left with the unanswered next question of the essay on negative magnitudes quoted above, which he prints in block letters: “How can I understand THAT BECAUSE SOMETHING IS, SOMETHING ELSE MIGHT BE?” In other words, having proved God’s existence, how can I understand him, or his agents in �72 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the world, as causal grounds? (This very same question will, as was said, be presented in the Critique as unanswerable by logical thinking alone, but solved with the aid of the a priori relations given in the intuition.) By 1781, the year of the first edition of the first Critique, Kant will have given up not only his own so circumstantially prepared ontological proof, the only possible one, as he had once thought, but also in principle any expectation of a theoretical demonstration of God’s existence—and so, it seems, any rational explanation of the first question, why there is existence at all. The second question, on the other hand, is just what the Critique addresses. Kant distinguishes cosmological freedom, the power to make an absolute beginning, from causality according to natural law, which is rule-governed consequence acting within what already exists. An insight into the first, into absolute causation, i.e., creation, Kant shows, is in principle impossible for us, for it is beyond the limits of human reason. The second causality, that of lawful succession, of cause and effect in natural events, is grounded in the synthesizing character of our cognitive constitution. The essays here considered show Kant—and for my part I find this intellectually moving—casting about for disparate clues to the concepts and claims which would one day come to cohere in his master edifice. 73 Four Poems Elliott Zuckerman Where the Poet Lives I saw the poet once in furnished rooms above the estaminet. There were others in his train, and I just tagged along. Foremost were my sidekick feelings. If only earlier in the evening I’d found the man alone at his table in the whitewashed space, the waiters not quite in position yet, and memorably our eyes had met. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 74 ZUCKERMAN Early Pupil She saw that her piano and only hers was missing black notes here and there and deemed that this deficiency was due somehow to my neglect, a lack of thoroughness. But never did she carp for long, clever enough at twelve to know that parents don’t pay cash for caviling. Have it your way, she’d imply. Go ahead and have it your way, for all you teachers insist on throwing bowling-balls overhand. To the narrow living room of the detached brick building in the borough’s heart I brought her Haydn. It was a hurdle that the piece, her first, was titled ‘Air,’ suggesting emptiness to her, and breathing. I told her something about sonatas, and life chez Esterhaz, then asked the girl to name the head bewigged in the oval insert on the page. ‘That is George Washington,’ she said. Among the portraits later in the book, she stopped at Purcell in a flowing wig. I played the left hand ostinato, and told her how a Trojan prig abandoned the passionate empress Dido to fiery death, while we can hear the drooping half-steps of imperial despair. Pointing to Purcell’s hair, ‘At last,’ she said, ‘a lady composer.’ 75 �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 76 ZUCKERMAN She and the Tree Outlay On that flat terrain is there a tree? Given at least one tree, she likes to arrange her limbs in imitation of the branches, seeking a quiet contraposto. We place ourselves on stools, shoes at the rungs, the ales in steins on the expanse between us, midway in bowls the usual cashews, and new pistachios. Her earlier attempts will be ignored, for rearrangements are encouraged. But when at last she settles on a pose, they’ll give that pose her name. Though hands can reach across to hands, no actual touch dare fluster the display: all my intent and all your puzzlement diffused in what we say. They emphasize the silence of the landscape, she and the tree. I wonder whether anything that hangs high in the air among the pleasantries could close those almond eyes. 77 �78 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 79 Platonic Pedagogy? David Roochnik No Platonic dialogue depicts a conversation between two equally mature philosophers. There is neither a friendly collaboration, nor a serious battle, between peers. Instead, the dialogues are consistently asymmetrical. Two familiar kinds of conversations are those between an older Socrates and a younger man (Glaucon, for example) who is, at best, a potential philosopher, and between Socrates and a non-philosopher (such as Protagoras, Laches, or Agathon). What is conspicuously missing is a dialogue between Socrates and a thinker offering a well-developed theoretical position, such as the Eleatic Stranger or Timaeus, neither of whom receives as much as a question from a present but silent Socrates. One explanation of this absence is that the dialogues are thoroughly pedagogical works. Their function, on this account, is not to present a positive or systematic theory, which is why they do not depict a symmetrical exchange between two theorists (who either agree or disagree), but an encounter whose asymmetry is designed to invite the reader to participate. As Eva Brann puts it, Plato “wants us as soon as possible to join [the dialogue], to be converted from passive perusal to active participation, to be drawn in among the other silent interlocutors” (p. 88). One version of this “pedagogical thesis” would maintain that by entering the conversation the reader, guided by the dialogue’s clues, can, and so should, attempt to reconstruct the teaching or theory (or logos) it implicitly contains. A second version would argue that the dialogue contains no positive theory at all. On this account, Socrates’ attempt to drive Eva Brann. The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and Plato’s Writings. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004. David Roochnik is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. �80 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW his interlocutors into thinking—and Plato’s attempt to achieve the same with his readers—is the teaching. This may sound odd, because pedagogy seems to be a means to an end. The teacher teaches the student who, upon completion of the instruction, is no longer a student, but instead is one who knows. Perhaps, however, the dialogues are asymmetrical because they are essentially pedagogical. In other words, perhaps Plato eschewed the sort of symmetrical dialogue that would communicate a positive theory—not to mention the fact that he never wrote a monological treatise—because he believed there was no positive or independent theory that could be detached from the attempt to teach it. (Brann’s own definition of a “theory” is “a conceptual construction designed in principle to yield satisfying explanations for every problem brought to it” [p. 322].) Perhaps pedagogy, the leading of the younger by the older, is an end in itself. Or, to put it somewhat strangely, perhaps pedagogy itself is the truth. Such a view comes close to a form of skepticism, although not of the Pyrrhonian or Academic varieties described by Sextus Empiricus. (See Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.1 and 1.4.) I think Eva Brann might accept some of these remarks, but I am not sure which of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis (if either) she would favor. Certainly, hers is a book written by a teacher for students. Included in this collection of essays are three “introductions”: to the Phaedo, Republic, and Sophist. One essay, “Socrates’ Legacy: Plato’s Phaedo,” was written for a student journal, and another is titled, “‘Teaching Plato’ to Undergraduates.” It and three others— “Why Justice? The Answer of the Republic,” “The Tyrant’s Temperance: Charmides,” and “Imitative Poetry: Book X of the Republic”—were delivered as lectures at undergraduate colleges. “Socrates’ Legacy: Plato’s Phaedo,” which Brann describes as a “view, very sketchily stated, of Plato’s Phaedo, which might help a serious student in reading the dialogue” (p. 36), lays out twenty-one questions that she thinks Plato “insinuates into the purported demonstrations of the soul’s ROOCHNIK 81 immortality” (p. 37). These are followed by a paragraph containing fourteen sentences, the first two of which are declarative, the following twelve of which are interrogative. She concludes the essay by imagining Socrates joining a conversation about them today. “He would not care so much about devising well-formulated breakthroughs for received issues as for staying with the inquiry at its origin in wonder...he is…asking [the young men who participate in this conversation] to keep his perplexities alive. For that is what philosophizing means to him” (p. 41). These remarks suggest that Brann would favor the second of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis described above. So too would her description of “Plato’s Theory of Ideas.” Despite using this well-worn academic phrase as the title of one of her own essays, she asserts that “the Ideas are not a theory” (p. 322) at all, and so she recommends that we “convert the falsely familiar title “‘Plato’s Theory of Ideas’ to ‘Socrates’ Hypotheses of the Eide’” (p. 324). In a similar fashion, her description of “recollection” as a “myth” (p. 332) rather than a theory, and her declaration that in the Timaeus “the Timaean story of the origin and nature of time is not the Socratic, and therefore not a central Platonic, theory” (p. 275), but instead may even “supply the reason why Plato has offered none” (p. 272), also seems to imply that beyond teaching lies no positive theory at all. Brann seems to believe that, at the end of the day, the philosopher must “go back to the beginning” (palin ex archês), and ask her questions, provoke her students, yet again. Teaching, in this sense, is an end in itself. There are philosophical explanations of why this would be the case. One is famously suggested in the Seventh Letter and is quoted by Brann (on p. 320): There is no treatise of mine about these things, nor ever will be; for it is not sayable like other kinds of learning, but out of much communion which has taken place around this business, and �82 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW from living together, suddenly, like a light kindled from a leaping fire, it gets into the soul, and from there on nourishes itself. If Plato believes that “these things” are not sayable, then there can be no positive theory of them, and thus neither a monological treatise nor a symmetrical dialogue would be an appropriate form of philosophical expression. Another possibility, which I can here only state, is that the dialogues resist symmetry, resist theory, because they are attempts to do justice to “the constitution of the soul…its topography” (p. 251), and this “topography” is itself assymetrical. Perhaps Plato wrote the sort of dialogues he did, in which the partners are invariably unequal, because the soul is somehow unequal to itself. The eponymous, and far the longest, essay of this book, “The Music of Plato’s Republic,” seems to challenge the notion that the dialogues are essentially pedagogical, and instead to favor the first of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis mentioned above, namely, that the Republic is meant to teach the reader how to reconstruct the theoretical doctrine to which it only points. Consider the following comments that Eva Brann makes about the images of the sun, the divided-line, and the cave: “The logos behind these images is absent in the Republic, but its terms may be recovered from Plato’s oral ‘Unwritten Teachings,’ particularly the lecture— or several colloquia—Concerning the Good…In these terms…the Image of the Good represents the One and the Image of the Cave the Indefinite Dyad” (p. 156). Later in the essay, employing a diagram of great complexity (p. 195), Brann begins to articulate such a logos, such a doctrine: This scheme shows the Good as presiding over and bonding a kind of pervasive duplication: The Good as the cause of knowledge is responsible for the unifying confrontation of knower and known…and thus originates the soul…The Good is as well the direct source of beingness…Finally, ROOCHNIK 83 as generating source, the Good puts forth the sun, a sensible secondary source that reduplicates the whole structure of Being on the lower level of sense and Becoming (p. 195-6). Brann draws on both the Parmenides and the Sophist to articulate the details of such a theory, a project that occupies a major portion of this essay. This attempt to “recover” the positive logos of the Republic is consonant with the assertive tone that pervades “The Music of the Republic.” The essay begins, for example, with this statement: “The Republic is composed of concentric rings encompassing a center” (p. 108). Books 1 and 9-10, on Brann’s reading, comprise the outermost circle, and set the mythic context of the entire work. Books 2-4 and then 8-9 are “the broad inner ring” consisting “of the construction and destruction of the successive forms of a pattern city in ‘speech’” (p. 116). Books 5-7 “presents the actual founding of a city ‘in deed’” (p. 116). This structure is diagrammed on page 117, which is one of thirteen such diagrams found in the essay. This structural account of the form of the dialogue—an account that seems of a piece with the attempt to recover its complexly structured content—can be challenged. Consider the following alternative: Book 1, as Socrates himself states in Book 2, “is only a prelude” (prooimion: 357a2). In the Rhetoric, Aristotle discusses this term. It is, he says, “the beginning of a speech” (3.14.1) whose “necessary and specific function…is to make clear what is the end (telos) for which the speech is being given” (3.14.5). Brann’s arguments that Book 1 establishes a mythic context are not without philological basis. Still, the bulk of Book 1 is a series not of mythic allusions, but of refutations, almost all of which operate on the basis of the “techne analogy.” So, for example, Socrates refutes Polemarchus’ assertion that it is “just to give to everyone what is fitting” (332c2) by smuggling in the assumption that justice is an art, a form of expertise, a techne. As medi- �84 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW cine gives what is fitting—drugs, food and drinks—to bodies, and cooking gives what is fitting—seasonings—to meats, so too (if the analogy holds) must justice give what is fitting to the determinate object of its expertise. (See 332c-d.) Because no such object can be identified, the definition is rejected. Socrates, then, begins the refutations of Book 1 with an assumption, justice is a techne, which he neither makes explicit nor defends. The refutations succeed because the techne model of justice proves to be inadequate. Nonetheless, it remains the case that justice, even if it is not a techne, must still be regarded as a form of knowledge. Book 1 is a prooimion suggesting the telos of the Republic because it sets out a task: to give an account of justice as a non-technical form of knowledge. What follows Book 1 are not concentric rings but, to borrow Socrates’ own metaphor, three successive “waves” of argumentation that become progressively more difficult to “swim through.” Books 2-4 construct an “arithmetical” or technical conception of both city and soul that ultimately proves to be deficient. Books 5-7 are a response to this deficiency, but suffer from limitations of their own. As a result, they are followed by Books 8-10, which, despite the scant attention they receive from commentators, are rich with insight (especially psychological insight) and so actually culminate the dialogue rather than serve as merely a descent and completion of the ring structure. This little sketch (elaborated and defended in detail in my Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato’s Republic) is mentioned only to raise a question. Is the purpose of the essay “The Music of Plato’s Republic” to uncover a positive teaching of the dialogue, one communicated by means of the ring structure Brann attributes to it, and then conceptually elaborated in a “recovered” logos about the Good? If so, does this essay stand at odds with the otherwise interrogative and aporetic stance seemingly taken by so many of the other essays in this book? ROOCHNIK 85 Perhaps “The Music of the Republic” is not quite what it seems to be. Even though it includes a significant number of diagrams, some of them (such as the one on p. 220) quite elegant, and contains numerically adumbrated outlines of the arguments, and even though it seems to offer first steps towards a coherent account of the whole (i.e., a theory), perhaps this is but the mathematical “sheen” of the essay and does not fully reflect its author’s understanding of the full content of the dialogue. In other words, a meta-mathematical doctrine may not lie at the heart of the Republic. Perhaps Brann’s diagrams and outlines, and her putative recovery of the logos, perform a function more like that Socrates attributes in Book 7 to arithmetic, that “lowly business of distinguishing the one, the two and the three” (522c): “to draw the soul from becoming to being” (521d). In other words, while mathematics is without doubt of significant value, it is not the model of a genuinely philosophical logos. Instead, arithmetic and its kindred mathematical technai are conceived by Plato to have instrumental value. As such, they are pedagogical in nature. They are meant to inspire and provoke, to turn the reader towards the project of philosophy. They are meant, in short, to be questioned. The goal of Brann’s longest and most “mathematical” of essays, then, is not to offer the last word on the Republic, but to convert the reader “from passive perusal to active participation.” To sum up: is the apparent assertiveness, the “theoretical optimism,” of “The Music of the Republic” compatible with a thoroughly interrogative essay like “Socrates’ Legacy: Plato’s Phaedo?” I believe it is. If I am right, then one of the many virtues of this beautiful book is that it effectively imitates the Platonic dialogues themselves. �86 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW ROOCHNIK 87 � 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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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2005/2 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Price, Audra Hunt, Frank Sachs, Joe Stephenson, David Ruhm von Oppen, Beate Benedict, Steve Roochnik, David Description An account of the resource Volume XLVIII, number two of The St. John's Review. Published in 2005. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_48_No_2 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/27cf647ee1d07f84e3970649ca46bf7a.pdf f6ff3ee9a09205a4056ff3d7a204fd20 PDF Text Text The St. John’s Review Volume XLVIII, number three (2005) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Sarah Navarre The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P .O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2005 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Essays and Lectures A Glance, A Look, A Stare........................................... 5 Jerry L. Thompson Muthos and Logos.......................................................41 David Stephenson Meaning and Truth in Klein’s Philosophico-Mathematical Writings...........................57 Burt C. Hopkins Addendum Two Images.................................................................89 Chaninah Maschler �4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 A Glance, a Look, a Stare Jerry L. Thompson In 1968 or 1969 a friend asked me to the first session of a workshop given in New York City by the photographer Harold Feinstein. Feinstein was an experienced teacher, and he began by talking to the assembled group of 20 or so about his approach to picture-taking. He said that each of us, the moment we stepped into his studio, had an immediate impression, a notion, an idea of his place. That impression, gained at first glance, was, he said, what photography was all about. A snapshot—a view recognized and seized in a fraction of a second—was the photographer’s view of the world. Certainly many of the best-known photographs made during the twenty years before my visit to Feinstein’s studio could be connected to this understanding of how photography worked. Two of the books of photographs most admired by young ambitious photographers at that time were The Decisive Moment, a book that presented large reproductions of minimally-captioned photographs by Henri CartierBresson without any text other than appreciation of the pictures, and Robert Frank’s The Americans, another book whose main content was pictorial. Though very different in form, in attitude, and in meaning, the two books contained pictures that looked like quick glimpses of the worlds they showed, views recognized and seized at first glance. I was a beginning photographer, but I had experimented with several cameras, and I knew that with a small camera a picture could be made in daylight at 1/500th of a second. At that shutter speed, the operator did not even have to hold the camera Jerry L. Thompson has been a working photographer for more than thirty years. He is the author of Truth and Photography (Ivan R. Dee, 2003), a book of essays on photography, and a forthcoming book combining some of his own photographs with a long essay on their making. �6 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW perfectly still in order to get a clear picture. With a wideangle lens pre-focused (that is, set at the “hyperfocal” distance setting, the setting which would allow everything off to the horizon and most of what was as close as 3 or 4 feet from the lens to be in focus when the aperture was constricted for a daylight exposure), the photographer could rush the camera to his eye to snap anything he saw within a fraction of a second of his first awareness of the scene’s potential to become a picture. In discussing Feinstein’s approach after the class my friend and I agreed that spontaneity was at its center. The idea was to act—to respond to a strong impression—before conscious deliberation or prolonged analysis could weigh in. Feinstein was proposing, we decided, a theory of visual truth. Directness and honesty of vision are most possible when the photographer, or artist, acts spontaneously and seizes the moment before he or she has a chance to ponder other considerations: should I be a little farther off? Should I make an exposure that will allow for detail in all the dark areas, or one that will record only dramatic highlights in a sea of darkness? Should I wait for a more amiable expression to appear on that person’s face? Should I shoot a vertical so that it can be considered for the cover of Life magazine? Each such deliberation, the thinking goes, chips away at the picture’s “purity,” compromises the artist’s perception, and takes the result further away from the “unmediated” truth of an instant response. Such thinking found many receptive auditors in 1968 and 1969. The rise in prominence of the so-called “AbstractExpressionist” painters had helped prepare the way. These “New York School” painters did not usually make preliminary sketches, let alone use perspective studies or scaled palettes. They rejected every device attached to European (mostly French) Beaux Arts training. For them that training was anathema; it reeked of the academy, flattery of princes, dishonesty, decoration, and corruption. Immediacy and THOMPSON 7 authenticity, not perspective, drawing, harmony, and a pleasing likeness were important to them. Their ambition, as a group, was not to copy nature but to create it. Photographers were more hesitant to substitute their own productions for the subjects they depicted. Most photographers then (if not now) still thought the pictures they took (or made, to use the word many artist-photographers have insisted using) at least referred to, but more likely clarified or even understood, the world those pictures showed. Photojournalism was a model for many, especially those who worked with small hand-held cameras, and photojournalism was generally thought able to present a kind of truth about what was going on in the world. Photographers in 1969 were more likely to single out Eddie Adams’s pictures of the summary execution of a suspected Viet Cong than they were to speculate about how many times Douglas McArthur had to wade ashore on the Philippines until the photographer got the picture the war effort needed. Though they might not follow the painters all the way to proclaiming their pictures a second, new nature, one that could stand on its own without reference to a “subject,” many ambitious young photographers in 1969 would have agreed that (a) photography is art; that (b) authenticity and immediacy in art are good things; and that (c) authenticity and immediacy are most available to an artist when working spontaneously. Hovering in the background of this thinking is the notion that there is something natural about this way of working. When the photographer Nick Nixon (who began photographing seriously in the late 1960s) was asked about his way of working by a group of students in 1975 he said his role was like that of a plant, a tree whose business it is to bear fruit (I paraphrase his remarks from memory). His job, he explained, was to produce the fruit. Discussing and analyzing the fruit was somebody else’s job. He also said he rarely used the camera’s controls for adjusting the drawing of the image projected on the ground-glass viewing screen of the large �8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW view camera he used. If the picture wasn’t there (that is, if he didn’t see it whole and ready to frame), he didn’t try to fiddle with the camera’s adjustments in order to coax a reluctant picture to appear. John Keats would have understood all of this, at least at the moment in February, 1818, when he wrote to John Taylor that “In Poetry I have a few Axioms,” including this one: That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all. Keats’s remark rightly suggests that the line of thinking I have been discussing did not begin with Harold Feinstein, or with the New York School painters. M. H. Abrams includes what he calls “vegetable genius” among the theories of unconscious genius and organic growth he finds widespread, particularly in England and Germany, as early as the eighteenth century (The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford, 203). These theories have several features in common: they hold that the artist is not directly responsible for what he makes; that he may not understand, in an analytical sense, what he is doing; and that the mechanism by which he works is like that of a plant. Johann Georg Sulzer, author of a four-volume dictionary of aesthetic terms published between 1771 and 1774, wrote that It is a remarkable thing, belonging among other mysteries of psychology, that at times certain thoughts will not develop or let themselves be clearly grasped when we devote our full attention to them, yet long afterwards will present themselves in the greatest clarity of their own accord, when we are not in search of them, so that it seems as though in the interim they had grown unnoticed, like a plant, and now stood before us in their full development and bloom. (Abrams, 203) THOMPSON 9 In 1793 Immanuel Kant went further to declare that the productive faculty of the fine arts was properly called genius, which he defined as “the innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art.” This faculty of genius cannot indicate scientifically how it brings about its product, but rather gives the rule as nature. Hence, where an author owes a product to his genius, he does not know himself how the ideas for it have entered his head, nor has he it in his power to invent the like at pleasure, or methodically, and communicate the same to others in such precepts as would put them in a position to produce similar products. (Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, ¶46; also cited by Abrams, 207) These theories were not confined to the visual arts. The passages quoted above speak of authors and ideas. And the theories do not appear as the aphoristic musings of practitioners; they are not the haphazard reflections of artists puzzling about what they do, but systematic treatments by serious philosophical writers. These theories are presented in the very form—discursive writing—that the activity the theories discuss, the activity of spontaneous invention, would seem to shy away from. Writing is, after all, the setting down of reasonable speech—argument, what Keats called “consequitive reasoning,” and what philosophers at the time of Plato and Aristotle meant by logos: a logical train of thought. Discursive writing involves connecting and setting down an articulated succession of ideas. Sometime between 1942 and 1945 Erich Auerbach wrote one such articulated succession of ideas, a long and detailed one, about a descriptive passage in Balzac (The essay appeared in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature). In that essay, he stresses the harmony and stylistic unity of a passage near the beginning of Le Père Goriot (1834), which describes the first appearance of the �10 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW pension-mistress Madame Vauquer. Every detail given by Balzac contributes to “an intense impression of cheerless poverty, shabbiness, and dilapidation,” and along with the physical description, “the moral atmosphere is suggested.” Auerbach’s discussion builds to the following observation: The entire description, so far as we have yet considered it, is directed to the mimetic imagination of the reader, to his memory-pictures of similar persons and similar milieux which he may have seen; the thesis of the “stylistic unity” of the milieu, which included the people in it, is not established rationally but is presented as a striking and immediate state of things, purely suggestively, without any proof. By “not established rationally” and “without any proof,” Auerbach means that Balzac does not present an extended argument or logical train of thought to demonstrate that all the details he names and observations he makes are in fact related, bound in some chain of causality. According to Auerbach, what Balzac presents is a striking and immediate state of things, something we take in all at once, uncritically, as if at a glance. In fact we encounter the components of this impression one at a time, as we read, but they accumulate to affect us as a growing ensemble, as a complete whole already existent and gradually revealed—not as a logical proposition or arithmetic calculation which must be worked through to the end before we can see and accept what is meant. “What confronts us, then, is the unity of a particular milieu, felt as a total concept of a demonic-organic nature and presented entirely by suggestive and sensory means,” Auerbach concludes (416). Balzac accomplishes the remarkable feat of presenting, in words that must be read and understood in sequence, the kind of impression we would have had if we had been there to look at the actual room. What he tells us over the course of sixteen sentences, most of them quite THOMPSON 11 long, we could have taken in had we been there, at a glance, in a single glimpse, like the view we were invited to take from the threshold of Feinstein’s studio. This is so because the sentences do not reason with us or attempt to demonstrate— they offer, as Auerbach says, no proof. Rather, these sentences overwhelm us with detail and observation mixed together, an imaginative description in which odors have moral overtones and misfortune oozes from worn furniture. When we know a thing at a glance, we do not consider evidence and weigh opinions as a jury might during a prolonged deliberation. We see the thing and know it at once for what it is, as we recognize a face that suddenly comes into sight without thinking, that nose, those eyes, brown hair parted on the right: it’s John Doe! Rather than reason our way to an identification, we somehow consult a memory-bank and call up, all at once, the one we recognize. Recognizing this feature of human understanding, Balzac could reasonably expect his reader to reach into his or her memory-bank of “pictures of similar persons” to “recognize” the intertwined physical and moral dilapidation of Madame Vauquer and her milieu. He doesn’t attempt to argue that this thing is connected to that, or that the one is a cause of the other: he presents not a thesis to argue, but a milieu to recognize; we see it, recognize it, and take it in as a whole. This taking in at a glance depends, as Auerbach notes, on “memory-pictures of similar people which [the reader] may have seen”: if I have never seen John Doe before I will not recognize him when his face suddenly appears. If I have the opportunity to look at him a little while, I may note a certain kind of nose, details of grooming, hair color and texture, etc., and conclude that he is a certain kind of person, but I will not “recognize” him if I don’t know him. In this instance knowing at a glance would not be available to me, but another approach, an approach involving sustained reasoning, demonstration, the kind of thinking involved in a “proof ”—such an approach might lead me somewhere. Such �12 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW prolonged consideration would hardly have time to come into play during a glance, but it might during a stare. But rather than start down this path, which will lead in a different direction, let me take the line of thinking we have been considering—that some operations of the soul are spontaneous—a little farther back in time. The careful reader will have noted a new word in the last sentence. In the quotations I cited, Kant refers to mental aptitudes and to things going on the author’s head. Kant speaks of the operations he discusses as taking place in the mind because he saw human experience as split between two worlds. The phenomenal world is the physical world, the world of space and time. Everything here is completely explained by the laws of physics. Our bodies are in this world. This world is nature, and it is available to us through the understanding. The other world—the noumenal world— is a thing apart. This is a suprasensory world in which the reason operates; it is in this world that moral judgment and the will exist. This is the world we can know only with the mind, which, as he notes, is in the head. But in the last sentence of the paragraph before last I used the word soul instead of mind. I did so in preparation for following the line of thinking we are considering farther back in time. Where we are headed—the thinking of Plato and Aristotle—there is no sharp cleavage between two worlds. There is an ordered cosmos, and there are many independent things in that cosmos, and some of those things have souls. Whether the soul is a thing that survives the death of the body it inhabits is, in this world, an open question. Plato’s Socrates likes to speculate about this from time to time, but he freely admits that in doing so he is indulging himself, not demonstrating, and that he does so for pleasure and comfort (as in the Phaedo, the conversation that takes place on the afternoon before his execution). Aristotle is not prone to mythological speculation. THOMPSON 13 But whatever its ultimate fate, the soul, in the world we are now considering, is intimately connected with the body and the cosmos it inhabits. One kind of thinking available to this soul is perception, and the soul perceives by using its bodily organs of sense. This soul has motions that may take the form of movements, either of small particles within the body or of large things outside us through use of the limbs. Choice and moral judgment operate not in spite of nature, but through nature, in cooperation with it. This is so because nature, choice, moral judgment, and everything else are parts of an ordered cosmos. Men tend to know and seek the good, and avoid the bad in the same way that light things tend to rise and heavy ones fall, and for the same reason: because the cosmos is ordered. Not only is the cosmos ordered, but it is ordered in a way that men can know, at least up to a point. Reasonable speech, offered in good faith, can be answered in good faith so that two earnest speakers working together can come to know what neither of them could have come upon on his own. This is one example of dialectic, and its application leads upward from commonplace observations everyone agrees on to ideas about these observations, from there to groupings and classifications, and on to an awareness of causes. Specific causes have more general causes, and the discovery of proximal sources leads to those that are more remote, more fundamental, more unifying. All this is available to those who use reason in good faith. “In good faith” means with the intention of discovering the truth. This world is no Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, no Pollyannaish rich boys’ club where only the privileged few are taken into account, where everyone is just, noble, and good because he (and only hes need apply) can afford it. The texts that give us this world are full of instances of what appears to be reasonable speech used for base ends: flatterers, tyrants, sophists, eristics, and practitioners of all the vices are present in these texts. The highest and best that these texts point to �14 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW can hardly be called “Greek thought,” or “the Greek way.” These best possibilities were defined—let alone practiced—by only a handful of thinkers, some of whom were at odds with the culture they lived in (Socrates was executed; Aristotle died in exile). But the possibility of knowing and playing a healthy part in an ordered cosmos lives in these texts, and this broad vision—this vision of wholeness—underlies the earliest appearance of the spontaneous operations of the soul we have been considering. According to translator Joe Sachs, Aristotle’s On the Soul uses twenty-four different words to mean thinking. The broadest of these, noein, can be thought of as meaning “to think” in a general sense: the activity of the soul that includes everything from sense perception to the highest kind of reason. But one word in the cluster, theorein, refers to just the kind of taking-in-all-as-a-whole we have been considering: the view of Madame Vauquer’s pension, and the glimpse of Feinstein’s studio. This verb is translated by Sachs as to “contemplate.” Contemplation gets a lot of attention from Aristotle. He begins with simple examples such as recognizing a figure, say a triangle, at first glance: we do not have to count the angles to know it as a triangle; we see it all at once. In a similar way we recognize a face we know, as in the example I used earlier. On this level, contemplation is almost like simple perception, only a bit more complex since it involves recognizing a pattern and not just a single sensation. But elsewhere Aristotle’s examples of contemplation are of things more complex; in the Nicomachean Ethics he speaks of the exercise of this ability not in the realm of perception, but in moral judgment: he speaks of recognizing instantly, without calculation, the right thing to do in a particular situation. Contemplation is available for all our actions, from the lowest to the highest. Sachs has given the best exposition I know of this feature of Aristotle’s thinking; here is a part of it: THOMPSON 15 Like our highest knowing, our perceiving takes in something organized and intelligible all at once and whole. That is why we can contemplate a scene or sight before us as well as something purely thinkable. In neither case is the thing grasped our product, and that is why Aristotle calls both perception and contemplative thinking passive (pathêtikos), but this receptiveness to being acted upon should not be confused with inertness. It is rather an effortful holding of oneself in readiness. Attentive seeing or concentration in thinking requires work to keep oneself from distraction; it is a potent passivity (dunamis) that becomes activity in the presence of those things that feed it. Nutrition is the active transformation of things in the world into the living body; contemplation is the effortful openness of the soul to a merging into the intelligible foundation of the world. Reading and listening are always hard work, and hardest of all when one lets the meaning of the speaker or author develop within oneself. Contemplation, as Aristotle intends it, is the same sort of act without the building up of interpretation; it is rather what he calls affirming something not by thinking any proposition about it but by touching it…Aristotle believes that the activity of knowing is always at work in us and available to us…potentially guiding everything we do in the same way the blind grub worm is led to its food and a plant is turned to the light. (Sachs, On the Soul, 37) In order to understand what this contemplation is, it is necessary to distinguish between what we do in contemplation and what we do in deliberation, which is also thinking, but thinking of a different kind. Deliberation involves paying attention and thinking things through. We apply it when we �16 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW are faced with things that could be one way or another. As a photographer in the street I notice a small detail—the chipped polish on a fingernail, say—and I start to wonder about what this detail tells me. Does it mean the person is careless of her appearance, therefore unselfconscious and possibly willing to agree to be photographed by a stranger on a public street? Or was the chipping an unfortunate accident, and is the stranger sufficiently concerned about this small mishap to be worried about how she looks, and therefore reluctant to agree have her picture taken here and now? Things could stand either one way or the other, and deliberation comes into play to weigh the alternatives. When we deliberate we are in the realm of practical judgment. We are using our ability to think to figure out what is best for us to do. Such thinking is an important part of living in society, but it is not contemplation. Contemplation does not, like deliberation, lead us to consider things that can be one way or another; rather, it leads us to the awareness of what cannot be otherwise—what Sachs, after Aristotle, calls “the intelligible foundation of the world.” And, as he carefully says, in contemplation we are led not just to see this “intelligible foundation,” but to merge into it, to participate in and become a part of it. What can this mean for a skeptical, secular, subjective, egoistic modern? One of the attractions of Aristotle’s thinking is that it offers a way to think about the self in the world that is neither subjective nor egoistic. What he proposes is that the cosmos is ordered, and that things happen, for the most part, for reasons. He calls those reasons causes, and he consistently finds that causes usually have other causes; those that are farther in the background are more general causes, which he refers to as sources. Following this line of thought does not involve rejecting modern science, but rather taking what modern technological science tells us and thinking about it in the context of what we know. To do so involves remaining skeptical that scientific explana- THOMPSON 17 tion—especially when it can be expressed only in mathematical formulations incapable of being rendered in speech that is not either non-sensical or hopelessly equivocal—is the whole story, the version that eliminates any possibility it cannot presently account for. In support of this sensible attitude, I might cite the wisdom of a thinker who began as a physical scientist, Immanuel Kant: The understanding which is occupied merely with empirical exercise, and does not reflect on the sources of its own cognition, may exercise its functions very well and very successfully, but it is quite unable to do one thing, and that of very great importance, to determine, mainly, the bounds that limit its employment, and to know the laws that lie within or without its own sphere. (Critique of Pure Reason, “Of the Ground of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena”) If we follow Aristotle in accepting the principle of an ordered universe as a model for our thinking—and in this it claims no more of our absolute, final, and unquestioning belief than any proposal of modern science should—then we can think about thinking in ways that are denied us if we accept the world as mostly dark, silent space where particles collide at random, a realm where some accident of chemical connection has made it possible for “us” to “think” about those random collisions. To follow Aristotle’s lead we do not have to believe in anything, except in the possibility that thinking can actually lead us to things not completely determined by what we are and what we already happen to know. As Aristotle himself says in the Nicomachean Ethics, after observing that “the intellect is something divine as compared with a human being”: But one should not follow those who advise us to think human thoughts, since we are human, and mortal thoughts, since we are mortal, but as far as �18 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW possible one ought to be immortal and to do all things with a view toward living in accord with the most powerful thing in oneself, for even if it is small in bulk, it rises much more above everything else in power and worth. (10.7) Taking what Aristotle says seriously requires accepting the possibility of an ordered universe, and the possibility that the intellect can perceive something of this order. As we go through our daily lives we do notice that, for the most part, things do seem to be connected in a causal way. If we follow Aristotle’s thinking we start with commonplace observations that many things seem to make a kind of sense; if we subject these observations to reason, clarify them and try to find some order in them, we are doing what Aristotle did. Reading his thinking can help clarify our own, and disclose possibilities we find attractive but might not—as “educated” post-Enlightenment moderns—have known about without his help. If we can entertain his notion that our world—the world we can discover and know—has some kind of order, then we can approach that order in contemplation. Think of that order as what we call in everyday speech “the big picture.” Someone who can’t get past petty details doesn’t get the big picture: that person can’t see the forest for the trees. If we notice that chipped fingernail (to return to the example I used earlier), we are paying attention to details involved in what Aristotle calls an ultimate particular. If we use that bit of the world as a guide to whether we should act or not—in this example, ask permission to take a picture—we are in the realm of practical judgment. We are deliberating. But if we happen to be in such a state—a state of open receptivity, of “potent passivity,” as Sachs calls it—that when we see the chipped nail we also see something about the single human life whose whole history up until that moment includes that nail and the events that led first to its painting and later to its chipping, then we are moving beyond deliberation. If we see THOMPSON 19 not only the nail and the history that led to it, but also something fundamental about what human life on earth actually is, in its briefness, in its vulnerability to shocks and surprises, mishaps great and small, in its reliance on vanity and attempts to please, and on things taken up only to be discarded in distraction a few moments later—if we see at the same time we see the chipped nail a whole concatenated bundle of small ambitions and great disappointments, then we are on the point of merging into the intellectual foundation of the world. We are in a state where ultimate particulars and universals both are present and connected, in a state where we can be aware of a thing itself and of its place in a larger order at the same time. In contemplation we see neither without the other. “An example is in fact a source of something universal” is how Aristotle puts it (Nicomachean Ethics, 6.3). In contemplation we see what we can know of the world’s order unfolding before us—not from us: it is not our product, though we are included in it, but before us. We see what is there to be seen. How do we know for sure that what we see is before us, rather than merely from us, the fevered product of an active imagination? We don’t. It may be only that. But it also may not be only that, and years of disciplined attempts to make it be not only that may help bring about the richer possibility, a world disclosed to us rather than a world imagined by us. The whole of the Nicomachean Ethics makes clear that contemplation is the highest, most difficult use of our ability to think, and that it is not available to everyone. Only those who are able to hold themselves so that they are not distracted by passions, needs, local interests—all the possible missteps Aristotle calls vices—can achieve the state of undistracted calm from which it is possible to see what is there rather than the opportunities for profit, reminders of desire, occasions to use a favorite skill, and so forth—the buzzing static of everyday life familiar to every normal citizen of the everyday world. In contemplation, we use the will to suppress �20 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW distraction rather than to initiate aggressive action. This explains why photographers who are extraordinarily talented, clever, and skillful can produce work that, though it may hold our attention for a time, never achieves greatness or profundity. Look at how clever I am, look what I can do, the pictures say. If a photographer has a marketing campaign in the back of the thinking part of his soul as he works, the needs and possibilities of that campaign will find their ways into the picture, and a careful, thoughtful viewer’s attempt to penetrate that picture will be blocked somewhere in the realm of deliberation—where strategies are hatched—before it can arrive at contemplation. What the photographer needed to see, and not what was there, is what the picture will be about, what that picture will show. This distinction may be difficult for some readers to accept, but it is real. Recall that effort is necessary, that will must be exerted to acquire and maintain the “potent passivity” we are discussing; steady practice of this discipline over a long time makes attaining the sought goal increasingly possible. It is a prospect worth pursuing. Imagine a diligent photographer who looks at the same or similar subjects for thirty or forty years. The showing off and cleverness, the willful self-full-ness get used up, sown like so many wild oats during the first few years. Eventually he or she might settle down, so to speak—in Aristotle’s model, come to terms with and tame the disorganized, distracted state of uncontrolled passions normal to childhood—and begin to see what’s really there. A genius (in the modern sense of being extraordinarily quick-witted, not in Kant’s more neutral descriptive sense) might come to the same point in two or three tries, and then go off in some other direction. I have strayed so far from the example I began with— standing on the threshold of Feinstein’s studio—that I have taken this discussion back to the time of Alexander the Great, and almost brought it full circle. Read what Sachs has written about Aristotle not from the point of view of a student of THOMPSON 21 ancient thought, but from the point of view of a photographer: We can contemplate a scene or sight before us as well as something purely thinkable…in neither case is the thing grasped our product…receptiveness to being acted on…a potent passivity that becomes activity in the presence of things that feed it…the effortful openness of the soul to a merging into the intelligible foundation of the world… when one lets the meaning [of another] develop within oneself…affirming something not by thinking any proposition about it but by touching it. (On the Soul, Sachs, 37) These could be tenets of an aesthetic of photography that would come into play on the doorstep of Feinstein’s studio, at the window of Madame Vauquer’s pension, on a violent Vietnamese street, any place or time since the invention of the camera. This suggested aesthetic, if scrupulously followed, would produce pictures not based on the principles of good design, nor in accordance with the wishes of an audience or market. These pictures would not speak first and most loudly about what the photographer knows, would not be deliberately expressive of anything urgent about that photographer’s own self or needs, nor would they present a poetic construction intended to distract a viewer’s attention from the everyday world he walks and breathes in. The pictures stemming from such an aesthetic would be quiet and true, diligently observant of the things in front of them, and alert to orders of order ranging far beyond ideas about scurves and The Rule of Thirds. What might a work of photographic art called into being according to the principles gleaned from Aristotle be like? It might be something like a work of another kind of art discussed by Auerbach a little later in the same essay I referred to earlier. This work is also a work of fiction, and �22 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Auerbach’s commentary concerns the author’s manner of telling the reader about his characters’ world: We hear the writer speak; but he expresses no opinion and makes no comment. His role is limited to selecting the events and translating them into language; and this is done in the conviction that every event, if one is able to express it purely and completely, interprets itself and the persons involved in it far better and more completely than any opinion or judgment appended to it could do. This description picks up the new note introduced by Aristotle into what we are considering. In referring to Balzac, Auerbach noted that that author depended on his reader’s “mimetic imagination,” on “his [the reader’s] memorypictures of similar persons and similar milieux he may have seen.” To the extent that this is true, Balzac expects his reader to match the description he reads with what he already knows. Aristotle goes further. The thing grasped is not our product; it is achieved through “an effortful holding of oneself in readiness,” the “effortful openness of the soul to the structure of the intelligible world.” This is not matching selections from our memory-banks with the stimuli that present themselves. Relying on memory-banks is mediation; full openness to what is is im-mediate. Balzac appeals to what the reader already thinks and even tells the reader what he, Balzac, thinks about the world he describes. But the later 19th century French writer Auerbach turns to promises to go farther in the direction Sachs indicates: There occur in his letters…many highly informative statements on the subject of his aim in art. They lead to a theory—mystical in the last analysis, but in practice, like all true mysticism, based upon reason, experience, and discipline—of a self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of reality 23 THOMPSON which transforms them (par une chimie merveilleuse) and permits them to develop to mature expression. In this fashion subjects completely fill the writer; he forgets himself; his heart no longer serves him save to feel the hearts of others, and when, by fanatical patience, this condition is achieved, the perfect expression, which at once entirely comprehends the momentary subject and impartially judges it, comes of itself; subjects are seen as God sees them, in their true essence. (On the Soul, 37) The writer referred to is, of course, Gustave Flaubert, and the letters mentioned were written while he was at work on Madame Bovary. His practice, and the theory of it deduced from his letters by Auerbach, take us to the threshold of an exciting prospect—the prospect of coming to know something that is truly foreign to us. In ordinary life this is a prospect that presents increasing difficulties for most of us, especially after the first dozen or twenty years of life. This prospect is also the central challenge of photography as a mature art. * * * * * * * * Photography is not primarily a studio art. The discussion so far has been directed towards photographs that come into being when a photographer looks at something new to him, something strange, something beyond the range of his familiar daily experience. Some photographers have made discoveries while rearranging the stuff on their desks or kitchen counters, of course, and such a familiar happening as the play of sunlight on a window curtain can appear miraculous to a certain kind of person in a receptive mood. But for many photographers encountering something new involves travel, or at least walking out of the house. The specific pictures I have mentioned so far were taken in a battle zone �24 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW in southeast Asia and in the Philippines; the hypothetical ones I have speculated about would have been made in the entryway of a strangers studio and in the corner (or at the window) of a French pension. Travel or walking around is easiest for the young and unattached. They have more physical stamina, and more time. So it is hardly surprising that photographers often do more work when young than later on. Walker Evans continued to work with a camera until very near the end of his life, when a fall broke his collarbone, making it difficult for him to hold even the small camera he was using at the time. Even before this fall, his work, though daily or nearly so, can hardly be compared in volume and intensity to the work he did in 1935 and 1936, when he exposed hundreds of 8x10 negatives and dozens of rolls of 35mm (and other sizes) film on a series of auto trips that took him through parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. As an older man his work was less strenuous, conducted at a more leisurely pace, and less adventurous than the work he had done in his mid30s. He took a job with Fortune magazine, and after retiring from that, a job teaching at Yale University. As his work became known to a new generation interested in the kind of photography he did, he was asked to speak to school and museum audiences from time to time. He gave a few prepared talks, but mostly he preferred taking questions from the audience. If a session went well, he might appraise its success by saying, “They got a good talk out of me.” As he aged, Evans grew more reflective, and he talked about his own work and photography in general. Some of his reflections were recorded on audio tapes by the institutions that asked him to speak. Anyone who considers these talks as a body might well come to the conclusion that Evans was shaping an image of himself, presenting the story of his development and work as he wanted it to be understood. THOMPSON 25 Some things he mentions again and again: he liked to talk about going to Paris as a young man, about seeing James Joyce once in Sylvia Beach’s bookstore but being afraid to approach him. He liked to talk about spending time with Hemingway in Cuba, and he frequently talked about other writers he had read but not known: D.H. Lawrence and Henry James, for example. He once began a question-andanswer session at a summer art program for college students by reading a long sentence from James’s The American Scene. That was his idea of getting the ball rolling with a roomful of art students in 1972. A recently-published portfolio of his photographs, most taken during the 1930s, was displayed on the wall behind him, and the students’ questions were about those pictures and not the passage Evans read. Evans’s literary interests were more than a snobbish pretension (though they were that as well). One observation that comes up more than once in these late taped conversations (Evans died in 1975) was his debt to two French writers, one of them Gustave Flaubert. I don’t think Evans ever cited a specific passage in Flaubert, and I’m sure he never read much (if any) critical writing on Flaubert. He had a low opinion of criticism in general: he considered critical writing to be a good deal below what is now called “creative” writing. For Evans, writing fiction was art, and writing criticism was not. He looked down on the English Department at Yale for being concerned mostly with criticism instead of artistic production. But somehow, despite his disdain for critical analysis, Evans managed to intuit that there was something in the work of Flaubert—a writer of fiction—that he could learn from and use in his work as a photographer. He was able to intuit this, and to acquire what he needed not by making propositions about it—not by analyzing what Flaubert had done, and then constructing from that analysis a program to direct his own approach to picture-taking. Rather, he absorbed it directly, as if by osmosis, relying I think on some- �26 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW thing like the procedure described by Immanuel Kant in the passage quoted earlier. You might even say that Evans, in looking at Flaubert as an artist, saw something whole and formed—saw at a glance, if you like—something he recognized and understood, not by analysis and calculation, but recognized in the way we recognize a triangle without counting the angles, or the face of our friend John without making an inventory of his features. If the connection between Flaubert and Evans is a real one, and I believe it is, then it may be worthwhile to try and work out just how something of Flaubert can be seen in a picture made by Evans. We might ask what it was that Evans absorbed, if not from page 213 of Madame Bovary then at least from the spirit in which Flaubert worked—a spirit which, as we saw from the brief passage of commentary by Auerbach and that passage’s parallels with Sachs’s distillation of a current in Aristotle’s thinking, has special ambitions and connections with other approaches to the world and earlier bodies of thinking. Let me take as a starting point the print that sits propped up on the desk where I write. It is of a well-known Evans picture, the flashlit view he made of kitchen utensils on the wall of a frame house in Hale County, Alabama, in the summer of 1936. The picture presents a small rectangle, mostly light gray in tone. Some of the tiny spaces between the vertical boards that form the room’s wall have been plugged, and are quite dark gray, almost black. Others are cracks that let in the daylight, and are white. Shadows of things on the wall are dark, and some reflections of the flash (from a bulb, probably) are as bright as the daylight showing through the cracks. For the most part, then, the field we see in this picture is gray, but the variations make a pattern—a pattern that is sufficiently arresting, in a graphic sense, to be noticeable at first glance. The material shown is unfamiliar to most of us (or at least it was, until this picture became so famous), but THOMPSON 27 the pattern of its display might cause anyone interested in looking to pause, ask, What’s that? and take a closer look. Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead, 1936 Even after this preliminary, superficial examination comments suggest themselves. This odd pattern—odd because it is unexpected, yet graphically sure, odd because we recognize the pattern before we identify the real-world stuff that forms the pattern—attracts us, and causes us to linger. Our attention has been attracted to the look of the picture. The look of the picture may be understood as its distinctive overall form, that look that makes it different from other pictures in the way that my face makes me different from other faces. Just as we linger at the sight of certain faces more than at the sight of others, so too we are more apt to linger at the sight of certain pictures. This feature is important to �28 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Kant, who attempted to establish that some arrangements are “naturally” appealing to “all men in all countries.” I am not the one to judge how far he succeeded in this effort, but his concern with significant form underscores its hold on our attention. When we are at the stage of being attracted by the look of the picture, we are in the position we were in on the threshold of Feinstein’s studio. We are taking in the picture as a whole, at a glance, and we may be open to an experience of contemplation—the experience, the reader will remember, of letting the truth of what is seen unfold within us, directly, as something not our product. Faced with this picture, what would that mean? It might mean, for a start, exerting effort to avoid distraction, freeing our attention of irrelevant demands from some personal agenda of wants of our own. An obvious example might be to avoid thinking about the provenance of this particular print. How old is it? Who printed it? From what collector or dealer did it come? What cryptic and possibly value-enhancing notations in pencil are on the back? How much will it bring at auction? Each of these concerns is legitimate, in its appropriate context, but none of them has anything at all to do with looking at the picture contemplatively, that is, in such a way as to let what is seen unfold within us. In a sense, what I am describing is trying to calm down the static so that we can approach something like the ideal “purity” that was the justification of the spontaneous first glance recommended by Feinstein at the first session of his work shop. It is important to understand, however, that we are not after a state of child-like innocence, some kind of willful ignorance. We live in the world, and if we take this picture seriously we will soon enough have to work very hard at bringing as much of that world’s experience as we can to bear on it, but only after the picture begins to tell us what we need to bring. Before that can commence, we need to shed THOMPSON 29 and focus, exert the effort it takes to avoid distraction and attain quiet. As the pattern continues to exert its hold on our attention, we may begin to survey the terrain that, at first glance, seemed so inviting. What things do these modulated grays disclose to our attention? The photographer’s wish to show small details is evident, but not obsessive: the flat light of the head-on flash illumination has minimized surface detail which would leap to the eye if seen in hard cross-light. The manner of rendering this humble scene hardly calls attention to itself at all, at first glance. We have noted a certain uneasy tension among the various things visible—the “elements” of the “composition.” The two horizontal strips of lath nailed across the vertical planks seem to the viewing eye to float, in spite of the clearly-visible heads of the nails securing them, and their echo in the darker, fuzzy marks in the picture’s center comes into play in this connection: they seem almost to recede in space, denying the obvious flat wall that ends the picture’s depth. The tilt of the cross member near the picture’s top—so flimsy a timber can scarcely be called a beam—adds to the sense of disorder, and the objects it supports cooperate in this impression as well. The glass jar is cockeyed (with reference to the board edge next to it, but who would expect a plank in this structure to keep to a true vertical?); the metal can looks off-kilter too—unless it is hanging true and the planks are off. The mysterious bit of crud suspended on a tiny line from the leftmost nail confirms the true vertical. A plate with a centered hole, odd patches of adhering paper—one a ripped commercially-printed notice retaining only the word fragment “AM”, in bold capitals, and “It’s [undecipherable] ized” in small, faint, linked script—and a single nail near the can complete the decorations on the “ground” of this “figure-ground composition.” Viewers familiar with other pictures by this photographer will recognize this tense, slightly-unnerving kind of arrangement of forgettable or cast-off objects. Both the objects shown, and their manner of framing and organization, as well �30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW as the seemingly unemphatic use of light and tone are characteristic of his work. These “stylistic elements” offer interests of their own, which can be expanded upon by those who believe the chief interest of pictures to lie in their relation to the history of style. Or perhaps such a line of analysis is another distraction leading away from what this picture has to show its viewers. Indeed, the tensely-organized visual field sets off a central focus, a “subject,” which lies at almost the exact center of the picture, where its diagonals cross. Its subject is the family silver chest. The objects forming the “ground” are so nondescript, so arrestingly organized (or disorganized), that it is easy to see them only—that is to say, to note their visual weights and positions without thinking too much about what they might be, or be used for. What viewer has an experiential reference for a topless Mason jar, or a plate with a hole in the center? We look at the tonalities, the textures, the odd spacing, and our experience is visual, “aesthetic.” Perhaps the can with its quaint wooden handle and the plate, certainly the textual fragment AM (a fragment freighted with ambiguous possible meanings), register as knowable, if disparate, objects. Any “kick” this recognition adds to our experience of the picture might be related to Surrealism (the picture was made in 1936), and also “aesthetic.” It would have to do with beauty. But at the picture’s center the rules change. The objects shown so clearly there, and highlighted by the reflection of the flash from their shiny surfaces, present a great load of specific information, and of recognizable illusion. These are utensils we know well; we feel them in our hands. We recognize the shell-like edges of one fork’s handle and note the different pattern of the next handle over, and the lack of ornament at all on the handle of a nearby spoon. In between is a knife with a wooden handle (like the handle of the leftmost utensil), a handle whose halves are held together by wire. THOMPSON 31 No narrator or even caption is needed with material as familiar, as everyday as this. Any viewer likely to see this picture would recognize—and understand—the distinctions in play among patterned, plain, wooden, broken, tarnished, matched, and odd—as quickly as he or she might almost feel the utensil in right or left hand, familiar from lifelong practice. These small images, so recognizable and familiar, send out “kindred mutations” to the minds of any viewers who bother even to identify what the picture shows. A lingering look—the arresting organization of the picture encourages it—raises the question of how this familiar material in the center—the “figure”—relates to the strange unsettling “ground” surrounding it. At this point, the picture begins to weigh in with its full largeness of meaning, the full force of its allusive reference. Once the silver-chest is seen to exist in such strange form, and understood to reside in so hostile and unsettled an environment, the imagination of an engaged viewer begins to work. He enlists his memory-bank, allowing what he knows to appear according to directions coming from the unfolding representation in the picture. That imaginative work might begin perhaps with the hands that hold, and wash, and polish, and put away those prized salvaged utensils—might those hands resemble the ruined members Hesiod dreamed of preserving as new in the Golden Age? Then there might be the odd attenuated daily chores that utilize the strange objects on the wall, now understood as utensils also, saved and arranged also. What sort of use might that suspended bit of crud have? How could anyone value such a thing so much as to hang it on the wall? Who could have such a need? Lear has an answer: “Oh, reason not the need. Our basest beggars/Are in the poorest thing superfluous.” This answer is only a short space from the extreme of sympathetic identification, an extreme whose full limit finds voice in this howl: Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this hideous storm, �32 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou may’st shake the super flux to them, And show the heavens more just. This speech of Lear is offered as part of the front matter of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which this picture first appeared. We have now gone outside the picture. To have done so at the beginning of our look at the picture—to have started our look with a consideration of the book in which the picture was published and its front matter might have been a distraction. But at this point, well into an experience of the picture, we want to know more: a question has been raised— who could have such a need?—and anything we recall or can learn about the picture’s first use and the circumstances of its making can properly be called in to help answer that question. Our unfolding awareness of the picture—and of the things in the picture—directs our thinking. In order to be in us, the things in the picture tell us what they need. Our memories and imaginations respond to the call and give the picture what it needs to develop within us. When puzzles or conflicts arise, they must be settled by thinking, and the thinking appropriate to contemplation—theorein—is supplemented by another of Aristotle’s twenty-four kinds of thinking—dianoein. This is the thinking that thinks things through, as in propositions and demonstrations. This thinking allows the viewer to sort out what he senses in that first look, when he or she takes things all at once, as a whole. But this problem-solving thinking, the thinking that looks at details, identifies them, and connects them to other things we recall from past experience—dianoein—operates in the service and at the direction of theorein. A vision of the whole THOMPSON 33 comes first, and as it develops it looms over and directs the step-by-step thinking it requires in order to unfold completely. Evans made the pictures and determined their arrangement in the book, and their placement apart from the text. James Agee was responsible for all the text. His huge sensibility may have worked its massy gravity on his collaborator. Agee’s text suggests moral urgency, as if he desperately needs to help the hardness and deprivation he observes, or at least immolate himself to make up for it. For his part Evans is moved so far as to wonder at what he sees—his “momentary subject,” to use Auerbach’s phrase, and the qualification is appropriate: Evans was not a humanitarian aid worker, but an artist. He was in Alabama for three weeks, with the tenant farmers for less time that that, and he stood in front of no individual subject, including the human ones, for more than a few minutes. But during that brief time he had available to him the special attitude toward his “subject-matter” that had been developing within him, and he paid close attention to details. Close attention indeed: he, like Flaubert, gave his momentary subject “self-forgetful absorption” so that the subject “completely filled” him to the extent that “his heart serves him only to feel the hearts of others”—others meaning milieux as well as individual people. It is this “fanatical” (Auerbach’s word used in connection with Flaubert; Evans reported to Lincoln Kirstein that he was so stimulated by the possibilities of photography that he sometimes thought himself “completely crazy”) concentration that allows him to come up with an approach, discover the approach that allows his chosen momentary subjects to speak for themselves in “mature expression.” He has framed (and lighted) this picture in a characteristic way, but this characteristic way does not overwhelm the subject-things with his “artistry.” He has made a picture in which the things shown can begin to work on the viewer, a picture in which the world of the picture, the milieu it shows, �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 34 can emerge as more noticeable, more important, and more worthy of attention than the artistic milieu that set the stage for its production. This is what Evans found in Flaubert. According to Auerbach, Flaubert completely dispenses with the “separation of styles”—the notion, prevalent in Western literature prior to the nineteenth century that only elevated figures (kings, princes, and heroes, for example) were worthy of the serious attention of tragedy. Humbler sorts appeared in comedy and in satire, but were not taken as seriously as the figures in a tragedy are. They did not come in for the serious treatment, the close attention reserved for figures of high standing. Here is Auerbach in an earlier essay (on Petronius): Everything commonly realistic, everything pertaining to everyday life, must not be treated on any level except the comic, which permits no problematic probing. As a result the boundaries of realism are narrow. And if we take that word realism a little more strictly, we are forced to conclude that there could be no serious literary treatment of everyday occupations and social classes…in short of the people and its life. Linked with this is the fact that the realists of antiquity do not make clear the social forces underlying the facts and conditions which they present. This could only be done in the realm of the serio-problematic. (Auerbach, 270) In Flaubert, however, he finds that There are no high and low subjects; the universe is a work of art produced without any taking of sides, the realistic artist must imitate the procedures of Creation, and every subject in it essence contains, before God’s eyes, both the serious and the comic, both dignity and vulgarity….There is no need for a general theory of levels, in which THOMPSON 35 subjects are arranged according to their dignity, or for any analyses by the writer commenting upon the subject, after its presentation, with a view to better comprehension and more accurate classification; all this must result from the presentation of the subject itself. (Auerbach, 429-430) [italics added] The artist works for “a self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of reality which transforms them (par une chemie merveilleuse) and permits them to develop to mature expression.” Flaubert wrote as a part of nature. In accordance with the procedure outlined by Kant, Auerbach interpreted the rule of nature given through Flaubert. Evans neither analyzed Flaubert’s nature nor read the rules formulated by Auerbach or anyone else. But he liked the look of the chimie merveilleuse, the “self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of reality which transforms them and permits them to develop to mature expression”; through some trick of temperament, talent, instinct, and sleight-of-hand he came up with his own version of it. Flaubert found tragedy in the life of a provincial wife, and Evans found matter for high seriousness in a poor tenant-farmer’s makeshift kitchen. As the photographer Lee Friedlander put it: after Walker we could take a picture of anything. It is hard to think of Evans’ pictures as glances. Many of the best-known ones resemble nothing so much as direct stares. This is so because the attention they give has a relentless quality: they are so clear, so unagitated—that is, not dominated by a sense of urgency, a sense that something must be done about state of affairs the camera shows. They avoid extreme contrasts of black and white, presenting for the most part a lucid field of modulated grays. They are composed not only in the sense of being unruffled emotionally, but also in the sense that they present their subjects in a way that might be called appropriately elegant. This dignified presentation of �36 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW humble objects represents the artist’s rejection of the “separation of styles.” Like Van Gogh, Evans made a worn pair of boots the subject of a picture. In their stillness, his pictures are also like stares. Many of Evans’s pictures from the mid-1930s were made with a view camera, a large apparatus that must be used atop a tripod. The view to be taken is framed in the camera’s ground glass screen, which can be seen only when a black cloth covers both the photographer’s head and the viewing screen of the camera. The film must be inserted and the lens closed from its viewing mode and reset before the film can be exposed and the picture made. All this takes time, several seconds at least, maybe a minute or two, and during this time the subject must not change in any important way if the photographer is to get on film the picture he saw on the viewing screen. And his exposure times were not instantaneous. Exposure times of one-half second and one full second, even in sunlight, were recorded on the negatives storage envelopes. The pictures look still because the subjects are still. The subjects may have been chosen in part for their stillness, but the photographer’s concentration gives them an extra measure of stillness. His attention to detail results in an organization that includes even tiny features of the scene, recording them with great fidelity while at the same time preserving a masterly control of the whole picture, the overall look of the scene that attracted his attention in the first place. Utility poles and their shadows, the raking light on clapboards, the small figure of an onlooker with his head cocked a certain way, even the clouds in the sky seems to settle into their proper places like so many elements of an ordered cosmos. The pictures seem still because they look inevitable. Also, many of Evans’s best-known pictures were made from a distance—from across the street or down the block. He frequently used a lens of long focal length—a “telephoto,” which yields a picture with flattened perspective. This tool allows the photographer to stand far off and yet THOMPSON 37 keep the objects he looks at large within his picture’s frame. The world is examined closely, yet held at arm’s length. The unruffled stillness of these photographs and what we know about the procedure of their making suggest that photography’s glance can be extended in time so that it becomes a stare. On the threshold of Feinstein’s studio we were invited to take in what we saw in the blink of an eye, before the corrupting influence of second thoughts could come into play. Under Evans’s dark cloth, time slows down; there is time for the appearance of second and even thirdthoughts. But under the discipline taught by Flaubert these do not appear as corruptions or distractions: instead of listening to distraction, the soul of the photographer exerts a willful effort to avoid distraction so that the things in front of the camera’s lens can fill it completely, obliterating (for the moment) I want, I need, I hate, and even I know. This extension of time from the glance to the stare prepares the way for a further extension. The time of the photographer’s stare at the subject, however long it lasts, will still be brief. Life in the phenomenal world of space, time, and traffic demands it. The “momentary” subject will pass from view, and the photographer’s contemplative experience of it will end. But the photograph lasts, and the picture can, at any future time, become the subject of some viewer’s own, later, separate contemplation. Flaubert’s discipline—and all the possibilities available in contemplation—apply to pictureviewers as well as picture-takers. Let me end this essay by stating the obvious: what a photographer does when photographing, and what a viewer does when he looking at a picture are similar, but are not the same thing. Both photographer and viewer can look in contemplation at what they see—I write “can look” because contemplation is not available to all people, nor at all times. But the attention each of the two, photographer and viewer, gives is of a different order. The viewer has a long time to look, a whole lifetime if the picture’s hold on him is strong. The viewer has the possibility �38 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW of endless revisiting, re-thinking, exploring various leads, various directions of thought that may arise, from time to time, during moments of contemplation that are each different, possibly increasingly comprehensive as the experience of the picture (and the viewer herself) mature during the viewer’s prolonged intermittent stare. The picture that occasions this viewing experience has to be made during a relatively short time. How does a photographer “capture” profound order in a brief instant, at a glance? How, at a glance, does a photographer take in the ordered “look” of a meaningful scene and sense its connection to the ordered “intelligible foundation of the world?” The only honest answer is, I don’t know how. Discipline and experience help prepare the ground: a prepared, receptive photographer who is also knowledgeable about his art and experienced in its practice is receptive in a way that is different, more potent, from the passive receptivity of a neophyte. Not everyone standing at the threshold of Feinstein’s studio would see something worthy of much attention or thought. An experienced architectural photographer might hit at once on the right place to put the camera in order to make a picture suitable for the pages of Architectural Digest. But another photographer—or that same photographer, if he managed to shed his professional ambition, even for the moment needed to contemplate this “momentary” subject—might find a view that would see in the ultimate particulars on view there some universals truly worth thinking about. How that happens, how genius operates in that brief instant of time, is a mystery. Somehow, inside and outside connect—merge, and an order that is corresponds to an order we can know, perhaps an order great enough to attract the attention and stimulate the thinking of viewers for a long, long while. In that brief instant—during the photographer’s glance that discloses the look that prompts the viewer’s stare—the photographer resembles Stevens’s connoisseur of chaos, the pensive man: THOMPSON The pensive man . . . he sees that eagle float For which the intricate Alps are a single nest. 39 �40 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 41 Muthos and Logos David Stephenson What is a story? What is a good story? And how does a story differ from other constructions of language either written or spoken? From a lecture or essay, for example, a history, philosophical treatise or mathematical proof? If you ever try to write a story, or even tell a tale without writing it down, you know how difficult it is to define exactly what you are doing—stringing words and sentences together, yes, but to what end? A speech or a proof has a much more obvious goal, viz. to praise or blame or persuade in the first case and to demonstrate truth in the second. Stories teach too, perhaps, but to say what or how they teach requires insight into a very obscure part of the human soul, obscure because logic does not operate in exactly the same way in stories as in demonstration, nor can there be a simple truth to illuminate or an action to promote. In fact, didactic stories are universally condemned, because a concluding moral or an explicit insight detract from the virtue of a story as such, and, conversely, precisely those details that delight us in a story will in general complicate any conclusion we might want to draw from it. Nevertheless, a story is always about something. The Iliad and Odyssey tell you right at the beginning that they have a subject: Achilles’ rage or Odysseus’ manhood. But if the author does not tell you, it is usually a real chore to formulate in just a sentence or two exactly what a story is about. Authors themselves confess to the difficulty or even disparage the effort. Try formulating the subject of Oedipus or War and David Stephenson is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This lecture was presented on June 15, 2005. Mr. Stephenson’s story, “The Glass Eye,” won first prize in the short story contest sponsored by Bards and Sages and will be published this winter as part of their annual anthology. �42 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Peace or Waiting for Godot and you will see how elusive is the task. So I’m ready to listen to analysis and advice from anybody who offers tell me what makes a story, even Aristotle. Story and Plot Before I turn to the ancients, let me consider some modern advisors. You can find shelves in any library or bookstore loaded with books that will teach you how to write. So they claim. Usually half of any such book is advice on how to sell what you have written, and the other half encourages you to keep writing at all costs, despite rejection, ignoring family and friends, eking minutes out of hours and hours out of days so that you can devote every spare bit of time to the elusive pursuit of a writing career. No, that’s not fair; they also give advice to the wordworn: tricks of the trade; rules of the thumb; inspiration to the perspiring. “Avoid adverbs and adjectives,” they say; “use short sentences”; “eliminate cliches”; “maintain tension”; “flesh out your characters”; “show, don’t tell”; “write what you know.” Much of this is stylistic advice. Once upon a time, you could find both readers and authors reveling in the clever peregrinations of a long sentence. No longer. The modern publisher presumes that the modern reader has a modern impatience. But if all this advice has to be taken with a grain of salt (there’s a cliche that somehow has not lost its savor), it also contains some useful maxims.1 A parade of adverbs and adjectives do often weaken rather than strengthen a description, because they imply an attribute without exhibiting it, without making you see or feel it. That is, “wily Odysseus” cannot charm or dismay you with his wiles until you actually see him in disguise or hear him telling clever lies. Nor can “swift-footed Achilles” frighten you with the ferocity of his pursuit until you watch him outrunning a river or hectoring Hector beneath the walls of Troy. STEPHENSON 43 So where the modern advisors give hints about how to catch and hold the attention of a reader or an editor, they rarely stop to examine the nature of the activity of writing, or of its object: the story itself. You have to go back a little ways to find someone, like E. M. Forster, willing to tackle that question. “The king died and then the queen died”: that is story, he says. “The king died and then the queen died of a broken heart”: that is plot. Here we have a serious attempt to characterize the storyteller’s art: he must connect events as cause and effect, and the principal causes must lie within the characters.2 Now E. M. Forster wrote some brilliant novels— Howard’s End, Passage to India, A Room with a View—nevertheless, I have to modify his terminology. The first version of “the king died, etc.” is hardly even a story, in my opinion, though it does reflect the ancestry of the word, “story,” which is offspring of the word, “history.” That is, in Forster’s first example, a “story” is a mere reporting of events, which can pass for a primitive kind of history even though these events occurred only in the writer’s imagination.3 Forster amplifies this dry version of his little tale into a more interesting one by making connections, but even the second version hardly presents all the rudiments of a true story. As it stands it can hardly suffice to identify anything. We need at least another sentence or two to put us in mind of a specific tragedy. From the point of view of the modern writer the connection between characters and events may be all you need, but Aristotle insists that these connections belong to the context of the individual work, they function within its identity. Of course, we do need to distinguish this naked version from the one clothed with all the linguistic and imaginative elaborations of published literature. A plot is only the barest skeleton of what we ordinarily call a “story,” whereas print or performance fix it in its fullness. We can agree with Forster’s designation of such an outline as “plot” only as long as we reserve the word “story” for a higher kind of being than the �44 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW unconnected sequence of deaths out of which he forms his first example. By “higher kind of being” I do not mean a socalled “short story.” In “story” we must find the essence of a work of literature, its “soul,” as Aristotle says. The distinction between story in its full and its synoptic form is easy for Aristotle, since he can call any complete work of literature (including plays) a “poem” (something made, poiêma). For the “essential story” he has other words, words like muthos and logos. How well do these Greek words correspond to “story” and “plot?” Muthos vs. Logos The clearest distinction between muthos and logos is made by Plato rather than Aristotle. In the Phaedo (61B), Socrates says that the god told him in his dream to make music. His attempt to comply turns him to meter and rhythm, and to story as well. To be a true poet, he says, he must make muthos, not logos. However, Socrates protests that he is not muthologikos enough to make up a story from scratch. So he cheats. He borrows one of Aesop’s fables and adapts it to meter. Now this bit of dialogue is interesting not only because it separates muthos radically from logos, but because after dividing them it recombines the terms into a single adjective, muthologikos. Muthologikos is hard to translate: we need to coin a noun that tells us Socrates’ flaw: he is no mythologue, no teller of tales, no mythologician.4 Here, as so often, Socrates pretends to a modesty he really lacks. He has no qualms about making up a story and even calling it muthos when he needs one in this and other dialogues.5 But the significance of this passage for us lies in the way Socrates’ understanding of poetry forces him to keep muthos and logos apart, which he may have forgotten to do elsewhere. At first these terms seem almost interchangeable in Aristotle’s Poetics, and some scholars (e.g. Fyfe) translate them indifferently as either “plot” or “story.”6 For example, STEPHENSON 45 at the end of chapter 17 Aristotle uses the word logos where one might think muthos more appropriate. Here is his complete description of the “logos” of the Odyssey: A man is for many years away from home and his footsteps are dogged by Poseidon and he is all alone. Moreover, affairs at home are in such a state that his estate is being wasted by suitors and a plot laid against his son, but after being stormtossed he arrives himself, reveals who he is, and attacks them, with the result that he is saved and destroys his enemies. That is the essence (to idion), the rest is episodes. (Fyfe, trans.) Whether one calls this synopsis “plot” or “story” hardly matters: the point is that even such a brief account allows us to identify the whole work and distinguish it from any other. It is an only slightly more extended distillation of story than Forster’s simple “plot.” Note that Aristotle does not name the man or his home or son. This summary is enough to fix the game even without naming players. It is just enough to identify the book by its events alone. Names should come later in the construction of a story, according to Aristotle, names that indicate character by their meaning or names drawn from the legendary list of characters that traditionally embody the necessary traits. First sketch the story in general (katholou), he says, then fill it in with episodes and choose names. Perhaps it might help to see how Aristotle defines logos in general (Poetics 20.11): “logos is a composite meaningful utterance of which some parts mean something in themselves.” To this Aristotle adds that logos can be one either the way a sentence is, or the way the whole Iliad is. That any sentence is itself a logos should be clear. A word is an atom of meaning. Out of words the sentence forms a compound that is not just a mixture or average or blend: it is a unity that generates new meaning out of these components. But the �46 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW entire Iliad too is a logos, one whose parts are logoi— viz., sentences. From this point of view, what causes wholeness in either a story or a sentence is clearly meaning, and the same could perhaps be said of any logos, whether that word signifies ratio or reason or speech. But this is different for muthos. Muthos too is unified, but it is unified around action, (praxis), rather than meaning. Aristotle defines muthos as “a representation (mimêsis) of an action. For I say,” he says, “that muthos is the synthesis of deeds (pragmata).” Consider Oedipus. He has performed a series of deeds, many outside of the play: he leaves Corinth; he kills an arrogant old man at the crossroads; he solves the riddle of the Sphinx; he marries the king’s widow and rules Thebes; he hunts down the criminal responsible for the plague; he consults oracles; he examines witnesses; he ignores the warnings of Tiresias and Jocasta; he looks for his true parents; he finds out who they are; he blinds himself. The play binds all these deeds into a single action: the action of self-discovery. In the end, and only in the end, does he know who he is. Thus, in a story, deeds culminate in action, and action is the result of choice—hence the peculiarly human quality of stories that the word logos does not capture. An epic or a drama has a soul, and that soul is its muthos. It is within Aristotle’s metaphor of life that one might best seek the source of beauty in a poem, which, he says, “must be constructed...round a single piece of action, whole and complete in itself, with a beginning, middle and end, so that like a single living organism it may produce its own peculiar form of pleasure.” Beauty, he says, belongs to “a living creature or any organism composed of parts.” The very unity of life, the unity that nature preserves in growth and reproduction, must evoke aesthetic pleasure in the scientific or philosophical observer; so also the imitation of that life in a poem should inspire a similar wonder and delight in everyone, all the more when it develops a story which—as story—always STEPHENSON 47 involves human life moved by choice and will and character as well as desire. The analogy with nature in general is not far to seek: praxis is to kinêsis as humanity is to nature. For praxis—political, moral, deliberate action—is a motion proper only to humans, and this is what moves a play or an epic forward. A rock falls from its nature as a rock and a seed sprouts out of its nature too; a story imitates the activity that defines a human being as a political and social animal. I think we must decide for ourselves whether the beauty of a story is the cause or the result of that unity that a human being provides through the cooperation of his own character, means and ends, that is to say, whether beauty resides in the representation or in the action itself. If the natural organization of a living creature, and of man in particular, is reason for delight; so also is the construction of a poem. A poem about human beings, therefore, a play or an epic, can bear us a double beauty. We might try to capture the distinction between muthos and logos by equating them to “story” and “plot,” respectively. But if we turn to elementary plots, such as the one Aristotle offers for the Odyssey, we find their differences eroding. The sense of these words start to shift and overlap. Does Aristotle’s description reflect the meaning of the epic or its action or something else? If by “meaning” we mean what just suffices to identify it in words, then, yes, this plot is its meaning. But the single action, the praxis that subsumes all the deeds of the Odysseus to his story, his muthos, is harder to find within this description. Perhaps it lies in the homecoming itself, of which the trials and triumphs are only details. Or maybe at the most fundamental level plot and story are the same thing, or different aspects of the same thing, plot emphasizing the logical sequence and progression of events and story emphasizing their subsumption under the larger dramatic whole of human endeavor. An epic like the Odyssey contains many stories: it is polymythic, one might say. There is the story of the Cyclops, �48 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW and the story of Nausicaa, the tale of Telemachus’s trip to Sparta and the story of the suitors’ slaughter. Similarly the Iliad contains the “Diomediad,” Hector’s farewell, Priam’s suit, Achilles’ scream on the wall, any one of which could form the basis of a separate play. Each of these sequences forms its own story. You remember Diomedes? Athena loves him. With her help, he kills more heroes than Agamemnon and Menelaus together, and even wounds the gods, Aphrodite and Ares. Could not some author focus on him alone? Or on Hector: the Trojan hero’s conquests in battle, his sense of duty, the tender love of his wife and his son, his willingness to sacrifice himself to protect Troy. There, too, is a story worth isolating and presenting by itself. Each part of the Iliad is its own story, and the whole epic is a story composed of stories. So a story can be a higher unity in two ways, a muthos muthôn—a story of stories, an action of actions—or a logos logôn—a plot of plots, a meaning of meanings. In this respect tragedies and epics differ: a tragedy can contain only one story, one muthos, though it always contains many logoi. Aristotle limits the number of distinct poetic elements to six. Muthos comes first, because he believes story to be the aim and end of a poem. He ignores lyric poetry in this treatise, although he must know of Anacreon and Sappho and Pindar. Why? The answer may be political: “the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Or perhaps a poem with fewer elements is simply less of a poem.7 The remaining five poetic elements, listed in order of importance, are: character (êthos); thought or reason (literally “thinking through”: dianoia); language, delivery or diction (lexis, a word deriving obviously from legô); song (melapoiia); spectacle (opsis). All of these, with the exception of spectacle, figure in epic as well as tragedy. Character plays an obvious role in any story. Thought, as understood here, is the kind of thought that speech can exhibit, what displays character and motive, but insofar as it dictates what is appro- STEPHENSON 49 priate to a speaker and a situation, it could influence the poet in a more general way. Aristotle refers the reader to his Rhetoric for a full discussion of this topic. Lexis may be his own coinage: at least, according to the Rhetoric (3.1), it is a neglected art, however important to the public speaker— to the poet as well, since this is what governs the choice of words. Lexis or lexis en logô “is the interpretation by means of words, which has the same power in prose and verse.” As to the last two elements of a poem, melopoiia and opsis, Aristotle says only that song is the more important. So he has his own favorite list of features and advice to the poet about how to improve many of them. The story must progress from a “tightening” to a “loosening,” for example, the first part building to a climax that turns happiness on its head, after which the drama unravels to its natural end. For a truly tragic effect, the hero of a story must be better than ordinary, but must be brought low by a single failing, and his fall must evoke pity and fear. The greatest of all writing skills is the proper use of metaphor. This cannot be grasped from anyone else. It is the sign of genius in a poet, since to construct a good metaphor is to contemplate similarity. Metaphor produces in miniature much of the pleasure of poetry, for, Aristotle claims, we learn from metaphor the way we learn from anything that raises our sights from species to genus. And learning is the greatest pleasure. And so on. Thus, the Poetics is full of such practical pointers for writers. So is the Rhetoric. Although that treatise deals with speeches rather than stories (the word muthos, therefore never appears) it is worth reading for its general advice. Aristotle could be a modern writing instructor after all. He gives many writing tips that still work. Other kinds of poetry might alter the order of importance in his list. Some will disagree with Aristotle’s preferences even in the drama or epic. Beautiful, well-crafted language, for example: isn’t that what we love most in Shakespeare? Wordsworth? Virginia Woolf? Should language always be �50 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW subordinated to story-line? What about character? Nowadays, writers often aim for “character-driven” rather than “plot-driven” stories, that is, they spend their energy on the development and delineation of characters, and then pretend to sit back and let the characters lead where they will. But this brings us back to story. Perhaps the truth is that such works too are “story-driven,” if not plot-driven. Even those who disregard Aristotle’s recommendation to begin with plot must end up with some kind of unity. Can dialogue and narrative come to life without something like a soul? History of Muthos and Logos Homer did not like the word, logos, or at least did not appreciate its philosophical or poetic implications. It appears only twice in his epics: once in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey. With only these two examples available, it is hard to discern any peculiarities the word might entail for Homer, but it must have been a rare or strange term to him. Patroklos takes pleasure in logos when applying his medical knowhow to tend Eurypylos’s wounds (Book 15). What could the word mean here? “Chat?” “Banter?” “The anecdotes of heroes?” The context gives us even less help with meaning in the Odyssey, where logoi figure only among Calypso’s charms. Maybe the word simply had not yet acquired the power that philosophy or mathematics or even the law courts were to give it in later times. It obviously derives from the verb legô, whose oldest sense referred more to gathering and selecting than to speaking, and that is how it is used in the Iliad: in Book 23 Achilles commands his companions to gather up (legômen) Patroklos’s bones for the funeral pyre. From this primitive sense gradually evolved the mode of speech signified by legô in Attic Greek.8 That is, to speak well requires the collection and ordering of perceptions and ideas, and this is the province of logos. Perhaps, therefore, the best rendering of the verb in English is “recount”—one can STEPHENSON 51 recount an experience or an adventure for the pleasure of the audience. As to its corresponding noun, “account,” that too can lend authority to the telling of a tale as well as reckon up cost. Both English words express the ordering (and even enumerating) function of discourse. In this way one can see how after Homer the mathematical sense of the word developed naturally alongside its reference to speech. Homer has no such hesitation about muthos. That word laces many pages of his epics. Agamemnon sends away the priest Chryses with a harsh word (muthos), for example, and Nestor is accused of loving words too much (again muthos). Sometimes, as if to emphasize Agamemnon’s despotism, its meaning verges on “command,” but in most places, wherever a later Greek author might use the word logos, Homer is comfortable with muthos. In the second example one might find a trace of its later connection to the specifics of storytelling—long-winded Nestor loves to tell tales of his past heroism and revels in the words that recall it. But nowhere can you discover any allusion to myth or fable or falsehood. You accuse Nestor of exaggeration at your own peril. Even in Plato’s dialogues the suggestion that muthos signifies a flight of fancy would be a mistake. The “myth of Er” in the Republic, the charioteer in the Phaedrus, Persephone’s provisions for the rebirth of souls in the Meno: these all have distinctive places in the dialogues, but none of them can be dismissed as mere entertainment. Even the cave depicted in Book 6 of the Republic is more than allegory. All of these muthoi are more than myth. That is, muthos and logos do not part company until much later, when truth and fiction become the touchstones of modern discourse. They have a long way to go before they spawn myth and logic in the English language. Truth can adopt a mythological as well as a dialectical or scientific form. Perhaps our modern tendency to sunder fact from fiction absolutely makes us exclude some mysterious region where they cooperate or �52 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW overlap, a region Socrates saw how to exploit. Lying may be a way to tell the truth better. Aristotle expresses this succinctly in the Poetics: “Homer has also taught others how best to lie,” he says (24.18), and in constructing stories one should “choose the plausible impossible rather than the unpersuasive possible.” Poetic effect justifies exaggeration and distortion, he claims, as in the case of Hector’s flight from Achilles. For Hector to outrun swift-footed Achilles so long while the rest of the army stands idly by strains credibility. But it also vividly exhibits Hector’s desperation and emphasizes the imminence of Achilles’ own demise, which will seize him soon after Hector’s death. In answer to critics who object to a story on the grounds that it is untrue, Aristotle suggests the reply, “But perhaps it should be.” One can paint people as better than they are—“for the paradigm exalts,” he says. So also other elaborations or idealizations may prove more fruitful in poetry than technical accuracy.9 Nowhere is Aristotle’s appreciation of the value of poetry more apparent than when he measures it against history. This is another version of his preference of the possible to the actual. The historian “tells what happened,” he says, “the [poet] what might happen. On account of this, poetry is more serious (spoudaioteron) and philosophic than history. For poetry says things in general, but history in particular.” History Itself In his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides admits that some readers will dislike his work because it lacks muthôdes character, which one scholar translates as “romance.” Literally, of course, the adjective means “storylike”—muthos + eidos.10 Whether that criticism is justified or not, I leave you to determine. But if muthos neither denies nor requires reality for its foundation, and implies only the unity of human action, it is possible to find much that is story- STEPHENSON 53 like in Thucydides’ book. For Thucydides does not confine himself to the mere reporting of facts; he is interested in causes as a story writer is, and, if he has to seek them in the mere inference of document and speech and event, and, unlike the poet, has no more than speculative access to minds of his characters, so much the better if he succeeds in finding the plausible and persuasive in his speculations. Indeed, there is no one character to focus on throughout the Peloponnesian Wars except Thucydides himself, and he appears in the flesh only once in the course of his narrative. However, Aristotle insists (Poetics, 8.1) the unity of a poem should not derive from the unity of the hero, but rather from the unity of his action. If, therefore, the war between Athens and Sparta is not just an unconnected series of advances and retreats, debates and battles, then perhaps it has an identity that can give it the wholeness approximating that of a story, of a muthos. After all, what above all makes a deed one is its purpose, and what arranges deeds into a story is the progression of a series of deeds to a higher goal that reaches beyond and above the separate and unrelated determinations of an individual. Consider Oedipus, who discovers his identity at the end of a criminal investigation aimed at anyone but himself, the procession of witnesses whose independently innocent responses spiral slowly inward of their own accord. Or Achilles, whose bloody triumph on the battlefield of Troy is forced upon him by his repeated refusals to fight. It is the oneness of action that unifies the deeds of one man, and not the reverse, and this is the very unity celebrated in tragedy and epic. Perhaps a better name for that kind of grand unity is “fate,” not because the gods force it upon the heroes of these stories, but because their lives and their deeds acquire meaning and power and beauty precisely in our understanding of this unity. We have to take Aristotle’s demotion of character seriously. A story does not derive its unity from the singleness of its protagonist, but from the wholeness of its action. This is �54 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW hard to swallow. Can an action be one if it arises out of the deeds of more than one person? This is a question crucial to our inquiry into the action of history. But Thucydides would not be the only author to think about cities as analogous to men, and thereby to suggest that they have character like men and might even act on the world’s stage like the actors in a play. So, if we can find the story in the Peloponnesian Wars, perhaps we can discover a purpose to the great concatenation of human events that compose that conflict and that history, one that would justify Thucydides’ claim to have written his book “not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.” 1 Aristotle has his recommendations, too, and many of them are quite as helpful as those of modern writers on writing. The Poetics is full of advice to the budding poet; so is his Rhetoric: I recommend Book three of the latter to anyone planning an essay. 2 I am assuming that the queen’s heart was broken because the king died, otherwise the second version, which Forster offers as “plot,” remains very incomplete and misleading. 3 That history might better include some speculation as to causes is an objection incidental to the present distinction, though we can return to it later. 4 It would be a mistake to settle on “mythologist” as the proper translation here. 5 Aesop’s “fables,” by the way, are muthoi for Plato, as you might expect, but Aristotle uses the word logos when he refers to them (Rhetoric, 2.20, passim). 6 It is worth noting that Latin retains or even extends the breadth of meaning of the word logos in cognates, like “lex” and “lego,” but to my knowledge has no cognate or equivalent of muthos. 7 Later, Aristotle declares epic poetry inferior to tragedy in part because it lacks the elements of music and spectacle. STEPHENSON 55 8 So also in English, the “tale” of one’s woes could begin with enumeration, continue with anecdote, and only after much retelling finally expand into story 9 There is either irony or venom in Aristotle’s comment, however, for he knows Socrates attacked the poets (in the Republic and in Ion) for lacking the technical knowledge that their subject matter requires. Aristotle seems much more forgiving or even encouraging to the liar. 10 Could there be a pun here? muthos + ôdê rather than eidos? That is, an allusion to the lack of melody in his history? �56 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 57 Meaning and Truth in Klein’s Philosophico-Mathematical Writings Burt C. Hopkins I want to begin my remarks with an apology for their imposing title, which is the product of my profession, for I am a professional philosopher. I am therefore manifestly not a Tutor but a Professor, and, as such, a significant portion of what I am required to spend my time doing is called—on my view mistakenly—“research.” One of the expectations my profession brings with it is that my research be “specialized,” and to this end I have spent the better part of the last twentyfive years focusing my research on the phenomenological philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger—the two German giants of European philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Jacob Klein also spent a significant amount of time studying these phenomenological philosophies. Moreover, he attributed great things to both philosophers: Heidegger, in Klein’s own words, was “the first man who made me understand something written by another man, namely Aristotle”;1 and Husserl, again in Klein’s words, “pointed to . . . a character of speech to which the ancients apparently did pay only scant attention,”2 a character that Husserl, and Klein following Husserl, called “sedimentation.” From my own studies of Husserl and Heidegger, I know that—when viewed within the context of their own thought—both of these characteristics singled out by Klein Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and is Secretary of the International Circle of Husserl Scholars. He is currently completing a book, entitled Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein on the Origination of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics: An Inquiry into the Historicity of Meaning. This essay was delivered as a lecture at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, on April 29, 2005. �58 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW are the result of each thinker’s thematic engagement with the concepts of meaning and truth. This consideration, therefore, brings me back to the apology for my imposing title, because Klein never treats either of these concepts in a thematic manner in his writings, and I think, given the apposition of Heidegger’s and Husserl’s philosophies to his own thought, it is legitimate to wonder and then investigate why this is. I should add that not only scholarly curiosity leads me to wonder about this, but also the nature of the interrelationship between the most fundamental problems posed by Klein’s writings, namely, how to understand properly the radically different conceptualities that determine the meaning and truth of the most basic concepts that belong, respectively, to ancient Greek and modern European science, and how best to overcome what Klein once spoke of as the “symbolic unreality”3 that is characteristic of “the modern idea of knowledge and science.”4 To say that meaning and truth are not thematically treated as concepts in Klein’s writings, then, is not to say that one cannot find in his writings discussions that take up the meaning of things or the concept of their truth. After all, Klein, more than any other thinker in the twentieth century, wrote about the meaning of the ancient Greek concept of number, and, indeed, he compared and contrasted this concept’s meaning with the meaning of the modern concept of number. In addition, Klein, more than any other twentieth century thinker, wrote about the fundamental change in the relation of science to truth that occurred when, in a process he identified as beginning in the sixteenth century,5 the ancient meaning of the concept of number was transformed into the modern meaning. But it is to say that Klein neither writes about meaning and truth as concepts—about what contemporary professional philosophers would call “the concepts of meaning and truth,”—nor ever discusses which concepts of meaning and truth presumably validate or otherwise justify the philosophical claims that he makes about the HOPKINS 59 different conceptualities of ancient Greek and modern European science. There is, perhaps, a ready explanation for this, namely, that Klein had no use for what he called “Modern ‘philosophical’ jargon,”6 and that he therefore sought to avoid it as much as possible. Talk of the concepts of meaning and truth, even by thinkers of the stature of Husserl and Heidegger, would have to count for Klein as such jargon, because it is the very thesis of his magnum opus, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra,7 that the philosophical preoccupation with concepts per se is a distinctly modern preoccupation. Moreover, if not in this work, then certainly in his subsequent lectures and essays, such a preoccupation is viewed as a philosophical mistake. Thus, in a lecture given in 1939, Klein says, “it is doubtful whether philosophy exists today,”8 and he clearly suggests that the reason for this is that “all our life and thoughts are molded by” the existence of a science that is not doubtful, namely, “mathematical physics.” And because, in Klein’s words, “the medium of mathematical physics, or rather its very nerve, is symbolic mathematics,” and because, moreover, this nerve (according to his Math Book) is only made possible by concepts that refer solely to other concepts and not to the individual objects to which they, as concepts, should properly and rightfully refer, on his view contemporary “philosophy’s” near total preoccupation with such concepts per se is not worthy of philosophy’s good name. According to this explanation, the attempt to investigate the concepts of meaning and truth in Klein’s writings, especially in his philosophico-mathematical writings, that is to say, his writings on the history of the philosophy of mathematics as well as the history of mathematics itself, would be misguided if this inquiry were oriented by the very concepts of meaning and truth that these writings demonstrate are a philosophically derivative byproduct of the modern “‘scientific’ consciousness.”9 According to Klein, these concepts are �60 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW “abstractions of abstractions…which at the same time we interpret as being in direct contact with the world.”10 They are hardly suitable for taking the measure of any thinker’s thought, let alone Klein’s, of all thinkers. Klein pointed out something that even Husserl and Heidegger did not see, namely, that the meaning of concepts as well as the meaning of truth underwent a radical and irrevocable transformation of their ancient and classical “meanings” in modern thought. Therefore to properly investigate meaning and truth in Klein’s writings on the philosophy of mathematics, one would have to—at least according to this line of thought— begin by comparing the status of meaning and truth in Klein’s writings with its status in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s. Even though Klein mentions Heidegger by name just one time in his writings that I know of,11 and refers to him once more without mentioning his name,12 it is still not much of an exaggeration to say that in a certain sense Klein’s entire thinking is informed by a fundamental criticism of a fundamental aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy. Specifically, Klein criticizes Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato and the role that this interpretation plays in Heidegger’s criticism of Aristotle and then, growing out of this criticism, Heidegger’s account of the continuity of metaphysical thinking from ancient Greek to contemporary twentieth-century philosophers. Heidegger maintains that Plato’s philosophy is guided by an unexamined presupposition about the meaning of the Being of beings, namely, that this meaning is determined by the static cognition of what they are, and that this cognition conceals within itself the likewise unexamined presupposition that, inseparable from how they are, is their constant availability in terms of their “looks” (eidos) to the logos of any soul that bothers to look at them. With only two references to Heidegger in all of his writings (neither one of which, by the way, directly engages Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato), my claim about the critical relationship of Klein’s thought to Heidegger’s may HOPKINS 61 appear to some as tenuous. However, the following considerations should remove any doubt about this matter. In 1925, Heidegger gave a lecture course on Plato’s Sophist, which was published after his death in a volume based on his and his students’ notes. According to Leo Strauss, in 1925 Klein attended Heidegger’s classes regularly.13 Toward the end of the course, Heidegger has this to say about 253d5-e2 of the Sophist: “I confess that I do not genuinely understand anything of this passage and that the individual statements have in no way become clear to me, even after long study.”14Heidegger then goes on to single out precisely what he does not understand: (1.) Mian idean dia pollôn… diaisthanetai (d5ff.), the dialectician “sees one idea throughout many,” one determinateness of beings in its presence in many, of which henos ekastou keimenou chôris (d6), “each lies there detached from the others,” such that this idea, which is seen throughout all the others, pantê diatetamenên (d6), is extended and ordered from all sides. (2.) . . . kai pollas heteras allêlôn (d7), the dialectician sees many ideas, which are different from one another in substantive content—this is partly understandable—but then Plato adds: hupo mias exôthen periechomenas (d7f.), “they are encompassed by one idea from the outside.” (3.) kai mian au di’holôn pollôn en heni sunêmmenên (d8f.), the dialectician sees “that the one idea is again gathered together into one throughout many wholes.” (4.) kai pollas chôris pantê diôrismenas (d9), the dialectician sees “that many ideas are completely detached from one another.”15 �62 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Heidegger mentions and rejects the traditional interpretation, which “has been eased by the introduction of a distinction between genos and eidos, genus and species,”16 because it is based on an “unjustifiable procedure, since Plato precisely does not make that distinction.” Heidegger therefore concludes, “so in fact it remains completely obscure what is meant by this mian di’ holôn pollôn en heni sunêmmenên [one idea is again gathered together into one throughout many wholes], and furthermore by the hupo mias exôthen periechesthai [they are encompassed by one idea from the outside] and above all by the keimenou chôris [lies there detached] within the unity of one idea.”17 The fact that Klein most likely was in attendance when Heidegger articulated these words (or, at the very least, was made aware of them by others who heard them), decides, of course, nothing about the relationship of his thought to Heidegger’s. However, the fact that the apex of the first half of Klein’s Math Book, Chapter 7C, presents a detailed understanding of precisely what Heidegger confessed was “completely obscure” in the Sophist, does indeed decide something about this relationship. In that chapter, Klein presents an understanding of the Stranger’s and Theaetetus’s dialogue in the Sophist about the division of intelligibles that takes aim at the following: Heidegger’s philosophy of the continuity belonging to the putative unquestioned meaning of the Being of beings in the metaphysical tradition, a continuity that, beginning with Plato, is supposed, unquestioningly, to think that Being is the being present to the logos—in cognition—of beings. Indeed, there can be no mistake about this: the heart of Klein’s chapter in the Math Book offers an understanding of the second directive in the Sophist regarding the division of intelligibles, that is, the directive concerning different ideas being encompassed by one idea from the outside, which shows that “Being” is not thought here as something present to the logos in the cognition of beings. Moreover, Klein’s Math Book as a whole shows that, HOPKINS 63 rather than continuity, there is a radical discontinuity between the way “Being” is understood by Plato and Aristotle and the way it is understood in modern philosophy. Klein’s Math Book establishes its understanding of the Stranger’s directives about division by taking into account Aristotle’s references to the Platonic theory of “eidetic numbers” (arithmoi eidetikoi), specifically, his report that Plato attributed a numerical mode of being to the eidê which, in one important respect, is distinct from the mode of being of mathematical numbers. While others before Klein had taken up the issue of the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek philosophy that is so important for the formation of both mathematical and philosophical concepts, both generally and in the particular case of Plato’s philosophy (most notably Julius Stentzel, J. Cook Wilson, and Oskar Becker), Jacob Klein was the first—and remains to this day the only18—thinker to make “an attempt”19 to do so from, in his words, “within the structure of the arithmos concept itself.”20 Attempts before and after Klein’s to interpret Aristotle’s reports about Plato’s “unwritten teaching,” namely, that the eidê are in some sense numbers, approach talk about numbers from the conceptual level of modern mathematics, that is to say, from the modern symbolic concept of number. Klein’s attempt, therefore, stands alone in its endeavor to approach both Greek mathematics and Greek ontology from a conceptual level that does not presuppose the basic concepts of modern mathematics. What Klein modestly refers to in his Math Book as his “attempt” to think the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek ontology from “within the structure of arithmos concept itself,” is actually a veritable philosophical, mathematical, and historical tour de force that ranges over ancient texts on the one hand—neo-Platonic and neoPythagorean mathematics, and Pythagorean, Platonic, and Aristotelian philosophy—and, on the other hand, early modern mathematics and early modern philosophy, while �64 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW linking them all together in the modern’s interpretation of the arithmetical work of Diophantus. Three themes orient Klein’s historical investigations of the mathematics involved here together with its philosophy: (1) the shift that the meaning of the concept of number underwent in the transition from ancient Greek to modern mathematics; (2) what makes this shift possible; and (3) the attendant shift in the very conceptuality of the “objects” of science and knowledge generally—in the very meaning of science and scientific truth, from the ancient to the modern meaning. These themes, in turn, are tied together by Klein’s account of the similarity between (1) the Platonic attempt to grasp the proportional relationships between numbers in mathematics and the analogical relationships between eidê in ontology in terms of the isomorphism of their relationships with the very structure of the arithmos concept itself; and (2) the modern interpretation of symbolic calculation as the complete realization of the ancient general theory of proportions. Both the Platonic attempt and the modern interpretation, in Klein’s words, “exceeded the bounds set for the logos,”21 precisely insofar as each assigns to eidê, to “concepts,” a numerical characteristic. And this means nothing more and nothing less than that for ancient Greek philosophy, as for contemporary philosophy (insofar, that is, as “philosophy” can still be said to exist), there is an insuperable limit to that which the logos—speech—can make intelligible, and this limit is reached when numerical characteristics are attributed to what the Greeks called “eidê” or “ideas” and the moderns (both the early ones, the so-called fathers of modernity, and us, their contemporary progeny) call “general concepts” or “general objects.” The reason for this, according to Klein, is, for all its complexity, relatively straightforward, namely: numbers properly refer to individual objects, that is, to more than one of them; numbers, therefore, refer to a “multitude” of objects, and, moreover, to exactly “how many” of them there HOPKINS 65 are, while number concepts (eidê) properly refer to the characteristics of numbers that are responsible for the exact delimitation of the “how many” inseparable from each number. Numbers are therefore many, and number concepts are one, albeit not one in the sense of each one of the many ones that are assembled together by every number, but “one” in the very different sense of “unity.” Moreover, even though there are many number concepts responsible for the exact delimitation of each number, for instance, the two most important concepts of the “odd” and the “even,” each of these concepts is not itself many but one (in the sense of a unity). Hence, to ascribe to any number concept a “numerical” characteristic, specifically, the characteristic of its being many, cannot make sense, because while numbers are intrinsically multitudinous, number concepts are not. Moreover, not just number concepts, but any concept that is related to their being “many” of something—many horses, many philosophers, many emotions, and so on—is one in the sense of being a unity. Hence Klein’s conclusion, that Plato’s theory of eidetic numbers, of concepts whose unity is in some sense “numerical,” cannot, strictly speaking, make sense to the logos, to speech. Likewise, because of this fundamental difference between what a number is and what a concept is, Klein also concludes that the modern mathematical general concept (or, what amounts to the same thing, general object) cannot, again strictly speaking, be said to be “numerical” in a manner that makes any sense. Of course, the question how Klein knows that there is a fundamental difference between numbers and number concepts, not to mention how he can know that there is a radical shift in the meaning of the ancient Greek concept of number and the modern one, returns us to the topic announced in my title. This is the case because what Klein knows about these matters is presumably something that he (and those who follow him on this) thinks is true. This means that Klein must know that it is true (1) that numbers and �66 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW number concepts, despite their relationship, are fundamentally different; (2) that the Greek and the modern concepts of number and number concepts have different meanings; and (3) that because of (2), the Greek and the modern meanings of philosophical and scientific truth are different. In other words, for Klein to know what he thinks he knows, he must know the truth of something that cannot be true for either “the Greeks” or “the moderns,” namely, that the true meaning of their concepts of number and truth are radically different. In the case of the Greeks, they did not, among other things, live long enough to discover this truth; in the case of the moderns, they were prevented from discovering this because they believed (and continue to believe) that the superiority of their concepts and truth over the ancient Greek ones is a superiority that is based in their completion and perfection of the Greek concepts and their truth. But I am getting ahead of myself here. Before considering the question of meaning and truth in Klein’s writings, we need to return to the critical challenge that Klein’s Math Book presents to Heidegger’s understanding of both Plato and the continuity of the putative metaphysical meaning of the Being of beings in the history of philosophy. As we have intimated, this challenge takes issue with the distinctly modern preoccupation with concepts per se that informs Heidegger’s approach to Plato’s philosophy, and therefore may have an important bearing on the topic of meaning and truth in Klein’s writings. Heidegger’s approach to Plato’s philosophy supposes that the meaning of Being is not interrogated by this philosophy but is already understood—uncritically—as the eidos, the “look” of something that is present to cognition and therefore available to the logos, to speech. Moreover, he supposes that something “remains completely obscure” in the Stranger’s dialectical directive regarding ideas that are different from one another being perceived as encompassed by one idea from the outside. Contrary to this last supposition, Klein’s Math Book endeavors to show that there is in the HOPKINS 67 Sophist, albeit in a veiled way, an articulation of how ideas that are different can nevertheless be encompassed from the outside by one idea. Because of the nature of the problem addressed in the Sophist, what Klein refers to as the problem belonging to the ontological participation of the ideas with one another, the account offered there cannot, on Klein’s view, be expected to be “completely clear.” Nevertheless, Klein shows, contra Heidegger, not only that it is not “completely obscure,” but also that the question of Being is not “one” but “twofold.” This has the following consequences: (1) Being for Plato has an intelligible structure; (2) Being’s intelligible structure can be articulated into its parts, although it cannot be, strictly speaking, known, because the logos is unable to give an account of these parts that is not paradoxical; and (3), because of the truth of (2), it is manifestly false to think, as Heidegger does, that Being in Plato is something that has or is “meaning.” And, once the latter is recognized to be the case, the resultant alienation from Plato’s philosophy of the meaning of Being that Heidegger ascribes to it, as well as that of this putative meaning’s alienation from the history of philosophy, becomes apparent. Klein illuminates the veiled manner in which Being’s intelligible structure is manifest in the Sophist by using Aristotle’s account of Plato’s unwritten doctrine in a way that takes seriously what they report while bypassing their polemic against the report’s contents. Moreover, Klein places the account of numbers from both Aristotle’s texts and Plato’s dialogues within the context of his “reconstruction” of the phenomenon of number, arithmos, which he maintains provides the basis for the theoretical considerations about the proper mode of being belonging to numbers that is found in ancient Greek mathematics and philosophy. Finally, the sine qua non of Klein’s reconstruction of the ancient Greek arithmos is that its mode of being is non-symbolic; that is, it is not symbolic in the sense that both the number concept and the numbers themselves that belong to modern mathematical �68 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW analysis—that is, to modern algebra—must be characterized as symbolic. Klein discerns the intelligible structure of Being in the Sophist on the basis of what he refers to as its “arithmological”22 structure, a structure that is related to, but not identical with, the basic structure proper to the Greek arithmos. The latter, in Klein’s words, is “grounded in the phenomenon of counting,”23 and according to him its basic structure precedes “all the possible differences of opinion” regarding the mode of being of number in Greek mathematics and philosophy. Klein characterizes this basic structure as a “definite amount of definite things,” and singles out two intrinsic peculiarities that belong to it. Both peculiarities, it is important to note, assume a fundamental significance for Klein’s understanding of the different “conceptualities” characteristic of Greek and modern science. The first peculiarity concerns the reference to more than one thing—that is, to a multitude that is inseparable from each arithmos. The second concerns the exactitude of this reference: each arithmos delimits precisely so many things. These characteristics belonging to the structure of arithmos are basic to and therefore underlie the different ancient views of its mode of being, because, despite their differences, all of these views share the common assumption that each arithmos is both one and many: it is “many,” insofar as it refers to more than one thing; it is “one,” insofar as each arithmos is exactly the “unity” of the amount in question. Accounting for how this mode of being belonging to numbers comes about—how not only the unity of each number is able to refer to an exactly delimited multitude, but also how each different number is able to delimit a different amount of things—was the business of ancient Greek theoretical arithmetic and logistic according to Klein. Significantly, for him, neither of these Greek sciences had as their subject matter numbers, but rather the eidê of numbers, above all the “odd” and the “even.” Klein explains that the reason for this is HOPKINS 69 rooted in the basic structure of the numbers themselves: theoretical mathematicians appealed to these eidê in the attempt to account for both the one-over-many structure of number in general, and the different amounts that characterize the unity of each different number. Plato, on Klein’s view, did not think that the mathematics of his day, or, indeed, the mathematics of all time, succeeded or could ever succeed in explaining either the basic one-overmany structure of numbers or the differentiations—in accordance with the different numbers—of the unities proper to the being one of each different number. Plato’s reason for this is simple: it cannot ever make sense to the discerning logos to say that something is both one and many—that the many is one and the one is many. Thoughtfulness about numbers, therefore, in contrast to counting or calculating with them, exceeds the bounds set by the logos, by speech that is intelligible, for “accounting for” what it is that is thought. Notwithstanding this, the combined thoughtfulness of the mathematician and the philosopher, both together, is able to recognize in the two kinds of unity characteristic of the mode of being of numbers (viz., the one-over-many unity in general and the different unity of the different amounts characteristic of each different number) the following: the mode of being of a unity that unites separate things in a manner allowing them to belong together even though their unity, as a whole, is “outside” or “external” to them. And it is precisely the “common thing” (koinon) of this unity that can be recognized as being responsible for the belonging together, the “community” (koinonia) of mathematical things whose mode of being is otherwise separate from one another—or of ontological things whose mode of being, likewise, is otherwise separate from one another. In other words, it is the structure of this unity, which Klein refers to as “arithmological,” that holds the key to understanding the dialectical directive in the Sophist and thus the key to legitimating my claim that Klein’s entire thought can be properly understood to be informed by �70 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW a fundamental critique of Heidegger’s disputing that this directive can be understood. What is it that can only be recognized by the philosopher and the theoretical mathematician, both together? The theoretical mathematician recognizes the peculiar one-over-many mode of being of numbers, wherein each number is composed of many things, each of which is counted not as the thing that it is but as “one”: anything at all can be counted only because the items really counted are understood to be identical ones that are many, indivisible, and, therefore, intelligible. The philosopher recognizes that the two unities involved in the mode of being of numbers cannot be accounted for, with precision, by the eidê of numbers appealed to by the theoretical mathematician, namely, by the “odd” and the “even.” The philosopher realizes this because the mode of being of the unity of each of these “concepts” is also one over many, albeit in a different manner than that of numbers. Each concept, the “odd,” the “even,” is both a unity—as what can or cannot be divided evenly—and a multitude, because what can or cannot be evenly divided is precisely not one but many. Thus the philosopher’s thoughtfulness recognizes that the thought of the theoretical mathematician mixes together that which, if our logos—our speech—is to make sense, cannot be combined: the one and the many. Both together, however, the philosopher and the mathematician can recognize what neither one of them alone can recognize: the unity of each number is something that is “outside” of the many things, and the many ones that it unifies as just this determinate amount. The unity of the Stranger and Theaetetus, as two interlocutors, is, as a whole, outside of each one of them: neither the Stranger nor Theaetetus is “two,”—as each is rather precisely not two but one—nevertheless, both together are exactly “two.” This joint recognition of the common thing that is responsible for the belonging together or community of identical ones or monads in an arithmos, however, addresses neither the problem of accounting for the many different HOPKINS 71 numbers, that is, for what makes one number, say “two,” different from another, say “three,” nor the Stranger’s directive about the dialectician seeing one idea encompassing from “outside” many different ideas. It does not address the first, “mathematical” problem, because each of the wholes that are outside of the ones or monads, and that as such compose the common thing that is responsible for the belonging together of the mathematical monads, must comprise a different “common thing” in the instance of each different number—if the fact that there are many different numbers is to be addressed. It does not address the second, “philosophical” problem, because the very terms of the Stranger’s directive stipulate that the many ideas that are encompassed by one idea are different ideas, whereas the many monads encompassed by one number are the same. What does address these mathematical and philosophical problems, is the Stranger’s and Theaetetus’ failed attempt to count the first “three” of the “five” greatest ideas, namely, Rest, Change, and Being. Even though Rest and Change are opposites and therefore manifestly different ideas, they are both encompassed from the “outside” by the idea of Being. Both together have to be recognized as Being, since neither Rest nor Change, by themselves, can be recognized as Being. (If either Rest or Change were thought to be Being, impossible things would happen: for Rest to be, it would have to change: for Change to be, it would have to rest.) The idea of Being, however, cannot be recognized as something different from Rest and Change, because then neither Rest nor Change would be at all. Hence, the only possibility left is to recognize that, just as neither the Stranger nor Theaetetus alone is “two,” but only both taken together are “two,” likewise, neither Rest nor Change is Being, but only both taken together are Being. According to Klein, the Sophist instantiates an aspect of what Aristotle reported about Plato’s unwritten doctrine, namely, that the ideas are in some sense numbers, and that in addition to mathematical numbers there are eidetic numbers. Moreover, the dialogue also exhibits the �72 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW difference between mathematical and eidetic numbers reported by Aristotle: that the monads of the former are many and alike, while those of the latter are many but not alike and are therefore not comparable. Thus the idea belonging to Being, as a whole, is like the whole belonging to a mathematical number: it encompasses from the “outside” the many monads that it, as a whole, brings together; however, it and what it brings together are also unlike a mathematical number, because the intelligible monads that the mathematical number brings together in the unity of one number are identical—while the intelligible monads that the eidetic number brings together are different. This is illustrated in the Sophist: The ideas belonging to Rest and Change are different; nevertheless, the idea belonging to Being, like the whole belonging to number, exhibits an “arithmological” structure, although, just as in the case of the mode of being of the mathematical arithmos, the mode of being of the eidetic arithmos exceeds the limits set by the logos. In the former instance, as we have seen, this is the case for Klein because the mode of being of both mathematical numbers and their concepts mixes the one and the many; in the latter instance, this is the case because the attempt to give an account of the “parts” of Being, namely, the ideas Rest and Change separately as well as the idea of both together, counts “three” of them—Rest “one,” Change “two,” and both together “three,” —when, in truth, there are only “two”: the ideas of Rest and Change. The eidetic number of the idea of Being, then, is “Two,” not “three.” Contra Heidegger, therefore, Klein’s Math Book shows that Being is not characterized by Plato as the idea of something that is present to cognition and therefore available to the logos, and, in the process of showing this, he shows that the Stranger’s second dialectical directive is not completely obscure. Only the “arithmological” structure of the community of ideas, that is, the one idea encompassing many ideas from “outside,” can provide the “paradigm” for the structure HOPKINS 73 of the one over many mode of being of mathematical numbers, and not vice versa. Moreover, only the taxis, the order of eidetic numbers beginning with the eidetic “Two,” the idea of Being, can account for the many discrete mathematical numbers, for the differences in the one over many unity of each arithmos as exactly so many. In addition, only the “arithmological” structure of the community of ideas can account for the many genê and eidê of that which has Being, and for the analogia, the proportion, by means of which both certain mathematical problems and the Being of certain things can be understood. In other words, the “foundation” of the Being of both quantitative and qualitative beings, of the beings counted and calculated with by mathematical thinking, and the beings collected and divided by dialectical thinking, are the arithmoi eidetikoi. As I have already suggested, because of the numerical character that is ascribed to this foundation, specifically, to the ascription of a number-like being to its eidetic “concepts,” Klein maintains that the “solution” to the problem of the one and the many that is provided by the theory of eidetic numbers, is in his words, “bought . . . at the price of the transgression of the limits which are set for the logos.”24 For not only is the “ordinary mode of predication, such as: ‘the horse is an animal’, ‘the dog is an animal’, etc., no longer understandable,” but the “natural” meaning of number, as the exact amount of a multitude of things, “is now lost.” (The former is the case, because the “arithmological” unity is precisely something that cannot be predicated of that which it unifies: neither the mathematical monads in an arithmetical number, nor the eidetic monads in an eidetic number can be said to be the number in question, as a horse or a dog can both be said to be an animal. The latter is the case because the monads in an eidetic number cannot be counted and therefore do not have an exact amount.) If Klein is right about Plato’s philosophy, this much is clear: Being is neither a concept nor something that can be known and articulated “with complete clarity” by the logos; what can be articulated about it is its �74 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW inseparability from its opposite, and the “common thing”— Being—shared by each term of the opposition characteristic of it is manifestly something that does not have or express what the moderns would call “meaning.” Klein’s reason for this last point is also presented in his Math Book, and can be succinctly stated as follows: the modern preoccupation with “meaning” is, in fact, a preoccupation with “concepts” that have as their primary referents other concepts, and, therefore, not the individual objects to which all concepts originally refer.25 The concepts that provide the foundation of modern, symbolic mathematics are paradigmatic of concepts whose fundamental mode of being is their relationship with other concepts, all of which, in turn, are derivative of or otherwise dependent upon the symbolic concept of number in general for their “meaning”—a term which must be kept sharply distinct from “intelligibility.” Individual beings are “intelligible” as changing or resting, indeed, as changing in one respect while simultaneously resting in another. The “invisible looks” (eidê) of Rest and Change, too, are “intelligible,” though not as individual things that are resting or changing, but rather as that which all resting and changing individual things have “in common.” Their commonality is likewise “intelligible,” although, again, it is not intelligible as individual things are. As we have seen, because Being is not one but twofold for Plato, the “intelligibility” either of things or their “invisible looks” can never be complete. In comparison with this incomplete “intelligibility,” the “meaning” of the modern symbolic concept of number in general is completely “unintelligible.” This concept refers neither to individual beings nor to what they share in common, their “invisible looks”; rather, the symbolic concept of number in general does not, properly speaking, refer to any thing, but is itself something that is referred to as if it were some thing, namely, as if it were an individual thing just like the individual beings that, for the ancient Greeks, are intelligible as resting and moving. But it is not a being like those beings. It is not a being at all, but a cipher, a sense- HOPKINS 75 perceptible mark (or marks) that is not only treated like some individual thing, but, in a fundamental ontological sense, also replaces all the individual things, individual beings, in the world with “concepts” that cannot refer to things or beings because the mode of being of the latter is now self-evidently taken to be “conceptual.” Klein’s Math Book traces the symbolic number concept’s remarkable power both to replace individual beings with concepts, and to do so without “detection,” to the literally twofold mode of being “unintelligible” proper to the mathematical symbol. On the one hand, it combines a completely indeterminate and non-perceptible concept—quantity in general—with a completely determinate sense-perceptible “mark.” Because this mark is indistinguishable from that with which it is combined, viz., from the non-perceptible concept or quantity in general, it is patently not a sign, if by “sign” we mean a part of language that indicates something other than itself in a manner distinguishable from the significance of what it indicates; rather than signifying something other than itself, the mark presents itself as what it symbolizes. For instance, “2” does not signify something other than itself, for example, the exact amount of some kind of object; instead, it presents itself as the “concept of two,” which means, “the general concept of twoness in general”26—and it does so in a manner that involves absolutely no immediate reference to any individual things. Therefore, to call “2” a “number sign,” or “a” a “letter sign,” is a misnomer, since in both cases what is meant is the “symbolic relation between the sign and what it designates.”27 In the case of “2,” what is meant is “the general number-character of this one number,” while in the case of “a” what is meant is “the general numerical character of each and every number.” On the other hand, the completely indeterminate and non-perceptible concept from which the sense-perceptible mark is indistinguishable assumes the status of something whose mode of being is itself indistinguishable from other sense-perceptible individual things, �76 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW and, as such, it assumes the status of something that can be “treated” just like these other sense-perceptible things, including being counted. Most significantly, the completely indeterminate quantitative mode of being of the concept that is inseparable from the mathematical symbol becomes determinate precisely insofar as the sense-perceptible mark that is inseparable from it is treated like other sense-perceptible things, for instance, rocks, tables, copies of Klein’s Math Book, and so on. Thus, in the case of the symbol “2,” Klein says, “The concept of twoness is at the same time understood as referring to two entities.”28 Both of these characteristics belonging to the mathematical symbol reveal their complete “unintelligibility” only in comparison to the incomplete “intelligibility” of the Greek arithmos. The Greek number’s incomplete “intelligibility” involves the mixture of (1) the “intelligibility” to mathematical “thinking” (dianoia) of the exact determination belonging to the amount of a definite multitude of sensible or thinkable (and, in this latter sense, “intelligible”) beings and (2) the “unintelligibility” to philosophical “thoughtfulness” (phronêsis) of its one over many mode of being. In comparison and contrast, the mathematical symbol’s complete “unintelligibility” concerns (1) its absolute lack of an immediate reference to any definite things and (2) the thing-like determinateness of its sense-perceptible mark, which presents the “concept” of an indeterminate quantity in the manner of a determinate object, and therefore, presents a mark that neither signifies anything nor shares an “invisible looks” with any other thing, as something that is nevertheless “intelligible.” In other words, Klein says that the “symbolic unreality” of the mathematical symbol is located in the fact that it presents something intrinsically and completely “unintelligible” as something that is “intelligible.” The mathematical symbol’s complete “unintelligibility,” however, is not for Klein tantamount to a putative meaninglessness. On the contrary, it is precisely the character of its mode of being as “unintelligible” that necessitates its involve- HOPKINS 77 ment with “meaning,” namely, with the meaning that accrues to it on the basis of the “stipulation” of rules for manipulating otherwise “unintelligible” sense-perceptible marks, rules whose “syntax” is derived, originally, from the rules of operation with non-symbolic numbers. Mathematical symbols are therefore only meaningful insofar as their “pure” conceptual mode of being is accorded a numerical significance that is akin—somehow—to non-symbolical numbers, to amounts of things that can be, “in principle,” counted. Klein’s Math Book, and his lectures prior to 1940, employs what he characterizes as “the” language of the Schools or Scholastic language’s talk of first intentions and second intentions, or, as he himself sometimes notes,29 the more properly articulated distinction between the objects of first intentions and the objects of second intentions, to “express” the state of affairs involved here. He uses this language to (1) describe both the shift from the ancient “meaning” to the modern “meaning” of numbers and (2) delineate the corresponding shift in the paradigm of the ancient “meaning” and the modern “meaning” of what it is to be a concept, the latter shift being characterized (likewise prior to 1940) by Klein as the transformation of the ancient concept’s “conceptuality.” (The scare quotes around the word “meaning” here call attention to the fact that, strictly speaking, for Klein, the term “meaning,” being commensurate solely with the modern concept, is therefore a misleading, if not falsifying, basis upon which to compare and contrast the statuses of ancient Greek and modern concepts.) First intentions concern the existence and quiddity of an object, its being in its own right; second intentions concern an the object insofar as it has being in being known, in apprehension. Hence, the state of being of an object in cognition is second, while the state of being of an object in itself is first. Because the Greek arithmos is inseparable from the direct reference to a multitude of definite things, the status of its referents lends itself to being designated as first intentional. �78 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Because the concept of “indeterminate or general quantity” concerns an object insofar as it known, the status of its referent lends itself to being designated as second intentional. Moreover, the sense-perceptible mark that belongs to the modern symbolic number is, like any other sense-perceptible thing, the object of a first intention, and because of this, Klein maintains that the “conceptuality” characteristic of the mode of being belonging to the modern concept of number is tantamount to the apprehension of the object of a second intention as having the being of the object of a first intention. Moreover, he maintains that the modern “conceptuality” of number is only manifest in its contrast with the ancient Greek “conceptuality,” which is characterized by the first intentional status of the objects to which it refers and is therefore related. Klein also appeals to the distinction between first and second intentions to clarify Descartes’s attempt to understand the origin of the novel mode of being that belongs to the symbolic number concept, an attempt that Klein maintains was the first, as well as the last such, in the philosophical tradition. Descartes’s attempt appealed to the power of the imagination to assist the pure intellect in making visible to it (the pure intellect), as a “symbol,” the indeterminate object that it has already abstracted from its own power of knowing determinate numbers. Abstraction in Aristotle presupposes definite beings that are intelligible in terms of common qualities, the latter being “lifted off ” the former in accordance with a process that is more logical than psychological; abstraction in Descartes presupposes definite beings but not their intelligibility, in the case at hand their “intelligibility” as so many beings. Rather, Descartes’s abstraction works upon the mind’s act of knowing a multitude of units, separating out the mind’s own conceiving of that multitude, which it immediately makes objective. The mind turns and reflects on its own knowing when it is directed to the idea of number as a multitude of units, and, in so doing, it no longer apprehends the multitude of units directly, in the “performed act” (actus HOPKINS 79 exercitus) and thus as object of its first intention, but rather indirectly, in the “signified act” (actus signatus), as object of its second intention. Thus, notwithstanding the fact that what is being conceived by the intellect is a multitude of units, the intellect’s immediate apprehension of its own conceiving as something, as one and therefore as a being, has the effect of transforming the multitude belonging to the number into a seemingly independent being, albeit a being that is only a “rational being” (ens rationis). To repeat: this “rational being” is the result of the intellect, which, secondarily (in reflection) intends a thing already conceived before, and intends it insofar as it has been conceived. When the rational being is then “grasped with the aid of the imagination in such a way that the intellect can, in turn, take it up as an object in the mode of a ‘first intention’, we are dealing with a symbol.”30 Abstraction for Descartes is therefore characterized by Klein as “symbolic,” because the “concept” (Begriff) that it yields is manifestly not something that is lifted off the intelligible qualities of things, but rather, is something whose very mode of being is inseparable from the following: (1) the intellect’s pure—by “pure” is meant completely separate from the things it apprehends—grasping of its own power to apprehend these qualities themselves, and (2) this power itself being apprehended as an object whose mode of being is nevertheless akin to the very things that its mode of being separates itself from. Klein stresses that the “kinship” between the power of apprehension proper to the “pure” intellect and that which is effectively foreign to it (i.e., the things possessing the intelligible qualities that are apprehended by the “pure” intellect’s power) is established by making this power “visible.” The algebraic letter “signs” of Viète or the “geometric” figures of Descartes are what accomplish this. They are what—in the language of the Schools— allow the object of a second intention to be apprehended as the object of a first intention, and are therefore “symbols.” �80 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW The indeterminate or general object yielded in “symbolic abstraction” is neither purely a concept nor purely a “sign,” but precisely the unimaginable and unintelligible identification of the object of a second intention with the object of a first. This identification is “unimaginable” because “images” properly—both for the ancient Greeks and for Descartes— refer to either particular objects of first intentions or to their particular “common qualities.”31 The identification between second and first intentional objects is “unintelligible” because for “natural” predication, to say that a concept is both general and particular “at the same time” is nonsensical. Nowhere that I know of does Klein write that this identification, which makes possible the symbolic “language” of algebra and therefore, mathematical physics, is a mathematical mistake. Likewise, nowhere that I know of does Klein write that the science that symbolic mathematics makes possible is a philosophical mistake. Moreover, so far as I can tell, Klein never even hints in his writings that the identification of the objects of first and second intentions means that first and second intentions have been “confused” by modern science, as some have suggested. What Klein does explicitly characterize as a mistake is the view of the symbolic language of algebra as “a purely technical or instrumental matter.”32 He writes, “it is a common mistake to believe that we can translate the theorems of mathematical physics into ordinary language, as if the mathematical apparatus used by the physicists were only a tool employed in expressing their theorems more easily.”33 He also writes that the early modern “natural philosophers,” in their self-interpretation of their new science, the “true” physics, understood it to be the perfection and the completion of the science of the ancients. And clearly, Klein’s Math Book is an “argument” whose goal is to refute the veracity of this self-interpretation, and to do so primarily on the basis of the different “conceptualities” that are characteristic of the incomplete intelligibility of the ancient number concept and the complete unintelligibility belonging HOPKINS 81 to the meaning of the modern symbolic number concept. That said, on my view it does not follow that the argument extends also to the new science itself, that is, to the claim that the symbolic cognition made possible by the “conception” proper to the symbolic number concept is something that is somehow false or less true, in comparison with the ancient number concept and ancient “science” generally. Modern science, mathematical physics, and the symbolic cognition that is its main nerve, is therefore not a mistake on Klein’s view. What for Klein is a mistake, however, is the interpretation of the “true” object (singular) of this science as the objects (plural) of the first intentions that were and indeed remain the “true” objects of ancient Greek science. The nature of this mistake is neither “mathematical” nor, strictly speaking, “scientific,” but philosophical. It is a mistake that was made by the early modern inventors of mathematical physics, and it is a mistake still made today by their innumerable progeny, philosophers and non-philosophers alike. It is a mistake made by Husserl, who, despite himself and the attempt present in his last writings to restore the integrity of knowledge threatened by the all pervading tendency of “sedimentation,” of the forgetfulness of the original meanings of our words and concepts, nevertheless could not let go of his earliest belief in the “mere” instrumentality of the symbolic calculus. Husserl likened the putative “technicity” of symbolical calculation to the “rules of the game” that govern it mechanically, rules that originally spring from the categories and objects that are “given” in the experience that makes our language and “traditional” Aristotelian logic both possible and intelligible. Klein had to know about Husserl’s mistake, which is no doubt why, among other reasons, Husserl’s name is not mentioned once in the original version of his Math Book, and why the concept of “intentionality” to which Klein appeals in that book and in his writings and lectures before 1940 is that of the Schools, not of Husserl. The reason for this can found �82 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW in Klein’s account of the symbolic character of the indeterminateness or generality of the modern concept of number. While Husserl was also aware of this indeterminateness— indeed, besides Klein was perhaps more aware of it than any other twentieth-century thinker, calling it the concept of the “anything whatever” (Etwas überhaupt) and assigning to its investigation a new science, which he called “formal ontology”—Husserl nevertheless thought that its “intentionality” could be distinguished from the sense-perceptible marks that manifest the mathematic symbol. This, as we have seen, is for Klein simply not possible, because, absent such marks, the pure concepts of modern mathematics would, quite literally, be invisible and therefore inaccessible to the “pure intellect” that calculates with them in symbolic cognition. Moreover, such an intentional distinction between the symbolic “signs” and the indeterminate objects to which they are related symbolically (and therefore not “significatively”), occludes the most important characteristic of the general object that this symbolic relationship makes possible, namely, the utter impossibility of its conceptual “meaning” ever referring directly to the individual things or objects in the world. Husserl, of course, spent most of his life trying to show both that and how the meaning of the “concept” of “something in genteral” is “objective,” and is such in the precise sense that the origin of its unity (as well as the origin of all its possible modes of being and relations) is rooted ultimately in the “phenomena” of individual objects and the “evidence” of their individuality that is presented in the perceptual experience of them. Klein, likewise, spent most of his life trying to show that it is a philosophical mistake to think that the meaning of a “concept in general” could ever be traced to an origin in individual objects and their perceptual experience. Klein’s “reason” for trying to show this impossibility can be found in his account of the “symbolic abstraction” in Descartes’ articulation of the genesis proper to the mind’s representation to itself of its pure concepts—to what makes HOPKINS 83 such concepts “concepts,” which Klein refers to as their modern “conceptuality.” As we have seen, Klein characterizes the modern “conceptuality” in terms of the, comparatively speaking, complete “unintelligibility” of the meaning proper to the general concepts that it makes possible, an unintelligibility that emerges when this “meaning” is compared to the incomplete intelligibility of the “conceptuality” of ancient Greek concepts. In a word, on Klein’s view, the “conceptuality” responsible for Descartes’ articulation of what a “concept” (Begriff) is, is not only paradigmatic for all modern concepts, but it is also the source of the late modern problem of providing cognition with a “foundation,” in the sense of both establishing and providing an account of the connection between general concepts and their “objects.” Because, however, this connection is second intentional in the instance of the concept of an object in general, Husserl’s attempt to provide the sought-after foundation by appealing to “intuition,” namely, to the intuition of the relation between the object of a second intention to the object of a first intention, is in principle doomed to fail. It is so for the simple reason that the status of the relation between second intentional objects, which manifestly are not first intentional objects— notwithstanding their philosophical misinterpretation as such—and first intentional objects themselves, is not perceptual but symbolic. Klein’s reason for distancing himself from Husserl’s phenomenological account of “meaning” is therefore at once philosophical and historical; or, rather, it presupposes a mode of awareness that is neither one nor the other, but “both together.” Indeed, only the presupposition of such a mode of awareness can justify the radical distinction he makes between the respective “meanings” of ancient and modern “conceptuality,” which distinction, strictly speaking, annuls the omni-temporality—or, what is the same thing, the omnihistoricality—of the very concept of “meaning” and assigns an historical locus to the concept of truth—a locus that is �84 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW relative accordingly as it is proximate to the ancient Greek or the modern “conceptuality.” Moreover, it is only the presupposition of such a mode of awareness that can account for the status of the vantage from which Klein makes the comparison between ancient science and philosophy and modern science and philosophy, a vantage whose sights are indeed set on the things themselves that are in comparison. I, for one, do not presume to be in the position, philosophically, mathematically, historically, or otherwise speaking, to judge that the mode of awareness presupposed by Klein’s account of these matters is unwarranted. Indeed, unlike Hans-Georg Gadamer, who complained that Klein together with Leo Strauss, “employ a style in their work that is too much a commentary, so that finally their voices are lost,”34 I find the hermeneutical “transparency” of Klein’s writings thought-provoking in a manner that renders trivial the claims of “philosophical hermeneutics” regarding the historically conditioned character of all our understanding. For me, Klein’s writings show not only what remains, even now, some three quarters of a century after the publication of his Math Book, as perhaps the most significant specimens of our “historically conditioned” understanding “in” history, but also, that the “history” that they are in is none other than the historia that Plato’s Socrates’ spoke about in the Phaedo. “Historia” in that sense is a problem, concerned neither with a contingent sequence of events or philosophical theories nor with the “concept” or “meaning” of “history” as such, but rather, with the problem of inquiry itself. The mode of awareness presupposed by the philosophical-mathematical-historical distinctions that Klein’s writings make regarding meaning and truth points, on my view, to the author’s encounter with “inquiry” (historia) as something that comes forward as a problem whenever the question arises of the origin of whatever it is that is under discussion. To the question of whether the inquiries in Klein’s Math Book and other writings are “true,” I believe that the best answer would have to be some- HOPKINS 85 thing like this: Klein has said what he thinks is true of the matters addressed by his inquiries. The question of whether what he has said is “correct” is one that has to be posed not to their author and the putative concepts and meanings that govern his “philosophy,” but to these inquiries themselves. If Klein has not spoken correctly, it is our “task to take up the argument and refute it.”35 That said, I would like to close with a suggestion and a question. The suggestion: Klein’s well-known reticence to discuss, in any detail, the presuppositions of his own thought, may be rooted in his polite refusal of Leibniz’s invitation to “follow him [Leibniz]—to the audience-chamber of God,” and to join him, along with the other immortal philosophers, “on a little stool at God’s feet.” The question: does the shift from the ancient Greek to the modern conceptuality of numbers, which Klein has shown applies to the cardinality of numbers, extend to their ordinality as well? Specifically, is there an historical locus proper to the truth of the “firstness” of the first intentional objects and the “secondness” of the second intentional objects by which Klein expresses the decisive shift from the ancient to the modern consciousness? Notes 1 Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss,” The College (April 1970): 1-5, here 1. Hereafter, cited as “Accounts.” 2 Jacob Klein, “Speech, Its Strength and Its Weaknesses,” in Lectures and Essays, eds. Robert B. Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1985): 361-374, here 370-371. Hereafter cited as “Speech,” while the volume itself will be cited as “Essays.” 3 Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” in Essays, 53-64, here 64. Hereafter cited as “Rationalism.” 4 Ibid. �86 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW HOPKINS 87 5 Although sometimes he identifies it as occurring earlier, for instance, when he stated in 1970 that it occurred “about 500 years ago” (“Accounts,” 1). Plato and Platonism, ed. Johannes M. Van Ophuijsen (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University Press, 1999), 218-239; “Figure, Ratio, Form” Plato’s Five Mathematical Studies,” Aperion XXXII, 4 (1999): 73-88. 6 19 Klein, Math Book, 62 (my italics). 20 Ibid. 21 Jabob Klein, Math Book, 184. 22 Jacob Klein, “Concept of Numbers,” 51. 23 Jacob Klein, Math Book, 54. 24 Jacob Klein, Math Book, 99. Jacob Klein, Plato’s Trilogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 2. Hereafter, cited as Trilogy. 7 Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969; reprint: New York: Dover, 1992). This work was originally published in German as “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra” in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, no. 1 (Berlin, 1934), pp. 18–105 (Part I); no. 2 (1936), pp. 122–235 (Part II). Hereinafter, cited as “Math Book.” 8 Jacob Klein, “The Concept of Number is Greek Mathematics and Philosophy,” in Essays, 43-52, here 43. Hereafter cited as “Concept of Number.” 9 Jacob Klein, Math Book, 9. 10 Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” 63. 11 Jacob Klein, “Speech,” 374. He also mentions him by name in “Accounts,” which, however, is a transcript of a tape recording. 12 Jacob Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” Essays, 171-195, here 171. 13 “Accounts,” 3. 14 Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 365. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 366. 17 Ibid. 18 Works by Konrad Gaiser, J.N. Findlay, and H.J. Krämer on Plato’s “unwritten doctrine,” for all their diversity, share the following characteristics: 1) they fail to acknowledge the priority of Klein’s work on their topic, and 2) they (perhaps, consequently) approach Plato’s “mathematics” and “eidetic numbers” from an alien conceptual level. See, respectively: Platos Ungeschriebene Lehre (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1968); Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974); and Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics, trans. John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). Mitchell Miller’s work is an exception to 2); see “‘Unwritten Teachings’ in the Parmenides,” Review of Metaphysics 48 (March 1995): 591-633; “Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato’s Statesman,” in 25 There may be one possible exception to this, namely “the so-called general theory of proportions” (Jacob Klein, “The World of Physics and the ‘Natural’ World,” in Essays, 1-34, here 27; hereinafter, cited as “World of Physics”) of Euclid, although Klein does not appear to be altogether of one mind about whether this “theory” really represents a case where ancient concepts refer originally to other concepts and not to individual objects. In 1932, he wrote, “The fifth book of Euclid, in fact, contains a ‘geometrical algebra’” (Ibid.), which he characterized as not treating “the ratios of particular magnitudes, geometrical forms for instance, or numbers or bodily masses or time segments, but ratios ‘in themselves’, the wholly undetermined bearers of which are symbolized [symbolisch . . . versinnbildlicht] by straight lines” (Ibid.). In other words, he seems to characterize here an indeterminate or general object as corresponding to the general procedure of Euclid, and therewith, a non-individual object as the “referent” of this procedure’s “concepts.” However, in his Math Book, which I assume was written later (it was published 1934-1936), precisely this possibility is ruled out by Klein, when he writes, “For ancient science, the existence of a ‘general object’ is by no means a simple consequence of a ‘general theory’” (Math Book, 161), and he goes on to quote Aristotle’s view on this matter (in Metaphysics M 3, 1077 b 17-20) as definitive: “‘The general propositions of mathematics [namely the ‘axioms’, i.e., the ‘common notions’, but also all theorems of the Eudoxian theory of proportions] are not about separate things which exist outside of and alongside of the [geometric] magnitudes and numbers, but are just about these; not, however, insofar as they are such as to have a magnitude or to be divisible [into discrete units]’” (Ibid.). It is therefore upon the basis of this, apparently, later view of Klein’s that I refer to the “all” here. 26 Ibid., 25. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. �88 29 Jacob Klein, Math Book, 306, n. 324. 30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Jacob Klein, Math Book, 208. 31 Indeed, it is for this reason that Descartes, on Klein’s view, stresses the “power” of imagination, and not the imagination’s “images,” to assist the pure intellect in grasping the completely indeterminate concepts that it has separated from the ideas that the imagination offers it, because these ideas are precisely “determinate images”—and therefore, intrinsically unsuitable for representing to the intellect its indeterminate concepts. The imagination’s power, however, being indeterminate insofar as it is not limited to any particular one of its images, is able to use is own indeterminateness to enter into the “service” of the pure intellect and make visible a “symbolic representation” of what is otherwise invisible to it, by facilitating, as it were, the identification of the objects of first and second intentions in the symbol’s peculiar mode of being. The imagination’s facilitation involves, as it were, its according its “power” of visibility to the concept’s invisibility. 32 Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” 61. 33 Ibid. 34 The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1997), 236. 35 Plato, Meno, 75C-D. 89 Addendum The following images correspond to pages 68 and 69 of The St. John’s Review, volume 47, number 1 (“What Tree Is This: In Praise of Europe’s Renaissance Printers, Publishers, and Philologists,” by Chaninah Maschler). Omitted originally because of print quality, they appear now at the request of the author. � 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 thestjohnsreview Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library 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. 89 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2005/3 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Navarre, Sarah Hunt, Frank Sachs, Joe Thompson, Jerry L. Stephenson, David Hopkins, Burt C. Maschler, Chaninah Description An account of the resource Volume XLVIII, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 2005. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_48_No_3 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/dd833f1d98e7314d8a0247b3c0f2fbde.pdf 4bde2716018d46e6919e9d5957ad0a15 PDF Text Text The St. John’s Review Volume XLIX, number one (2006) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Sarah Navarre The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P .O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2006 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Essays and Lectures In the Beginning. . . The Genesis of the St. John’s Program, 1937................ 5 Charles A. Nelson Understanding Quantum Mechanics with Bohr and Husserl................................................ 33 François Lurçat Eve Separate................................................................71 Eva Brann Going in Silence........................................................ 111 Abraham Schoener �4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 In the Beginning. . .The Genesis of the St. John’s Program, 1937 Charles A. Nelson The transformation of St. John’s College in 1937—with the introduction of what was then, and for many later years, called the New Program—set on foot a way of learning and teaching that has now enfolded, inspired, and perplexed students and teachers for lo these sixty-eight years. I shall attempt to describe and explain what took place here on this campus in 1937. Let me say parenthetically that this is not an exercise in nostalgia, a yearning for “the good old days.” On the contrary, I can assure you that the College is much stronger now than it was then, the faculty is better, and the entering students are, on the whole, smarter, a bit better educated, and a lot better looking! On Tuesday, September 21, 1937, the student newspaper here in Annapolis, announced that, under the new leadership of Stringfellow Barr as president and Scott Buchanan as dean, the fall term would open with a “different set-up” for the arriving freshman class. A different set-up indeed! Probably no other educational institution anywhere has undertaken so radical and so swift a transformation as took place at St. John’s in the eighty-three days between July 1, 1937, when Barr and Buchanan took office, and September 22, when the fall term began. Before describing what took place on this campus that summer and fall, I will provide some of the context by recounting activities of our two “transformers” in the preceding years. Perhaps as good a place as any to begin is at the University of This lecture was delivered at St. John’s College, Annapolis, September 30, 2005. Mr. Nelson is the author of three books about the founding of the Program at the College and about the founders, Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan. �6 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Virginia at Charlottesville, and then to go backwards and forwards from there. Stringfellow Barr had been a history teacher at Virginia since 1924, and, since 1930, a full professor and the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Buchanan had been teaching philosophy there since 1929. Before Buchanan was appointed to the faculty, Barr had been consulted. He recalls: The head of the philosophy department accosted me and asked what I knew about Scott Buchanan . . .I said, “He’s the most remarkable man I’ve ever met, but he’s not an easy person, and I would rather not urge his appointment. It would mean a great deal to me personally to have him here, but . . .you might find him a very difficult customer to handle.” They decided to risk it and got him. Despite that rather ambiguous endorsement, the friendship prospered. Both men developed formidable reputations as teachers. They also shared a deep concern about the inadequacies of the undergraduate curriculum. Buchanan reported that “The college at the University was being squeezed, exploited, and reduced to the size and functions of a secondary preparatory school for the graduate schools.” This concern was sufficiently widespread that it led President John Holcomb, in 1934, to appoint a Committee on Honors Courses. He asked both Barr and Buchanan to serve. This small group of six met almost weekly for a period of about six months and issued its report in March 1935. The report has three sections. The first is an exposure of the grave weaknesses of the existing undergraduate curriculum, drafted by Barr. It must have offended many members of the Virginia faculty more senior than he. Here is an excerpt: The able student, on his part, feels. . .that many of the lectures now given are not worth listening to NELSON 7 and that the textbooks assigned are not worthy of serious study. In his more charitable moods, he recognizes that, given the present student body, the professor is not much to blame. Observing this low morale on the part of both professor and student alike, the publishers have done their best to supply increasingly “easy” texts. . . .The selfrespecting professor has consoled himself with research. . . .Or he has found consolation in graduate courses in which “real work” may be attempted. . . .The able undergraduate has turned to athletics and other “activities”. . . .He comes to look on the strictly curricular exercises of the university as interruptions that must be borne patiently but which he quite sees through. . . . The second section of the report is a detailed plan for a two-year “college within the college,” a required program of tutorials, laboratory work, lectures, and discussions, all based on the reading of the great books of the Western tradition, including a substantial number of mathematical and scientific works. This section was written by Buchanan. The range and depth of the plan are extraordinary; it bears a strong resemblance to the program installed here at St. John’s. Buchanan contended that the best materials for the proposed curriculum are the literary and scientific classics of Europe. He states that “all instruction will be based on the reading, analysis, interpretation, criticism, imitation, and discussion of the books in the following list.” That list includes over a hundred authors, and it will look familiar to anyone with a St. John’s connection. When the report was circulated on the Charlottesville campus, the most startling feature, I feel sure—apart from the very notion of an allrequired two-year program for a select twenty of the best undergraduates—is the inclusion on this list of numerous works in Mathematics and Science, a grand total of forty-two titles, ranging from Euclid, Nicomachus, and Hippocrates to �8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Darwin and Faraday and Lobachevski and Mendel, and including those giants Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Harvey. In Winfree Smith’s insightful book A Search for the Liberal College, published by St. John’s in 1983, he comments on Buchanan’s proposal: When one considers that the plan was to read in two years almost as many books as St. John’s undergraduates now read in four years, and to read in their entirety books many of which are now read at St. John’s only in part, and that list contained Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae, Part I, Newton’s Principia, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology, Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, etc., one sees the impossibility of the task. To that one might add that there were also included works not so inherently difficult, but very long—Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Bible, Marx’s Capital, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Tolstoi’s War and Peace. What Buchanan in this report called the “machinery of instruction,” was to be conducted in four modes: once-aweek discussion of the assigned reading for the whole class (of no more than twenty), with two instructors in charge; formal lectures at least once a week, based on the expository texts; tutorials in languages and mathematics, for “formal drill and supervised practice,” and for detailed criticism and discussion of student papers; and a laboratory “equipped for the performance of the crucial experiments in the history of science, for the practice of the arts of measurement and experimentation, and the illustration of scientific theory.” The full report, including a third section on the elective portion in the third and fourth years, was submitted to President Newcomb in March 1935—and that was the end of it! The country had not yet emerged from the Great Depression, and the Committee report was shelved, at least in NELSON 9 part, for lack of funds. But in retrospect one can readily imagine how Buchanan’s plan would have been chopped to pieces department by department if it had ever emerged as a serious proposal. So by this time, Barr and Buchanan had developed not only a deep conviction of the necessity for college curricular reform but also this specific plan for its radical transformation. It was no doubt frustrating to have worked so hard and so productively in developing their proposal and to see no result. (If it can be said that a seed was planted at Virginia, it must be added that the seed was not nurtured there, and a transplant would be required to keep it alive and growing.) Meanwhile, at the University of Chicago, what appeared to be a more favorable climate for curricular reform had been created by President Robert Maynard Hutchins. He had earlier enticed Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon from Columbia, and Adler had persuaded Hutchins to invite Barr and Buchanan to come and join Hutchins’ Committee on the Liberal Arts. They accepted, though Barr was reluctant to leave his native Virginia and the University he loved in spite of all its shortcomings. Although there was considerable muttering on the Chicago campus about Hutchins’ unconventional opinions and appointments, it soon transpired that the Committee members themselves were the chief cause of what turned out to be a farcical failure. Buchanan’s account is especially interesting: The first meeting of the Committee on Liberal Arts will never be forgotten by any of those present. It was one of those occasions of recognition that mark the crises in tragedies and comedies. . .and in spite of many interchanges of lectures and papers, McKeon, Adler, and I, each of us, had constructed . . .quite different universes of discourse. . . .Heat and light became thunder and lightning. There was never another general meeting of the whole �10 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW committee. We agreed to disagree and to pursue our separate courses. . . . One significant outcome of that year’s work at Chicago was the effect on Barr of his seminar readings with Buchanan. He says in one of his oral history interviews, “We read the dialogues of Plato. . .and we read the whole of Euclid’s Elements. . .I’ve been saying ever since. . .that I would never have touched St. John’s if this hadn’t happened.” Chicago was, to say the least, another very frustrating experience for both Barr and Buchanan. Later Adler claimed that the seeds of the New Program at St. John’s “were sown in the meetings of the Committee on the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago in 1936-37,” but he is wrong on two counts. The seeds were sown at Virginia, or earlier, and the year at Chicago added virtually nothing to the conception of the New Program that emerged here in 1937. In the same academic year, 1936-37, an event occurred in Buchanan’s life that appeared to be totally unrelated to his pursuit of educational reform but that turned out to be the key that unlocked the door. He accepted an invitation to a meeting of “Christian leaders” in Alexandria, Virginia, in May, 1937, to discuss how to combat the rising threat of Fascism and Communism in Europe. Buchanan shared a room with a friend, Francis Pickens Miller, and they soon got to talking about the state of college education. Miller had recently agreed to serve on the Board of Visitors and Governors of St. John’s, and the trustees were looking for new leadership for an institution in deep trouble. It was not long before Miller arranged a meeting between Barr and Buchanan, on the one hand, and the College trustees on the other, followed by a full day’s discussion with Richard Cleveland, then secretary and later chairman of the College board. An offer soon came, and so it was that Barr, reluctantly, and Buchanan, more hopeful, but no doubt with reservations, agreed to come promptly to St. John’s. Less than two months after the Miller-Buchanan conversations in NELSON 11 Alexandria, Barr and Buchanan were installed at St. John’s. The world was not thus saved for democracy, but this college found a new life. A few words first about the college they found on arrival here in the fall of 1937. The president, Amos Woodcock, had just cost the college its accreditation by awarding a bachelor’s degree to a senior against the judgment of the faculty. The dean, a retired Navy captain, was formerly director of the Naval Academy’s athletic program. Although there were only twenty-four faculty members, fifteen majors were available. There was just one faculty member in each of the departments of Art, German, Classics, Spanish, Government, Philosophy and Psychology, and Physics. There were four national and two local fraternities. Intercollegiate athletic schedules were maintained in football, basketball, and lacrosse. St. John’s thus had a conventionally organized but weak academic and extracurricular program. Lest it be thought a hopeless case it is worth remembering that among the faculty who made a successful transition to the New Program were the very able Ford K. Brown and Richard Scofield, both themselves Rhodes Scholars; John Kieffer, a Greek and Latin scholar with a Harvard education; and the mathematician George Bingley. When Barr and Buchanan took over the all-but-bankrupt college, they prescribed a four-year curriculum alike, in all important respects, to that now in place here and in Santa Fe. In the sixty-eight years since its inception, the “bones” of what was then called the New Program—seminars on the great books, language and mathematics tutorials, laboratory, and a weekly all-college formal lecture—have not changed. Significant refinements have taken place, however, as the curriculum has undergone constant review. The most important of these are probably (a) in the language tutorial, instead of one year each of Greek, Latin, French, and German, the current pattern is two years of Greek followed by two years of French; (b) Music has found a solid place in �12 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the required program; and (c) the preceptorial has been introduced. An equally radical—perhaps even more radical—alteration in the modes of instruction accompanied the curricular revolution. In the seminar, which became the heart and soul of the program, a group of eighteen to twenty students sat facing one another around a long, wide table and discussed a book read by all. The two faculty members in charge took turns opening the discussion with a question (not “When did Plato write this dialogue?” but perhaps, “What is justice?”). In the conversation that followed, students and tutors together sought answers by reviewing and analyzing, for instance, the conflicting definitions of justice debated in the first book of the Republic. The New Program called for a complete transformation of the structure and functions of the faculty. There were no longer any departments, ranks, or specialization. Of course this raised questions of status and dignity and inevitably raised the question of whether Buchanan was the leader of the faculty so desperately needed—or simply out of his mind! Each new member and every retained member of the existing faculty became a “tutor” and was offered the opportunity, as well as the challenge, of learning how to teach throughout the curriculum. Could a physicist learn to teach Greek and to discuss Plato’s Meno? Would a philosopher be willing to study the conic sections of Apollonius or to dissect a frog in the laboratory? Was this too much to ask of self-respecting teachers with credentials from Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard? And there were no tenure appointments to the faculty during the Barr-Buchanan years. In the space of two years, all intercollegiate sports were discontinued and were replaced by an intramural program designed to attract and involve everyone. The fraternities, too, were abolished, and their entryways on the campus buildings where they had been housed were renamed by Barr in honor of the four Maryland signers of the Declaration of NELSON 13 Independence—William Paca, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Samuel Chase, and Thomas Stone. Although both Barr and Buchanan hoped that their plan would inspire other colleges to follow their lead, they did not want it to be universally copied, even if it were feasible to do so. That would have left the entering freshman without a significant choice, and the freedom to choose the St. John’s path is essential to its success. The discipline and commitment required in order to gain the rewards of the program presupposes that the path is freely chosen. In fact, I believe that most alumni would assert that it must be not only freely chosen, but also pleasurable; otherwise, it isn’t worth the pain. Buchanan was convinced that an understanding of modern science was essential to the liberal education of the modern man or woman, and that in turn required an understanding of—among other things—Newtonian physics. Newton’s Principia appeared to be inaccessible to the average college student. How could it be made accessible? Buchanan made it accessible by plotting a chronological course of study through mathematics, physics, and astronomy, beginning with Euclid’s Elements and proceeding through the works of Apollonius, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, along with straight mathematical exercises and accompanying laboratory work. The decision to abolish academic departments had several consequences. First, Barr and Buchanan were able to assert and dramatize their shared conviction that every faculty member should establish as a goal, no matter how long it would take to reach it, to teach across the curriculum, to transcend his or her specialty, to aim to become a liberally educated person. Equally important, the abolition of the departments and divisions broke through one more barrier to the direct confrontation of a book by the student. A reading of Plato’s Republic, for instance, would not be filtered through the lens of political science, or philosophy, or history, or theology; the work would speak for itself. It would not be categorized and �14 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW thus prejudged. The student was to confront each author and each work in its own right. Except for the necessity of reading most of the books in translation, there would be no intervention between the author and the reader. It is this radical departure that allows the College to claim that the great books are the teachers, the primary faculty within which the tutors and their students are learners together, with the tutors as the more seasoned guides. Lessons Learned, Lessons Applied The transformation wrought by Barr and Buchanan here in 1937 seemed nearly miraculous to some (and errant nonsense to others!). But in fact it was in part an incorporation of lessons learned not only early in their lives, but especially during the eighteen year period from their arrival as Rhodes Scholars at Balliol College, Oxford, to their arrival in Annapolis. I add only that they came to St. John’s not just with lessons learned, but with that indispensable daring and conviction without which the sturdy structure that now flourishes here and in Santa Fe sixty-eight years later, would not have survived the first winter. Perhaps at this point you have some curiosity about these two “transformers,” Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan. What were they like? What did they do before Charlottesville and Annapolis? Barr—Growing Up Stringfellow Barr, known to his family and friends since infancy as “Winkie,” was born and grew up in Virginia, the son of an Episcopalian bishop, and the grandson, on his mother’s side, of Franklin Stringfellow, famous in Virginia as a daring cavalry scout for Jeb Stuart and Robert E. Lee. After the war Grandfather Stringfellow became a country parson, and a man of simple convictions. Barr recalled: “He said. . .that NELSON 15 he didn’t want to go to heaven if Dixie (his horse) wasn’t there.” Winkie grew up under the engaging influence of that celebrated grandfather and of his learned and devoted father who introduced him to Dickens, Shakespeare, and the Bible. He recalls reading all of Oliver Twist out loud to his older sister, Jane, when he was eight or nine. Even earlier, when he was five or six, he had begun reading the Bible to the black servants in the kitchen. And then, he says, On my tenth birthday. . .Father gave me a Shakespeare play. . .He said, “You won’t understand this well when you read it, but keep reading it.” So I did. I’d do anything for him. . .I adored him. . .I was so taken with Macbeth I wanted to express myself somehow, but the thing that I was taken with was not Macbeth, for God’s sake, it was King Duncan. He was the first king I ever met . . .I had been given. . .a funny little kimono-sortof-garment with a blue and white design on it, with a belt. . .I would put this on, not over my pajamas or anything, I’d walk rapidly across the room so that the train would float better behind. . .This had the disadvantage of leaving my belly completely exposed, but nobody gave a damn. It will not surprise you that this boy then grew up, went to college and graduated from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. When Barr received his B.A. in 1916 he was nineteen years old, and had behind him four years of Latin, three years of Greek, eight years of English and English Literature, and an abundance of extra-curricular activity. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1916—not surprising. But the Brits were deep in the first World War, so he did not take up his Rhodes until three years later. During that period, several dramatic events shaped and matured him. In April, 1917, the United States entered the war against Germany. Conscription had not yet begun, but Barr promptly enlisted �16 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW in the Army in May. He was transferred to an ambulance corps training at Allentown, and, expecting a quick trip overseas, he began intensive study of French. But it turned out that the Army had no vehicles available for ambulance training; so Barr, severely flat-footed and unable to do the foot-soldier drill, was transferred to the Sanitary Corps, which was organizing instruction about venereal diseases, “not a very glorious assignment, and not one I coveted.” His talents as a speaker and writer continued to be appreciated. When he spoke to recruits about the dangers of “the clap,” he composed entertaining verse designed to catch their attention. Many, like Barr, frustrated and disappointed, were never sent overseas. And so, Winkie Barr, having enlisted out of a sense of duty, having suffered the humiliation of unfitness for combat service, and having prepared uselessly to be an ambulance driver in France, made the best of his assignment to teach recruits the risks of venereal disease. And, somehow, he managed to do that with a light heart! Then, immediately after his discharge from the Army, he was called upon to undertake what he called “the most painful adventure of my whole life.” His adored father suffered a mental and physical collapse, requiring Winkie’s services as an attendant to him at a mental hospital in Asheville. Perhaps miraculously, after six months of daily round-the-clock attendance, his father recovered, and was able to return home. So when the Armistice was signed in November, Barr was free to take up his Rhodes Scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. At age twenty-two, a young man of some experience. NELSON 17 Buchanan—Growing Up Meanwhile, what about Scott Buchanan? A markedly different sort of person with a markedly different set of childhood and youthful experiences. Born in a small town near Spokane, Washington, Scott, an only child, was soon carried by his parents across the continent to Jeffersonville, Vermont, where his father, a country doctor, soon died. The boy was then just seven years old. His mother and he were left in near poverty. In an interview many years later, Buchanan recalls his early education: Jeffersonville was a small town, probably not over a thousand inhabitants. There was a schoolhouse in the middle of town next door to our house. . . . It was a curious school, with four rooms that included everything from the first grade through high school. There were three grades in each room and recitations were held in front of the room in rotation. From the very start I was listening to classes ahead of me and then, as I went on, to classes behind me. So I had a sort of triple education. . . I had to prepare my own work but I was always watching the teaching and learning. . .from the other classes as I went on. It made me realize very early how much teaching goes on between students. . .Since then I’ve always seen a classroom as a very lively relationship between mutual teachers. In his youth, Buchanan was an earnest Christian and a “great church-goer.” “I used to count five times on Sunday that I did something at the church.” Young Scott had been converted by a visiting evangelist and “they took me in as a member of the church at the age of eight. I don’t think that is �18 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW often done but Congregationalists are free-wheeling. . . .Then after that I began having doubts, of course. . . .By the time I was in high school. . .I refused to take Communion. . . .I didn’t understand why you should eat bread and drink wine because it was the body and blood of Christ.” (I recall Buchanan saying in my language tutorial in 1941-42 that “hocus pocus” was a corruption of Jesus’ saying at the Last Supper, “Hoc est corpus meus.”) These recollections may suggest that Scott’s young life was consumed with religion and personal reflections on the meaning of Christian doctrine. As evidence to the contrary, he later recalled how much he missed the winters and the ice skating in northern Vermont. Amherst College was a natural destination for Buchanan, and he was admitted there, no doubt on scholarship, in 1912. By a happy accident it was the very year that the estimable Alexander Meiklejohn joined Amherst as President. Somehow a bond developed between them despite a twentythree year age difference. And when Meiklejohn brought together in his study five or six members of the faculty for a reading and discussion of Immanuel Kant, the undergraduate Buchanan was invited to join. The two became lifelong friends. (When I say “the two,” I mean Meiklejohn and Buchanan, but I might as well have said Buchanan and Kant.) Scott Buchanan had a good academic record at Amherst. He won the mathematics prize in his sophomore year and the Greek prize in his junior year, he was the Ivy Orator at his commencement and received his degree cum laude, and, most notably, he was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship from Massachusetts. The United States entered the Great War in 1917, and, in 1918, Buchanan signed up for the Navy, though a pacifist and a conscientious objector. Although he didn’t want to fight, he thought it was wrong to escape what his college friends, who had been drafted, were going through. In any case, after the Armistice was signed in November, 1918, Buchanan was NELSON 19 discharged from the Navy, leaving him free to take up his Rhodes Scholarship. Barr Meets Buchanan And thus it happened that our two “transformers” met for the first time at Balliol College, Oxford, in the fall of 1919. Barr remembered vividly their first encounter: There was a knock and I opened my door. “Hello,” he said, “I’m Scott Buchanan, Massachusetts.” He stood, smiling, relaxed, his head a little on one side. He wore the heavy tweed jacket and gray flannel “bags” that I was beginning to recognize as the Oxford student’s favorite costume. . . .[He said]: “I’m looking for Barr, Virginia.” Thus began a friendship that lasted until Buchanan’s death forty-nine years later. But it had a rocky beginning. Perhaps that is partly because Barr did not quite realize at first that he was in the process of becoming Buchanan’s student. After all, they were Rhodes Scholars together, and, although Buchanan was two years older, they had graduated from college only a year apart. But Barr discovered that the best conversations seemed to take place when Buchanan was on hand, and later, during Buchanan’s last term, an informal seminar developed, in which Barr and several Englishmen began to meet regularly in a discussion group led by Buchanan. Barr recalls: It was his curious kind of questioning that bound them and me. . . .I had quite simply been snared into Platonic dialectic, by a dialectician who had staked his life on Socrates’ statement that the unexamined life is not worth living, a dialectician who may already have agreed with that stately first �20 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW sentence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men desire to know.” Buchanan later reported that during those Oxford years he and Barr “had spent long hours in talk about the plight of American education.” He did not say explicitly what the conversations encompassed, but the context suggests that one of their main concerns was that the growth and dominance of the graduate schools in the American universities was turning the undergraduate years into preparation for specialization instead of cultivating the liberal arts. From Balliol and Oxford, Buchanan and Barr borrowed the “don-rag.” In one of his letters to Meiklejohn from Balliol, Buchanan describes it briefly: “Our term closed on Monday,” he wrote, “with what is called a ‘don-rag.’ One goes before his tutor and the Master to hear his work commented on and discussed in approval or encouragement for better work in the future.” Barr, years later at St. John’s, refers to “a device we stole from English university practice, the device which British undergraduates term a ‘don-rag,’” and then goes on to describe what “we have adapted . . .more nearly to our needs,” an adaptation with which most of you are quite familiar. Also, they borrowed the title “tutor,” and made the tutorial not, as at Oxford, a weekly meeting of one or two students with a tutor to discuss a paper prepared by the student, but a small group of eight to ten students meeting daily to study language and mathematics. (And let me interpolate here: it appears that Buchanan and Barr borrowed liberally, but they never copied; whatever they took underwent a Buchanian twist.) They also took the best of the informal discussions that had enriched their lives at Balliol and transformed them into the “seminar,” in which the size of the group was limited to twenty or so, in order to ensure the primacy of student participation and, by using two tutors, to counterbalance any tendency, on the part of either, to impart “the truth.” NELSON 21 Oxford encompassed many colleges of varying sizes. A “large” college might have as many as 450 resident students. St. John’s in the 1940’s shrank to almost nothing during the war years, and didn’t reach 300 even after the war. But now St. John’s, by Oxford standards, is a large college! Barr and Buchanan, despite the experience of Amherst, Harvard, and the University of Virginia, thought that the Oxford colleges were about the right size. After graduate work at Harvard and two years teaching philosophy at City College, New York, Buchanan, in 1925, with a Harvard doctorate in hand, began four stimulating years at the People’s Institute at Cooper Union in New York. He enjoyed providing adult programs for first—and second— generation European immigrants who were not looking for credits or degrees, but seriously interested in learning. Perhaps of greater import for our current concerns, he organized with the New York Public Library, eighteen great books seminars meeting in library branches around the city, which were led by instructors or recent graduates from Columbia. These seminars no doubt confirmed his conviction that the great books were accessible to a wide readership of serious, intelligent readers, and should not be considered the exclusive preserve of university scholars. This was also a time of invention, exploration, and experimentation in the undergraduate program at Columbia, where Mortimer Adler, Mark Van Doren, and Richard McKeon were in the thick of it. Unlike the situation at many leading research universities, the undergraduate program at Columbia engaged the continuing attention of many of its leading scholars and its brightest young instructors, who quickly discovered that providing young men with an intelligible introduction to their world could not be achieved within strictly departmental confines. They developed an interdepartmental course, and by making it required of all freshman underlined the conviction: “However intelligent a �22 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW boy may be, he is in no position, when he first enters college, to determine a curriculum for himself.” The effort to introduce the great books into the Columbia undergraduate program had a long and choppy history beginning with John Erskine in 1917. The opposition came chiefly from classical scholars provoked at the notion that any good could come from undergraduates attempting to read and discuss one classic a week. Many scholars also objected that to read a masterpiece in translation was not to read the same work at all. Erskine relished the argument and happily reported: I agreed. I couldn’t help adding that I marveled at my colleagues who did their reading exclusively in the original. I publicly offered them my sympathy for never having read the Old Testament, nor the words of Christ. Of course the Old Testament was possible for any colleague who knew Hebrew, but there was no text extant of the words of Christ in the language he spoke. When the faculty finally relented, Erskine offered his course in 1920. He later said that the original instructors were a “remarkable lot:” they included both Mortimer Adler and Mark Van Doren. The Columbia faculty had long been dedicated to the small discussion group for undergraduate instruction. The renowned Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the University for forty-three years, said forthrightly in 1912: “The habit of conveying information to college students by means of lectures is wholly deplorable. It is not only a waste of time, since the printed page would be far better than the spoken word, but it leads to unfortunate and undesirable intellectual habits on the part of the student.” The serious and long-standing efforts of Columbia College to provide a sound liberal education for undergraduates employing the great books and the small discussion group were well known to NELSON 23 Barr and Buchanan, especially through the close, enduring friendship between Buchanan and Van Doren. Now I have given as much attention as the occasion allows to those activities and events leading up to the arrival of Barr and Buchanan at St. John’s in the summer of 1937. Barr was reluctant to come to St. John’s. He knew a bit about the college, and what he knew was not good. He had occasionally come to Annapolis from Charlottesville to lecture at the Naval Academy, and he had found that the reputation of the college next door was poor and that it had just recently lost its accreditation. He did not see it as a promising site for a revival of the great classical tradition. Buchanan, on the other hand, was intrigued. Perhaps his experiences at Virginia and Chicago had shown that only at an institution in dreadful difficulty would they be given a free hand to overturn completely the existing structure and install a revolutionary new order. Barr was persuaded to make the attempt, though he expected to fail; he just felt he had a duty to try. Then it was left to them to sort out their respective responsibilities. Barr relates: Buchanan said I would have to be president. I scoffed at the idea and reminded him that the curriculum we had dreamed of was his baby, not mine. But he answered he couldn’t be president; he didn’t answer his mail. I retorted that this was because he believed a lot of it was not worth answering. He agreed but pointed out that his correspondents thought it was, so I would have to be president. I groaned and told him he would have to be dean. He loudly objected but I declined to budge. I think everyone who knew these two men will agree that it would have been incongruous, and perhaps fatal, if it had turned out the other way. It is just possible to imagine Barr as dean, but Buchanan as president? No way. But Barr as �24 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW president and Buchanan as dean seem, in retrospect, almost providentially well-suited to their respective capacities. Buchanan’s function was to create and refine the basic structure; to match tutors to assignments; to build faculty understanding of the Program; to teach, and by teaching, to embody the methods of the seminar leader and of the language and mathematics tutor; to find new faculty members with the capacity to learn how to be tutors, teaching across the program, conquering unfamiliar, treacherous ground. He also had the usual tasks of any college dean: to counsel with students and with tutors; to provide letters of recommendation for graduating students and departing faculty members; to respond to parents’ complaints about discipline or lack of discipline. He also took the responsibility to set forth in print, for all skeptics and critics to see, as he did in the catalogues of the college, the reasons why this college had adopted a curriculum radically different from anything else on the academic scene. Barr confirms that “it was Buchanan who conceived, established, and continuously developed the St. John’s program. In a sense he had been building it ever since his work at Cooper Union in the late twenties.” Barr continues: Meanwhile, my job was to interpret it to the public by wide lecturing and by writing; to teach one seminar on the books and usually one language tutorial so I would understand the thing I was publicly interpreting; to find quickly the few men and women who could both grasp what we were doing and finance it in time to keep the College open; to fight off. . .three successive attempts of the Navy Department to get possession of our entire campus; and to reorganize the board of the college. One interesting sidelight: although typically we see Buchanan as the radical force and Barr exercising some restraint, it was Barr, against Buchanan’s advice, who NELSON 25 abolished intercollegiate athletics. Buchanan thought that was one step too many when the alumni were already deeply disaffected, and it would be better to wait another year or two. Barr, however, feeling directly responsible for the health and welfare of the students, was concerned, especially with respect to football, that the Johnnies were outclassed, battling against bigger and better-trained opponents, and that injuries would result for which he would be responsible. He also noted that the scheduling of away-from-home contests required team members to be absent from classes, and the Program was simply too demanding to permit it: student athletes would inevitably fall behind. Instead, he championed a vigorous intramural sports program in which all students could engage on a schedule consistent with their academic obligations. These two collaborators were very different in temperament and capacities. Quoting Barr again: . . .three or four years after our New Program started I was delighted with it and Scott was depressed with it. The difference between Scott and me was that when I see a baby I’m enchanted with him and Scott is always feeling, “Well, that’s not the baby I had in mind. Babies ought to be better than that.” All human enterprises, including birth, seem to him a little disappointing. He’s a Platonist in the sense that he’s got some notion of a baby in the back of his mind that no baby lives up to, whereas to me it’s such a miracle the little brat is alive—so what if he has defects. His ears stick out and he is cross-eyed, certainly, but he’s still alive. At Buchanan’s death in 1968, Barr said of their long friendship and collaboration, “Aside from our dialectical bond, he and I were in many ways incompatible; with it, our incompatibilities made our friendship richer.” �26 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Since there is so much about Buchanan that helps us to understand the Program, I turn to Winfree Smith, who was a student of his (and of Barr’s, as well) at Charlottesville, and who arrived here in the fall of 1941, and who continued to teach here until his death. Although he was an admirer of Buchanan as a teacher, he nevertheless criticized him for being “cavalier in the way he read the great books” and goes on to cite “blunders” he made in his reading of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Smith’s examples are convincing. They naturally raise questions about the soundness of Buchanan’s “scholarship.” Buchanan was not the sort of man you would have asked to write a textbook on the history of philosophy, nor would he have said yes if asked. His interest was not that of a bird overhead, surveying the distant fields below, but of a cannibal on the ground, devouring what he needed, turning flesh to food. I remember that when he was reading the volumes of Arnold Toynbee as they came off the press in the 1940’s, almost everything he thought about and talked about related to Toynbee. He made Toynbee his own, so that, in a sense, it was no longer Toynbee. He was engaged, as no other man I have known, in the process that Michel Montaigne called learning. It is a sign of crudity and indigestion to throw up what we have eaten in the same condition it was swallowed down. The stomach had not performed its office unless it has altered the form and condition of what was given it to cook. . . .Bees pillage the flowers here and there, but they then make honey of them which is all their own; it is no longer thyme and marjoram; so the fragments borrowed from others he will transform and bend together to make a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment. His education, labor, and study aim only at forming that. NELSON 27 As a teacher, it was never Buchanan’s aim to trot out a student who could dutifully and accurately disgorge the opinions and precepts of Plato or Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas or Kant. He hoped, rather, that his students, by means of their fresh encounter with these best minds, would begin to develop, however imperfectly, minds of their own. That would be the beginning of lifelong self-education. This is not the occasion for an account of the nine-andone-half years of the Barr-Buchanan leadership nor for a recapitulation of the crises, one after another, that characterized their tenure here, some of which they themselves created, and some of which were thrust upon them. But their departure cannot be understood without some further reference to the attack from the Navy. As everybody here knows, the College is physically separated from the Academy by nothing more than King George Street and a wall, as it was then. The advocates for the Academy argued the necessity of acquiring the College’s meager acres to meet further expansion needs. (Although today’s enrollment at the Academy is a bit over 4000, it was then projected to rise to 7500.) Perhaps you can imagine the convenience to the Academy of an overpass somewhere along King George Street or a tunnel underneath it connecting the two campuses and fulfilling nicely the Academy’s requirements. The unfolding drama involved President Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Secretary of State James Byrnes, Secretary of the Navy Knox and his successor James Forrestal, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Admiral Ernest King, both houses of Congress, and, of course, Admiral Ben Moreell. He was the Navy’s Goliath to our David. St. John’s defense was led by Barr, Baltimore lawyer Richard Cleveland, and Thomas Parran, Surgeon General of the United States, and fortunately then chairman of the St. John’s Board. I am convinced that if World War Two had not ended in 1945, the Navy would have won its war with this college. This was no croquet game; it was life or death for St. John’s. But in 1946 the Senate and House committees decided for the College. Except for the �28 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW accidents of war and the passage of time, the Navy would have prevailed, and we would not be here. The narrowness of the victory, and the pro-Navy alignment of the local business interests with the local newspaper, led Barr and Buchanan to believe that there would never be an end to these attacks. They were not comforted by the language of the concluding official letter from Secretary Forrestal stating that in view of a resolution adopted by the House Naval Affairs Committee to the effect that “the national emergency neither justifies nor warrants the proposed acquisition of St. John’s campus,” the Navy Department would acquiesce in the Committee’s disapproval, [and] that this “makes it possible for the College to pursue its plans with assurance that it will be secure on its historic site for the foreseeable future.” That concluding phrase, “for the foreseeable future,” provided little comfort to Barr and Buchanan. They could see ahead unending attacks on the College and its vulnerable property. They were wrong, but if one looks objectively at the situation as it was in 1946, it is easy to understand why they thought that the only secure future for the college lay elsewhere. In a tribute to Barr at the memorial service for him here in 1982, I said: It is very hard indeed to understand, looking back, how St. John’s College survived those first ten years of the New Program. . . .Just as Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan were turning up the lights on this campus in the late 1930’s, the lights were going out all over Europe. The recently arrived immigrants on the faculty here heard the grim news on their radios as they plotted on their wall maps at home the daily advance of the German armies over Poland and Czechoslovakia and France and the Soviet Union. My freshman class arrived here exactly two months before Pearl Harbor. . . .At the College there were farewell parties virtually every week, as one small group or NELSON 29 students after another entered the Army or the Navy or the Marines or the Air Force. Within two years sixty of the sixty-five members of my class were scattered all over the world. In June 1943 there were fifteen graduating seniors; a year later eight; in 1945, five; in 1946, three. Yet, for me at least, the memories of the College during those war years are not of hardship and struggle but of exuberance, spirited conversation, and laughter. The tone and style and mood were set [pretty much] by Winkie; without his lively presence, those would have been grim days indeed. Both of the founders were highly controversial figures. Buchanan was called “a destroyer, an irresponsible amateur, and a corrupter of young men—a man who drew students into worlds of the intellect too difficult for them, who made them, as Buchanan [himself said], ‘misfits in the universe for the time being.’” In May of 1958, twenty-one years after Barr and Buchanan had sprung the New Program in Annapolis, a group of their former students organized a picnic in their honor. The forty-four of us who gathered for the occasion first heard from their old friend and our friend too, Mark Van Doren. Memorably, he characterized the two men in this fashion: Both of them are incendiary; both are burning; they have always burned. Scott burns slowly and smokelessly. Winkie burns with a blaze, bright and red and always there, always at the top of his intensity. When it came Buchanan’s turn to speak, he began by saying: “I want to stage a little tableau for you, a composite oral examination and don rag. I have some questions I want to ask you.” It is questions, not answers, that seem to me to �30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW be the appropriate last words here from Buchanan, even though these questions are admonitory, unlike most of the questions I remember him posing to us in our seminars. The first question is: Do you believe in and trust your intellect, that innate power that never sleeps?. . .Many of you have gone on to graduate and professional learning. . . .You have fallen into the hands of scholars and into the grooves of practice. . . .In all these learnings and practices have you listened to the small spontaneous voice within that asks continually if these things are true? Do you believe that knowledge is possible, that truth is attainable, and that it is always your business to seek it, although evidence is overwhelmingly against it? The second question. . . .Have you yet recognized that you are and always have been your own teacher? Liberal education has as its end the free mind, and the free mind must be its own teacher. Intellectual freedom begins when one says with Socrates that he knows nothing, and then goes on to add: I know what it is that I don’t know. Do you know what you don’t know and therefore what you should know? If your teacher is affirmative and humble, then you are your own teacher. My third question is. . .more superficial perhaps, but fateful, nevertheless. . .have you persuaded yourself that there are knowledges and truths beyond your grasp, things that you simply cannot learn? Have you allowed adverse evidence to pile up and force you to conclude that you are not mathematical, not linguistic, not poetic, not scientific, not philosophical? If you have allowed NELSON 31 this to happen, you have arbitrarily imposed limits on your intellectual freedom, and you have smothered the fires from which all other freedoms arise. The fourth question: Do you accept the world? I am thinking of. . .The Brothers Karamazov, when Ivan tells Alyosha that he finds it easy to believe in God, but that he finds it impossible to believe in the world. Because he believes in God, he cannot accept the world. For most of us these days, the case is that we have believed in some things so weakly or fanatically that other equally or more real things have become absurd or impossible. This results from our crippled minds. . . .I am persuaded that the cure for this sickness of mind is in some vigorous and rigorous attempt to deal with that most puzzling and mysterious idea, the idea of the world. . . .There have been other such ideas that have governed thought, the idea of God or Being as it puzzled and dazzled the ancient world, the idea of Man as it stirred and fermented the world from the Renaissance on. God and Man have not disappeared as charts and aids to intellectual navigation, but they are in partial eclipse at present, and the world is asking us the big questions, questions in cosmology and science, questions in law and government. They are not merely speculative questions; they are as much matters of life and death and freedom as the old questions were. Most of us have made, with Ivan, a pact with the devil, an agreement not to face them and accept them—yet. “If these questions are valid,” Buchanan concludes, “they may come somewhere near indicating a standard by which we �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 32 judge our common intellectual life, and therefore our common education in this country.” It will come as no surprise that Buchanan did not think that the curriculum he had designed was definitive, the answer. It was undertaken as a step “in search of a liberal college,” his own descriptive phrase. This idea of “the search” was not a transient notion. On several occasions, he imagined curricula quite different from the one we associate with his name. More than thirty years after the launching of the New Program, he asked a group of the College’s students and tutors the question with which I conclude my remarks: “How is the search going?” *** The chief source of material for this lecture is my recent book, Radical Visions: Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and Their Efforts on behalf of Education and Politics in the Twentieth Century, Bergin & Garvey, 2001. I have also relied on two earlier works of mine published by the St. John’s College Press: Stringfellow Barr: A Centennial Appreciation of His Life and Work, 1997; and Scott Buchanan: A Centennial Appreciation of His Life and Work, 1995. The primary sources on which I have depended for all of the above work include the following: J. Winfree Smith, A Search for The Liberal College: The Beginning of The St. John’s Program; Harris Wofford Jr., Embers of the World: Scott Buchanan’s Conversations with Harris Wofford Jr.; Papers of Stringfellow Barr, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library; St. John’s College Papers at the Maryland State Archives; New Program files in the Greenfield Library, St. John’s College; Scott Buchanan Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; unpublished transcripts of interviews with Stringfellow Barr; Lionel Trilling and Justus Buchler, A History of Columbia College on Morningside; Alexander Meikejohn Papers, Amherst College Library; author’s private papers and correspondence. 33 Understanding Quantum Mechanics with Bohr and Husserl François Lurçat There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. Niels Bohr1 Quantum mechanics brilliantly succeeds as a mathematical formalism: the numbers it provides are always successfully compared with experimental results. But it is often said to fail as an explanatory theory allowing us to understand the laws of atomic processes.2 Richard Feynman (1918-1988), author of essential contributions to both the theory and its applications, once declared: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”3 According to Roger Penrose, it “makes absolutely no sense.”4 And René Thom described it as “the intellectual scandal of the century.”5 There exists, however, an interpretation of quantum mechanics that makes it understandable. It was worked out by Niels Bohr, author of the quantum theory of atoms, in the François Lurçat is emeritus professor at the Université de Paris XI (Orsay). As a theoretical physicist, he has worked on nuclear resonance (magnetic and quadrupolar), later on particle physics; he is still busy with strong interaction theory. He has also published several books and articles on the cultural effects of science. He asks again and again the same question: why does Western culture remain unable to use the works of such scholars as Husserl and Bohr that might allow it to understand at last the nature of science? The present essay will appear in a collection of essays: Rediscovering Phenomenology, edited by L. Boi, P Kerszberg, and F. Patras. It is published here with the kind . permission of the editors. �34 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW course of more than thirty years of researches and discussions. During the 1930s and 1940s, there was a sort of loose consensus in its favor. But most physicists did not even try to follow the line of Bohr’s subtle and deep arguments. Einstein’s seminal discoveries had become classic, and he was presently busy with topics outside the mainstream. Bohr, on the contrary, was making essential contributions to nuclear physics. So he was necessarily right about everything, Einstein was a troublemaker, and the debate between both physicists was not really relevant. In the last decades, however, the situation has changed. Some theoreticians have proposed that we replace the “thought experiments” discussed by Einstein and Bohr with feasible ones. Thanks to advances made in measurement techniques and to the ingenuity of many experimentalists, crucial experiments have been done, and their results have supported Bohr’s conceptions.6 This might perhaps have made these conceptions more acceptable; it turned out, however, that they became less and less accepted. The whiff of heresy no longer lingers about Einstein’s thought, but now it surrounds Bohr’s. When physicists, philosophers, and historians of science write about such questions, as a rule they refer only vaguely to the Danish physicist’s ideas without ever going explicitly and clearly to his texts.7 I would like to present here an approach that in my opinion should help to explain why Bohr’s essential contribution has been rejected for its strangeness even after its successful confrontation with experiment. I rely on Husserl’s definition of phenomenology in his article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1929). Phenomenology, he writes, “has established (1) an a priori psychological discipline, able to provide the only secure basis on which a strong empirical psychology can be built, and (2) a universal philosophy, which can supply an organum for the methodical revision of all the sciences.”8 My assumption is as follows: as far as physics is concerned, the kind of methodical revision Husserl had in mind was never undertaken; it is, however, needed LURÇAT 35 even more urgently now that quantum physics has come to light, in fact, at the same time as phenomenology. The lack of revision, which has permitted the persistence of age-old confusions, can help to explain the paradoxical rejection of the Bohrian approach and the ensuing failure to understand quantum mechanics. Of course one should not forget that there are many publications devoted to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, some of which are quite valuable. My aim here is not to discuss what has been done recently in this field of research, but to go back to the origins in order to understand why, despite so many efforts, confusion remains about several important aspects of the problem, for instance, about such notions as “observer,” “Copenhagen interpretation.” In my opinion, as long as Bohr is understood to be an incomprehensible author, the beginnings of quantum mechanics will continue to be shrouded in mist, and the same will probably be true for quantum mechanics as a whole. Bohr’s thought is generally considered difficult to grasp, a difficulty commonly ascribed to what he himself called an “inefficiency of expression.”9 One may wonder, however, whether the clarity of classical physics, implicitly contrasted with Bohrian obscurity, is not itself at least partly based on an illusion. Because we are familiar with mathematically formalized space and time, we assume a degree of clarity about it. This familiarity has a double origin. It comes from our technical environment, which embodies in some way Euclidean space and Newtonian time (or, when electromagnetic signals are exchanged, Einsteinian space-time). And it follows from a feature analyzed by Husserl: the substitution of the mathematically substructured world of idealities for the real world.10 The lack of clarity commonly found in Bohr, and the inefficiency of expression for which he blames himself, are actually effects of thought exploring virgin territories. They can be understood as traces of Bohr’s effort to free himself from old mental habits. But the feeling of obscurity experienced by Bohr’s readers is also due to the �36 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW result of that effort: a reasoning free from several—most often implicit—premises of common thought “We take,” says Husserl, “for true being what is actually a method.”11 By retaining only those properties of things that can be geometrized, Galileo laid the foundations of modern physics, but at the same time he gave credibility to the prejudice that declared those properties to be the only real ones: nature is mathematical, and whatever cannot be mathematized is relegated to the swamp of preconceptions and subjective impressions. What made classical physics understandable was the general acceptance of its metaphysical foundations, laid by Galileo and Descartes.12 During the twentieth century, the development of quantum physics challenged those foundations—a major event in the history of scientific and philosophical thought. But the prevailing positivist view of sciences did not allow that event to be understood or even noticed. According to positivism, there are no metaphysical foundations of sciences; there is a scientific method, the only one that allows us to reach correct conclusions. One can thus understand the negative reception of the Bohrian conception of quantum mechanics. Bohr’s thought has indeed challenged generally accepted ideas, but the status of those ideas is misunderstood. Their metaphysical character is not recognized: they are mistaken for basic and necessary methodological principles. Classical Physics Why is quantum theory reputed to contain paradoxes? Because the Galilean and Cartesian substitution of mathematical abstractions for the real world has been almost unanimously and uncritically accepted by scientists and philosophers—except, of course, phenomenologists. The strangeness of quantum physics might even follow from affinities with phenomenology that remain implicit. We must therefore begin this study by taking a brief look at the Husserlian critique of the metaphysical foundations of classical physics. LURÇAT 37 According to Husserl,13 Galileo’s essential discovery is that of “nature, which is in itself mathematical.” Summarizing the Galilean view, he writes again: “Nature is, in its ‘true beingin-itself,’ mathematical.” Hence follows, for Galileo, the “law of exact lawfulness”: every occurrence in nature must come under exact laws. Here we apparently have the basic principles of physical theory, used daily by scientists. Yet the mathematical nature in question is a “methodical idea,” so when we accept Galileo’s discoveries as “straightforward truth,” we repeat his “naïveté,” a naïveté never overcome by his successors. Galileo is a genius: his idea of mathematical nature “blazes the trail for the infinite number of physical discoveries and discoverers.” But he is “at once a discovering and a concealing genius.” With the Galilean mathematization begins “the surreptitious substitution of an idealized nature for prescientifically intuited nature.” In the world where we live, “we find nothing of geometrical idealities, no geometrical space or mathematical time with all their shapes.” This is an important remark, Husserl observes, even though it is so trivial. “Yet this triviality has been buried precisely by exact science, indeed since the days of ancient geometry, through that substitution of a methodically idealized achievement for what is given immediately as actuality.” Physics, then, appears as “a particular technique, the geometrical and Galilean technique which is called physics.” “In geometrical and natural-scientific mathematization, in the open infinity of possible experiences, we measure the lifeworld—the world constantly given to us as actual in our concrete world-life—for a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of the so-called objectively scientific truths.” This garb of ideas allows us to make predictions relevant to our practical life, and this kind of prediction infinitely surpasses the accomplishment of everyday prediction. But, on the other hand, it dresses up the life-world as “objectively actual and true” nature. It is because of this substitution that the actual meaning of the method was never understood. �38 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Since the days of Galileo, the substitution of a mathematical schematization of nature for the real world has obscured the nature of classical physics; this continuing confusion now hinders us from understanding quantum mechanics. Believing that the trouble started with the advent of quantum physics would be an illusion. Both the obscurity of quantum physics and the clarity of classical physics are grounded in the same initial mistaking of mathematized nature for the world we live in. For three quarters of a century, the persistent Galilean substitution has been an insuperable obstacle in the way of the acceptance of Bohr’s conceptions, which provide a rational and understandable frame for quantum mechanics. The fundamental criticism of substitution by Husserl has not been taken into consideration, and we still pay the price for this neglect or refusal. Bohr’s Dissertation (1911) and Bohr’s Atom (1913) Let us now set some milestones on the way followed by Bohr as he discovered and developed his interpretation of quantum mechanics. This will require placing his work in a historical context, in order to regain with their original strength arguments now covered with various layers of sedimentation. In 1911, the young physicist defended his dissertation on the electron theory of metals. Its theoretical frame was the statistical mechanics of a gas of electrons. The main result was that magnetic properties of metals cannot be explained in this frame. As Rosenfeld commented in his biographical sketch, “the very rigour of his analysis gave him, at this early stage, the firm conviction of the necessity of a radical departure from classical electrodynamics for the description of atomic phenomena.”14 In 1921, the primary finding of the dissertation was rediscovered by a Dutch physicist, J.H. van Leeuwen; it is currently known as the “Bohr-van Leeuwen theorem.” LURÇAT 39 Two years later, Bohr published his trilogy, On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules. His starting point was Rutherford’s hypothesis: an atom is composed of a central nucleus and peripheral electrons. In the first article, devoted to the hydrogen atom, he assumed that the single electron of this atom can follow only a discrete set of trajectories, characterized by a “quantum condition” involving Planck’s constant. This means that when the electron is on one of those allowed orbits, it is in a “stationary state” and does not emit electromagnetic radiation. Each of the allowed orbits is characterized by its energy. Radiation takes place only in the transition from one orbit to a second one of smaller energy; the difference between the energies of both orbits is taken away by the quantum of radiation emitted. Such a process is called a transition. From these simple assumptions Bohr deduced the empirical Balmer formula, which describes the main features of the hydrogen spectrum. But, however simple they are, they represent a radical innovation with respect to classical mechanics and electromagnetism. In classical mechanics, there is a possible trajectory for any initial condition (position and momentum): this precludes any quantization of trajectories or of energies. Bohr understood very early that this freedom of classical trajectories was incompatible with the stability of matter. As he later explained it to Heisenberg: What I mean by stability is the fact that always the same substances are found, with the same properties; always the same crystals are formed, the same chemical compounds are created, etc. This must mean that, after many modifications due to external influences, an iron atom becomes again an iron atom, with exactly the same properties as it had previously. This cannot be understood according to classical mechanics, above all if one admits that it is like a planetary system. Hence there exists in nature a tendency to produce �40 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW definite forms—here I use the word ‘forms’ in its most general sense—and to make these definite forms reappear again and again, even when they have been perturbed and destroyed. . . .This looks incomprehensible if one admits the basic principle of Newtonian physics, namely the strict causal determinism of phenomena; in other terms, if the present state of a system must always be determined uniquely by the state that comes immediately before it, and only by that one. This contradiction worried me very early.15 According to the trilogy, when a transition takes place the frequency of the radiation emitted depends on the energy of the initial state (before the emission of radiation) and on the energy of the final state (after the emission). If the transition is a process continuously unfolding in time, as are those described by classical physics, how can we understand the idea that the intermediate stage (the emission of radiation) is partly determined by the final stage?16 To this, Bohr simply answered that while the stationary states of an atom follow the laws of usual mechanics, these laws do not hold for the transition from one state to another.17 Later he was to develop this idea, specifying that a description of atomic processes in space and time is not always possible. A transition is not a process of which the physicist can write a history, but rather a “quantum jump.” Here we have a radical break with the principles of classical physics, which declared a description in space and time to be a universally valid requirement. In the relation of physics to experiment we can see another aspect of the break. Newton lays down his axioms of mechanics and draws consequences from them about planetary motions, tides, etc. The refined calculations performed by his successors are almost always borne out by astronomical observations: the only exception, a detail in the motion of Mercury, was explained by Einstein when he laid LURÇAT 41 down new axioms in his theory of general relativity. Similarly, Maxwell’s equations prevailed until Bohr called into question their universal validity. This represents a new kind of challenge. The aim is no longer to replace one theory with a new one that better meets the Galilean ideal of identity with the physical universe. Rather, Bohr’s atom inaugurated a new conception of the relations between theory and experiment. While classical mechanics and electromagnetism remain essential to describe the stationary states of the atom, some of their implications are rejected: stationary states are quantized and radiationless, despite classical impossibilities. Nature can no longer be identified with the theories of Newton (or Einstein) and Maxwell. They are not wrong, but they have only limited validity. A Digression on Semiclassical Theories As we shall see further, Bohr’s atom—“the old quantum theory” as it is now called—is currently considered to have been a provisional theory, superseded by quantum mechanics. This is only a partial truth, however. Bohr’s atom still survives under the rubric of semiclassical theories, an active field of research nowadays.18 In atomic, molecular, and nuclear physics, for instance, it happens in many cases that the phenomena of interest involve a large number of quantum states: one is thus near the limit where the correspondence principle becomes relevant, as we shall soon see. On the other hand, as Miller puts it, semiclassical theories play an interpretative role: they provide spatiotemporal descriptions, of approximate validity, which nevertheless give tools for understanding that are more efficient than what “exact” quantum mechanical calculations can offer. In the case of the formaldehyde molecule, for instance, or of exchange collisions between a hydrogen atom and a dihydrogen molecule, we are told by specialists that “rigorous” quantum-mechanical calculations are untractable, while semiclassical description permits both an understanding of the phenomena and acceptable numerical results. We must �42 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW consider semiclassical theory, then, as the truly relevant theory for such objects or phenomena. Hence the idea of limited validity has not become obsolete with the advent of quantum mechanics. The epistemological lesson of this idea is as relevant as ever: our concepts are not written in the book of the universe, we ourselves devise them in an effort to understand the laws of natural and, more generally, physical phenomena. Wave-particle Duality and Its Consequences There is no question here of summarizing the main stages of the development of quantum theory, or even of Bohr’s contributions to it.19 I would only like to show, relying on Bohrian texts, how phenomenological thought can give a meaning to quantum physics. In order to do that, some historical data will have to be recalled; let us begin with the debate about the quanta of radiation. A photocell is now a familiar object (found, for instance, in every elevator). One century ago, the photoelectric effect was something new, unexplained by classical electromagnetism. In 1905, Einstein published an article: “On a Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Conversion of Light.”20 He showed that the thermodynamic properties of thermal radiation could be described by comparing the radiation to a gas of light quanta (later called “photons”). Applying this assumption to the photoelectric effect, he obtained a simple relation (the “Einstein equation”) between the frequency of incident light and the energy of the electrons freed from the metal. Einstein’s “heuristic point of view” so obviously contradicted some known properties of electromagnetic radiation (such as interferences and diffraction) that it was received with scepticism. In 1916, however, the careful experiments of Millikan confirmed the Einstein equation. Another experiment went further in the same direction. When a beam of X-rays falls on a sample of matter, a fraction of the beam is deflected (what is called “scattering”) and its wavelength increases. This phenomenon cannot be explained LURÇAT 43 by classical electromagnetic theory. In 1923, however, Arthur Holly Compton’s experiments showed that it could be understood by making use of the hypothesis of light quanta, if they are endowed not only with energy but also with momentum. The scattering of X-rays (now called the Compton effect) is described as a collision between an X-quantum and an electron. From this point on, light quanta seemed to possess all the attributes of particles. The Compton assumption implies a definite relation, well confirmed by experiment, between the increase in wavelength and the angle between scattered and incident radiation. Thus electromagnetic theory found itself in a strange situation: from interference and diffraction experiments followed the inescapable conclusion that radiation has a wave nature, while other experiments, such as those regarding the photoelectric and Compton effects, convincingly proved its corpuscular nature. While this mysterious duality remained unexplained, it was generally recognized as a fact. There were still opponents to the light quanta, however, and Bohr was one of them. His point of view was well expressed at a conference given in 1922: In spite of its heuristic value, however, the hypothesis of light-quanta, which is quite irreconciliable with so-called interference phenomena, is not able to throw light on the nature of radiation. I need only recall that these interference phenomena constitute our only means of investigating the properties of radiation and therefore of assigning any closer meaning to the frequency which in Einstein’s theory fixes the magnitude of the light-quantum.21 What did Bohr have against the hypothesis of light quanta? The relation that gives the energy of a quantum (equal to the frequency multiplied by the Planck constant), whatever its experimental success or “heuristic value” may be, is meaningless. Indeed, the frequency can only be �44 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW measured using interference phenomena that are incompatible with the hypothesis of light quanta. But why should one look for the meaning of a physical concept? For classical concepts, such a problem did not arise: the concepts of classical physics were supposed to be inherent to the physical objects that they described; nature simply was mathematical. Classical physicists might have repeated Galileo’s famous assertion that the book of universe is written in geometrical characters. As far as I know, the question about the meaning of a physical concept was first explicitly asked in Einstein’s seminal paper about relativity theory.22 He explained there that the usual description of the motion of a material point (based on coordinates as a function of time) “has no physical meaning unless we are quite clear as to what we understand by ‘time.’” He then analyzed the experimental procedure allowing us to establish the simultaneity of two events located at two different places; this analysis led him to relativistic kinematics. The important point is that the meaning of simultaneity is disclosed by the experimental procedure that establishes it. The reasoning that goes from experiment to meaning is radically different from that of classical physics, which goes from a priori mathematical principles to the interpretation of experiments. It deviates from the metaphysical foundations of classical physics and gets closer to phenomenology, according to which one should abandon dogmatic certitudes and pay attention to modes of givenness. When he looks for the meaning of frequency in the experimental method for its measurement, Bohr follows in Einstein’s footsteps; but while Einstein came back to the Galilean identification of the universe with geometry, Bohr did not stop moving forward towards phenomenological thought. Quantum Mechanics One of the main tools used by Bohr to work out his 1913 theory of atoms was found in the relations between quantum LURÇAT 45 and classical theories. The stationary states of the hydrogen atom can be numbered according to increasing energies. The number of a state is called its quantum number. Bohr noticed that the numerical results obtained by application of the quantum laws approach the classical results when the quantum number becomes very large. This “correspondence principle” was well borne out afterwards. Between 1919 and 1925, Bohr and his followers worked out the consequences of the correspondence principle. It turned out that, in the simplest cases, important results could be obtained, especially about the interactions between atoms and electromagnetic radiation; but the “systematic guessing guided by the correspondence principle”23 failed as soon as one dealt with any systems except the simplest ones. For instance the hydrogen atom, with its single electron, lends itself well to these methods, but for the helium atom, which has two electrons, they no longer work. Physicists needed to depart further from classical physics. The decisive step was taken in 1925 by Heisenberg. In his article “On the Quantum-Theoretical Re-interpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations,”24 he showed how, by transforming the differential equations of classical mechanics into difference equations, one could get a formulation of the expected theory—“quantum mechanics,”as it was called by Max Born. While in classical mechanics the physical quantities are represented by numbers, in the new theory they are represented by matrices. Very soon this “matrix mechanics” became a powerful tool, able to deal successfully with problems that had defied the physics of correspondence principle. But a theory that prescribes representing such familiar quantities as the positions and momenta of the electrons by mathematical objects other than numbers is not easy to understand. Before dealing with this difficulty, some facts should be recalled. With Louis de Broglie’s thesis (1924), the waveparticle duality had been extended to electrons. Experiments about the diffraction of electrons by a crystal soon confirmed �46 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW that electrons could indeed behave as waves. In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger raised this physical idea to the rank of a coherent theory: wave mechanics. Starting with very different physical conceptions he found again the results of matrix mechanics, especially concerning the stationary states of the hydrogen atom. He hoped that wave mechanics would lead to a theory closer to classical physics. These hopes were to be disappointed by the ensuing developments: the Schrödinger wave is not a classical wave, as shown by the essential fact that the function that describes it is not real-valued but complexvalued. As Max Born showed, the squared modulus of this function can be interpreted as a “probability of presence.” Debates between Bohr and Heisenberg Bohr at once recognized quantum mechanics as a father recognizes his child. “The whole apparatus of the quantum mechanics,” he stated in 1925, “can be regarded as a precise formulation of the tendencies embodied in the correspondence principle.”25 Among all the debates of that time, the most relevant for us here is the one between Bohr and Heisenberg. While Heisenberg emphasized mathematical formalism, Bohr wanted to understand physical concepts and to explain them in common language. According to him, whatever the merits of quantum mechanics, the problem of wave-particle duality was not yet solved. Heisenberg’s discovery of the indeterminacy relation took place after long months of intense discussions with Bohr. In his article,26 he first defined the notion of understanding: “We believe we understand intuitively a physical theory when we can imagine qualitatively its experimental consequences, and when at the same time we have recognized that the application of the theory never implies internal contradictions.” From the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics, he then deduced the indeterminacy relations: that the product of the imprecisions with which the position of an electron and its momentum are determined is of the order of the Planck constant. (It will appear later that LURÇAT 47 it is in fact a matter of inequality: the product is greater than or equal to the constant.) He also gave a physical interpretation of the indeterminacy relation, in the case of the state of lowest energy of the hydrogen atom. To determine the position of the electron, one must use a microscope illuminated with a light of wavelength shorter than the size of the electronic orbit (a notion that has no precise meaning in quantum mechanics, but retains some sense as an order of magnitude). Therefore we shall have to use gamma rays. The gamma photon changes the position of the electron (Compton effect), from which comes an imprecision in the determination of the position; the product of the imprecisions about the position and the momentum satisfies the Heisenberg relation. As will be seen, Bohr criticized this demonstration; but let us first have a look at both protagonists’ conceptions of physical knowledge. They clashed during heated discussions during the winter 1926-27. Unfortunately, “hardly any trace has survived of their conversations in the documents of that time.”27 There is, however, in an interview of Heisenberg in 1963, an analysis that agrees with what is known from other sources: The main point was that Bohr wanted to take this dualism between waves and corpuscles as the central point of the problem, and to say: “That is the center of the whole story, and we have to start from that side of the story in order to understand it.” I, in some way, would say, “Well, we have a consistent mathematical scheme and this consistent mathematical scheme tells us everything that can be observed. Nothing is in nature that cannot be described by this mathematical scheme.” It was a different way of looking at the problem because Bohr would not like to say that nature imitates a mathematical scheme, that nature does only things which fit into a mathematical scheme. While I �48 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW would say, “Well, waves and corpuscles are, certainly, a way in which we talk and we do come to these concepts from classical physics. Classical physics has taught us to talk about particles and waves, but since classical physics is not true there, why should we stick so much to these concepts? Why should we not simply say that we cannot use these concepts with a very high precision, therefore the uncertainty relations, and therefore we have to abandon these concepts to a certain extent. When we get beyond this range of the classical theory, we must realize that our words don’t fit. They don’t really get a hold in the physical reality and therefore a new mathematical scheme is just as good as anything because the new mathematical scheme then tells what may be there and what may not be there. Nature just in some way follows the scheme.”28 After quoting this interview in his book about Bohr, Abraham Pais adds: “Having talked countless hours with Bohr on complementarity, I could imagine that to Heisenberg’s ‘our words don’t fit’ he would have replied: ‘Our words have to fit, we have nothing else.’” The difference between both conceptions most clearly appears here. Heisenberg follows the Galilean tradition when he imagines a nature strictly obedient to a mathematical scheme. That can be seen also from his article, when he explains finally: The proposition that, for instance, the xcomponent of the velocity is “in reality” not a number but the diagonal term of a matrix, is perhaps no more abstract and no more unvisualizable than the statement that the electric field strengths are “in reality” the time part of an antisymmetric tensor of the spacetime world. The phrase “in reality” here is as much and as little LURÇAT 49 justified as it is in any mathematical description of natural processes. As soon as one accepts that all quantum-theoretical quantities are “in reality” matrices, the quantitative laws follow without difficulty.29 The ideas of abandoning the classical concepts and giving up common language logically follow from Heisenberg’s essential statement that “nature follows a mathematical scheme,” which repeats the Galilean thesis that the universe is written in mathematical language. As will be seen, Bohr maintained and developed the idea that classical concepts and common language remain necessary. Thus the current idea of a “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics, supposedly worked out by Bohr and Heisenberg, should be clarified and even rectified. The discussions between Heisenberg and Bohr were very fruitful for both of them, and they gave rise to two different interpretations of quantum mechanics.30 The Heisenberg interpretation continues the Pythagorean and Galilean traditions; it has been adopted by many theoretical physicists. Bohr’s interpretation breaks with these traditions; it has deep similarities to the Husserlian critique of the metaphysical foundations of classical physics. Complementarity The close personal collaboration between Bohr and Heisenberg came to an end in the summer of 1927, when Heisenberg left Copenhagen to take up a professorship in Leipzig. In September 1927, an “International Congress of Physicists” took place in Como, on the centenary of Alessandro Volta’s death. Bohr gave an address there: “The Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of Atomic Theory.”31 He first characterized the situation of quantum theory with respect to classical physics: on the one hand it entails “a fundamental limitation in the classical physical ideas, when applied to atomic phenomena”; but on the other �50 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW hand, “our interpretation of the experimental material rests extensively upon the classical concepts.” Here a brief comment is in order: we are thus, from the very beginning, at variance with the metaphysical foundations of classical physics. Concepts whose validity is subject to a fundamental limitation cannot be found in nature as one finds a character on a page; rather, the fact that they play an essential role suggests that they are built by physicists to allow an understanding of physical processes. Their privileged role stems, inseparably, both from the features of human knowledge and the nature of physical phenomena. Bohr then expressed the quantum postulate: “to any atomic process [it] attributes an essential discontinuity or rather individuality, completely foreign to classical theories and symbolized by Planck’s quantum of action” (by “individuality” Bohr means indivisibility).32 Indivisibility is indeed completely foreign to the metaphysical foundations of classical physics; in Western science the division of processes or of objects into as many parts as may be necessary is generally considered as a self-evident methodological principle.33 Bohr then explains: The postulate implies a renunciation as regards the causal space-time co-ordination of atomic processes. Indeed, our usual description of physical phenomena is based entirely on the idea that the phenomena concerned may be observed without disturbing them appreciably. . . .Now the quantum postulate implies that any observation of atomic phenomena will involve an interaction with the agency of observation not to be neglected. Accordingly, an independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation. As to the indeterminacy relations, Bohr did not deduce them from the interaction with the measuring device, but LURÇAT 51 from classical considerations. In the theory of optical instruments, indeed, there are well-known relations between the duration of a wave train and the width of its frequency spectrum, and similarly between the spatial extension of the train and the indeterminacy of its wave number. Combining these results with the Planck relation between frequency and photon energy, and the de Broglie relation between wavelength and photon momentum, one gets the Heisenberg relations. This reasoning is essentially different from Heisenberg’s. According to Bohr, the indeterminacy relations should not be explained by the perturbing action of the photon used for observation, but by the mutual limitation of the possibilities of definition of the conjugated physical quantities.34 This point lies at the center of the misunderstandings so often met with, especially in pedagogical or popular accounts of the Heisenberg relations. The central idea is the limited validity of classical concepts, from which follows the limitation of the possibilities of definition. The approximate validity of the concepts of coordinates and momentum components allows us to make picturesque representations of atomic processes. But the very fact that their validity is only approximate requires us to be careful when we ask such questions as “What is the value of the coordinate?” or “What is the value of the momentum component?” Asking such questions carelessly means going no further than Galileo’s mathematical nature, with material points having definite values of their coordinates and momenta. Heisenberg’s proposal takes up again the idea of mathematical nature, simply replacing the old mathematical concepts with new ones. Bohr’s proposal is more fundamental: the meaning of any question has to be clarified by defining the experimental device that allows us to ask it concretely. Such is the meaning of an idea that, from the point of view of the classical tradition, looks strange and even incomprehensible—the reciprocal nonautonomy of atomic processes and experimental devices. �52 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW The Debate with Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (“EPR”) In the years following the Como congress, a discussion began between Bohr and Einstein. The account of it by Bohr is the most illuminating of his texts.35 I will retain here only some passages of particular relevance for a study of Bohr’s way towards phenomenology. In 1935, Einstein, who had become a refugee in the United States, published an article with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen entitled “Can QuantumMechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” (commonly known as EPR). Bohr’s answer was published some months later under the same title.36 The first sentence in the abstract of EPR’s article at once characterized the philosophical conception of the authors: “In a complete theory there is an element corresponding to each element of reality.” This shows how opposite are the premises on both sides: as we have just seen, Bohr’s quantum postulate states precisely that atomic processes are indivisible. Einstein and his collaborators considered the case of two particles A and B that have interacted in the past, between which exists such a correlation that the measurement of a quantity (coordinate or momentum) belonging to A immediately gives the value of this quantity for B. (That such correlations exist is a consequence of quantum mechanics.) EPR states: “If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty. . .the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity.” Now, EPR continues, we can choose to measure of A either its coordinate or its momentum. Because of the correlation between A and B, these measurements will give the value of the coordinate or of the momentum of B. As we did not touch B, we must conclude that B has indeed determined values of the coordinate and the momentum. Since according to quantum mechanics this cannot be, it follows that the quantum-mechanical description is incomplete. In his answer, Bohr first outlined the general frame of the debate. The apparent contradiction raised by EPR, he says, LURÇAT 53 “in fact discloses only an essential inadequacy of the customary viewpoint of natural philosophy for a rational account of physical phenomena of the type with which we are concerned in quantum mechanics. Indeed the finite interaction between object and measuring agencies conditioned by the very existence of the quantum of action entails. . .the necessity of a final renunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude towards the problem of physical reality.” Bohr then shows that the correlations, presented by EPR in the abstract form of a mathematical expression for the wave function of the two particles, can be realized by sending the particles across suitably arranged diaphragms. He comes at last to the core of the argumentation. The criterion of physical reality proposed by EPR, he says, “contains an ambiguity as regards the meaning of the expression ‘without in any way disturbing a system.’” Of course there is no mechanical disturbance of the system B. But there is “an influence on the very conditions which define the possible types of predictions regarding the future behavior of the system” (Italics are Bohr’s). And he concludes: “Since these conditions constitute an inherent element of the description of any phenomenon to which the term ‘physical reality’ can be properly attached, we see that the argumentation of the mentioned authors does not justify their conclusion that quantum-mechanical description is essentially incomplete.” He then points out that the experimental procedures permitting the definition of complementary quantities (such as coordinate and momentum) are mutually exclusive; this “provides room for new physical laws, the coexistence of which might at first sight appear irreconcilable with the basic principles of science.” The final conclusion then follows: “It is just this entirely new situation as regards the description of physical phenomena, that the notion of complementarity aims at characterizing.” We have here a further elaboration of ideas already presented at the Como conference. But the critical passage of �54 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Bohr’s answer, quoted above, enjoys a special reputation because John Bell had explained why he did not understand it37 (One should not forget how fruitful Bell’s lack of understanding of Bohr’s conceptions was: it gave rise to Bell’s fundamental discovery, perhaps the most important one in theoretical physics in the second half of the twentieth century). It may be useful, therefore, to comment briefly on the italicized passage. In the first sentence, by “the very conditions that define the possible types of predictions regarding the future behavior of the system” Bohr means the whole experimental arrangement. The sentence then means: choosing to measure either the coordinate or the momentum of A has practical implications, because, in accordance with this choice, we must modify the experimental device. The second sentence then could be stated: in the quantum domain, a relevant description of a real phenomenon is one that includes the whole experimental arrangement. The core of the contradiction between Bohr’s conception and what he calls “the customary viewpoint of natural philosophy” may appear even better in less formal accounts. The physicist Robert H. Romer tells us how, as a graduate student, he had the opportunity to spend an hour with Einstein.38 “Do you really believe,” Einstein asked him, “that if you would measure the z component of the spin of an atom here, that might instantaneously have an effect on the spin of another atom, perhaps miles away from here?” The question here is about the correlation between two atomic objects, already considered in EPR’s article, but in a different form, one nearer to practically realizable experiments. Probably inspired by David Bohm’s treatise on quantum mechanics,39 what Einstein had in view was not the coordinates and momenta of two particles, but the spins of two atoms. To be even nearer to experiments that have been really carried through, we shall now speak about the correlated polarizations of two photons, emitted by a calcium atom. The result of the measurement of polarization of photon A is random, and the same is true for photon B. But as the two photons LURÇAT 55 have been emitted by the same atom, when we know the result of measurement A we can predict with certainty the result of measurement B, and conversely. What Einstein refers to, then, is the following paradoxical question: if the two photons are far apart, how can the result of one of the measurements have an influence on that of the other one? The correlation of both experimental results has been well proved now; for instance, in Gisin’s experiments both measurement devices are more than 6 miles apart.40 Einstein had always considered such correlations (which during his lifetime were never experimentally proved) as unacceptable; this opinion justified his opposition to quantum mechanics. In 1947, speaking to his friend Max Born about the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics (and hence about quantum mechanics itself), he wrote: “I cannot, consequently, believe it really, for the theory is incompatible with the principle according to which physics must represent a space and time reality, without spooky action at a distance.”41 Let Bohr and Husserl answer Einstein in an imaginary dialogue: “I had,” says Bohr, “answered in advance in general terms in my Como report. What the quantum postulate says is precisely that quantum phenomena have a character of indivisibility completely foreign to classical physics. Of course one may be surprised at a feature so remote from our every day experience, but there is nothing unacceptable here.” Husserl adds for his part: “When you speak about atoms (or photons), you have in view small objects belonging to ‘nature, which is in itself mathematical.’ You do not take into account the way by which these supposed objects come to our knowledge. It seems that now, experiment is for you no longer anything else but a way of checking the theories. If the raw experimental facts (the �56 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW click of a counter, or a trace in a Wilson chamber) were mere signs for elements of the mathematical nature, one could disregard the signs and care only about the signified. But as I have explained long ago, it is misleading to think that in physics we are dealing with ‘true’ physical things, while the appearances are only signs of these true things. As I said, ‘the perceived physical thing itself is always and necessarily precisely the thing which the physicist explores and scientifically determines following the method of physics.’42 Now there is nothing in the experimental results that would allow us to state that the part of the experimental arrangement located in A, for instance, deals with a definite partial object, named the photon A; we can only say that the complete experimental arrangement deals with the radiation (two photons per atom) emitted by calcium atoms. We must abide by what is or can be actually perceived.” “This is,” Bohr adds finally, “precisely what you did at the time of your seminal article about special relativity, when you discarded Newton’s absolute space (at that time an essential part of the supposed mathematical nature) because it has no counterpart in the experimental methods of measuring distances and durations.” To follow Bohr’s and Husserl’s wise advice, we should mention measurements carried out on the “biphotons” emitted by calcium atoms. The correlation between the results recorded by both parts of the experimental arrangement (photomultipliers and polarizers on both sides) shows that as far as the polarizations are concerned, the biphoton is not separable into two photons. This result is surprising, but it is the case. One of the great merits of EPR’s article is that it raised the problem of distant correlations, a striking proof of the originality of quantum phenomena. LURÇAT 57 Bohr’s Report about His Discussions with Einstein: Complementarity This report was published in 1949, in a volume of the collection “The Library of Living Philosophers” devoted to Einstein.43 Going back over the successive stages of the debate, Bohr improved or corrected several of his formulations, nearing a phenomenological approach. First he reviewed the role of classical concepts, which he considered essential for the description of experiments and their results to be communicable to other people. Bohr then critically examined the interpretation of the indeterminacy relation. “A sentence like ‘we cannot know both the momentum and the position of an atomic object,’” he explained: raises at once questions as to the physical reality of two such attributes of the object, which can be answered only by referring to the conditions for the unambiguous use of space-time concepts, on the one hand, and dynamical conservation laws, on the other hand. While the combination of these concepts into a single picture of a causal chain of events is the essence of classical mechanics, room for regularities beyond the grasp of such a description is just afforded by the circumstance that the study of complementary phenomena demands mutually exclusive experimental arrangements. Let us comment on this passage. Energy and momentum, subjected to conservation laws, allow a causal description of atomic processes. In the Compton effect, for instance, the collision between a photon and an electron—which in the initial state are supposed to have definite values of energy and momentum—is the cause of a final state in which both particles take different directions (“scattering”). This description allows us to discover a relation, well confirmed by experiment, between the deflection of the X-radiation and �58 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the increase of its wavelength. But on the other hand a spacetime description of the X-beam is necessary for the definition and measurement of its wavelength; such a description corresponds to experimental situations where diffraction phenomena, described in terms of waves, can take place. Bohr’s comment, then, is that these two descriptions require mutually exclusive experimental arrangements. This allows a rigorous critique of the quoted sentence (“We cannot know both”), which implicitly assumes that the particles really have at any time, as in classical mechanics, determined values of coordinates and momenta. According to the Galilean conception of nature as in itself mathematical, one may speak about “the position (or the momentum) of the particle,” without wondering whether these words have a precise meaning. Bohr requires us to become aware that a particle has such an attribute (coordinate or momentum) only as a part of a relevant experimental arrangement. As the arrangements relative to coordinate and momentum are mutually exclusive, the criticized sentence has no rigorous meaning. This example shows how complementarity requires us to get rid of the “nature mathematical in itself ” and relate any statement about atomic objects to the experimental situation in which it can be tested. Bohr’s Report about His Discussions with Einstein: The Observer and Objectivity The report then described Einstein’s objections to some quantum statements. In his answers, Bohr always implemented the above stated complementarity principle. He also dealt with the random aspect of atomic processes (This is an aspect which can be easily observed if one uses a radioactive source of weak intensity and a counter: the only reasonable description of the time sequence of the clicks of the counter is as a random sequence). According to Dirac, individual effects of that kind correspond to a choice on the part of nature. According to Heisenberg, on the other hand, in such cases “we have to do with a choice on the part of the LURÇAT 59 ‘observer’ constructing the measuring instruments and reading their recording.” As he quickly refuted both points of view, Bohr put forward an interesting argument about Heisenberg: “It is certainly not possible for the observer to influence the events which may appear under the conditions he has arranged.” This sentence briefly settles both sides of the question of the “observer.” The observer does not create or influence the phenomenon, but he creates the conditions of the phenomenon. On the one hand, the laws of atomic processes are objective, independent of our desires and of fashions (at least in their essential content); but on the other hand, the properties of individual atomic objects can only appear when we, physicists, prepare an experimental arrangement and record the results. (Or else, when we prepare the arrangement for the automatic recording of the results.) This statement is not a dispensable comment: it is inscribed in the very mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics. The basic element of the formalism is indeed an amplitude, made of two abstract vectors; one of them represents the preparation of an experiment, while the second one represents one of its possible results.44 Without physicists, there is neither preparation nor results. Of course the experimental results are objective: if the experiments are correctly and honestly carried out, their results will be (approximately) the same in different laboratories and different countries. One can hardly say, however, that they are independent of human beings, because without human beings there would be no results. In that respect, atoms differ from physical objects of human or astronomical dimensions. One might try to summarize this essential difference by saying that atoms are invisible. This formulation, however, is too cursory. Microbes and remote galaxies seem invisible as well, but they are able to be seen. To see them, one magnifies their image with a microscope or a telescope; as Galileo replied to those who questioned the objectivity of the images given by his telescope, perhaps lynxes, with their sight better than ours, �60 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW can see the satellites of Jupiter he had discovered. But atomic objects make their entrance in the sensible world of appearances thanks to a much more complex and roundabout process: in a counter or in a Wilson-type chamber, they come into contact with a macroscopic system in an unstable state, in which they trigger an avalanche-type process. For the believer of “nature mathematical in itself,” such a difference does not deserve any attention: atoms, like stones and stars, are “in space.” But it is an essential difference from the point of view of common sense, as well as for the phenomenologist, whose field of study can be defined as “the method of the analysis of essences within the sphere of immediate evidence.”45 Furthermore, the phenomenologist has something to add here, because for him the essential difference between the modes of givenness of atoms on the one hand, and of stones and stars on the other hand, points out that they belong to different regions of reality.46 The misunderstandings between Bohr and most physicists stem from his claim of an essential difference between quantum phenomena and the world of classical physics. The drama of physics, and more particularly of quantum physics, is that it never admitted the notion of regions of reality or, equivalently, the notion of essential differences. When Galileo annexed sensible appearances to the world of mathematical concepts, he put an obstacle in the way of understanding what physics really is, an obstacle still not overcome. In his study “Einstein and the Quantum Theory,” Abraham Pais recalls his conversations with Einstein.47 There we find one of the most striking examples of a refusal of essential differences. I quote Pais: We often discussed his notions on objective reality. I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it. LURÇAT 61 There is no question that the moon existed before human beings were there to look at it; all the same, quantum mechanics describes phenomena as prepared and observed by human beings. Abiding by “nature mathematical in itself ” leads to insuperable problems. It would probably be wiser to take into account the notion of regions of reality, admitting that the moon, on the one hand, and atomic objects, on the other hand, which are given to us in such radically different ways, belong to different regions. This being said, one should never forget that without Einstein and some of his followers (David Bohm, John Bell), who resolutely and perseveringly opposed Bohr’s views, we would have perhaps gotten no further than the Bohrian vulgate of the 1930s and 1940s, according to which there was essentially no problem. Today mimetism and unanimity are harmful to science. Bohr’s Report about His Discussions with Einstein: The Phenomenon Finally the report recalled a review of some terminological questions, made by Bohr in his contribution to the conference, “New Theories in Physics” (Warsaw, 1938): In this connection I warned especially against phrases, often found in the physical literature, such as “disturbing of phenomena by observation” or “creating physical attributes to atomic objects by measurements.” Such phrases, which may serve to remind one of the apparent paradoxes in quantum theory, are at the same time apt to cause confusion, since words like “phenomena” and “observations,” just as “attributes” and “measurements,” are used in a way hardly compatible with common language and practical definition. Both phrases are in fact quotations from Heisenberg. We have already discussed the first one, and the second one can �62 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW be found in his article on the uncertainty relations: “The ‘trajectory’ first comes into being by the fact that we observe it” (“Die ‘Bahn’ entsteht erst dadurch, dass wir sie beobachten”).48 Bohr then explained how one should understand the words “phenomenon” and “observation:” As a more appropriate way of expression I advocated the application of the word phenomenon exclusively to refer to the observations obtained under specified circumstances, including an account of the whole experimental arrangement. In such terminology, the observational problem is free of any special intricacy since, in actual experiments, all observations are expressed by unambiguous statements referring, for instance, to the registration of the point at which an electron arrives at a photographic plate. Moreover, speaking in such a way is just suited to emphasize that the appropriate physical interpretation of the symbolic quantum-mechanical formalism amounts only to predictions, of determinate or statistical character, pertaining to individual phenomena appearing under conditions defined by classical physical concepts. Here, Bohr defines his rules: break with “nature mathematical in itself ” and use “practical definitions,” dealing with experiments and their results. Describe them in the language of classical physics, appropriate to the visible world. Keep to the definition of the phenomenon: it occurs in conditions determined by the physicist; it consists of macroscopic events; it is within the reach of senses, hence it can be described in “common language.” Finally, in the use of the notion of attribute, Bohr sees the danger of forgetting that position, momentum, and other quantities relating to an atomic object can only be defined in terms of a method of measurement, which implicitly supposes LURÇAT 63 an indissoluble bond between object and measuring apparatus. Of course, it is not always easy to follow these rules, for an age-old tradition constantly incites us to ask: Where is the atom? Which path did the photon follow? But we know that we should answer these questions with practical definitions: if you want to know which path the photon has followed, build and use an apparatus designed to give an answer. Conclusion In his Vienna lecture of 1935, Husserl summarized the situation of modern physical sciences: Mathematical natural science is a wonderful technique for making inductions with an efficiency, a degree of probability, a precision, and a computability that were simply unimaginable in earlier times. As an accomplishment it is a triumph of the human spirit. As for the rationality of its methods and theories, however, it is a thoroughly relative one. It even presupposes a fundamental approach that is itself totally lacking in rationality. Since the intuitively given surrounding world, this merely subjective realm, is forgotten in scientific investigation, the working subject is himself forgotten; the scientist does not become a subject of investigation (Accordingly, from this standpoint, the rationality of the exact sciences is of a piece with the rationality of the Egyptian pyramids).49 In classical physics, the oversight of the subject manifests itself in the form of belief in mathematical nature. Galileo began with the sensible world of appearances; he then amputated from it of most of its qualities, and, finally, denied the reality of the suppressed qualities. (There is no essential difference between the Galilean illusion and the present-day naturalistic illusion, according to which the essence of subjec- �64 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW tivity lies in the electrochemical processes that take place in the brain.)50 With quantum physics, the negation of the subject began to exert its corrosive action within the physics itself. The classical physicist did not understand the nature of his science; the quantum physicist does not understand his very science, and, as we have seen, he is in many cases aware of this lack of understanding. Locked up in the Galilean prison, he does not see the key proposed by phenomenology, a key that Bohr, to a certain extent, rediscovered by himself. For a long time, atoms could be reached only by speculation, first philosophical, then scientific. It became possible to perform experiments on atoms only when scientific instruments designed to comply with theoretical notions about their nature could be made. To make counters and chambers of various types, one must have the electromagnetism of Maxwell-Faraday, notions about electrical discharge in gases or about thermodynamics, and basic notions of atomic theory. Atoms, molecules, nuclei, particles, which are not parts of the sensible world of appearances, can have perceptible effects and become accessible to experiment, but only in a society with a high degree of scientific and technical development. They are given to us in quite a different way than are stones, trees or stars. But the essential importance of this difference can be seen only by getting out of the metaphysical matrix inside which the growth of classical physics took place. As long as physics is understood as dealing with “nature mathematical by itself,” perceptibility, or lack thereof, will continue to be reputed unessential. In the prevailing way of understanding quantum phenomena, quantum mechanics is a universal theory, while classical physics is merely an approximation valid for processes involving actions large with respect to the Planck constant. The subjective side of the difference thus falls out of sight, and both the way to Bohrian conceptions and the way to phenomenology are barred. LURÇAT 65 Quantum mechanics is really, as René Thom once put it, an “intellectual scandal”: a theory successfully used in many different fields of science and technology, which most people accept without understanding it. Husserlian phenomenology proposes a frame in which this paradoxical lack of understanding might be understood, thereby opening a way towards recovery. It invites us to enlarge our horizons, especially by going back over the origins of physics (of modern physics, but not only of it). It suggests that our irrational attitude towards quantum mechanics is part of a wider historical fact: the global lack of understanding of the nature of science, which became an acute problem with the advent of modern science. In the present situation of the world, this problem has become particularly urgent.51 I would like to thank Pamela Kraus for her kind linguistic and editorial help. 1 Declarations of Bohr reported by A. Petersen, The Philosophy of Niels Bohr, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 19, pp. 8-14 (1963). See also M. Jammer, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1974, p. 204. 2 I use the convenient term “atomic” to refer to such physical entities as atoms, molecules, nuclei, and particles. 3 R.P Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, Cambridge, Mass., MIT . Press, 1965, p. 129. 4 R. Penrose, in: R. Penrose, C.J. Isham (eds.), Quantum Concepts in Space and Time, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 139. 5 R. Thom, Prédire n’est pas Expliquer, Paris, Flammarion, 1993, p. 86. 6 Conclusive experiments about the violation of Bell’s inequalities have been made by Alain Aspect and his collaborators in Orsay: A. Aspect, P . Grangier, G. Roger, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 47, p. 460 (1981); Vol. 49, p. 1804 (1982). More recently, I have been interested in the experiments of Nicolas Gisin and his group in Geneva: W Tittel, J. Brendel, H. . Zbinden, N. Gisin, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 81, p. 3563 (1998); A. Stefanov, H. Zbinder, N. Gisin, A. Suarez, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 88, p. 120404 (2002). Additionally, I have considered those of Anton �66 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW LURÇAT Zeilinger and his group in Vienna: G. Weihs, T. Gennevein, C. Simon, H. Weinfurter, A. Zeilinger, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 81, p. 5039 (1998). York, Harper and Row Publ., 1971. I translate from the French translation by Paul Kessler, La Partie et le Tout, Paris Albin Michel, 1972. 7 67 16 Such is the case, for instance, of the philosopher David Z. Albert’s book Quantum Mechanics and Experience, Cambridge, Mass. and London, Harvard University Press, 1992; of the historian of science Mara Beller’s book Quantum Dialogue, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1999; of the physicist Frank Laloë’s article “Do We Really Understand Quantum Mechanics? Strange Correlations, Paradoxes, and Theorems,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 69, pp. 655-701 (2001); and of the physicist Bernard d’Espagnat’s book Traité de Physique et de Philosophie, Paris, Fayard, 2002. 8 E. Husserl, article Phenomenology, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 17 (1947) (first publication: 1929). See also E. Husserl, Collected Works, Vol. 8, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London, 1999. 9 Commenting on his answer to Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, Bohr writes: “Rereading these passages, I am deeply aware of the inefficiency of expression which must have made it very difficult to appreciate the trend of the argumentation.” N. Bohr, “Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,” in: P Schilpp (ed.), Albert .A. Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist, New York, Tudor Publishing Company, 1949. This text is reprinted in: N. Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1958. Also in: J. Kalckar (ed.), Niels Bohr Collected Works, Vol. 7, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 1996, p. 234. (In the following the Collected Works is abbreviated as BCW .) 10 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, §9h. Translation by David Carr: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1970. 11 E. Husserl, The Crisis §9h. Translation quoted, p. 51. All the analysis in the following section is a simplified summary of this paragraph of the Crisis. 12 See E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1924; revised edition, 1932), Doubleday Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, N.Y., 1954. 13 E. Husserl, The Crisis, loc. cit. 14 L. Rosenfeld, Niels Bohr, Biographical Sketch, in: J. Rud Nielsen (ed.), Niels Bohr Collected Works, Vol. 1, Amsterdam, North-Holland Physics Publishing, 1972, p. XIX. 15 From W Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze, Munich, R. Piper & Co . Verlag, 1969, chapter 3. English translation: Physics and Beyond, New The remark about the frequency determined not only by the initial state of the atom, but also by its final state can be found in Bohr’s Nobel Conference (1922): The Structure of the Atom, in BCW Vol. 4, 1977, , pp. 467-482. 17 N. Bohr, On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules, Part I, § 1; in BCW Vol. 2, 1981, p. 167. , 18 W Miller, “Semiclassical Methods in Chemical Physics,” Science, .H. Vol. 233, pp. 171-177 (1986). T. Uzer, D. Farrelly, J.A. Milligan, P .E. Raines, J.P Skelton, “Celestial Mechanics on a Microscopic Scale,” . Science, Vol. 253, pp. 42-48 (1991). 19 The interested reader may refer to: M. Jammer, The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics, New York, Mc Graw Hill, 1966; B.L. van der Waerden, Sources of Quantum Mechanics, Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1967; or to A. Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times, in Physics, Philosophy, and Polity, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991. 20 A translation of this article is given in: D. ter Haar, The Old Quantum Theory, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1967. 21 N. Bohr, The Structure of the Atom, above quoted conference; see p. 470. 22 A. Einstein, Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper, Annalen der Physik, 4th series, Vol. XVII, pp. 891-921 (1905). A translation of this article is given in: H. A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Minkowski, H. Weyl, The Principle of Relativity, New York, Dover Publications, 1952. 23 This phrase belongs to van der Waerden, see reference 19. 24 W Heisenberg, “Über Quantentheoretische Umdeutung Kinematischer . und Mechanischer Beziehungen,” Zeitschrift für Physik, Vol. 33, pp. 879893 (1925). A translation of this article is given in van der Waerden, reference 19. 25 N. Bohr, “Atomic Theory and Mechanics,” Supplement to Nature, December 5, 1925, pp. 845-852. In BCW Vol. 5, pp. 273-280. , 26 W Heisenberg, “Über des Anschaulichen Inhalt der . Quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik,” Zeitschrift für Physik, Vol. 43, pp. 172-198 (1927). The original text is given in BCW Vol. 6. , There is a translation in: J.A. Wheeler, W Zurek, Quantum Theory .H. and Measurement, Princeton University Press, 1983. 27 I have used the book by Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Vol. 1 to 6, New York, �68 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Springer-Verlag, 1982-2001. See Vol. 6, “The Completion of Quantum Mechanics, 1926-1941,” chapter 2. The quotation is from page 151. 28 Interview of Heisenberg quoted by A. Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times. . .quoted above, pp. 309-310. 29 W Heisenberg, “Über den Anschaulischen Inhalt,” article quoted . above, end of § 4; translation quoted, p. 82. 30 See the books, already quoted, of J.Mehra and H.Rechenberg, and of A. Pais, and above all the introduction and comments of J. Kalckar to Vol. 6 of BCW . 31 N. Bohr, ”The Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of Atomic Theory,” Nature, Vol. 121, pp. 580-590 (1928). Reprinted in: The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. 1, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1987. Also in: J.A. Wheeler, W Zurek, Quantum Theory and Measurement, .H. book quoted above; and Vol. 6 of BCW . 32 “The inability of the classical frame of concepts to comprise the peculiar feature of indivisibility, or ‘individuality,’ characterizing the elementary processes.” N. Bohr, Discussions with Einstein. The passage quoted is at page 34 of: N. Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. op. cit. 33 Descartes, for instance, states this principle explicitly in the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (Rule 13), and in the Discours de la Méthode, Second part. 34 “Indeed, a discontinuous change of energy and momentum during observation could not prevent us from ascribing accurate values to the space-time coordinates, as well as to the momentum-energy components before and after the process. The reciprocal uncertainty which always affects the values of these quantities is (. . .) essentially an outcome of the limited accuracy with which changes in energy and momentum can be defined, when the wave-fields used for the determination of the spacetime coordinates of the particle are sufficiently small.” (N. Bohr, “The Quantum Postulate,” § 3) 35 N. Bohr, Discussions with Einstein. I have analyzed other aspects of the Bohr-Einstein debate in my book Niels Bohr et la Physique Quantique, coll. “Points Sciences,” Paris, Editions du Seuil, 2001. 36 A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, N. Rosen, Physical Review, Vol. 47, pp. 777780 (1935). N. Bohr, Physical Review, Vol. 48, pp. 696-702 (1935). Both texts are reprinted in: J.A. Wheeler, W Zurek, Quantum Theory and .H. Measurement, quoted above. Also in BCW Vol. 7. , LURÇAT 69 37 J. Bell, “Bertlmann’s Socks and the Nature of Reality,” Journal de Physique, Vol. 42, Coll. C2, suppl. n°3, pp. 41-61 (1981). Reprinted in: J. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press, 1987. 38 R.H. Romer, Editorial: John S. Bell (1928-1990), “The Man Who Proved Einstein was Right,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 59, p. 299 (1991). 39 D. Bohm, Quantum Theory, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall, 1951. 40 See the articles of the Gisin group quoted above, reference 6. 41 A. Einstein, letter to Max Born, March 3, 1947, in: M. Born (ed.), The Born-Einstein Letters, London, Macmillan, 1971. French translation by Pierre Leccia: Albert Einstein, Max Born, Hedwig Born, Correspondance 1916-1955, Commentée par Max Born, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1972. 42 E. Husserl, Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie. I. Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die Reine Phänomenologie (1913), p. 99. Translation by F. Kersten: Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, Vol. 2, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982. 43 N. Bohr, Discussions with Einstein, see note 9. 44 This is explained in textbooks, for instance by Feynman: R.P Feynman, . R.B. Leighton, M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 3, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, 1965. 45 E. Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie (1907), p. 14. Translation by Lee Hardy: The Idea of Phenomenology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/ Boston/ London, p. 70. 46 E. Husserl, Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. by Marly Biemel, Husserliana 5, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Translation by Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences. Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, Vol. 1, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1980. 47 A. Pais, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 51, p. 863 (1979). The quoted passage is at page 907. �70 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 71 48 W Heisenberg, article quoted above (note 26), §3, page 185 of the . original text. Eve Separate 49 Eva Brann E. Husserl, Die Krisis des Europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie, published as an Appendix of Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften. Translation by David Carr in The Crisis. Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity, a lecture presented before the Vienna Cultural Society on May 7 and May 10, 1935. 50 This prejudice had been already aptly criticized by Erwin Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne, Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie, 1st edition, 1935; 2nd edition, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Tokyo, Springer-Verlag, 1956. 51 Such is the problem that I study in my book De la Science à l'ignorance, Paris, Editions du Rocher, 2003. In memory of John P. McNulty (1952-2005), an acute and sensitive reader of great books and a lovely partner in our seminar conversations, particularly about Paradise Lost. Contents 1. Is there a Subtext? 2. Satan’s Eve: The Schismatic Pair 3. Eve Separate: The Mother of Modernity 4. Domestic Adam: The Clod Erect 5. Poetic Milton: The Devil’s Party 6. Insipid Heaven, Sapient Hell 7. Mismanaged Monarchy 8. Infected Paradise 9. Original Siring 10. Eve’s Happy Fault and Salutary Fall 11. Wisdom Without Their Leave For stirring up thought in general and for particular insights I warmly thank the members of a seminar on Paradise Lost held at St. John’s College on October 30-31, 2005: Patricia Cook and George Lucas, Margaret and Steve Crockett, Cecie and Paul Dry, Murray Dry, Emily and Sam Kutler, Gretchen and Barry Mazur, Joyce Olin and Chris Nelson. At lunch with Max Kronberg, then one of our juniors (who one and all read Paradise Lost), I asked him why God made some angels, a third, to be precise, prone to pride and jealousy. He shot right back: “Because he wanted all this to happen”—the very answer to justify Milton’s ways to God. My thanks to my colleagues in Annapolis: Tom May, who told me a number of interesting things that I’ve made mine below, and Jonathan Tuck, who looked at the piece with a keen eye. After completing this piece I co-led a week’s worth of alumni seminars on Paradise Lost with my colleague David Carl in Santa Fe. In its course pretty much everything I had noticed was brought on the scene and a lot more (much of it by my co-leader), which is here incorporated. Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College, Annapolis. �72 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 1. Is there a Subtext? Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem of such panoramic grandeur and such human acuteness as may wean one—and has even weaned me—from a lifelong exclusive Homerophilia. Partly its attraction is that it is insinuatingly suspect. I keep having the sense that something is going on that runs right counter to the overt text. There seems to be a separate, opposed meaning. Should it be called a hidden agenda, a subtext? On the supposition of trust—to which I warmly subscribe—what the words in a book say is what the author means; it is simply the reasonable faith that the writer knows how to express himself. So if an attentive reader discerns an under-meaning, there is in fact a subtext, a second probably more seriously meant meaning. Such occulted meanings are associated with esotericism, “insiderism,” the notion that the author speaks with a forked tongue—one text for the naively simpleminded, another for the initiable. The purpose is to protect the author from misapprehension by ungifted, and from persecution by orthodox, readers. But I don’t think great authors are often in that mode. The deep matters they raise are too well guarded from overeasy access by their inherent difficulty to want the shield of obscurantism, while from imputations of heterodoxy there is really no protection; its odor cannot be masked. Consequently I have a feeling, just a sense, that something much stranger than the double intention of a subtext runs through Paradise Lost: that Milton’s judgments denigrate what his representations magnify, that his characters contradict his condemnations and justifications. I have no idea how much a close study of his published opinions or a deep penetration into his private thoughts could establish the truth; I feel terminally baffled by the points I’m about to make. I keep having the sense that some truth in this cosmic Christian drama keeps asserting itself to Milton as poet which, as a theologian, he suppresses. But that notion implies that the story of this temporal episode within eternity is not BRANN 73 altogether a made fiction but has the power of unintended consequences that belongs to living truth; I just don’t know. So I’ll set out my sense, in brief. 2. Satan’s Eve: The Schismatic Pair Satan lies in wait, hardly hoping that he “might find Eve separate.” “Eve separate he spies” (9.422, 424). She has separated herself from her consort Adam—“split,” as our young now say. It is a good word, the English for the Greek verb whence comes “schism,” breaking away. Satan, in turn, addresses her as “sole wonder” and presents himself as “single” (9.532, 536). He often speaks of himself as “alone” (e.g. 2.975, 3.441), but “single” had then as now another meaning as well: unmarried. And surely he woos her; he is the primal seducer. But it doesn’t take much. Eve, that crooked bone, is a born schismatic as Satan is a created one. Or it is at least a great question just how he and his host of fallen angels come to be heaven’s splitters, the aboriginal protestants. Here is how they are a pair, alike in features that bear the name of badness in Milton’s book, but are attractive in description, and what is more have the stamp of approval in our day. First then, Eve too wants to be alone. We respect that: “I need time to myself, I need space.” She is indeed the instigator of her separation from a weakly reluctant Adam. “Eve first” speaks up: “Let us divide our labors”—she is the inventor if not of the division of labor then of separate work spaces!—“Sole Eve, associate sole” he answers, meaning more than he knows, the clueless man, but then he gets it: “but if much converse perhaps / Thee satiate, to short absence I should yield”—though she has pleaded efficiency rather than surfeit (9.205 ff.). He, the “patriarch of mankind,” lectures her on free will: “O woman. . . .” But “Eve / persisted, yet submiss.” It is what we have learned to call the �74 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW passive/aggressive mode, the underdog’s determined selfdefense. She is, like Satan, a dissimulator who keeps some things private. For she has had a week to ponder Satan’s night visitation in which, “Squat like a toad” he whispered suggestions in her ear (I imagine the left, for this is surely a parody of the impregnating Holy Spirit who comes to the Virgin by the right ear in many late Medieval paintings) and manages to “raise / At least distempered, discontented thoughts” (4.806). Thus she surely has more in mind than mere efficiency in weeding Paradise as she separates from her husband. As she will later say: “Was I to have never parted from thy side? / As good to have grown still there a lifeless rib” (9.1153). There is a whole list of similarities of situation and likenesses of character between the fallen angel and the woman, for which I could cite book and line: Both are kept at a remove from their God, he by the Son, she by her mate. His rebelliousness is proudly asserted, her resistance submissively masked, but both have that in them that is ready to abrogate obedience: “Our great Forbidder” she calls God, and Satan calls him “the Threat’ner” (9.815, 687). Satan is a brilliant sophist on the ancient model, but his clever proof to her that a God who inspires fear is no God, so that her “fear itself of death removes the fear” (9.702), is matched by her clever musings: “good unknown, sure is not had, or had / And yet unknown, is as not had at all. / In plain then, what forbids he but to know, / Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? / Such prohibitions bind not” (9.756). She is willful, restless, venturesome, poignant in her lapse, proud as the mother of mankind. Satan is willfulness incarnate, a great engineer, the original Adventurer (10.440), both as explorer and in the older sense of undertaking grand ventures, such as the development of Hell, the colonizing of earth, and the sponsoring of the great highway that makes Hell and this world “one continent of easy thoroughfare” (10.392). He is, in fact, a Promethean figure, a god at odds with his Chief, who is a patron of invention and, in his BRANN 75 perverse way, a benefactor of mankind (Sec. 1). He is the instigating cause of the earth’s obliquity, that skewing of the terrestrial pole which brings us seasonal variety and moral diversity; he is the ultimate reason for human mortality and the succession of generations (how on earth would Eden have held all the promised increase of immortals?), in short, of history. There is true pathos in the racking pain of his inability to love: About to spoil Paradise, he curses familiarly but eerily: “O hell!” he says, seeing the bright spirits, the humans, “whom my thoughts pursue with wonder and could love” (4.358). There is real candor in his confession of unwillingness to repent: He concludes a meditation on his certain relapse were he to submit with a chillingly final choice, “Evil be thou my good” (4.110). And there is residual receptivity to the influence of innocent grace: Seeing Eve, alone, “that space the Evil One abstracted stood / From his own evil, and for the time remained / Stupidly good” (9.463). Satan has been said to be modeled on Iago, literature’s most notorious bad man. They are both, to be sure, racked with resentment for being passed over by their superiors, but there is an enormous difference in their stature: Iago suffers meanly and mutely, Satan grandly and candidly—at least by and to himself. Eve cannot match his stature, but there are two capstone transgressions in which they are nearly equal. One is the drive to explore, experiment, experience—as he sails through the uncreated void to explore the created world, she dreams of flying with him to behold the earth in its immensity, the first human to ride the skies. The second is the desire for godhead: He thinks himself God’s equal, and she, eating, has Godhead in her thoughts (9.790). 3. Eve Separate: The Mother of Modernity In short, they are the original moderns, he in God’s universe, she in our world. For there is a generic modernity: asserted individual will; unbounded experimental science (whose root meaning is, wonderfully, the same as that of schism: dividing, �76 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW cutting off); chameleon-like adaptability (Lucifer-Satan is a master of transformations, willed and imposed: cherub, toad, serpent; Eve too undergoes some pretty dramatic changes); future-oriented temporality (here Satan and the Son cooperate, one to make sin endemic, the other to make salvation attainable); and godlike creativity (such is attributed to man by Pico della Mirandola in that manifesto of protomodernity, the “Oration on the Dignity of Man” of the 1480’s: Adam, man, has no fixed being; rather “our chameleon” assumes by his own free will whatever form he selects, and so he can be as God). But this perennial possibility is realized predominantly in historical modernity, our epoch, within which we are temporal compatriots. We are indeed the progeny of Eve, for with her all its deeper characteristics originate, above all narcissistic individualism, the thirst for liberation, the lust for experience, a hunger for equality, and a drive to resolve all mysteries, “to leave no problem unsolved,” as a founder of modernity puts it (Vieta, Analytical Art, 1591). There is a startling story Eve tells Adam, a story of her first awakening into consciousness (4.449). “With unexperienced thought” she goes to a smooth lake, bends over it—and falls in love with what she sees, pining for her own image “with vain desire”; she is the first self and image worshiper. When she first sees Adam she doesn’t much like him; he is “less fair, / less winning soft, less amiably mild.” She runs away; Adam tells her that she is part of him, body and soul, and she yields. Her first love is herself—even before Satan leaps into Paradise. Is self-love ever innocent? Now she gets what she is longing for, experience and experiences, discovery by trying things out and stimulation by affects deliberately aroused. She has eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which the Tempter calls “Mother of science” (9.680). She has, instantly, grown “mature in knowledge.” She knows what to call her fascination: “Experience, next to thee I owe, / Best guide;” “thou. . .givest access. . .” to secret wisdom (9.807). And in short order she BRANN 77 invents novelties now well known to us; this wisdom of hers has much of applied science, particularly political and psychological know-how. She tells an outright, very politic lie, the original lie on earth: She figures first that she might keep the secret of the fruit so as to “render me more equal, and perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior; for inferior who is free?” (9.823). After this very contemporary manifesto of family politics, she reconsiders to herself: What if I do die, as promised, and he takes on another Eve? Better to die together. But to him she cleverly claims that her “growing up to godhead” was all done for his sake, and that he must join her “lest thou not tasting, different degree / Disjoin us, and I then too late renounce / Duty for thee, when fate will not permit” (9. 883). A barefaced, self-serving lie! Of course she has already invented drug-taking and having ecstatic experiences, and instant knowledge; experiential learning too will be her invention (10.967). Shortly she will propose birth-control—“willful barrenness”—and suicide to him (10.987, 1001, 1042). Ask where all the snares and escapes of our time come from, and the answer is: Eve. To him she calls herself the “weaker sex” (9.383), for that is what he thinks, but her submissiveness hides a huge ambition: Satan gets to her by addressing her as Queen of the Universe, Empress of the World, “a goddess among gods, adored and served” (9.547). It cannot be a really meek, dependent woman who glories in such appellations; it is, after all, what domineering men want as well. Recall that the primary, the horror-inspiring transgression of Mr. Kurtz in dark Africa is that he accepts worship and human sacrifice as a god, and he is a very demon of force. If anything she’s a born outlaw: To the Serpent she interprets paradisaical life as one prohibition, and for the rest “we live / Law to ourselves, our reason is our law” (9.653). But from one perspective she’s no outlaw nor a rebel either. Our political progenitor, Locke, points out that rebellare means “to go back to a state of war,” and that the true rebel is the contract-breaking tyrant, not his imposed-on �78 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW subjects; they are revolutionaries (Second Treatise, para. 226). Now Satan can claim that his monarch has in fact revoked, if not a social contract, then a heavenly understanding, and Eve does claim that the single prohibition is irrational in principle and defectively promulgated: She knows neither why the tree is forbidden, nor what the punishment means, nor when it will be imposed. To return to my initial perplexity: There is no question that the above is a skewed version of these events, that Milton expresses more respect for Adam than for Eve, that he is not unsympathetic when he allows Adam to call her “that bad woman” (10.837), that Satan is the Evil One. There are formulaic explanations for my unhistoric perspective: Milton’s poem sets out Christian doctrine, not necessarily orthodox but fervent; I am a post-Christian modern who believes that the soundest part of modernity is rooted in pagan philosophy. So what seems pernicious to him seems admirable to me. Or, alternately, Milton was in fact a revolutionary, a republican, a defender of regicide, so naturally he has some sympathy for the adverse party in heaven and on earth. Both explanations have plausibility, and neither resolves the perplexity: How do Satan and Eve come to be such exact types of modernity? Is our world Satanic or was Hell Luciferic, “light-bringing”?, meaning: is our present condition the consequence of a devilish seduction—as Goethe’s Faust sells his soul to the devil for the boon of restless experience and grand enterprise—or is it really the other way round: that Hell was from its founding the place of enlightenment and progress—and we moderns found that out? 4. Domestic Adam: The Clod Erect And then, who is really dominant in the Original Pair? The splendor of Adam’s looks is conveyed in sonorous lines. Satan sees the pair, distinguished from the other creatures by being “erect and tall, / God-like erect, with native honor clad / In BRANN 79 naked majesty. . .though both / Not equal, as their sex and not equal seemed; / For contemplation he and valor formed, / For softness she and sweet attractive grace, / He for God only, she for God in him: / His fair large front and eyes sublime declared / Absolute rule” (4.288). Here is what is odd. That Adam is a well-made creature of fine bearing and natural dignity, a good man and loving husband, is unquestionable. But not contemplation, nor valor, nor absolute rule are in fact his forte. He is, to put it plainly, an upright klutz, one of those amiable, fine males a female might well cling to, well knowing she could run circles around him—and so Eve does. As for contemplation. In that wonderful interlude, Books 5-7, the archangel Raphael is sent to Paradise to warn and instruct Adam—Adam, not Eve, who sits listening “retired in sight” (8.41), having served the angel a paradisaical meal, which the angel, hilariously, falls to and begins “with keen dispatch / Of real hunger, and concoctive heat / To transubstantiate” (5.437). She listens on the sidelines to the story of Satan’s war and defeat. To be sure, it all comes too late; he has already leaped into Paradise and entered her imagination in a dream—part of Heaven’s mismanagement I’ll talk of below. But when Adam’s “countenance seemed / Entering on studious thoughts abstruse” (8.39), that is, when the theological account of Heaven’s battles and earth’s creation are done and the astronomical part begins, she goes off to her gardening “not as not with such discourse / Delighted, or not capable her ear / Of what was high,” but preferring to hear it from her husband; the angel, though gracious, is too stiff for her. Here I must interject two observations: first, the question Adam asks that sets off Raphael’s account of hypothetical rational astronomy is a cumbrous version of one asked him by Eve the night before, together with assurances of submission: “God is thy law, thou mine,” she begins and then gives the loveliest speech of companionable conjugality imaginable: “With thee conversing I forget all time / All seasons and their �80 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW change, all please alike” (4.637)—to end it all abruptly by posing the most embarrassing question of celestial mechanics: “But wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep has shut all eyes?” She wants to know nature’s purpose, and by implication, who’s at the cosmic center. He gives a confidently ignorant answer, but knows enough to ask the angel: “Something yet of doubt remains. . . .” When he computes the world’s magnitude (he actually can’t), how is it that the firmament with its numberless stars seems to roll through spaces incomprehensible (he’s a natural Ptolemaean, as are we all) “merely to officiate light / Round this opacous earth” (8.13)—same question, more Latinate vocabulary. Second, Raphael gives, oddly, the Catholic answer. The preface by Bishop Osiander to Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) tries to neutralize the heliocentric revolution by ranking it as merely an alternative hypothesis, a mathematical simplification devised in Plato’s phrase “to save the appearances,” that is, to mathematicize the phenomena. Raphael tells Adam, never mind fact, “rather admire.” God has left his heavenly fabric to human conjecture and disputing, “perhaps to move / His laughter at their quaint opinions wide / Hereafter when they come to model heav’n / And calculate the stars . . .to save appearances” (8.75). So much for mankind’s first and grandest and most theologically fraught science: “What if the sun / Be center of the world. . .?” Of course the angel knows, as we know from Copernicus, that when astronomical obliquity enters the world after the fall, when equator and ecliptic come apart at an angle, so that the sun appears to spiral up and down the earth making seasons, the more economical way to effect this phenomenon is to push the earth’s pole askew. Yet even then Milton insists only that “Some say he bid the angels turn askance / The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more. . .some say the sun was bid turn reins” (10.668) on the now-skewed elliptic—c. 23° 51', in BRANN 81 fact—which obliquity produced corruption and pestilence and variety of season and weather for us. And Adam, the biddable, is “fully” satisfied when enjoined to be “lowly wise,” to descend to “speak of things at hand, useful.” For him “experience,” which widens Eve’s horizon, teaches “not to know at large of things remote” (8.173); he is content to be temperate in knowledge. So much for contemplation, which means, after all, taking a wide point of view, theorizing. Eve is—until cowed by her lapse—more insatiable for wisdom than that, and a keener inquirer. Now as for valor. We hear of his proneness to passion, which he is warned against by Raphael (8.635), and of his pusillanimity—he has to be told to have “self-esteem” (8.572), that contemporary buzzword—and he is, though inconsistently, upbraided by Eve for his weakness in letting her separate from him (10.1155) and allowing Satan to prevail. Michael, sent to comfort Adam, goes so far as to answer thus his accusation that the beginning of man’s woe is by women: “From man’s effeminate slackness it begins” (11.634). This sedentary “domestic Adam” (9.315) has a stodgy but infirm virtue that is no match for mobile, venturesome Eve’s spirit of independence. In the end it is he who cannot bear to be without her; she is, after all, one of his bones. So much for valor and for authority: “Was she thy God?,” the “sovran Presence” asks him (10.145); the very thought had occurred to Eve (9.790). But at the least she is used to having the final word, one way or another: The “patriarch of mankind” has spoken “but Eve persisted, yet submiss, though last. . .” (9.376)—a grimly hilarious line written by a two-timed husband. And he’s slow (though sweet) and inattentively clueless. Eve has told him the tale of her self-love and how he at first repelled her. When he regales Raphael, at the end of his visitation, with the story of his own creation and of Eve’s, it turns out he hasn’t listened at all: He thinks she ran from him out of coyness; she “would be wooed, and not unsought be won” (8.503). And when the great disaster has come, and �82 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Eve, doomed, offers him the fruit, why does he not, simple man, think beyond the two options of dying with her or getting a new Eve? Why doesn’t he refrain from eating and intercede for her? Clearly “domestic” and “dominant” are at odds here— maybe it is the reality of the Adamic character, that ensouled clod of earth, that is prevailing. 5. Poetic Milton: The Devil’s Party Much stranger things are to come, so this might be a moment to consider theological poetry. Blake says that Milton wrote in fetters of Heaven and at liberty of Hell because “he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). I don’t know what he meant, but I think I know what it means: The devil is—or wants to be—autonomous, a rule unto himself (as Eve thinks they are in Paradise); he is literally a heretic—for “heresy” is a Greek word that means “choosing,” or as we redundantly say, “choosing for oneself.” In the realization of self-will and selfrule, he becomes innovative. Novelty is not new with him: Heaven starts it, knowing the possible consequences, which are therefore not wholly unintended. So also is this poet a maker of newness: David’s Muse, Milton’s first muse, is to sing “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (1.16; not the first one, though. Jon Tuck tells me that the line comes from Ariosto). His Raphael tells Adam “The secrets of another world, perhaps / Not lawful to reveal” (5.569). Milton writes a new epic, not “sedulous by nature to indite / Wars” and other old heroic and chivalric shenanigans (9.27), yet his great interlude is a magnificent war poem, though perhaps too embarrassing to Heaven to be revealed—Milton reveals it. We might well ask: Where does the poem leave Scripture? The poem is far more revealing; is it revealed? It is far more visible, a huge, magnificent moving picture, a blind poet’s telling—and showing—“Of things invisible to mortal sight” (3.54), “lik’ning spiritual to corporeal forms” (5.573). Is the imaging of spirits permissible? It is “in nightly visita- BRANN 83 tions unimplored” dictated to him by his second Muse, his “celestial patroness” Urania (9.21), though a heavenly, not, as far as I know, an orthodox source. To be sure, Milton denies that he means the pagan Muse of Astronomy: “The meaning, not the name I call, for thou / Nor of the muses nine” (7.5). But surely this is equivocation. The inspiration for his books on the cosmos comes from the Greek source of enthusiasm (literally from entheos, the god within), one “of the muses nine,” though he disclaims her. And so this epic does not replace but absorbs pagan epic and pagan science, and puts Milton in a skewed position of accepting the splendor and deriding the culture of pagan hell (see Sec. 6., below). To give a name to the poet’s peculiar propensity: It is a form of Manicheanism, the teaching that evil is real and incarnable. In a long tradition, the Neoplatonists and their Christian partisans held that badness is nonbeing, defect of being. For example, Adam is, understandably, a confused Neoplatonist: When he loses his wonted composure, he nastily calls Eve in turn “serpent,” and “this novelty on earth, this fair defect” (10.867), not sure whether a feminine being, that “rib / Crooked by nature” is lacking in something or oversupplied with “pride / And wand’ring vanity.” Milton’s Satan has no such doubts: To him his evil being is real and is accepted, no, vaunted as such, just as the darkness of hell is a paradoxical illumination. Surely the poet who produces a brilliant personification of evil is a perhaps unwitting, perhaps half self-admitted follower of Mani, not exactly of his doctrine but of the Manichean propensity for the personification of the kingdom of darkness. There is another huge work that makes a novel tale of a sacred story. As Milton had expanded the second and third chapters of Genesis, comprising that book’s two alternative accounts of the creation of man, into a huge epic, so Thomas Mann developed his novel, Joseph and His Brothers, from twenty-six chapters in Genesis, telling the story of Jacob and his sons into nearly two thousand pages; he was executing a plan conceived by Goethe. But Mann has his “irony” to �84 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW extenuate this dubious and so doubly engaging enterprise. He hovers above faith, and his ultimate belief is in the allusive imaging and reference-fraught story-telling itself. Perhaps the poet’s—and this poet’s—indefeasible partisanship for the devil, that sets him “more at liberty” when writing of Hell, is in just this re-creative activity: Satan thinks he might not be a creation but an original, a self-created being (5.860). Poets too want to be original, themselves creators, if not of themselves, of their worlds. It makes them great iconodules (image-servers), for they love their creatures. Iconodulia, a term from the old iconoclastic (image-breaking) battles culminating in the eighth and ninth centuries, was by the opponents understood as idolatry (idol-worship), praying to, not through, the icon. The charge goes way back, to that ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy spoken of in Plato’s Republic, where images are devices to distance us from Being by ensnaring us in the desire for sights (601 ff.). Iconodulia is a sin of which Satan, the proudly unattached leader of that “atheist crew” (6.370) is not guilty. But who can say that blind Milton did not love his invisible universe, made by him and made visible to himself, better than the real world made by God and made invisible to him, and, perhaps, better than the ultimately invisible God? He does not, in any case, succeed in making God lovable—or his Son interesting: “Hail Son of God,. . .thy name / Shall be the copious matter of my song / Henceforth . . .” (2.412), he says after two terrific books about Satan. But the “copious matter” of the remaining ten is not the Son either, but more Satan—and Eve. I’ll be concentrating on the problematic vision and thought-raising qualities of Milton’s poetry, so I want to make here a declaration of love to the texture of words through which these are delivered: the steady English beat of the more than ten thousand iambic lines with their ever varied stresses in the hyper-English produced by the mixed Latinate and Anglo-Saxon diction—which with a little practice begins to read like mankind’s original language. BRANN 85 6. Insipid Heaven, Sapient Hell The first two books of Paradise Lost are of paradise lost, of hell gained. Heaven itself comes on the scene only later, mostly at war. And this is well, because it is not attractive. I recall Bernard Williams saying in an encyclopedia article on death that Heaven’s eternity must be boring—all that everlasting monotonic intoning. (In fact, in Milton’s Paradise they play harps and occasionally sing in parts. Bach knew better; witness the glorious victory march-by in heaven on the words of Revelation 12:10, “Now is the salvation and the power and realm and the might” celebrating the Son’s defeat of Satan [Cantata fragment 50]). So the notion of celestial tedium is wrongheaded, for incorporeal substances don’t experience the weariness of the bodily senses. What is offputting in the poetry of heaven is God’s ultimate invisibility, for it is simply mystifying how formless light can by mere effulgence in fact produce any shaped copy, be it an ethereal image—the Son (6.680)—or an embodied one— man. I suppose there’s plenty of theology about it. In any case, God is heard out of invisible obscurity: “Glorious brightness. . ./ Throned inaccessible” (3.375); to Satan it looks like “Thick clouds and dark” (2.263), to Heaven it’s a “golden cloud” (6.28); sometimes God speaks vengefully, from a “secret cloud” (10.32). He often speaks peremptorily and on one occasion even with pointedly offensive vulgarity, when he promises to seal up hell: “See with what heat these dogs of hell advance” —as if they were bitches. He has suffered them to enter and possess earth, to puzzle his enemies, “That laugh, as if transported with some fit / Of passion,” thinking that it has not happened on purpose. No, they were called up on purpose, “My hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth” of man’s polluting sin, so that gorged they might nigh burst “With sucked and glutted offal” (10.625)—infernal vacuum cleaners. In a human, that’s surely gross talk. �86 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW But Heaven itself, with its unvarying obedience, is vapid—not surely to inhabit but, unavoidably, to read about. It is the poetic problem of goodness, which is, ipso facto, even-tenored, uneventful, not the stuff of intense drama or vivid imagery. It does not have the snags and hollows that throw shadows and catch our interest: Perfect globes are intellectually perfectly beautiful, but who wants to look at their image for long? It is why newspapers never report that two hundred and eighty million people went to do respectable work and came home to enjoy their families, but always that someone or other killed, raped or stole. So Heaven is not interesting until there is civil war, and even then the so easily victorious Son fades against the brilliant, beaten Adversary, whose legions the heavenly general sweeps so easily over the brink into chaos, like Indians driving herds of buffalo over cliffs into canyons. Moreover, who can exonerate Heaven from the charge that in its war was born the notion that might makes right—and the hoary justification that right is in this case might. As if to make up for its Chief ’s invisibility and its remaining inhabitants’ spotlessness, Milton makes heaven and its furniture baroquely opulent. The Son’s war chariot with its four Cherubic faces and eyes all over, made of beryl, crystal, sapphire, amber and all the colors of the rainbow, is extravagantly strange (6.753); there is no such vehicle even in Revelation, one of the Biblical sources for the war in Heaven (12:7). This is not the style of Hell. It is, to begin with, a place of somber and restrained beauty. Opulence calls for Corinthian capitals, which are, as Palladio says, the most beautiful and elegant of the orders of columns. Pandemonium, however, rising “like an exhalation, with sound / Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet / Built like a temple” (1.711)—a pagan temple, of course—employs the severe and chaste Doric order with a golden architrave, for gold is mined in hell. Mulciber, Greek Hephaestus, the most gifted of the pagan gods, is the architect. The inside is illuminated by starry lamps. BRANN 87 It is a People’s Palace, and there a consultative parliament is held, a large inclusive synod (6.156) such as is never called in monarchic heaven. Hell is a sort of democracy. Its presiding chief was once Latin Lucifer, the “Light-bearer,” so called for his former brightness (7.131), but in my anachronistic ear there sounds also the word Enlightenment). Now he is Hebrew Satan, the “Adversary” and Greek Devil, diabolus, the “Accuser.” He is a revolutionary, a “Patron of Liberty,” not only in seeming, as Abdiel, the counterrevolutionary angel, claims (4.958), but in fact, as one who has been made “free to fall” (3.99), has claimed that right for himself, and finds his companions worthy of liberty and honor (6.420). Thus he is termed by his lieutenants “Deliverer from new lords, leader to free / Enjoyment of our right as gods” (6.451). He has a bill of accusations against his tyrant, not unlike the one found in our Declaration of Independence; he accuses God of enforcing vassalage, “Forced hallelujahs” (2.243), and, ironically but truly, of requiring image-worship (5.784) in interposing the Son, his image, between himself and his angels. Interposition is indeed the sub-theme of Milton’s justification—strange term—of the ways of God to man: the Son as intermediary between God and the angels and as intercessor in man’s behalf, Adam as God’s representative to Eve and interpreter to her of Heaven’s messages, and even Satan as Hell’s emissary to earth. This God is a deus absconditus whose ways are incessantly indirect. Satan is, moreover, a real leader, intrepid, of unconquerable will (2.106). He heartens and rallies his troops, and they respond to him with trusting enthusiasm (1.663), rejoicing in their “matchless chief ” (1.486). He is strangely like the Son in willing to volunteer for fatally dangerous service to his people—to go through Chaos where no devil wants to go, to break out of by now homey hell to explore new lands for his people’s occupation (2.402); thus he is raised to “transcendent glory” (2.427). Proud, rebellious, and monarchical in his spirit though he is, he knows how to assure his loyal band of their equality: “O �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 88 friends” (6.609) he addresses them at their great crisis, but even before his magnificent speeches to them were all about equality—their equality in freedom if not in power. For as Abdiel, the Tory, points out, Lucifer is himself a prince. But he presents himself as primus inter pares, first among equals: No one more often utters the word “equal” linked with “free”: “or if not equal all, yet free, / Equally free; for orders and decrees / Jar not with liberty, but well consist. / Who can in reason then or right assume / Monarchy over such as live by right / His equals, if in power and splendor less, / In freedom equal?” (5.791). And as he speaks, so, it appears, he rules in the spirit of our Declaration: that all angels are created equal, that they are endowed, Satan would say by their heavenly nativity, with certain inalienable rights, among which one is liberty—that is, their freedom derives from an equality of rights. From Satan’s politics to his endowments: He sits exalted, “by merit raised / To that bad eminence” (2.5). He is a sublime psychologist and the only wit, a mordant one, in this high drama—except of course for Milton himself, whose wit, insinuated into the action through his whiplash enjambments and his fork-tongued puns, is borrowed by Satan who can have no insight or wit but his maker’s. In Satan’s “Indeed,” when Eve naïvely tells of their perfect freedom in heaven except for the forbidden tree (9.656) you can hear the supercilious Englishman. When he tells Hell how he seduced Man he adds, with a witty contempt: “with an apple;” it’s a sheer, wickedly derogatory invention; I don’t think it was just a juicy apple, though Satan’s put-down prevailed. Here is a pertinent ditty (see Sec. 11.) from the early 15th century: And all was for an appil, An appil that he tok. Ne hadde the appil taken ben, The appil taken ben, Ne hadde never our lady A bene heven quene. BRANN 89 Blessed be the time That appil taken was. Therefore we moun singen ‘Deo gracias.’ But Satan is more than smartly cynical; he is a great inventor and engineer. The manufacture of that tremendous contrivance, the cannon, which he builds in heaven, that devilish engine which nearly routs the heavenly host in the most tremendous cannonade I’ve ever read of, is vividly described by Raphael in Book 6. Like Persian Xerxes, who cut a mountain off from its mainland (Herodotus 7.22), he refigures nature: His offspring Sin and Death cut through Chaos “by wondrous art / Pontifical” (that is, bridge-building, 10.312) to join Hell to Paradise. But back to Hell itself, a place of relative harmony: “O shame to men! Devil with devil damned / Firm concord holds, men only disagree” (1.496). It is a place of music, of “partial,” that is, of complex polyphonic sound, as contrasted with the simple celestial unisons, I imagine. It is also “partial” as being of the devil’s party, of their heroic deeds, and it takes with “ravishment / The thronging audience” (1.552). There is, above all, the sweetest soul-charming discourse: high reasoning “Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, / Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.” Round and round it goes as do conversations in a serious college: “And found no end” (1.560). They talk, as do we on earth, philosophy: of passion and apathy, of good and evil, of happiness and final misery. They have the experience for it; it is not talk abstracted from life but real inquiry. “Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy,” this passage concludes. That is Milton’s way with Hell and the devils. It and they are depicted gloriously and dismissed ignominiously. It happens over and over. The representation raises what the judgment crushes. Hell is altogether puzzling. Following an old Patristic tradition, Milton has all the fallen angels assume, as devils, �90 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the form of the pagan gods, some Levantine and horrible, some Greek and graceful, all vivid (1.375) and more distinctively individual than ever were the loyal archangels. All are beautiful, and though their looks deteriorate, as angels they can never be all bad in soul or all spoiled in form (1.483). Satan, as I have imagined him, is the aboriginal modern, not only in his politics, but perhaps most of all when he is at home in hell where he asserts a modern hallmark: subjectivity, solipsistic ideation, inner-world creation: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, or hell of heav’n. / What matter where, if I be still the same. . .?” (1.254). But he is not only a post-Christian, he is also a pagan pre-Christian; he encompasses the human salvational episode, coming before and after as it were. As G. K. Chesterton says: “It is profoundly true that the ancient world was more modern than the Christian” (Orthodoxy, Ch. 9). As fallen Lucifer, in Hell Satan belongs to the Greek crew, though more as hero than god—albeit as god too. For like the Christian God he gives birth, though not to a Son but to a daughter, and like Zeus he gives birth through his head, not to wise Athena but to canny Sin. Yet primarily he is like the Iliad’s Achilles, first in battle, and offended by a sense of injured merit (1.98). The relation is, however, perverted for the occasion, as displayed in Satan’s adaptation of Achilles’ words in Hades: “I would wish rather to be a slave in service to another. . .than to be ruler over all the dead” (Odyssey 11.488). For Satan, at home in Hell, says instead: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” (1.263); it is how he proudly counters good Abdiel’s “Reign thou in Hell thy kingdom, let me serve / In heav’n God ever blest” (6.183). Milton, to be sure, disowns Achilles: His is an “argument / Not less but more Heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles” (9.13). And he most assuredly disowns the philosophizing of Hell. In Paradise Regained Satan advertises ancient wisdom as the final temptation of Jesus, sounding much like the catalogue of a Christian college trying to persuade applicants that a liberal education should include Greek philosophy: “All BRANN 91 knowledge is not couch’d in Moses’ law, the Pentateuch or what the prophets wrote, / The Gentiles also know, and write, and teach / To admiration, led by Nature’s light” (P.R. 4.225). So “To sage philosophy next lend thine ear, / From Heaven descended to the low-rooft house / Of Socrates” (4.272). Jesus rejects it all, though, like Milton, he is an admirer of Plato and his Socrates. He says that Socrates “For truth’s sake suffering death unjust, lives now / Equal in fame to proudest Conquerours” (3.96), but explains that this “first and wisest of them all profess’d / To know this only, that he nothing knew” (4.293). Even so he rejects Satan’s temptation. He neither knows nor doesn’t know these things; his “light is from above;” any great reader must needs be “Deep verst in books and shallow in himself ” (4.286). In this spirit Milton comments on the pair asleep in Paradise: “O yet happiest if ye seek / No happier state and know to know no more” (P.L. 4.774). So heroic poetry, philosophical inquiry and book-learning appear to be rejected as Satanic. But that’s the trouble; they flourish in or about Hell, which is a display case of antique lore and heroic character and liberal artistry and free inquiry and sophistic skill. Belial is Hell’s most beautiful god “For dignity compos’d and high exploit”—here comes the customary whiplash—“But all was false and hollow,” for “he could make the worse appear / The better reason” (2.110); this is verbatim the sophistry attributed to the Clouds in Aristophanes’ play, those clouds that are parodies of Plato’s Ideas and the sponsors of Socrates’ Thinkery. In Hell is to be found all that was exciting in its splendor or rousing in its dubiousness in paganism. In Hell as in life there is no escaping its attraction, and all the poet’s damning postscripts cannot dim the glories of his “infernal pit.” Milton’s Satan speaks gallantly; Milton explicates: “Vaunting aloud—but wracked with deep despair” (1.126, my dash); it’s still the gallantry that resonates. “Insipid” means tasteless, savorless, as sapor means taste, savor: Milton’s Adam, influenced by the taste of the �92 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW forbidden fruit of knowledge, discovers its etymological connection with sapience, wisdom (9.1018). Hell is sapient as hell; is that an inherent truth asserting itself? 7. Mismanaged Monarchy If Hell, when not racked with supererogatory spasms such as the yearly Hissing when all the devils turn into writhing snakes (10.508), is a well-run republic, Milton’s Heaven can be said to be a mismanaged monarchy or firm. The archangels’ inefficiency cries, so to speak to high heaven. Set to watch out for escapees from Hell, Uriel, in his simplicity, is, “for once beguiled” by Satan’s cherubic disguise—though the heavenly gods are supposed to know good from evil (3.636)—and directs him straight to Eden, where he evades the angelic pickets posted at the gates by simply leaping over the wall of Paradise. God lets it go: “be not dismayed,” he says to the unsuccessful sentinels; this intrusion “your sincerest care could not prevent” (10.37)—so what was the point of posting them? Raphael is sent too late to prevent the capture of Eve’s imagination, and, by his own account, the heavenly army under Michael, outnumbering the forces under Lucifer’s command two to one, are beaten; the Son alone saves Heaven (Book 6). But that’s the least of it. To take a coolly secular view, the ruler of this polity is either deliberately disruptive or disregards some prime rules of management: Don’t add intermediate layers of authority; don’t make yourself inaccessible; don’t rebuff your insiders; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Everyone knows what discontent the intromission of a provost between the president and a faculty induces in it, or the upset that bringing in a vice-president from the outside and disappointing fair expectations causes in companies. This is exactly what happens in Heaven. Once all worshiped and obeyed God alone, a God who, though inaccessible to sight, was equally so to all. Then one day there is a newcomer, a Son, born not created. Though it is not clear that he appears BRANN 93 after the angelic creation, it is clear that he is one fine day proclaimed and anointed—and set over all the princely angels, God’s loyal servants, as vice regent, a head to be acknowledged Lord (5.609). It is a novelty, an innovation whose necessity is not apparent; God seems to be, in Caesar’s words, simply cupidus rerum novarum, “avid for new things” (Gallic Wars 1.18). He does not need a Son. Indeed when Adam, shortly after his creation, asks God for a mate, God slyly joshes him “as with a smile”: “What think’st thou then of me. . ./ Seem I to thee sufficiently possessed / Of happiness or not, who am alone / From all eternity, for none I know / Second to me or like, equal much less” (8.403). Either God has forgotten or is concealing that he too now has family, or he is signifying that he needs none. We do know that the Son was born—whenever it was in timeless time—before Adam was made, though, to be sure, the possibility of innovation in an atemporal realm is humanly incomprehensible. “When?” makes no sense in eternity. What’s of more human consequence is that Milton’s God is playing a dangerous game with Adam: accustoming him to the sense that persisting in one’s desire and opposing God’s advice is permissible, even possibly successful. For Adam gets his consort. Naturally some angels, created proud, are outraged at being set at a remove from the throne, at having their rights disrespected and expectations disappointed. Over and over Satan repeats that this is the cause—be it the mere occasion or the actual reason—of the rebellion, which is thus a revolution. The engaged reader (for irreverently deadpan literalism can be a way of respecting the story) has to ask: Is Heaven’s action an incitement, an entrapment? God has given the angels free will. Has he made them dissimilar in nature, some more proud, more prone to apostasy, with more propensity to self-assertion and offense-taking? Is he calling these flawed ones out? Here the question arises whether the angels, to whom God gave the knowledge of good and evil (11.85), know evil �94 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW by their own experience or just by contrast to good. The latter is conceivable; Socrates in the Republic demands that a judge should learn of badness by observation, not from within his own soul (409). Moreover, Satan says to Gabriel that he cannot know what it means to seek relief who “evil hast not tried” (4.896). But then, before the angelic uprising, what evil was there to observe? Do some, a third, have it in them? Is Heaven rife with potentiality for evil, waiting to be realized? Is God indeed planning a razzia, a raid on putative infidels? God does have foreknowledge of the event. But his argument, that omniscience does not prove determinism, is persuasive. An atemporal Godhead oversees our entire temporal episode as a whole from its beginning to its end. Earth’s history is not, after all, infinite in this story: Hell will be sealed and Heaven opened to man. Sub specie aeternitatis, under the perspective of eternity, foreknowledge is not foretelling, since to observe is not to interfere (at least not outside quantum theory). Since we see the past as fixed and conclude that because it is done it cannot be undone—which isn’t even so very true—therefore we think, a fortiori, so much the more, that if it cannot be altered it must have been necessary—which is a plain paralogism. No more need God’s sight, which includes the end, fix beforehand what happens; he is no cryptodeterminist. To foresee completely from a perspective outside time is not to predict certainly from causes within. But it is an entirely different question whether Milton’s God wishes for the catastrophe that he has made, at least and at most, possible. And everything points that way. He leaves Satan to his “dark designs” so that he might “Heap on himself damnation” (1.214); indeed the whole historical episode, from the angelic fall of one who wants to rival God in power to the human fall of one who wants to be like a god in experience to its end in the re-opening of Paradise on earth and the first opening of Heaven to mankind, is an entertainment to the Godhead who watches it as a drama, just as BRANN 95 it is an acute delight to the humans who read it as an epic. Yet while Aristotle allows that epics contain the plots for tragedies (Poetics 1459), Milton actually switches to the tone of tragedy within his epic: “I must now change / Those notes to tragic” (9.5); thus a serene epic delight is, for us humans at least, converted into that notorious tragic pleasure whose well-known dubiousness lies in our enjoyment of the representation of excruciated bodies and souls. Is it so for God? To rise from the aesthetic to the ethical: The poem abounds in conversions of good to bad and bad to good, in missed intentions and antithetical transformations. Our labor must be, says the Arch-Fiend, “Out of our evil seek to bring forth good. . .And out of good still to find means to evil” (1. 163). On the brink of Paradise, it is no longer transformation he intends but identification: “Evil be thou my good” (4.110); here the distinction between good and evil is not, as in Hell, perverted but simply obliterated. The angels, on the other hand, sing in unison: “his evil / Thou usest, and from thence creat’st more good” (7.615), and God repeats it, meaning just the opposite from Satan. How is the human reader not to be absorbed into all this relativistic confusion? And all this starts with the late fathering of a crown prince. For there is no question that this is the cause of the revolt: being set aside, twice, once by the newly born Son, once by the newly made image, man. Over and over Satan expresses his sense of wrong, of merit unrecognized; in Hell he may sit “by merit raised / To that bad eminence” (2.5; note, as usual: first some term like “merit,” then “bad”). In heaven God excuses the Son’s elevation: “By merit more than birthright son of God,” (3.309). Lucifer, however—at 5.666, which is the number of the Beast, the Antichrist, in Revelation (13:18)—thinks “himself impaired.” “Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain,” he whispers conspiracy to his “companion dear,” because he feels released from loyalty by the new laws God has imposed: “New laws from him who reigns, new minds may raise.” Then next morning at his palace, he, “Affecting an equality with God,” takes his royal �96 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW seat to make that magnificent speech about the equal right to freedom. Injured merit, ex post facto laws, subjection are the griefs—God has, “O indignity! / Subjected to his service angel wings” (9.154)—later compounded by the replacement of his own contingent by newly created man. All this is as foreseeable by us as it was foreseen by God: on earth the CEO would be blamed, and the monarch would have a revolution on his hands. 8. Infected Paradise Paradise is similarly questionable. How are we to go on with Milton’s picture of terrestrial perfection? Do those who will one day fall never stumble, those who will soon need to be clothed—not just for shame but warmth (10.211)—ever get nasty colds before the world is skewed? What happens if paradisaical lushness gets out of control as Eve worries it will, when the leisurely gardeners can’t keep up and growth goes rank? (10.205) Is Eve pregnant, and if not, why not, since passion is from the first practiced in Paradise (8.511)? Do they know death, with which they have been threatened, more distinctly than as something not-good, in some other way than as a blind, mystifying doom? More broadly, do they know some bad before they know evil, some harm before sin? Is Paradise already infected, as the serpent whose head is “well stored with subtle wiles” (9.184) seems to signify, who, “not nocent yet,” is physically “the fit vessel, fittest imp of fraud” (9.89), made in effect to incarnate Satan? Kierkegaard, in his very pertinent meditation on Paradise, says that innocence is ignorance, it is the spirit yet asleep, dreaming. But the dream is infected with a presentiment of freedom, a “possibility of possibility,” which makes the spirit anxious and, once awake, unresistant to sin (The Concept of Anxiety 1.¶ 6). Eve conceives sin in her dreaming imagination, through Satan’s insinuation. Adam dreams soberly, merely of what is then actually happening and meant to be real: God—in what BRANN 97 “shape divine,” one wonders—guides him, gliding, through Paradise; shows him “the tree whose operation brings / Knowledge of good and ill” which God has set as the pledge of his obedience by the Tree of Life, and warns: “The day thou eat’st thereof, my sole command / Transgressed, inevitably thou shalt die” (8.323); he demands a companion; falls into another sleep, really a half-conscious, waking anesthesia, while his “sinister,” that is, his left rib is removed by God and shaped into Eve (8.460). Eve dreams wildly, raptly, anxiously of what is to come, and her “organ of fancy” is receptive to evil. We already know that she, who falls in love with her own image, is image-prone, and now she is the first and prime instance for a long philosophical and theological tradition that sees in the human imagination the effective snare of evil: desire made visible and vivid. One third of the inhabitants of Heaven were open to the suggestion of evil; in Paradise, it appears, one half of the rational beings is so—the imaginative half. Adam delivers to Eve a well-meaning little lecture on our cognitive constitution. He inventories first judging reason, then “mimic fancy,” and last the five senses. On the basis of these faculties, he trots out a soothing naturalistic explanation of the “wild work” the imaginative fancy produces in dreams from fragments of sensation, when judgment has retired into her private cell. How wrong he is, the complacent man! He goes on to discourse comfortingly of evil: “Evil into the mind of god or man / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave / No spot or blame behind” (5.117). How would he know, not knowing evil—yet? But, I think, Eve does indeed now know, ahead of him. Thus Paradise is infected before the lapse. But it is not by the devil’s temptation, it is by God’s. For what does the whole arboreal set-up betoken? Near the Tree of Knowledge is the Tree of Life. We learn that more such grow in Heaven, that after the fatal fall, man has to be moved from the proximity of the one in Paradise, for it can �98 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW cure mortality (11.94). Why is one of these there at all? Surely the answer is ominous: Fallen humans who ate of it would be fallen immortals like the fallen angels, beyond salvation, incapable of participating in the redemptive history about to begin. Was the primal pair’s ejection from Paradise an act of mercy—and if so had this irremediable catastrophe crossed Heaven’s mind? What a complexity of divine design! But that’s a side issue; it’s the Tree of Knowledge that is at the problematic center of the Garden. Here is the question: Is the fruit of itself deleterious, some sort of spiritual poison, or is it a mere incitement to disobedience? Is the real evil ingestion or transgression? Is its intoxicating effect, which makes Eve so “jocund and boon,” a “virtue” proceeding from the fruit itself and the tree’s “operation” or from the sinner’s mind? Moreover, when they have both eaten and love turns into lust, passion into concupiscence, nakedness into exposure, candor into shame, harmony into hate, work into labor, what has changed? What is “the mortal sin / Original”? (9.1003) Of passion and of carnality there was plenty before: “Here passion first I felt, / Commotion strange” says Adam at the first sight of Eve (8.530). Or: “half her swelling breast / Naked met his under flowing gold / Of her loose tresses” says Milton (4.495). Is that very turn from love to lust the original sin, or is it its consequence? Or is the true primal sin indeed mere disobedience? This last thought is what Adam and Eve cannot entertain: that mere transgression will be punished. (Indeed so far have we come in the way of Eve that “transgressive” is, for some postmoderns, a term of approval and a sign of sophistication.) They both think that the acquisition of knowledge and godlikeness is the virtue of the forbidden fruit. Adam, to be sure, first fixes on Eve’s disobedience itself: “how hast thou yielded to transgress / The strict forbiddance” (9.902). But soon, he deprecates the danger that God, “Creator wise, / Though threatening, will in earnest so destroy / Us his prime creatures” (9.938), encouraged to think so by his previous experience with God’s leniency. So BRANN 99 he accepts the profit: a “Higher degree of life.” Eve, a more subtle reasoner, goes even further: “What fear I then, rather what know to fear / Under this ignorance of good and evil, / Of God or death, of law or penalty?” (9.773) In other words, because she is ignorant of the terms she need not fear anything before partaking, since she doesn’t even know what’s to be feared; “Here grows the cure for all,” she concludes, the cure, that is, for cluelessness. The trouble seems to be, once more, the unintelligibility of the tree’s operation (8.323, 9.796): Is it God’s command that threatens or the tree’s powers that are dangerous? Is it the fruit that imparts knowledge of good and evil or the fact of human transgression? Is that knowledge an experience or an understanding? Once again, the question is whether their novel unbowered daytime sex with its postcoital recriminations, whether love turned into lust, is the sin or its consequence? And over, and over, is God not only expecting but wishing the outcome? This last question is perhaps answerable from Milton’s perspective. He speaks in the Areopagitica of “the doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil—that is to say, of knowing good by evil” (my italics). So knowing evil takes precedence, and, accordingly, he, Milton, “cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed [unexhausted], that never sallies out and seeks her adversary. . .Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather. . .That virtue therefore which. . .knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue.” To me this signifies that the eating not only caused the world’s obliquity but prepared the pair (and its progeny) to live in it, that is, to keep learning by experience and experimentation, as it had begun. But if that is so, then there is too fine a contrivance in it all not to be an intended or at least a wishedfor consequence. And altogether God’s gift of free will, this is the occasion to observe, is a curiously strained thing. One of our students, �100 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Christopher Stuart, discussed in his junior essay, which I have before me, an apparently scandalously inconsistent line, spoken by Raphael to Adam. After telling him once more that his will was by nature ordained free, “not overruled by fate inextricable or strict necessity,” the angel says, speaking of all created beings: “Our voluntary service he requires” (5.529). How, the student asks, as we must do, do “voluntary” and “require”—even “require” in the weaker sense of “ask”—go together, when it is God who asks? Doesn’t full freedom extend beyond the liberty to choose between the allowed and the forbidden to the determination of choices itself? Isn’t the deepest, innermost freedom the freedom to set one’s own limits? Isn’t that what autonomy means? No wonder then that Satan harps on his own kind of freedom even more than on equality. He has fully felt that Heaven’s gift of free will has negating strings attached. These perplexities, however, the sequence and significance of the will to disobedience and its punishment, the eating of the fruit and its effect, the skewing of the world, and the resulting diversity, all seem—at least seem to me—to converge in one type: the turning of love into lust. When Adam shyly asks Raphael whether the angels have intimate congress he gets a forthright answer delivered with a “Celestial rosy red” smile. The angels “obstacle find none / Of membrane” (8.625); their intercourse is “Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace, / Total they mix, union of pure with pure / Desiring” (8.625). In Hell too there is passion: Envious Satan sees the man and the woman “Imparadised in one another’s arms,” and bemoans that in Hell there is only “fierce desire, / Among our other torments not the least, / Still unfulfilled with pain of longing” (4.506). In prelapsarian Paradise there is passionate desire and sexual congress, “preceded by love’s embraces,” “happy nuptial league.” Adam and Eve’s love-making after the lapse when “in lust they burn” inflamed with “carnal desire” is now carnal knowledge: Adam harps on Eve’s sapience: “Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste, / And elegant, of sapience no small BRANN 101 part, / Since to each meaning savor we apply” (9.1012). Now “that the false fruit / Far other operation first” displays (note the fricatives), we may ask: What is that operation that turns innocence to lasciviousness and makes them, “as the force of that fallacious fruit” evaporates, wake up from “grosser sleep / Bred of unkindly fumes with conscious dreams / Encumbered.” What has happened that when they rose, they “As from unrest, and each the other viewing, / Soon found their eyes how opened, and their minds how darkened” (9.1046)? What the fruit has done is to make them sophisticated in sexual taste, self-conscious in their bodies, self-seeking in view of the other’s otherness: This is schism all over, the renunciation of trusting obedience in favor of self-determination, self-will, and selfhood in desire and the advent of solipsistic separatism in body: They see each other as other, their bodies as obstacles to entire interpenetration, and they concentrate on parts that are therefore now become private, shameful and in want of hiding (9.1090). They have, to use Milton’s word for the music of Hell, become “partial”: particular in taste and partisan for themselves. Now first Adam turns, in a bad moment, from an easy assumption of superiority to misogyny. He wishes that God had stopped his creating after the “Spirits masculine” of Heaven and before making “this novelty on earth” (10.890), a female; of course he doesn’t know that angels are transsexual at pleasure (1.423); oddly enough Hell proper really does seem exclusively masculine. So there are these degrees, from love to lust: the total merging of angelic congress, the selfless closeness of the paradisaical union, then the choosy separation of fallen sex— and a last grade, the unassuageable desire of loveless, lonely Hell, that seems to have no female but Sin. Thus the eating and the fruit’s operation are one: separation. The transgression and its punishment are one: schism. Their obliquity and the skewing of their world are one: sophistication—that is complex and varied knowledge in �102 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW a world of polarities. At least, so it seems to me. What I wonder about is if it doesn’t all start with Adam’s little prelapsarian lapses: Does it begin when he asks God for a companion? When he fails to take Eve’s Satan-inspired dream seriously? When he gives Eve—as God gave him—the freedom to disobey, although he has been warned? Were there Adamic falls before Eve’s great Fall? Yes, but he doesn’t have it in him to sin greatly. But then arises a much more momentous question: Is the original sin that starts our way of being, Eve’s Eating of the Fruit, a bad thing? This consideration is the crux of this piece. But first one more Miltonian intricacy. 9. Original Siring There is no female birth-giving in this poem (excepting, if you like, Sin’s, whose monster-children keep creeping back into her womb, 2.795). The birth of human children takes place out of Paradise. In Adam’s last hours in Paradise Michael shows him the prospect of human history in ever more foreshortened overview, up to the Second Coming (Books 11– 12), while Eve, not only the “mother of mankind” by ordinary generation but also the bearer of the “Seed” by which the “greater deliverance” is to come (12.600), is sent to sleep and given a separate view, once again, in a dream—a remarkable locution, by the way, this recurrent reference to her remote progeny, Jesus, as “the Woman’s Seed” (e.g. 12.542, 601), for he is indeed begotten without male insemination. So whatever her condition when Paradise is lost, whether the first offspring is engendered on that racking last night in sin or before that yet in innocence, or afterwards in their new world, there are no women’s births before the fall: As he is henceforth to labor in the sweat of his brow in the fields, so she is to labor in unparadisaical pain in childbirth (10.193). But there are plenty of male sirings, firsts of their kind and strange, in Heaven, Hell, and Paradise. God begets a son BRANN 103 (5.603) having made the angels—geneses of which the human imagination cannot conceive. One angel—Satan—doubts his creation; he thinks he might be spontaneously generated, selfcreated, though he doesn’t know how (6.853). As Zeus gives birth to Athena, so Satan gives birth to Sin from his head. She is his brain child, born from the seat of reason, in him a source of perversion. Soon he has congress with her, his daughter and wife, who bears Death, who in turn rapes his mother (2.747). Adam is formed from dust in God’s image— who is however not an imageable original, being in his nature invisible. Eve is, not unlike Sin, born from her wombless progenitor’s body, not from his head but from his sinister side (8.465, 10.885), as a body part; hence she is at once apart and, somehow, also a lesser image of his entirety and of God at a remove. She is—strictly speaking—at once Adam’s offspring and his consort; like Oedipus’s fratricidal sons, one, though not both, of her children will kill the other, earth’s first murder (11.445). Are these origins, these firsts of begetting, creating, imaging, producing, even intended to be closely inquired into? Are they just the hapless by-products of making theological mysteries into poetic pictures in which the supernatural cannot help but appear as unnatural? Or are they meant to be dangling perplexities, intended subtexts of questionableness, reflections on the consequences of entertaining nightly a Muse that tells of geneses beyond Nature? 10. Eve’s Happy Fault and Salutary Fall Back to the great perplexity—the way the poem puts itself in question: The angelic crew falls into a hell that will at the end of time be sealed for eternity. The mortal pair wanders into a world that is “all before them,” a world spaciously various in places, and eventfully progressive in time. Is man’s fall and the sin that at once was and induced that fall a bad thing altogether? The answer No is considered by Adam himself, when the Archangel Michael shows him the future and the Final �104 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Judgment. Then Christ will reward “his faithful and receive them into bliss, / Whether in Heaven or Earth, for then the Earth / Shall all be Paradise, far happier place / Than this of Eden, and far happier days” (12.462). To this astounding prophecy, astounding because it announces that mankind’s posthistorical condition will exceed its prelapsarian state in happiness, Adam responds, with one last of those “good out of evil” turns: “O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense, / That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good. . .Full of doubt I stand, / Whether I should repent me now of sin / By me done or occasioned, or rejoice / Much more that much more good thereof shall spring” (12.469). This paradox of paradoxes, that one man’s great Lapse, that his deliberate disobedience should send mankind on the way to the greatest bliss, so that repentance itself seems redundant, has a theological name: the felix culpa, the “fruitful fault.” The long history of the thought and the phrase is traced in an article by Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall” (ELH 4.3, September 1937); it is referenced in Scott Elledge’s marvelous edition of Paradise Lost. The precise phrase felix culpa seems to come from the “Exultet” of the Roman Liturgy, which also speaks of the “certainly necessary fault of Adam,” giving a clear answer to the question of divine intention. The thought, however, goes back to the Church Fathers. Ambrose, Augustine’s bishop, spoke of the fructiosor culpa quam innocentia, “the more fruit-bearing fault than innocence,” and Augustine himself says straight out that God “wisely and exquisitely contrived” sinning so that the human creature, in doing what it itself wishes, also fulfills God’s will—a generalization of the original sin. Milton is said probably to have known this patristic tradition. It seems to me that this notion, to which I referred above, that the experience of vice is the necessary antecedent to fully operative virtue, is along the same lines. BRANN 105 Now here is something remarkable: In all of Lovejoy’s quotations, including the little apple ditty copied above (Sec. 4.), it is Adam’s fault, Adam’s apple. Milton himself begins Paradise Regained: “I who erewhile the happy Garden sung, / By one man’s disobedience lost, now sing / Recover’d Paradise to all mankind.” But it’s not one man’s disobedience. Though he is the apple taker, she is the apple giver, hers is the literal original sin—if priority now, under the felix culpa doctrine, bestows a certain credit. Hers is the first fault, for better or worse. Satan seduces her first, she Adam; his is a very secondary apostasy. Satan sins aboriginally as Hell’s native; Eve sins by seduction, as Paradise’s malcontent; Adam sins derivatively, as Eve’s husband (10.2): “She gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (10.143). In fact for God this sinning at second hand is an extenuating circumstance for humans. Indeed, Eve tries to accept full responsibility and all the punishment (10.934). Adam reproves her, God seems to agree: “Was she thy God. . .that to her / Thou didst resign thy manhood. . .?” (10.145), but she is undeterred (12.619). And so is Milton, it seems, implicitly and explicitly: implicitly, in making her book, the book of her absconding from domestic Adam, the high point of the drama of the epic, with its modulation to tragedy, according to its own invocation (9.6); explicitly, when Michael, explaining why man is now in looks more Satan’s image than God’s likeness, terms the disfigurement “inductive mainly to the sin of Eve” (11.519). So which is text, which subtext here? Eve is the original sinner, and her sin is fruitful; she is, in fact, the Mother of the Seed. She is, moreover, much more disposed to disobedience than he, so why isn’t the Fall her drama? Isn’t it indeed so in this poem where the events are vividly enough seen to blanch out an old tradition in Adam’s favor—so to speak? A disclaimer, lest these observations be imputed to me for feminism. I’m not much for Eve. Her badness is bad: Her adventurousness is feckless, her careless disobedience immature, her rebelliousness shallow, her susceptibility to �106 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW flattery foolish, her avidity for stimulation reckless, her appetite for Godhead clueless, her lies to her husband ugly, and her argumentation too smart by half. It is not Eve I admire but Milton, for his second sight in knowing how qualities connect, and then, now, and always make up into a human type (of either sex) which I think of as characteristically modern—vivid and endangered and very familiar to a teacher. Besides, it isn’t even quite clear what she did for us. Under the felix culpa doctrine Satan is an unwitting agent provocateur for Heaven, but the Almighty in fact contradicts this in a speech from the Throne: Let man, he says, “boast / His knowledge of good lost, and evil got, / Happier, had it sufficed him to have known / Good by itself, and evil not at all” (11.86). This contrary doctrine jibes with a promise we have heard earlier: Raphael, having transubstantiated a meal of paradisaical fruit, explains to Adam how this nourishment “by gradual scale sublimed” can raise man’s embodied soul through degrees to full reason—“and reason is her being.” For the soul is the same in kind as the angels’ though less in degree, since man’s reason is mostly discursive, the angels’ intuitive. So then, “time may come when men / With angels may participate,” and find that “from these corporal nutriments perhaps / Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit . . .and winged ascent / Ethereal, as we, or may at choice / Here or in heav’nly paradises dwell; / If ye be found obedient” (5.483). An amazing promise, though hedged: The route to Heaven is through diet and obedience! Thus the Fall achieved just a long detour to the same end: a choice of goods, either of a dwelling in Heaven or an etherealized life in Paradise. And Adam actually knew this before the Fall, as did Eve who had been listening in! We do not hear much more about it. Perhaps, we may surmise, the prospect of man etherealizing directly from Paradise to Heaven is embarrassing to the Father, for it leaves the Son without his salvific mission. BRANN 107 So has Eve, in causing history, launched mankind on its necessary road or on a futile byway? And did Milton intend to throw such doubt on the need for the Son’s self-sacrifice, his entering history as a man? 11. Wisdom Without Their Leave “The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow / Through Eden took their solitary way.” With this solemn iambic saunter, sad but comforted, bereaved but hopeful, the divine epic ends and human history begins. Yet in the very last of these tenthousand five-hundred and fifty-six lines there lurks still one more provocation to stimulate the intellectual sensibility like a dissonance in music: “solitary.” Does it mean “alone”?—but they have a Guide. Does it mean “single”?—but they are a Pair. Does it mean “at one”?—but her “meek submission” (12.597) is dearly bought and perhaps not so very reliable or heritable (moreover it’s not a meaning in the OED). Or could the word perhaps intimate that this same sole humanity is about to end, that in the poem Cain was perhaps conceived on that first and last night—or afternoon—the first of the “contagious fire” of “foul concupiscence” (9. 1035, 1078) and the last on their “native soil” (11.269), in their Paradise —Cain the first man born out of Eden, at once the first murderer and the first city-builder (Genesis 4:17). If Milton’s last lines intimate something obliquely but precisely, something beyond the general hopefulness of the opening of a wide land and a new era, namely the incipient first natural birth on earth—a thing of course unprovable— then not two only but a future three are leaving Paradise, and history with its highway and so crucial byways has already begun. For Cain’s generation is a false yet necessary start. It is the main cause of the Flood in which it is itself destroyed. Yet it is the indirect cause of God’s covenant by which the earth is forever safely populated, for from Noah’s sons “was the whole Earth overspread” (Genesis 9:19), and among their �108 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW progeny was one Javan, the ancestor of the Ionian Athenians, our Ancients. But that is a fantasy in the spirit of the two new books (11-12) of prospective history that Milton added to the second edition of Paradise Lost (1674). The point is that here might be one last exemplification of that derivation of good from bad that informs the poem and makes one think. And so we did, all of us, think about this question in the seminars that incited these reflections, but perhaps the daughters of Eve in particular. One form of the recurrent question was: What would we have done, what do we do and shall we do, and, above all, let our young do, in the face of Satanic temptation? By “Satanic temptation” I mean the Serpent’s promise of a riskless transgression, of acute experience, of our equalization with the gods to attain “Wisdom without their leave” (9.725). Do we owe it to ourselves to yield to temptation? The angels in Heaven evidently know good from evil without being affected by evil; they heard the report of man’s lapse “with pity” that “violated not their bliss” (9.25). The Angels in Hell know evil and violated bliss in its grand pathos and deep misery. Milton preaches in the Areopagitica that we humans must know vice practically and previously to virtue to be capable of vital goodness. If we permit, even encourage, the transgression of the intellect—Satan’s temptation of Christ, resisted by him, to liberal learning and philosophy—and also of the senses—the “artificial paradises” of Baudelaire, drug-taking and similar stimulation, to put it plainly—are we realizing a plan inherent in our postlapsarian mortality? Unlike our Original Parents, we are born as babies and grow laboriously into our adult state, so we have no cause to be as cluelessly innocent as they of the substance of sin and the meaning of the punishment. Moreover, on earth it is required not only that prohibitions be clearly promulgated but that they define an intelligible crime, and that the punishments be understandably formulated before we are answerable—the reverse of the order under which Eve commits the “mortal sin / Original” BRANN 109 (9.1003). She knows what death, the punishment, is only after she has sinned: It is, as she puts it with brutal brevity, “I extinct” (9.829); before that it was “whatever thing death be,” as Satan expresses for her the sum of her knowledge (9.695). And, I think, she never quite learns wherein the badness of the forbidden fruit lies beyond the fact that it is forbidden. But perhaps that really is the meaning of the felix culpa, the fruitful fault: It is at once a first exercise of autonomy, expressed as mere disobedience, and the first lesson in its fruits, felt as potent wisdom. The poet of Paradise Lost seems to intimate that we might do well to opt for transforming experience over psychic intactness, to be adventurously bad with Eve rather than stodgily good with the angels. But it is not, I think, what he would agree to having said. Postscript: Two of the very problems considered in this essay, the intellectuality of pre-lapsarian man and the real cause of the Fall, are raised by Maimonides in the Guide of the Perplexed (1.2; translated by Shlomo Pines, 1963). He finds this way out of the problem of Adam’s knowledge: before the eating he knows True and False. The evidence is in the fact of the commandment itself, for its prohibition requires apprehension by the intellect. But for inclining toward the desires of the imagination (which is the villain organ for Maimonides) and the pleasures of the senses, Adam “was punished by being deprived of that intellectual apprehension” of True and False, and was instead “endowed with the faculty of apprehending generally accepted things [that is, common notions].” Thus, “he became absorbed in judging things to be bad or fine [that is, Evil or Good].” This is certainly an ingenious explanation of the original nature and subsequent change in Adam’s intellect, though it is neither hinted at in Genesis nor imagined by Milton (who �110 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW does not endow unfallen Adam with much philosophical intellect) that what he lost was intellectual certainty and what he gained was conventional morality. As for the cause of the Fall—imputed by Maimonides to Adam alone—it was that Adam was greedy and followed his imaginative and carnal appetites. His punishment, “corresponding to his disobedience. . .measure for measure” is that he was deprived of good things to eat gotten without labor and compelled to feed on the grass of the field in the sweat of his brow (15a). So here Maimonides is as equivocal on the point at issue as is Milton: was the root of the transgression disobedience or desire? (Many thanks to Barry Mazur for the reference.) 111 Going in Silence Abraham Schoener I tried to explain to a February Freshman why our basketball games here at St. John’s have five quarters. I was not very successful. It made plain to me how much we live in a queer world of our own making. The same is true of the heroes in Homer: they live in a very queer world, but it is a world—a thriving whole, in which part answers to and contends with part, in which each individual represents the whole and the whole nurtures and challenges each individual. And it is a whole of their own making—from the hollow ships to the earthen walls to the roaring sea to the aromatic sacrifices, even to the gods above and among them. I am not going to justify these claims here; I only pause to suggest to you what makes me believe them. How could the heroes have created the inexhaustible sea, the sea that carries them from port to port, the salt sea, the wine-dark sea? Let me say only this: once the sea has become “wine-dark” for them and for us, it is our sea. We name it by one of our own creations, a creation that requires not only a certain level of human intervention into the workings of nature, but a creation that is most present to us in our own social activities—in meals, sacrifices, celebrations. The sea called “wine-dark” is now part of this, our social world. This is equally true of Homer’s other words for the sea—the “saltsea” is the sea whose water we have tasted, the taste we feel in our mouths—the sea, once again tied to our food, our meals, our habits of seasoning.1 Through habits no different from these, the heroes have created their world. Abe Schoener was a tutor at St. John’s College for nine years. In the tenth year, he went to California to learn how to make wine. He now directs a winery named The Scholium Project. This essay was delivered as a lecture at the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College on January 29, 1993. �112 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Their gods, however, we are only too happy to conceive as human creations. There is nothing in the Iliad to support this; all of its language points toward the contrary. In particular, Zeus is called the “father of gods and men” in order to show that he is the condition for the existence of both the other gods and men, of the heroes in particular. So let me rephrase what I said about the gods above: we should be unwilling to see them as the creations of mortal men, but we should still recognize how their continued presence in the world of the heroes depends on the heroes themselves. There are two small but important signs of this in the beginning of the Iliad. In Book 5, Dione consoles the wounded goddess Aphrodite by telling her of the other gods who have been grievously wounded by mortals. It is surprising, perhaps shocking, to learn that Aphrodite’s wound at the hands of Diomedes was not some amazing and unique transgression of an immutable boundary, but only one in a series of impudent, and successful, human assaults upon the immortals. Two incidents stand out in my memory of these tales: Dione says that Diomedes had attacked Hades—the king of the realm of the dead, a figure I had always thought of as dead himself, a mere shade—and wounded him severely and painfully. And lest we think that only gods like the unsubstantial Hades and delicate Aphrodite are subject to these attacks, Dione tells the story of Ares, the god of war, who was set upon by two heroes, trussed up, and stuffed into a huge brass jar for thirteen months, as if he were a lost Jinni from the Arabian Nights. Dione is clear about the consequences of this imprisonment: she says, simply, that if a certain mortal woman had not heard his groans and freed him, he would have perished. (5. 380 ff.) This suggests a possibility that Homer never makes explicit: the gods are subject to starvation. We could bottle them all up, forget about them and so starve them to death. Their place in the world of the heroes is not guaranteed. It depends upon a certain kind of attention, an attention of which Zeus is deeply conscious. He says to Hera: 113 SCHOENER For of all the cities of earth-bound human beings that stand beneath the sun and the starry vault of the heavens, the one most honored in my heart is sacred Troy, and Priam, its king, and his people— for there my altar was never without its fair share of the feast, of the poured wine, of the roasting meat. There we always got the prizes of honor due us. (4. 41-49) This almost nostalgic speech makes me think that there are easier ways to starve the gods to death than by having to stick them into brass jars—and that Zeus is painfully aware of this. If we forget the gods at our meals, when we drink wine, at our games. . . . *** This is not the heart of what I want to discuss. I only wanted to suggest to you that the world of the heroes is much like the world you have entered here—a world of traditions, of traditions that are largely our own singular invention, of traditions supported only in our common and constant activities of talking, eating, celebrating, playing. Singular as this world may be, it need not be in any way cut off from larger spheres, different worlds. For instance, I will now appeal to the world of Homeric scholarship, a world in which the rigors of Freshman lab are unknown, in which the population is too innocent to tremble at the name of Kant—a world that might seem to discourage the interest of us amateurs. Bah! I say. It is a world in which I have learned things and had fun. I recommend it to you. Any Homeric scholar, no matter how much of a Freshman in the field, will be able to tell you right away that Homer has two words for “silence,” siopei and sigei, and that he never uses them as the subject or object of verbs but that they occur only in the following construction: “in silence.”2 This is the subject of my essay: what does Homer mean by �114 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW “silence”—in particular, what does it mean that Homer only speaks of silence as that in which something else takes place?3 In attempting to answer this question, I will draw only on the one fragment of a text that we all have in common: the Iliad, Books 1 through 5. But this is no deprivation for us; rather, even in this small piece of a text there is more in the way of riches than we could ever appropriate, much less digest. In the face of these riches, I will bluntly, almost without discrimination, reach out for one of the gems that shines most brightly, the beginning of Book 3: Now once each of them had been put into order, each with his captain, then the Trojans went out in clamor and shrieking, like birds—just as the clamor of cranes before the face of the sky, when they flee winter and its endless rains, and they fly toward the streams of the Ocean, all with a great clamor, and bring bloodshed and destruction to the men at the source of the Nile. And so these cranes are surrounded by evil strife, even from the break of day— But the Achaians went out in silence, breathing strength, each one eager to defend and protect the other. The contrast here is so striking that it could mislead us. If we did not proceed with the greatest discrimination, we might immediately infer from it that the Greeks and Trojans were completely different races, almost different species, and, further, that Homer much prefers the Achaians to the Trojans, since he compares the latter to squawking birds but treats the former with great and simple dignity. Let us sift through this passage carefully. We should recall that this description is immediately preceded by the strange, nearly endless, enumeration of all the battalions fighting at Troy. The enumeration seems to be entailed by two parallel, but not identical, pieces of advice SCHOENER 115 offered to the Achaian and Trojan generals by the wise elder of each side. After the Achaian host has shouted its assent to the counsel of Odysseus—that they should stay and continue to fight for the capture of Troy—Nestor suggests to Agamemnon that [H]e separate the warriors by tribe and by brotherhood, so that brotherhood can bear aid to brotherhood, and tribe to tribe. . .Then you will know who among the chiefs and who among the troops is base, and who is brave—for each group will be fighting by itself. (2. 362 ff.) This seems to be Nestor’s idea: the Achaians have been fighting in ranks as organized as they ever will be until now, but they have been all mixed together, as if they were all one tribe. But they are not: Achilles’ withdrawal has already made that clear. If they now fight tribe by tribe, it will be easy to assign honor and shame to the particular groups that particularly deserve each. This might eventually result in a new principle for the division of the spoils, but Nestor does not mention this. It might lead to even more contention in assembly, but Nestor is surely thinking that it will spur the troops on in battle, urging each group to exceed the accomplishments of the others. This division into tribes makes the catalogue of the Achaians a possible and even logical, if not gripping, part of the narrative. This division is also the condition for their eventual approach to battle, going in silence. Now once Homer finishes his enumeration of the Achaian tribes, he switches his attention suddenly to the Trojans. He says that, at this time, they were holding an assembly by one of the gates to the walled city, but he tells us nothing of what they were saying. Instead, he describes how Iris, a minor divinity thinly disguised, approaches the Trojan king Priam and his son Hector and gives them the following advice: �116 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Since there are so many foreign allies throughout the great city of Priam, and since one language is not the same as another among human beings scattered all over like seeds—because of this, let every leader give orders only to those whom he has led here, and once he has ordered for himself his fellow citizens, let him lead them forth. (2. 804 ff.) Hector receives the voice and immediately disbands the assembly before we have heard the exchange of a single word. Now this divine advice has the same effect among the Trojans as it did among the Achaians: the men end up ranged for battle according to their tribe and place of origin, and so Homer catalogs them just as he did the Achaians. But we should attend to the great differences here: it looks like many of the “Trojans” are in fact foreign allies, sufficiently foreign that they do not all speak the same language. They are thus separated so that they do not continue to confuse each other, but no special care is taken to unify them. The Achaians are all set against each other in contention for the prizes of glory; but this very contention will unite them in the same task. They will all naturally seek the same end, and their quests are not mutually exclusive but mutually assisting. The face of battle is so vast and so varied that many of the tribes can win great glory at once, and the more each damages the enemy, the easier will be glory for all.4 But the Trojans, now divided into battalions with no means of sure communication between them, are isolated: they are neither pitted against each other in contest, nor capable of joint action. They are already fractured, even before they enter the battle, and reduced to fighting the way a pack of dogs must fight, with only barks and growls, or shrieks of terror, not words, to communicate. But even this great difference does not explain why the Achaians would go to battle in silence. We must go back 117 SCHOENER almost to the beginning of the book and retrace the way the Achaian host behaves when it acts as a whole. We should notice that when Achilles first calls the host to assembly, this gathering is presented as nothing remarkable. Every man takes his place, the whole is orderly and quiet, and any man may approach the center and speak to the whole. Agamemnon may well dominate, but he has neither exclusive right to speak nor the right to decide who speaks. But the assembly is not a model of thoughtful discussion. Achilles and Agamemnon insult each other, and Agamemnon treats Achilles so bitterly that he almost curses the assembly with the slaughter of its king. When the gathering is finally dissolved, Achilles has withdrawn from the host, Nestor has been ignored—and if I had been seated among them, I would be glad that this open forum for group discussion was now over. This bodes badly for the Achaians’ future ability to work together and makes their silence look like failure of speech—not an act of strength or resolution. *** The return of Chryseis placates Apollo, and health, if not peace, returns to the Achaian camp. But soon Zeus begins to carry out Achilles’ wish for vengeance, and sends a dream to Agamemnon, to lure him to disaster. The dream urges Agamemnon to rally the troops for battle, promising him that the immortals intend immediate victory for him. But as if in a sign that he needs no lures to disaster, Agamemnon decides to stir the troops to battle by conveying the opposite message to them—telling them that they are doomed to failure. This has always seemed like the pitch of folly to me, and was a cause of my despising Agamemnon further; but I think that I now see some understanding behind it, an understanding that would help restore the spirit to the host after the last disastrous assembly. Let me spell out this understanding in detail. As soon as he wakes, Agamemnon has the heralds summon the host to assembly. But on the way, he seems to �118 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW catch the most important leaders—“a council of the greatspirited elders” as Homer calls them—and separates them from the throng. To them he reveals his dream and his plan: he will “make trial of the men with words, as is right, and order them to flee, but you,” he tells the great-spirited elders, “you hold them back with words” (2. 73 ff.). They agree, and all proceed on to the assembly. There are two especially important points to notice here: the first is the use of a beautiful word, megathumos. I have translated it as “great-spirited”, but this lacks much. Thumos is one of the strongest words in the Greek language, but it is hard to say what it means. It is at the heart of every hero, and perhaps of every philosopher. It is connected to strength and fury, desire and deliberation. Now Homer often uses this word as the epithet of the Trojans; he never bestows it upon the Achaians—they are, by contrast, prudently “wellgreaved.” Achilles, on the other hand, puts it to special use early in his dispute with Agamemnon: when he addresses the host as a whole, he calls them “the great-spirited Achaians.” I do not think that this is mere flattery on his part; at this moment he thinks highly of his comrades and expects them to support him in his denunciation of the fat dog-king. But soon it is clear that they will remain voiceless, mere spectators; and that he can have no revenge through the spilling of Agamemnon’s blood. But even worse, Agamemnon picks up Achilles’ use of the word and uses it to address the host in response. But this time, he casts it back in their faces as a taunt. In answer to Achilles’ suggestion that Agamemnon give up Chryseis and be rewarded with another prize later, Agamemnon says: So if the great-spirited Achaians give me a prize, having fitted it to my own spirit, so that there will be equal exchange—then fine! But if they do not give me this, then I will myself come and seize what I want—whether it is your prize, Achilles, or Ajax’, or Odysseus’. (1. 135 ff.) 119 SCHOENER He thus uses Achilles’ compliment to threaten and humiliate them, clearly foreseeing that neither Ajax nor Odysseus, nor any of the other “great-spirited Achaians” would resist him. And he is right: only Achilles trembles with anger and reaches for his sword. This taunt must have been a great source of shame for the heroes, but still they stayed quiet. Now having witnessed this humiliation of his comrades, Achilles returns his huge sword to its sheath and speaks in a different voice: “You heavy with wine, you with the face of a dog but the heart of a doe. . .you folk-devouring king—you rule over men worth nothing: for otherwise, Son of Atreus, you would be committing your last acts of insolence now.” (1. 231 ff.) With this, he pledges his withdrawal and throws the scepter, a symbol for him of the Achaian concern for justice and reverence, to the ground, swearing on it now merely as a piece of dead wood. The Achaian host has gone from “greatspirited” to “worth nothing” in his eyes; its emblem is some dead wood that “never more will put forth leaves or shoots or run with sap.” These are heavy words from one of the greatest warriors in the host, a man glorious in battle who rose up to help save the people from the plague that was about to destroy them. It seems impossible to me that this change in his words could not affect the warriors, from Diomedes and Odysseus, all of the way down to the nameless foot soldiers and horse feeders. No matter whether they thought Achilles was justified or overweening, their silence in the assembly—in the face of Agamemnon and his brazen taunts, and in front of their own men—this silence must have been a source of shame for them. As the first book closes, the miasma of the plague has been replaced by a different kind of stain: the whole camp now festers with the shame of its silence. *** �120 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW This is where I begin to see the results that may come from Agamemnon’s strange plan. He calls the elders together to inform them of a plan to test the fighting-spirit, the thumos, of the troops. The test is a test of shame: will the men be ashamed to accept his order to break camp, or is their thumos so broken that they will rush to the ships? The plan could only make sense on the assumption that they will despise the order and insist on staying. But Agamemnon makes no such assumption; rather he proposes that when the men run, the elders should restrain them with words. Now this proposal implies two utterly natural assumptions on Agamemnon’s part: first, that the thumos of the elders is indeed great, so that they will be in no way tempted to go home; second, that the men will respond quickly and completely to the words of the great-spirited elders—in other words, that all they needed was a “pep-talk.”5 The whole plan seems intended to cement the relations of Agamemnon and his lieutenants and to provide the troops with the occasion for a series of dramatic invigorating speeches by their leaders. The plan seems more and more reasonable. The assembly gathers—but not in the same way it did at first, even in the midst of the plague. The people were scurrying. Just as tribes of thronging bees pour out of hollow rocks, always coming in fresh waves, and they fly in clusters over the spring flowers, and some hover here, some there—just so did the many tribes of men pour from their ships and huts and make their way in throngs to the assembly. But Rumor, the messenger of Zeus, blazed among them, and urged them on— and so they began to assemble. But the assembly was completely disordered, and the earth groaned beneath the seated host, and there was an uproar throughout. Nine heralds, shouting, were trying to restrain it, if only the noise could be restrained . . .with effort, the people were made to sit, and SCHOENER 121 once they had ceased from their clamor, they were made to stay seated. (2. 86 ff.) The assembly is practically a rabble; the people move like bees covering a field, but once they are pressed to order themselves, they begin to shout and cry. They make the same clamor that Homer ascribes to the Trojans at the beginning of Book III and the same “uproar” that he ascribes to the joint battles of the Achaians and Trojans all through the book. And this is the beginning of an assembly. One could hardly imagine calling these bee-men “great-spirited.” Agamemnon’s test, and the eventual Achaian march into battle, seems doomed. Once they are assembled, Agamemnon begins his harangue, and it is a remarkable test. Following his own plan, he points out that their dream-ordered departure will be a “shameful thing to hear about—indeed even for those who are yet to be, how in vain an Achaian host so good and so huge warred a war without result, even in fighting with weaker men.” Next he expands on the difference in numbers between the armies and points out that if all the Trojans were captured and made cup-bearing slaves for the Achaians, there would still be only cup-bearer for every ten Achaians. Then, as if their spirits were not yet utterly broken by imagining the contempt of future races, he says: In fact, nine years have passed, and the timbers are rotten in our boats, and the ropes have frayed utterly, and, I suppose, our wives and infant children are awaiting us in our halls. Of course, if there were any infant children around, they would not belong to the warriors—and what chilling effect Agamemnon’s “I suppose” must have had! The heart of each man must now be turned home with such longing and eagerness that no desire for glory, nor martial shame, could restrain it. And so Agamemnon closes his test thus: “All right then, we should all obey—just as I say. Let us escape with our �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 122 ships to our dear homeland—for we will assuredly never take Troy and its wide streets.” The results of this cruel speech are utterly predictable: the assembly dissolves and the men fly to their ships, and with only increasing momentum, the men are on board, and some ships are already in the bright salt sea. Homer says: “Then the Achaians would have had their homecoming, but beyond what was fated.” (2. 155) Before we consider what prevented this homecoming, we should attend to a striking development in the language of the poem. You will have noticed a certain abundance of wonderful similes in the Iliad; the simile of the bees is an instance of these. You will have noticed that they seem to compare the events of the battlefield to moments in the world of nature, especially to bucolic scenes of mountains and farms, and that many of the comparisons seem odd. Let me point this out: there is not a simile in the book until the bees appear in Book 2, but this simile is only the beginning. Once the troops here Agamemnon’s speech, Homer compares the Achaians in swift succession to waves whipped by the wind and to a wheat field knocked down by a gale; then, before they eventually march in silence, he compares them again to the sea, to fire, birds, flowers, and flies in a barn. But once the Achaian begin marching, Homer describes them directly, without simile—but then suddenly, for the first time, he compares the Trojans to birds. We will soon understand the reason for this development. *** Now the Achaians do not win their homecoming because of a remarkable series of actions by Odysseus. While the others rushed to their ships, he, perhaps alone, did not move—“for a great pain had seized his heart and spirit.” Athena came to him and spurred him to prevent the sudden departure, and when he heard her voice he began to run. Now Homer says that when he met another leader, he spoke SCHOENER 123 to him gently and either informed him of reminded him of Agamemnon’s stealthy plan, and urged him just to sit down, and to seat his followers with him. But when he met a warrior who was not a leader—and not just a horse-feeder, but a true warrior—and found him making noise, he would strike him with the great scepter of the Achaians, make him sit down and would ashame him, calling him “not worth counting, neither in war nor in counsel.” And Homer says: “And so they rushed back to the assembly from their ships and huts, with a roar, as a wave of the much-resounding sea thunders along a great beach, and the sea roars.” We should note first that Agamemnon was perilously wrong in his two assumptions: neither were the elders so strong of spirit that they could withstand his test—only Odysseus did not move; nor did the troops need only a peptalk to prepare for their next attack. They were desperate to leave and many, even warriors, needed beatings from great Odysseus just to sit still. This suggests that the thumos of the whole host was nearly broken, and that Agamemnon had no understanding of its true state. Even Odysseus and Nestor must have misunderstood its condition, or have been terribly weak in spirit, for neither of them—in fact, none of the “great-spirited elders”—had objected to Agamemnon’s foolhardy plan. Now we must also note that the state of the restored assembly is still far from encouraging: it is not even like tribes of bees, but like the wild and inanimate sea, roaring incessantly and without meaning. We might wonder, who could speak helpfully in such an assembly? In answer to this, Homer offers us Thersites, an ugly and impudent hunchback. We must be very careful of not taking him as some kind of stock comic character. He rises up, lame and misshapen, and hurls abuse at Agamemnon. We must now notice how close he is in this respect to brilliant Achilles. He accuses Agamemnon of keeping them in Troy only for his own gain and urges the troops to desert. He does not speak poorly, and perhaps he was persuasive, for suddenly Odysseus �124 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW appears at his side and reproaches him with “hard words,” and strikes him with the scepter. He hits ugly Thersites hard enough to raise a bloody welt on his back, and Homer says, “A big tear fell from him.” (2. 269) Tears are very serious things for Homer; the heroes, especially the Achaians, let them fall when their friends are taken from them, parents let them fall over lost children. Thersites’ tear is no less serious than the rest, perhaps even more so because of his ugliness, his utter destitution of friends. Though he is here in Troy he will never have any one to cry with, nor is it possible to imagine that any one would cry if he fell beneath a Trojan arrow. Some of you know Sophocles’ play, the Philoctetes. Perhaps it will seem just to you that Odysseus is mistaken for Thersites by the destitute Philoctetes in the play. (5. 440 ff.) Now Thersites’ counsel is expressed with neither elegance nor subtlety, nor can it sound very noble. But as the recent rush to the ships has shown, it expresses longings recently made public by every man of the host. These men, already reviled by the departed Achilles, now find that they have failed a test of their shame and courage. They have been tempted cruelly, failed, and now each finds himself humiliated before his neighbor. It would be hard for any of them to imagine any nobility in himself, or in his neighbor. Then up steps miserable Thersites, who speaks the unspeakable. He presents to the gathered host the position they are unwilling to take, the depth to which they could never sink. They could flee the war, but never speak publicly with such contempt for their enterprise and their leaders. His shameless public display restores to them their own sense of shame; but even better, his public humiliation and punishment presents them with the scourging that each would consider meet for his own cowardice, and for the cowardice of his neighbor. I hate to use words like this, but I feel that Odysseus’ beating of Thersites provides a common release for the abashed and humiliated army. A sign of this is their reaction: SCHOENER 125 And the men, though they were grieving deeply, all laughed at him with relish; and thus one would say, with a glance, at the one nearest him: “Oh! Though Odysseus has certainly accomplished numerous brave deeds, leading us in good counsel and commanding us in battle—this deed, now, this is by far the finest he has wrought among the Achaians.”. . .So spoke the multitude. I had always thought that this universal laugh was odd— there is not much laughter in the Iliad—and a little cruel and mean-spirited for heroes. I certainly never understood why the men would call this “by far his finest deed.” But now I think that the laughter the deed provides is not only appropriate but necessary, and so each warrior turns to the man closest to him, and they all share this grisly moment that helps restore their self-respect. For now as each one turns to the other, and as they look at each other, each one can now think of how different he is from Thersites—how noble by comparison, how like Odysseus. Thus do the Achaian warriors regain some of their great spirit. But they are not yet ready for battle: Homer’s similes show this. After the humiliation of Thersites, Odysseus and Nestor finally give them the speeches of encouragement, and the troops are ready for them: at the end they shout in assent. But Homer compares their shout to a great wave breaking against a high cliff. One might wonder what the cliff is here— the Trojans are still far away. There is still something bootless in the fury of the Achaians. As they draw closer and closer to battle, they win new comparisons: after sacrificing and feasting and donning their armor, they are like a forest fire, “and their gleam, shining everywhere, went up through the sky to the heavens.” (2. 445 ff.) And once they take their place on the plain around the river Scamander, now closer to Troy, Homer compares them to �126 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW the many tribes of winged birds, geese, or cranes, or long-necked swans, [that] fly here and there, glorying in the strength of their wings, and with clamor they advance, and the meadows resound with them—just so did the tribes of men pour from the ships and huts onto the plain of Scamander; and the earth echoed terribly beneath the tread of men and horses. It is wonderful now to feel the men, so recently not just wounded but crippled in their spirits, wonderful to feel them stretching their strong arms like swans “glorying in the strength of their wings;” terrible too to imagine the sound of their tread, the clamor of gleaming bronze armor, the uproar of their war cries. But suddenly they are like the many tribes of swarming flies, buzzing through the farmhouse at the peak of Spring, when the pails dew with milk—in just such numbers stood the long-haired Achaians on the plain, facing the Trojans and eager to tear them apart. And now all the illusions have been destroyed. Even as the Achaians become calmer again, from roaring oceans, to screeching birds, now to buzzing flies hovering in farm houses, near sweet pails of fresh milk, even as we sense the return of their great spirits, we must recognize the goal toward which they are moving. The humiliated, brokenspirited men were rushing home; these stronger, fire-like, swan-like, glorious men are gathering their strength in order to kill other men. For these men, the Trojans they are eager to tear apart, the flies will not be circling pails of milk. Lest we see this all from the side of the apparently mightier Achaians, Homer insists upon one more simile. In this one, the Achaians are finally separated into their tribes and brotherhoods; this separation, I now believe, ensures not only a kind of team by team competition for glory, but ensures that standing next to each man is a brother, a cousin, SCHOENER 127 a companion from youth. No warrior is anonymous, no warrior has disappeared. Each is, I think, painfully present to his neighbor. This is the simile: These men, their leaders ordered them, just as goatherds easily order widely scattered flocks of goats that had been mingling in the pasture, and the leaders ordered some here and some there in order for them to go into the battle. I will say one thing about this simile: there are only two reasons a goatherd would order his goats. Either he is going to milk them or he is going to bring them to slaughter. As if to settle our hesitation, Homer compares Agamemnon in all of his glory to a great bull, the most pre-eminent of his herd. We do not have to live long in the world of the Iliad to know the destiny of the greatest, most beautiful bulls: they are sacrificed on the most important occasions. I do not mean to abuse you with a tedious reiteration: of course we all know that these men are all liable to die soon— that, in a certain sense, they are here to die. But do they know it? Let me suggest to you that this point distinguishes the Achaians from the Trojans at the beginning of Book 3. The Achaians have faced shame and humiliation, they have been teased with images of a homecoming and have turned their back on those images with their eyes wide open to what they will face if they remain. As their spirits return, and as they are calmed from the force of a sea or a forest fire to buzzing bees and docile goats, they are seeing more and more clearly what they will face. Notice the last two things that Homer says are on their minds before the battle: in Book 2, directly before the catalogue, he says “they are eager to tear the Trojans apart;” at the beginning of Book 3 “they are eager in their spirits to bring help to each other.” These warriors, whose spirits have clearly returned, are not thinking about glory, booty, even victory. Facing the Trojans, they think about destroying them in the most terrible, beastly, inglorious way; �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 128 marching towards them, hearing their wild cries, they think only of helping each other in the horror to come. The Achaians go in silence because they see what is ahead of them, because they see each other as brothers, because they still see Agamemnon’s images of their wives and children. They march in a hard-won silence in awe of the world they have created and willed for themselves.6 *** 1 Compare the whole literary history of the word porphureos: it surely represents something from the realm of nature in itself, not merely through our eyes or experience. But note that Homer never uses it of the sea itself (only of its waves, and even so only four times or so) and favors it instead as an epithet for something very intimately related to us: our blood. 2 It is surely worth noting that the phrase is properly a kind of comitative dative rather than a locative since the silence names the condition—rather than the place—in which the action takes place. It would be awkward, though not impossible, to translate sigei “with silence” in order to show this. I have not embarrassed the February Freshmen with these minutiae. One might also note that the constructions occur 14 times in the first ten books of the Iliad, but only three times after that. 3 Silence is not properly an absence of sound, noise, talk: it is the negation or canceling of them. It takes place, but only as the result of something. It is not a negative state, but the opposite—an intentional state of fullness, a state the Achaians, especially, create. 4 But cf. 6. 98 ff.: it looks like the departure of Achilles is the necessary condition for any such distribution of glory. His might is so preeminent that no other can win glory when he is in the fray. 5 I am afraid that when Homer, narrating Agamemnon’s summons of the elders, calls them “great-spirited,” he is only speaking ironically. Neither now nor when Achilles first used the word were they great-spirited. 6 The Trojans have not yet had an assembly because they have not been terrified. This seems to be when the assembly is most necessary. Similarly, the Trojans still make lots of noise on the way to battle: they have not yet been shaken badly enough to be quiet. 129 � 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2006/1 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Navarre, Sarah Hunt, Frank Sachs, Joe Nelson, Charles A. Lurçat, François Schoener, Abraham Description An account of the resource Volume XLIX, number one of The St. John's Review. Published in 2006. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_49_No_1 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1d34fc95c65ab9a75a70b8742a1e55a0.pdf f900b46b7423bd019345a6a421185db2 PDF Text Text The St. John’s Review Volume XLIX, number two (2006) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Elizabeth Curry The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P .O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2006 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Essays and Lectures The Fixed, The Fluid, and the Flexible: Achilles, the River, and Homer’s World........................ 5 Mera J. Flaumenhaft Making Up Our Minds............................................... 47 Robert Richardson Reviews What Good Are Friends? Lorraine Smith Pangle’s Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship................... 73 Robert Goldberg �4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 The Fixed, the Fluid, and the Flexible: Achilles, the River, and Homer’s World Mera J. Flaumenhaft Homer’s Troy is a mainland city with access to the sea. Although Troy’s riches have been acquired through trade with other cities, in the Iliad the seafaring life is almost entirely associated with the Greek flotilla moored on Troy’s shores. We hear of Greek ships, Greek captains, and voyages from Greek lands across the sea. The army of the Greeks is enumerated in the catalogue of ships they sailed to Troy, while the Trojans and their allies are listed by the lands they come from. Troy has had a history of troubled relations with the god of the sea. An early king failed to pay the promised price for walls built by Poseidon, and the weakened city barely survived the sea monster sent to avenge this violation. Several generations later, a Trojan prince sailed “over the sea in seafaring ships” (3.46-47) and stole away with the wife of his unsuspecting host. In the Iliad Paris is the only prominent Trojan who is said to have gone to sea.1 When the Achaean host besieges Troy to regain Helen and destroy Priam’s city, Poseidon takes the side of the Achaeans. But Troy’s relationship to the watery realm is not entirely troubled, for the city also owes its prosperity to the river Scamander, which rises in the mountain above the land, meets a tributary, and flows down to the “broad gulf of the sea.” The Olympian sea god Poseidon, “who circles the earth and shakes it,” is, like Ocean, associated with water of the cosmos, universal water. Scamander, like all rivers in Greek myths, is descended from Ocean. But, like the others, Troy’s river is local water, associated with a particular place; it serves Mera Flaumenhaft is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. �6 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW as a symbol of its “habitability.”2 It irrigates crops, provides water for drinking and cooking, as well as hot and cold water for the tanks in which the fabrics that so characterize Trojan wealth are laundered (22.147-56). There is no indication in Homer that Trojans, or others who come to Troy, navigate the river. Ships ply the sea from coast to coast, but inland places are usually reached by land. The river is lively; it eddies and bubbles, swirls and crests. Because of its yellow-brown color, the Gods call it Xanthus, but in Troy it has a personal name, Scamander (20.74), which is also the name of the grandson of the present ruler (6.402), the future heir to the kingship. Like its tributary Simoieis, another source of Trojan fertility, the river serves almost as a “landscape symbol for Troy itself.”3 As an offspring of the “river Oceanus” from whom all the gods are sprung (14.246, 302), Scamander is also a descendent of immortal Zeus (14.434; 24.693). The river has its own priest, whose name (Hypsenor, “high,” 5.75-78), like the epithet of his father (huperthumou, “high spirited,” 5.76-77), suggests his high status; the Trojans honor him “like a god” (5.77). They sacrifice bulls and live horses (21.131-32) to Scamander to insure the continued fertility of the land. An old story predicted that Troy would survive if its Thracian ally Rhesus—or his horses—could drink the waters of Scamander.4 It is fitting that Zeus lifts his golden scales to signal the death of Hector just as he and Achilles, on their fourth circuit of the city, come to the two springs that feed eddying Scamander (12.147, 208). When Hector dies, the city by the river will come to its end. Scamander has another important function in Troy. Although its flowing and shapeless water can be removed by the mortals who dwell around it, the river itself remains channeled between steep banks, and its channel, which does have a set shape and location, divides the land that surrounds it. It is a natural landmark that, unlike the Trojan or Achaean walls, can never be erased. Homer charts the war geographically, as the sides repeatedly cross the river, waging battle, now at the Trojan walls, now at the Greek ships. At the end FLAUMENHAFT 7 of the Iliad, when Priam goes to Achilles’ tent to ransom Hector’s body, he leaves the relative safety of Troy and crosses into the no man’s land on the other side of Troy’s tutelary river. In Book Twenty-one the river becomes the site of some of Achilles’ strangest encounters as he moves towards the walls of Troy, determined to take revenge on Hector for the death of Patroclus. The strangeness of this part of the Iliad has suggested to some that it is alien material, or that Homer here regresses to a more primitive mode of thinking.5 The book consists of four parts: the admired, realistic encounters of Achilles with Lycaon and Asteropaeus; the battles between Achilles and Scamander and between Scamander and Hephaestus, which scholars sometimes compare to episodes in other epics and folktales or describe as just plain weird;6 a reprise of Olympian wrangling over the mortals; and the Trojan retreat into Troy, where Priam awaits the coming of the man who will kill his son. This essay will suggest that, rather than pulling away from the Iliad, Book Twenty-one points to the deepest meaning of Achilles’ experience. Part One discusses the three river episodes as graphic depictions of Achilles’ response to his own mortality. Part Two offers three alternatives to his tragic opposition to the threat of dissolution. The shield of Hephaestus and Homer’s poetry suggest the interplay of fixity and fluidity, stability and change, in the human soul and in the cosmos as a whole. Odysseus, too, exemplifies a kind of flexibility as a viable alternative to the tragic extremes of stable fixity and unstable fluidity as they are presented in Book Twenty-one. The essay concludes with a brief note on another river, the one to which Achilles might return, were he a less extraordinary man. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 8 1 1. Battles by the River: Achilles, Lycaon, and Asteropaeus However the book divisions came to be, Book Twenty-one is set off from what comes before and after it by its association with the watery world. As Achilles drives the Trojans towards the city, some of them “pour forth” (“streaming,” proechonta, from cheô, 21.6) in flight. Others are pent up in the “deep flowing river with its silver eddies, [where]…whirled about, they swam this way and that” (21.8-11). Homer emphasizes the noise. In addition to the usual din of battle, we hear the sound of flowing and splashing water, now disturbed by the confused and violent action between the riverbanks. The din will increase, as the river speaks in human voice and bellows in anger. At the end of Book Twenty-one, those Trojans who have survived the episode “pour back” (or, “stream,” esechunto, from cheô, 21.610) into the city. Between the “streamings” which begin and end the episode, Achilles literally battles the great Trojan stream itself. He is first compared to a fire driving locusts into a river and then to a huge dolphin devouring prey in a harbor. We have entered a realm where all conventional restraints are about to be abandoned and where natural predation is uninhibited: big fish go after little fish, undeterred by pity, self-control, or the laws of nations. Revenge is the sole motive. In the catalogue of Trojan allies in Book Two Homer mentions a foolish Carian named Nastes who came to the war “all decked in gold, like a girl” (2.872) and was slain in the river by Achilles, who “bore off the gold” (2.875). In Book Twenty-one, Nastes is not named and Achilles has no interest in gold. Before the major confrontations, he pulls from the river twelve Trojan youths, dazed, “like fawns,” to reserve for sacrifice on the tomb of Patroclus. In the following verses, two other Trojans emerge from the river, only to be tossed back after their pleas for mercy are denied. Human sacrifice and the rejection of surrender violate the ordinary conventions of battle between civilized human beings. FLAUMENHAFT 9 The first of these two named Trojans, Lycaon, is a son of Priam who has only recently returned to battle, having been ransomed previously by a gentler Achilles and returned to his father’s house. Now, desperately “unwilling,” he is destined for the house of Hades. Like the twelve anonymous youths, he is “dazed,” but, unlike them, he makes a personal plea for his life, promising many gifts if Achilles will ransom him again. Achilles hurls his spear, which misses him, but “stands in the ground” (eni gaiê estê, 21. 69-70), upright and fixed, an emblem of his own refusal to be moved. Lycaon’s plea rests on his having a different mother from Hector, although he knows that did not deter Achilles from refusing to give back Lycaon’s full brother, Polydorus, whose name ironically means “many gifts.” Achilles now sounds like Agamemnon at earlier moments when he brutally rejects pleas for ransom and vows to let no Trojan’s son remain alive for ransom (6.46, 11.131). In their brief but memorable exchange, Achilles calls the naïve boy who begs for his life first “fool” (21. 99) and then “friend” (21.106), sardonically assuring him that he must die. Homer here reminds us that Achilles, despite his immortal mother, is no less subject to death than this hapless Trojan boy. Using a word associated most strongly with Achilles himself, Lycaon says he was born minunthadion, “to a brief span of life” (21.84). He dies as all men do in Homer’s battles; his knees and his heart are “loosened” (luto, 21.114) and his dark blood “flows”(rhee, 21.119). In life, men are solid beings, distinct from their surroundings, upright and contained. In death, they dissolve, go slack, and lose their shape and outlines. Internal fluids, no longer contained within the channels and boundaries of a closed body, flow forth and gather outside it in shapeless pools on the ground. Achilles flings more words at Lycaon as he flings him into the river. No longer governed by his own will, the precious son of the king of Troy will be carried away (21.120), passively, like an object, by the “eddying Scamander…into the broad gulf of the sea” (21.125). The savagery of Achilles’ �10 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW treatment of Lycaon is intensified by blasphemy. He throws Lycaon into the river as he says Lycaon has thrown many sacrificial bulls and even living horses into the silver eddies of Scamander. In a grotesque parody of Trojan piety, Lycaon is a human offering to his own river. Achilles cruelly taunts him by describing how the fish, actively leaping among the waves, will eat his lifeless “white fat” (21.127). The mutilation of human bodies by the fish of the sea is a horror even beyond that of the devouring of corpses by birds and dogs on the battlefields.7 Here the predators are even lower in the hierarchy of living beings, are themselves more subject to the flow of their medium, and lack the ability to express themselves, even in cries and howls. Their human victims are nibbled at, silently and out of view. With no bathing, burning, or funeral ceremony, they will not be touched again by human hands, and there will be no visible reminder of them to those who come after. They are, quite literally, dissolved. By now, the river is red, literally a bloodbath filled with men, corpses and horses, and is “pondering in mind” (21.137) how to aid the Trojans. Achilles’ next opponent is not a son of Priam, but a Trojan ally, Asteropaeus, the “star”(astêr) of Paeonia, who is said to be descended from “wide-flowing [eurureontos] Axius,” his own local and “deepeddying river” (21.141-43), the “fairest water upon the earth” (21.158). The ancestry of this new opponent is on Achilles’ mind from the moment he sees him: “Who among men art thou, and from whence…? Unhappy are they whose children face my might” (21.150-51). Xanthus, angry at the pitiless Achilles for wreaking havoc beside his banks, puts courage in Asteropaeus’s heart. Achilles now faces a man who is riverine in origin and proud of his ancestry. He is the only man in Homer who is said to be ambidextrous (peridexios, 21.163); his strength is not fixed on one side, but alternates between right and left or flows from both sides at once. Xanthus gives him courage as he “stands forth from the river” (21.144), holding two spears. In contrast, Achilles’ single ashen spear, which misses Asteropaeus, “fixes FLAUMENHAFT 11 itself ”(enestêrikto, 21.168) “up to half its length” in the bank. For all his ambidexterity, Asteropaeus is unable to draw out this spear, which again suggests the implacable hero’s desire for eternal fixity. In this round, the fixed defeats the fluid. Asteropaeus wounds Achilles with his sword, making his “dark blood start forth” (21.167). But this wound, the only one Achilles suffers in the Iliad,8 is not fatal. It elicits, as he kills Asteropaeus, an account of his own genealogy, which he claims is superior to the one derived from the Paeonian river, and, indeed, from any water, however great: Wherefore as Zeus is mightier than rivers that murmur seaward, so mightier too is the seed of Zeus than the seed of a river….With him [Zeus] does not even king Achelous vie, nor the great might of deep-flowing Ocean, from whom all rivers flow and every sea, and all the springs and deep wells. (21.190-97) Achilles easily pulls his own spear from the bank and strikes Asteropaeus in his belly, from which all his bowels “flow” (181, chunto from cheô). The grandson of the river Axius is left in the sand, where the dark water “moistens”(21.202) him, and fish and eels immediately begin to “tear the fat about his kidneys” (21.203-4). Like Lycaon’s, his body is no longer a shaped whole. Achilles’ claim about his superiority is a bit puzzling. He traces his origin, not to his immortal mother Thetis, but through his mortal father Peleus and grandfather Aeacus, to Zeus who, as he says in Book Nine, will honor him above all men. Throughout the book, it is understood that his death, anticipated from the beginning, is the legacy of Peleus. But in Book Twenty-one Achilles’ mortality is suggested even in his immortal mother. To be immortal is to be fixed in an unchanging eternity. But Achilles’ mother is a sea-goddess, the daughter of Nereus, the aged god of the sea. The old stories tell how, unlike other goddesses, who willingly marry mortal men, Thetis resisted marriage to Peleus. Fluid, she �12 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW tried to avoid his grasp by slipping through his fingers, metamorphosing into a lion, snake, flowing water, and even burning fire. He finally got hold of her while she was sleeping and unable to change her form.9 She married Peleus, and produced the swift-footed son destined to run through his brief life brilliantly, yearning for eternity even as he ages from moment to moment. Thetis is a minor divinity in the Iliad, with an ambiguous relationship to the more solid gods “who have their homes” on high Olympus. Lower than they are, she is at home in the depths of the slippery, changing sea. Lacking the clear, dry outline of Athena and Apollo, she appears, in the brief third simile in the book, “like a mist”(1.359), visible only to her son. By the time of the Iliad, she is wed to an aging mortal from whom she has withdrawn in distaste (18.432-35). But, despite her lesser, more fluid status, her marriage and mortal son were the conditions that insured Zeus’s unchanging reign. Had she married Zeus, her immortal son would have been greater than his father. Cosmic equilibrium is bought at the cost of human mortality. The alternative would mean perpetual evolution, perpetual violent succession, perpetual disorder.10 At another time, she is said to have prevented the other Olympians from binding Zeus (1.396-406), again insuring his continued power. When Patroclus is killed, Thetis and her sister nymphs, the Nereids, anticipate the death of Achilles himself. In a cave in the depths of the sea, they augment the waters with their tears, as Homer, in flowing hexameters, intones a mellifluous catalogue of their names (18.39-49). The character of Achilles’ divine maternal origins—eternal fluidity and slip— make all the more poignant his will to fix his character, reputation, and memory, in the even more mutable and less permanent world he inhabits, “the human order, where each generation must yield to the next.”11 In any case, confronting the very fact of descent—on either side—is problematic for FLAUMENHAFT 13 the man who aspires to the autonomy of a god. It forces the hero to acknowledge that his being is dependent on those who generate him, even if these progenitors are themselves immortal. Those old stories also tell how Thetis tried to insure the immortality of her extraordinary child by dipping him in the waters of another river, Styx, the boundary line between the living and the dead. Instinctively, she held on to him to prevent his drowning, and thus neglected to dip the ankle by which she held him. Homer only alludes to the stories of his birth and death, but his ancient audience—and most readers today—knew that Achilles dies of an arrow wound in that undipped heel. 2. Battle Against the River: Achilles and Scamander Homer quietly foreshadows the clogging of the river in Book Sixteen when Achilles gives Patroclus permission to enter battle. There, he points out that, if Agamemnon had not insulted him, the Trojans would be fleeing and “would fill the watercourses with their dead” (16.71). After the death of Asteropaeus, Achilles slays seven other Paeonians, until the river rises in anger. Slipping from god to man to beast, it calls forth “like a man” (21.213), bellows “like a bull”(21.237), and warns him to slay his Trojan victims on the plain, not in his waters. From now on, although it never assumes a human form,12 the river is personified in its behavior. English translations, which require a subject pronoun, now call the river “he.” Throughout this episode, the gods refer to the river by its divine name, Xanthus, while the man Achilles calls it Scamander. The narrator raises its status by using both names or simply calling it “the river,” capitalized in some translations. The river’s streams are clogged with corpses and cannot flow down to the sea. Achilles’ rage and self-exertion literally have begun to interfere with the natural flow of things. Incited by Apollo, he leaps from the bank into the river itself, which sweeps along the bodies in his midst, tossing corpses up onto the land, and hiding the living in his deep eddies. �14 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Achilles’ battle with the river is a vivid image of what the Iliad suggests throughout: that his desire for undying glory is a desire to transcend human mutability, to become an unchanging god. Consider how he differs from Diomedes, the surrogate “best of the Achaeans” when Achilles is absent from battle: … he stormed across the plain like a winter torrent at the full that with its swift flood sweeps away the embankments; this the close-fenced embankments hold not back, neither do the walls of the fruitful vineyards stay its sudden coming when the rain of Zeus drives it on. (5.87-91) Later, at the sight of Hector, who he assumes must be protected by some god, Diomedes gives ground, like a man who “halts in dismay at a swift-streaming river that flows on to the sea, and, seeing it seething with foam starts backward” (5.597-99). Here the river suggests a boundary; Diomedes recognizes his mortal limits and declines combat with a god. But Achilles, confronting a real river, jumps right in. The verse itself now imitates the action of the river, as it concentrates all its force on overwhelming Achilles.13 We have seen how his desire for constancy makes him the uneasy progeny of a sea goddess. Thetis has always had to visit him on earth; he has never joined her and her sister Nereids in the watery deep. Now he actively opposes a fluid divinity, and it is clear that he is out of his element. While Achilles attempts to play the role of a god in what was supposed to be a theomachy (20.73ff.; 21.31-32), the river god behaves more and more like a human opponent. Against Achilles’ rage, Scamander will not slacken his own fury (menos, 12.305). His proper motion is usually described as “fair-flowing”(eürreês), relaxed and horizontal; now he “stands up” vertically and beats down on Achilles’ shield. But Achilles’ land skills dissolve when he fights with the watery deep. The great hands that have killed so many men are powerless against water that cannot be grasped, or pierced with a spear. His swift feet, deprived of FLAUMENHAFT 15 solid land beneath him, cannot “stand firm” (stêrixasthai, 21.242) in the slippery flow. This is the same word used when Achilles’ spear “sticks” in the bank; it is related to stereos, “solid” or “rigid.” In Book Nine Phoenix says that Achilles “stubbornly” (stereôs, 9.510) refuses to return to battle, to “bend”(gnamptô, 9.514; see also 11.669; 23.731; 24.359). He remains in his tent, literally unbudgeable, until he finally allows Patroclus to enter battle. Now, fighting for his own life, he grasps a “well-shaped”(21.243) elm in an attempt to anchor himself. But the tree comes right up by the roots and dams the river with its thick branches, making it even deeper. Unlike Achilles’ dead ashen spear that resists Asteropaeus’s attempts to free it from the earth, here a living tree easily comes loose from the solid riverbank. Like it, the uprooted, godlike hero, unattached to his mortal, down-to-earth home in Phthia, is now ungrounded in Troy. Unlike the Trojans who also are whirled around in “deep-eddying” Xanthus at the beginning of Book Twenty-one (21. 2, 11, 15), he makes no effort to swim. Even when Achilles flees from the water to the bank, he cannot outrun the swiftly running river, which pursues him, overflowing its natural channel to flood the plain. At this fluid violation of boundary, obscuring some primal distinction between water and dry land in an organized world, Achilles is said to feel fear (21. 248). Again Homer emphasizes the impotence of swift feet and his inability to “make a stand” (266) as the violent river “weakens his knees” and “snatches the ground from beneath his feet” (270-71). In a peculiar extended simile, Homer reminds us of the connection between Scamander and Troy’s continuing fertility: the swift river, now uncontrollable by the most powerful warrior at Troy, is compared to the artificial and directed stream that a farmer makes to divert water from a spring to his crops. He clears obstructing dams of pebbles, and the stream flows swiftly and “outstrips [phthanei] even the one that guides it” (21.257-62). Scamander, rising high, makes the “wave of his flood into a crest” (korusse, 21.306) like the crest of a �16 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW warrior’s helmet. But unlike a mortal enemy, who would speak to him in battle, the immortal river does not address Achilles. This battle is strikingly devoid of the usual boasts and insults of the human contests, although the river does exhort his “dear brother,” the tributary Simoïs, to help him save Troy. Also missing is the usual human audience of whom the fighting heroes are always conscious. Further distancing this part of the Iliad from the political context of the war, Homer does not here mention other Greeks or Trojans. To Achilles, death in these circumstances, like the drowning of a miserable swineherd (281-83), would be far more contemptible than death at the hands of Hector while making a courageous stand, exchanging speech, face to face, against a human antagonist, before a human audience. Scamander’s speech to Simoïs echoes Achilles’ taunt to Lycaon: I deem that his strength shall not avail him, nor in any way his looks, nor yet that goodly armor which, I think, deep beneath the sea will lie covered over (kekalummena) with slime; and he himself I will wrap in sands and shed over him great store of shingle past all measuring; nor will the Achaeans know where to gather his bones, with such a depth of silt shall I enshroud him. Even here will be his sepulcher, nor shall he have need of a heaped-up mound, when the Achaeans make his funeral. (21. 316-23) The worst disgrace for the shining hero, whose shapely glory distinguishes him from his surroundings, is to be “covered over.” The way of the warrior Achilles is to stand forth— disdaining deliberate deception, surreptitious strategies, and indirect speech—and show himself, like a bright star, or blazing fire. He has never anticipated that his own fire might be “quenched” by a river. Now it is fire, in the shape of an anthropomorphized deity that must rescue him. FLAUMENHAFT 17 3. Fire and the River: Hephaestus and Scamander At the end of Book Eight, the Trojans await their dawn victory over the Achaeans. On the plain between the Achaean camp and the streams of Xanthus, “a thousand fires” burn. This early juxtaposition of fire and water is an eerily beautiful scene of quiet peace before the expected slaughter. When the gods line up at the beginning of Book Twenty to fight on behalf of the Achaeans or Trojans, Hephaestus is listed as the opponent of Scamander (21.73-74). In Book Twenty-one, after godlike Achilles has substituted himself for Hephaestus, only to meet with disaster, the two gods finally do face each other. Hera calls upon the halting, crook-footed (kullopodion, 21.331) god to rescue the floundering, swiftfooted (podarkês) man just as he has lost his footing and is about to be swept away in the seething flood of “foam and blood and corpses” (21.325). Hephaestus’s shield has proven “helpless against the river” (21.317-18); he himself must now come to Achilles’ aid.14 The enmity of Paris and Menelaus, Achilles and Hector, Greeks and Trojans, and of the partisan gods on Olympus is now expanded to include the cosmic elements themselves, as fire and water, primal nature deities, confront each other. Personified and quick with motion, changing but remaining themselves, they seem alive. The opposition of the river god and the Olympian has suggested to some the overcoming of a primordial “water world” of flux and “pure process” by a “sky world” characterized by “form and meaningful signs.”15 Like a hot wind, Hephaestus “dries up”—we hear the word xêrianô three times (21. 345, 347, 348)—the plain where the swollen river has overflowed its channel. The fire consumes the dead Trojans on the plain and the living vegetation that the river nourishes, both in and beside itself. The musical catalogue of waving, abundant plant life transforms the river, now called “bright” and “fair,” from the destructive aggressor of the previous encounter with Achilles into the helpless victim of the harsh fire. Its “blast” “torments” the eels and fishes that Achilles said would nibble the fat of Lycaon and Asteropaeus. Even under the “whirls” �18 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW or “eddies” of water, these animals, like the plants, are not fireproof. Finally, in a reversal of the natural quenching of fire by water, Hephaestus “burns” the river. Unlike mortal warriors, watery Scamander has no body parts that an opponent can grasp or upon which he can inflict mortal wounds. But Hephaestus can make the river seethe and boil like his own molten metals. Homer compares the boiling to the melting of solid hog fat into a shapeless liquid in a cauldron on a cooking fire (21.362-64). No longer does Scamander even “wish to flow forward, but is “stayed” (ouk ethele proreein, all’ ischeto, 21.366). The closest the immortal river can come to death is immobility. It cannot be evaporated like ordinary boiling water, or consumed like corpses on a pyre; but Hephaestus can arrest its flow. The battle between water and fire differs from mortal combat in another striking way: here, as with Achilles, there is no verbal exchange between the antagonists. Hera warns of Scamander’s soft words and threats (16. 339), but Hephaestus, who in earlier passages is fully articulate, does not speak to his opponent. The silence of this terrible fire, in contrast with the speech and shouts of men and gods and the bellowing of the river, is particularly grim. The horror abates only when the river promises not to intercede even “when all Troy shall burn with the burning of consuming fire, and the warlike sons of the Achaeans shall be the burners” (21.37576). This promise evokes the terrible image of the end of Troy, which the Iliad does not depict. Only after Scamander’s promise does Hephaestus “quench” his fire and allow the river to rush down again within its bed. The ancient nature-philosophers puzzled over the primal stuff of the cosmos. Impressed by the ubiquity of water in the world, Thales derives all heterogeneous being from this single substance, recognizing ice, water, and vapor as different forms of the same fundamental material. In addition to appearing in these three modes, water is infinitely changeable with respect to its own form: it takes the shape of any FLAUMENHAFT 19 container. Water itself appears relatively lacking in qualities, but takes on the characteristics of other substances; it can be blue, salty, hot, and smelly; and the intensity of these characteristics can vary. Solid lands appear to float on wider expanses of water, and all life arises from the moistening of seeds. If form and life are fundamental conditions of things that are, one might well conclude that all things are continually solidifying into individual particularity and dissolving into undifferentiated homogeneity, that all things are, somehow, water. Heraclitus asserts the fluidity of such a world, seeing its transformations in both water and fire: all things flow; you can’t step in the same river twice and you yourself are not the same “you”; dry things become moist, the moist become dry; there is exchange of all things for fire; it becomes sea or earth, and itself again; everything gives way, and nothing is fixed. But, if nothing self-same endures, the apparent multiplicity of stable, articulated particulars must be an illusion. Heterogeneity in flux becomes homogeneity, a solution of chaotically swirling stuff, not an ordered “world.” Furthermore, even Heraclitus’s own assertion is unstable, since words themselves flow in time, and their meanings cannot be univocal or fixed. Heraclitus attempts to address this difficulty by imitating the condition he asserts in the syntax and diction of his language. His word order takes advantage of the fluidity of Greek, allowing, even more than is usual, for different predications, and his words have multiple, even conflicting, meanings. His readers are endlessly intrigued by the infinite slipperiness of his pregnant pronouncements16 and by the paradox of meaningful speech about constant change. Even the fragments that remain of his writings may be, not the victims of time, but deliberate attempts to mimic a “world” that lacks wholeness, continuity, and order. Diogenes Laertius says Heraclitus died of dropsy. The story is unconfirmable, but fitting: he drowned in his own fluids. “It is death to souls to become water.” �20 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW At the other extreme from Heraclitean flux in time and place, is Parmenidean fixity, outside time and beyond place. Pure, complete, and homogeneous in its unity, Being simply is; there is no beginning or becoming, past, future, or conclusion; all is solid, stationary; all Being is one. If singularity, homogeneity, stability, and permanence are the great sticking points of the Heraclitean hypothesis, multiplicity, heterogeneity, instability, and change slip up the partisans of Parmenides. Language seems inadequate to this view too, for predication itself requires multiplicity and an articulated cosmos. In Greek, esti can stand alone, but, even a nominal sentence, aiming at full identity of its parts, must have two elements. Human speech is rhêsis—the “flowing” forth of words in time. Heraclitus’s words, in brief fragments with fluid meanings, flow together; Parmenides’ words, even the lofty vision of the “Way of truth” in articulate Homeric dactylic hexameter, point to silence—or to mere pointing. Homer, of course, does not speak the metaphysical language of the early philosophers. In his vocabulary, kosmeô and kosmos are not abstract terms, but refer to the setting in order of troops, dress, or behavior. But Homer’s stories and his people do, nevertheless, suggest his own thinking about what later writers call the “cosmos.” And, as we shall see, his own speech is shaped to depict a world that participates in and is informed by both fixity and fluidity, neither to the exclusion of the other. Angered by Achilles, whose attention is fixed first on immortal glory and then on eternal revenge, the river threatens to dissolve the world into Heraclitean flux. The episode suggests that both the desire for fixity and the response in mere fluidity would destroy a heterogeneous cosmos of changing beings that are, nevertheless, distinguishable and, in some convincing sense, enduring. Homer repeatedly describes physiological or psychological collapse in terms of dissolution17 or as the liquefying of firm structure. Wine and tears can bring on this kind of collapse, and the “strength” or “limbs” of dying warriors are “loosed” (luomai). When Priam meets Hermes on the way to FLAUMENHAFT 21 Achilles’ tent, the old man is so overcome with fear that his “mind became fluid” (voos chuto, 24. 358), the word used for “pour” or “flow”(cheô) in Book Twenty-one. As Norman Austin says “It collapsed and lost its shape.”18 In the Odyssey Homer describes sleep as lusimelês, “limb-loosening,” “relaxing,” (10.57), and Sappho and Archilochus use this word to describe the effects of eros or desire.19 We too know what it means to “drown” in wine or tears, to “be at sea” or “out of our depths,” and “to go down the drain.” There are, in the Iliad, suggestions of destruction by flood of the solid, articulated world experienced by mortal men. When no Greek warrior rises to accept Hector’s challenge, Menelaus curses the Achaeans collectively: “would that all of you would become earth and water” (7.99), that is, disintegrate into their constitutive elements. Many of them will die in battle and their bodies will be reduced in fire, water, or in the bellies of scavenger dogs, birds, fish, and worms. Likewise, all human artifacts seem destined to disintegrate. Poseidon objects when the Achaeans build the wall around their ships, but Zeus assures him that it will not endure for long (7.446ff.) In Book Twelve, Homer tells how, at the end of the war, when the Achaeans depart, Poseidon and Apollo will bring all the waters of the world—rivers, rain, and the salt sea—to sweep away the wall: Bringing against it the might of all the rivers that flow forth from the mountains of Ida to the sea— Rhesus [speech, or flow] and Heptorus and Caresus and Rhodius, and Granicus and Aesepus, and goodly Scamander and Simoïs…of all these did Apollo turn the mouths together, and for nine days’ space he drove their flood [rhoon] against the wall; and Zeus rained ever continually, that the sooner he might overwhelm the wall in the salt sea. And the Earth-shaker, bearing his trident in his hands…swept forth upon the waves all the foundations of beams and stones, that the �22 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Achaeans had laid with toil, and made all smooth along the strong stream [agarrhoon] of the Hellespont and again covered the great beach with sand, when he had swept away the wall; and the rivers he turned to return and to flow [rhoon] in the channel, where before they streamed [rhoon] their fair-streaming [kallirhoon] water. (12.17-33) The ease with which this wall will be destroyed is previewed in Book Fifteen when Apollo breaks the Achaean trench and wall, “as a boy scatters a sand castle by the sea” (15.360-64). This allows Hector and the Trojans to rush over the wall like a “great wave of the broad-wayed sea” (15.381-83). From the standpoint of the immortal gods, human life and its constructions are easily destroyed and slip quickly into oblivion. We should note, however, that the predicted destruction will reduce neither the plain nor the beach to Democritean elements or to mere swirling chaos. Rather, it will restore them to their “natural” shape, stripped of human constructions, and marked only by the relatively permanent features of the landscape. The paths of rivers, the stony mountains, and the boundary between shore and sea are themselves subject to temporary disturbance and slow change but, compared to living and dying beings and their fabrications, they endure in shapely permanence. The exact location of the city of ancient Troy remained a mystery for centuries, but Scamander has flowed in the same place since antiquity. Men may come and go, like generations of leaves and fish in the sea, but the cosmos and the kinds of beings that inhabit it endure. This is the condition for the belief of the hero that there will be others like himself, kindred men, to tell and to hear his story. Achilles does not explicitly acknowledge that he requires a bard to maintain his heroism, but the hero who asserts his autonomy is, in fact, doubly dependent: on his parents who give him life and upon the poet who keeps him alive in the minds of others. Nowhere in Homer is there the prospect of the destruction of the entire human race—by FLAUMENHAFT 23 flood or fire or any other means—or of institutions or teachings that would definitively wipe out the characteristic human quest for autonomy and immortality. Homer’s depiction of such human striving is tragic, rather than merely negative. The very qualities that make the hero outstanding are the ones that will destroy him. Achilles’ extreme heroic exertion finally meets its limit, but the world that produced him will produce others like him and they will continue to inspire awe in their fellows. The Homeric gods did not create the world and its inhabitants, and there is no suggestion that the gods will wipe them out. In such a world it is problematic, but not merely evil or delusion, for mortals to aspire to permanence. Some readers see similarities between the river battle in Iliad 21 and those in Mesopotamian flood stories like Gilgamesh.20 Others persuasively contrast the floods in Gilgamesh and Genesis, where the story of Noah is meant to “drown the natural human aspiration to apotheosis through heroic deed.”21 Homer’s river Scamander puts an end to Achilles’ rampage, but men like him will arise again. Although, like the Biblical oversteppers, they do awful things, they, like the gods, are, somehow, awesome. Perhaps the work of Hephaestus suggests how changing, continuous fluidity can coexist with enduring articulated form. On at least two occasions the divine smith has been hurled down from Olympus, but, of course, neither fall results in his destruction. In Book Eighteen he recalls how, on account of his lameness, Hera once hurled him down to the watery cave of Oceanus’s daughter Eurynome and the Nereid Thetis, “and around me flowed, murmuring with foam, the stream of Oceanus, an immense flood” (18.402-3). For nine years Hephaestus, himself misshapen, lived in this unshaped watery deep, but he spent his time shaping beautiful ornaments. His lame feet did not preclude, and perhaps they even contributed to, the extraordinary powers he developed in his skilled hands. Like the “ambidextrous” Asteropaeus, the smith-god is “strong [or, “bent]-limbed on both sides,” amphiguêeis. He is polumêtis (21.355), a “god of many �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 24 wiles,” and poluphrônos, “of great intelligence” (21.367). In Book Twenty-one the only way he can counteract the flow of Scamander is brutally to burn and dry up all-threatening liquidity. But, in the face of the more gradual dissolution of all earthly things, he solidifies the fluid into form. On lofty Olympus, as in the deep sea, he liquefies solid metals into shapeless fluids, and then re-forms the softened materials into bronze houses and tripods, silver-studded chairs, golden wheels and handmaids, and greaves of “flexible” (heanou, 18.613) tin. His most memorable masterpiece is the solid shield of bronze, made of fused copper and tin, that he fashions for the unbending son of the tearful water goddess. What does it tell us about being and time in the cosmos as Homer sees it? 2 1. Hephaestus’s Art Scamander threatens to cover all Achilles’ beautiful armor with slime (21.318). Although a shield may last longer than a man, it too is not forever. Like all Hephaestus’s works, Achilles’ shield is made of metals and glass, melted into fluids in “melting vats” (choanisi, from cheô, “flow,” 18.613), and then re-solidified into stable forms. But the figures on it are not static or frozen like the Achilles whom Patroclus describes as the pitiless offspring of grey sea and the rocky cliffs because his mind (nous) is so unbending (apênês, 16. 33-35). Nor are they like the stony frozen Niobe whom Achilles describes to Priam at the end of the Iliad (24.605-17). Rather, the wonder of the shield is that its figures seem to be alive and in motion. This is partly because, as Lessing points out, they come into being before our eyes, in words that take time, and partly because they are so artfully made that they appear to be actually engaged in the activities described.22 In the progressive form of Homer’s verbs, the dancers are described as dancing, the ambushers ambushing, the bull lowing, and the field being turned over, although it is made of lifeless FLAUMENHAFT 25 gold: “this was the marvel [thauma] of the work” (18.549). Hephaestus makes an enduring picture of a changing life, albeit a life that will not satisfy the aspirations of the warrior hero of the Iliad. The cosmos depicted on the shield combines the formal fixity of a stable world with the living, changing life of everything associated with the human beings who live in it. Even its river combines duration and change. The shield’s dry riverbed—in another season, a watering place for the herds— is the scene of an ambush (18.520-21), and men fight beside its banks (18.533). Shortly after, the river is stable, contained, reliably watering the cattle that low and pasture Par’potamon keladonta, para hrodadon donakêa Beside the sounding river, beside the waving reed (18.576) Noting the way it appeals to differing senses, one reader has described this as the “most beautiful verse in Homer.”23 Another calls attention to the “rippling dactyls,” alliteration, and chiasmus of the line.24 The pictured people are not “immortal and ageless all their days” as the single-minded Achilles and other heroes might wish to be. They are of different ages, changing with the passing of time, and unlike the gods and eternal heavenly bodies pictured there, the mortals have no lasting names and fame. There are dead men and animals on the shield, and red blood stains some of the golden figures. But the elders will keep on talking, and the boys and girls dancing, even as Achilles holds them forth on the shield in deadly battle. The point of view of the shield is wider than that on the battlefield where Homer’s “camera” zooms in on the horror of war for particular—named— people at particular moments. Hephaestus’s view suggests that the life of men, as well as of cities, never merely ends, but has a cyclical character. Glaucus compares such lives to the “generations of leaves” (6.146). But the nameless leaves and crops and cows and river, and even the nameless humans depicted on the shield, are not merely ephemeral, “of a day.” �26 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Mortality and change make generation necessary, but generation itself insures a kind of continuity that even living and dying beings can participate in. They, like the vegetation and animals, and even their own artifices, are not immortal, but they do recur according to regular patterns and in recognizable forms. There are recurrent, recognizable kinds of beings in the articulated, heterogeneous cosmos; the most interesting of them are human beings. Tragically, human beings are often prevented from fulfilling the natural shape of their lives, but human lives do have natural shapes, and they generate others who are the same in kind. Homer’s mortals are not part of a historically directed trajectory of the sort described by the Bible, Virgil, and Hegel. But they do achieve a kind of permanence. Although the shield does not depict lasting personal glory, even for men like Achilles, it does not bitterly insist on the tragic futility of our desire for duration. Nor should it make us think, as C. S. Lewis did, that Homer’s greatness lies in his depiction of the human and personal tragedy built up against a background of “meaningless flux.”26 Rather, Homer, like Hephaestus, depicts a beautiful image of regular change in time, and a world in which the tragedies of individual mortal lives are intelligible. What is perhaps even more important is that he makes us feel that these lives are worth our attempts to understand them. The circular pattern of return is repeated on the shield, as if to emphasize the possibility of appropriate change that does not simply negate existence. Thus, we hear about the young men “whirling” (edineon, 18.494) in the wedding dance, the judgments given in the “sacred circle” (hiero eni kuklô, 18.504), the repeated “wheelings” (dineuontes, 18.543) of the ploughs and of the youths and maidens dancing in circles (18.599-601), and the agricultural cycle of the seasons. The word for these whirlings and wheelings (from dineô) is the one used to describe the “eddies” of the raging Scamander, as well as “deep-eddying” Ocean (10.511). But here on the shield it suggests ordered regularity rather FLAUMENHAFT 27 than Scamander’s destructive turbulence or the meaningless chaos asserted by Aristophanes’ Socrates who preaches that “Whirl”(Dinos) has replaced Zeus.26 The beginning and end of the description of the shield call attention to circularity in the cosmos itself: the full round moon, the circular daily motions of most of the stars, and the Bear, or “Wagon,” that “turns in place and has no part in the baths of Ocean”(18.488). On the outermost rim is the “great might of the river Ocean” (18.608), that same Ocean towards which Scamander and Simoïs and all the other rivers flow, when they are not unnaturally impeded. Unlike any other “river” in the poem, Ocean is apsorroos, “backwards flowing”; turning back into itself, it encircles the world. The edges of the cosmos do not dissolve into watery flux; rather, the world is surrounded, held in shape, by Ocean. Although the shield is called a sakos, the word usually used for a rectangular shield, we must imagine it as round. Hephaestus’s pictures include simple agricultural and musical implements—yokes, plows, baskets, pipes, lyres, and bronze tips on spears—evidence of human culture beyond mere nature. But there are no signs of more sophisticated human technology or art. Homer depicts Hephaestus, but Hephaestus does not depict himself and his own technology.27 Also, although there are rivers and Ocean on the shield, Hephaestus does not depict any ships. They belong to a different world, one in which men sail off to distant places: to make war, to trade, and to learn how other men live. Ships point to progress, to radical change beyond that seen in the communities and natural world of the shield. Both Trojans and Greeks sail the sea, but Homer’s Greeks—and, as we shall see, one Greek man especially—are particularly associated with the seagoing technology that brought the Greek army to Troy, but is not the focus of the human activities depicted in the Iliad. Nor does Hephaestus include Olympus, the abode of the gods, or Hades, the destination of all mortal warriors, on his shield. The former is the clearly illuminated setting for many �28 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW scenes in both of Homer’s poems. In the Odyssey we are told of the other realm, beyond the “stream of Ocean” in the outermost circle of the shield, a realm reached by crossing the roaring rivers of Periphlegethon and Cocytus (Blazing and Wailing), a branch of the dread (stugeô) River Styx. On Styx, the Iliad tells us, men and gods swear their most solemn oaths (2.755; 8.369; 14.271; 15.37). The Iliad, which depicts the deaths of so many men, contains no description of the land of the dead. But in the Odyssey, the “house of Hades” is a dark, “dank” [eurôenta, lit. “moldy,” 10.512] place, and a whole book is devoted to exhibiting its inhabitants. The dead souls are misty and ungraspable, but recognizable, as weakly delineated shadows of their former selves. In the indistinct realm of the “un-seen” (a-idês), the shade of Achilles is now fixed, eternally denouncing his former desire for fixed and shining visible fame. He reveals his unchanged mind, however, in his joy at the report that his son is just the way he was. Achilles’ attempt to stop Scamander is a violation of the natural flow of things, of nature itself, although Homer does not use nature as a philosophical term any more than he uses abstract philosophical language elsewhere.28 Achilles’ retreat and his return to his main object, killing the mortal man who killed his mortal friend, is a forced admission that, despite his divine genealogy, he too is a mortal man. The course of the swift-flowing river can no more be stopped than the swift flowing of Achilles’ life can be. But Hephaestus prevents Scamander’s attempt to dissolve the hero who aims at fixity and to flood the dry land that ordinarily bounds the flowing water. The god of fire reminds us that mortality does not mean mere obliteration and oblivion, mere washing away, but orderly change in an enduring, coherent cosmos. The river is a river even when it flows outside its well-defined borders. The lives of mortal men do have shape, and so do the artifacts and stories that outlive them, even if not forever. The verbal description of the shield is Homer’s likeness of the whole world, the longest extended similitude in the poem. FLAUMENHAFT 29 2. Homer’s Art In addition to the description of the shield, there is further evidence in Homer’s poetry of both the whole unity and the articulated multiplicity of his cosmos. Book One introduces the major Greek characters of the Iliad in all their particularity. Here, for the first time, we hear their identifying epithets and see their first defining acts. Although the official enemies against whom they test themselves are Trojans, these men are concerned about who is the most outstanding, even among the Greeks. They are determined to distinguish themselves, and not to be confused with others. Thus, Achilles and Agamemnon dispute who is the “best of the Achaeans.” Their quarrel is filled with comparisons, but each claims that he, as the best, is incomparable. There are only three brief similes in Book One (47, 104, 359), and two of them describe gods. The human actors are concerned, not with likenesses, but with singularity. Book Two recounts how Nestor and Odysseus rehabilitate Agamemnon as commander and reunite the Achaeans after the quarrel. The latter parts of the book present Homer’s warriors both as one whole, continuous mass, and as separate, individual elements of an articulated multitude. Like Homer’s cosmos generally, the descriptions in Book Two point to the very things we have been considering in Book Twenty-one: the unifying fixity of the man who attempts to oppose a divine river, and the dissolving fluidity of the river that responds. As we shall see, Homer’s epithets, catalogues, and similes have meaning only if one assumes a unified, selfsame whole consisting of a multiplicity of differentiated elements. The relative scarcity of metaphors in the Iliad is a sign of the poet’s reluctance to completely collapse two compared things into an identity. Phrases like “winged words” and the “barrier of your teeth” are implied similes that identify the subject and the comparison so completely that the compared object almost disappears as its attribute is transferred to the �30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW present subject. Epithets are adjectival tags, stable descriptions that characterize enduring intelligible individuals in an enduring world. Epithets, like names, are permanent.29 Like the phrases above, the same epithet can contain an implied comparison when it is attached to different subjects, or an ironic reflection when it no longer suffices to describe their subjects. The implications of “swift-footed Achilles,” “Hector of the shining helmet,” and “white armed Helen” deepen and are more fully understood as the narrative unfolds and the bearer acts out his entire story. Agamemnon announces his plan to test the troops at the beginning of Book Two. The people (laoi, plêthus, mass nouns) respond immediately as soon as the leaders or elders (plurals) arise. Homer describes this folk in a great, extended simile, comparing the companies to the tribes (ethnea) of bees that feed on flowers in the spring (2.87-93). The men, too, emerge in “many tribes.” Homer’s bee simile and the subsequent description emphasize the turmoil and noise of this “throng” as it rushes towards the water. The noise, like the buzzing of bees and the confusing urgings of Rumor, obscures the inner organization of the army. Stirred by Agamemnon, the men, like the bees, are seen as a great multitude (plêthus) that moves as the sea and corn move when they are stirred by the winds of Zeus. (2.142-49). The crossed adjectives produce a sub-simile between the two main ones: the “long” sea-waves move as the “deep” fields of corn do. The wave is simultaneously one and many, as are the field of corn stalks and the army of warriors. We have already seen, in the river incident in Book Twenty-one, the literal power of such waves to stir the articulated many into a homogeneous fluid. In these early similes the troops exhibit the same loose, or fluid character as they come pouring out of their tents on dry land. Although they shout “to one another” and come on in “tribes,” they are not fully articulate, either in speech or in body. Prompted by Athena and by his own prudent assessment of the situation, Odysseus quickly does articulate the disor- FLAUMENHAFT 31 dered troops into the kings who “stand out”(exochon) and whom he addresses individually by name, and the anonymous men “of the people,” whom he beats into submission. His humiliation of Thersites further organizes the Greeks, forcing them to shape up, both as individuals and as groups, to confront the Trojans. Nestor proposes the separating out of the men by tribes and by clans (phula, phrêtra, 2.362). The extended similes that follow compare them to flocks of birds, recognized as distinct species, to undifferentiated swarms of flies around milk pails, and to mingled goats, more visible as individuals than the aggregates of birds and insects, but still not articulated by name. The only named individuals are the leaders who attended Agamemnon’s council. Agamemnon has spoken of the relative size of the enemy (2.123-33), but not until Homer sings the component parts of each army, do we have a concrete and vivid picture of how many are in the host, as well as how large it is. Unlike the earlier similes in Book Two, the catalogues are characterized by specificity. The armies are now two wholes that are articulated and organized into parts identified by their geographical origins and by their leaders. The marshalling or ordering of the troops—the Greek word is diekosmeon—shapes them into an ordered whole, a kosmos. The many items in the catalogue are held together by the general categories it describes, but the detailed description of each item differentiates them from one another. The order in which the different companies are listed reveals much about the political organization of the two sides. The catalogues describe multitudes that are now articulated masses. They have more elaborate shapes than the two-member similes, which usually give the extended comparison first. The Trojans and their allies are also listed—although not enumerated—in a catalogue in Book Two as the leaders from the different cities lead them forth, each marshalling (kosmêsamenos) his own men. Among them are the same Trojans who “pour” or “flow”(cheô) into the river and city at the beginning and end of Book Twenty-one. But by then they have been floated off �32 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW from their allies; their former force has been dissolved into its elements, each of whom swims for his own life. No catalogue of names and leaders is possible in such devastating dissolution. We shall hear a few minor catalogues in the last books of the Iliad: the names of the mourning Nereids with Thetis in Book Sixteen, and the sons of Priam, in Book Twenty-four, for example. They remind us how the orderly, articulated cosmos, as we knew it at the beginning, has been disrupted by the horrors of war. Like the epithets and catalogues, Homer’s similes throughout the poem suggest that his cosmos is neither a fluid Heracleitean multiplicity nor a fixed Parmenidean “one,” but an organized, enduring whole whose parts can be understood and related to each other. There is not only one analogy for each being; rather, similes contain other similes and are interwoven and overlap. They cover the cosmos with a flexible net, not a rigid grid. The cosmos is intelligible because, in some way, “all nature is akin.”30 The beings in this world have stable characteristics by which they themselves can be recognized and by which they can help us to know other beings and ourselves. Despite their special characters, even fire and water are stable elements; this is, in fact, the necessary condition of their occasional attempts to encroach on each other. The gods too are stable combinations of related characteristics; they may disguise themselves before mortals, but they do have enduring and intelligible natures. Aphrodite, Athena, Ares, and, as we have seen, Hephaestus are all understandable as coherent collections of characteristic qualities, ways of being, in a coherent cosmos. Even those associated with the fluid elements in Homer’s world—Poseidon, Oceanus, Thetis, the Nereids, and the river Scamander— remain consistently fluid. Beneath his many shapes, Proteus, the changeable old man of the sea in Odyssey 4, can slip from shape to shape, as lion, serpent, leopard, boar, tree, even “fluid water” [hugron hudôr, Odyssey, 4. 456-58]. But, at last, he can be held down and made to speak as “himself.” FLAUMENHAFT 33 In the extended similes the hero can be like a god, great oak (16.482), mother bird (9.323) or the “most baneful star in heaven”(22.26-31) only if gods, oaks, mother birds, and Sirius, complex and multifaceted as they are, have consistent, recognizable meanings. There are few proper names in similes; the likenesses are not between particular individuals, but between a particular individual, for example, and a general category to which he is compared. People who are said to be “like” particular named gods (Ares, Aphrodite) are compared to them as personifications of generalized attributes (Might, Beauty). Although the gods sometimes call things by different names (1.403; 2.813; 14.291; 20.74; 18.487), there is no indication that human subjects are merely projecting their own perceived structures on a chaotic or differently organized “real” world. Homer weaves together a picture of a natural world that is whole and shaped, in which and by which mortal humans can take their bearings. This is why, as Norman Austin has shown, not only similes, but paradigmatic myths, omens, dreams and other symbols have meaning both for gods and humans in the poems, and also for those who read and interpret the stories.31 The last way in which Homer avoids both the Charybdis of Heraclitean flux and the Scylla of Parmenidean fixity is seen in his own poetic language, which is not confounded by the language paradoxes of either philosopher. Syllables, words, lines, episodes, narrative and direct speech, the structures of parts and the whole, are clearly recognizable even as the singer’s speech (rhêsis) flows (from rheô) on continuously for hours and hours. There is nothing fragmentary about the Iliad; it is an ordered whole. The regular and sustained dactylic hexameter rhythm is heard even when the meter deliberately departs from it, and the intelligible diction and syntax endure throughout, even as we delight in the sounds, puns, and verbal flexibility that guide our thoughts and feelings. Homer is as subtle as Heraclitus in conveying multiple meanings by the artful arrangement of sound and �34 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW syntax. But one rarely feels that one has lost one’s footing or that there is no footing to be had in the deep flood of his verse. Homeric wonder does not call into doubt the stability of the multitudinous cosmos, or the adequacy of human speech to describe it, even as it faces tragic paradoxes and the most shattering human experiences. Similarly, unlike Parmenides’ vision of the “Way of Truth,” the unity of Homer’s world does not strain against the rich multiplicity of the individual beings that dwell together in it. The character of Homer’s poetry has offered one conclusion to this discussion that began with Achilles and the river. The other is to be found in the man who represents the most interesting alternative to both the fixity we desire and the dissolution we fear. 3. Amphibious Man This story, like most stories in the Iliad, points to Odysseus. Although the quarrel about the “best of the Achaeans” that begins the Iliad arises between Achilles and Agamemnon, the natural and conventional contenders for that title, it is Odysseus who offers the most interesting alternative to Achilles. In the Odyssey we do hear of a quarrel between these two over who was the “best of the Achaeans” (8.75-78). In fact, Odysseus and Achilles are incommensurable, as they exemplify two entirely different ways of being human. Achilles single-mindedly pursues individuality, purity, and permanent glory, thereby suggesting the Parmenidean perspective: unity, fixity, being. The life of Odysseus embraces multiplicity, change, and becoming, but it does not abandon the conviction that, although human beings must suffer and die, they can lead coherent and integrated lives in a stable cosmos. In a lived life, as opposed to a philosophical quandary, one can step twice into the same river and one can go home again. Homer’s two poems offer an extended meditation on the difference between immortality and endurance. Unlike Achilles’ tragic embrace of early death as a means to immortal glory in an infinite future, Odysseus’s FLAUMENHAFT 35 goals point always to continuing life in the foreseeable future. Achilles is Homer’s hero of fixity, the man who can only make a stand on land. A brief examination of Odysseus in both poems does not see him as Achilles’ opposite, the hero of Heraclitean fluidity, but as the flexible man, the one who can endure in any medium.32 It is no surprise that Odysseus has a special relationship to Poseidon, the earth-shaking god of the rolling sea, a relationship that must be stabilized before his story can be completed. Our first view of polumêtis Odysseus in the Iliad, displays the “man of many wiles” as a sailor, when he commands the ship that crosses the “watery ways” (hugra keleutha, 1.312) to return Chryseis to her father. Unlike Achilles of Phthia and other mainland Achaeans, Odysseus rules over several small islands in the extreme west of Greece. His special skill with ships and his versatility generally have something to do with his origins in a small rugged “isle in a surging sea” (poluklustôi pontôi, 4.354), “sea-girt” (amphialôi , 1.385) Ithaca. Always at sea, he is never at sea; Derek Walcott calls his later incarnation “sea-smart Odysseus.”33 More than any other Homeric hero, he delights in the pleasures of a warm bath (10.576; 6.210; 7.174, 296; 10.360; 19.356-473). His ablutions in both books aim not at Achillean purity or absolution, but at restoration and the continuation of a life that he accepts as mixed, stirred, stained, scarred, alloyed. Hephaestus sponges himself before dinner after a day’s work at the forge (18.414-15). Similarly, Odysseus, returning from the dirty work of the ambush in Iliad 10, washes off, first in the sea, and then in a bath, to “refresh” himself or to “lift his spirits”(anepsuchthen, 10.575). There is no indication that he thinks what he has done to Dolon and Rhesus requires purification. In his own book, he is characterized by an extraordinary flexibility. Achilles strives always to move forward and remain erect; Odysseus is always willing to bend over and curl up, to turn back and change direction, in order to preserve himself. Again and again, we hear how he is able to improvise a solid �36 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW platform to make a stand, even on the unstable sea. Repeatedly he emerges from dangerous waters to dry land, having endured the repeated attempts of Poseidon to swamp him in “deep-eddying Ocean” (Odyssey, 10.511). The amphibious hero is at home in all elements, and equally prepared to resist threats of petrifaction and dissolution, both of which would undermine his integrity as a stable, although changing, being in time. Achilles’ furious swift motion and his refusal to move both assert his absolute independence of outside influences. Odysseus recognizes—or learns—that viable autonomy and self-reliance sometimes require external tools and coordination with others, rather than head-on opposition. He is polumêchanos, a man “of many devices.” Achilles’ most important “tool” is his spear, which seems almost an extension of his own arm. His lyre accompanies a song he sings for himself. Odysseus, in contrast, is an enthusiastic user of tools and of other men, whom he skillfully uses as tools. Unlike Achilles’ song, Odysseus’s stories are often tools to achieve desired ends. He has a bow, not a lyre, in his storeroom. Odysseus delights in the liquid warmth of good wine— apparently mixed with water—with no adverse effects. But he intoxicates the Cyclops with a deliberately undiluted fluid (12.205, 209) unfamiliar to the monster, and slips through his hands by concealing himself horizontally beneath a dumb ram. He sails by the Sirens in his natural position, rigidly upright and attentive to their song, but is able to remain standing at the mast only by arranging to be tightly tied to it. He liberates himself by being willing to bind himself, overcoming his human limitations by resorting to a clever device: he uses knots to maintain his freedom. Like the ambidextrous Asteropaeus, Odysseus prepares to face the monster Scylla with “two spears in his hands” (12.229). When his ship is shattered in the “wine-dark sea,” he deals with the whirlpool Charybdis, not by opposing her turbulent (kukômenê, 12.238), sucking waters, as Achilles does Scamander’s turbulent (kukômenos, 21.235) streams, but by FLAUMENHAFT 37 waiting patiently for his mast and keel to be flung forth again. He has discerned that the whirlpool, like the Cyclops, has absolutely regular habits.34 Like Achilles in Scamander, he is not able to “plant his feet firmly” (stêrixai posin empedon, 12.434) to save himself from her. But, unlike Achilles, in whose hands a rooted tree comes loose from the riverbank, Odysseus manages to cling to the branches of a tall fig tree that remains firmly rooted. By turning the rescued keel into a boat and “rowing with [his] hands” (12.444), he makes it to Calypso’s island, the “navel of the sea.” Seven years later, he builds the raft that carries him from Calypso’s “sea-girt”(“stream-surrounded,” amphirutê, 1.198) isle. Zeus speaks of the raft as an instrument of Odysseus’s self-liberation; he will return home by his own devices, “not by the escort of gods or mortal men” (5.32). Achilles never makes anything; productive labor is base to the man who seeks only to make himself worthy of immortal glory. His man-slaying hands and the weapons they hold are useless against Scamander, and he almost dies the ignominious death of the drowned. In contrast, after seven years of enforced inactivity, Odysseus seems to come to life again. With forged tools, rather than forged weapons, in his hands, he constructs a seaworthy raft with sides, mast, oar, and sail, and even a device to move it from land into the water (5. 252-61). Here, and throughout his story, he works in wood, a material of less duration, but greater pliancy and flexibility than stone or metals. A long simile explicitly compares him to a skilled boat-builder.35 Finally, it is no surprise that, unlike Achilles, Odysseus is a great swimmer. Swimming, like navigating, offers a paradigm for human activity that requires strength, skill, and calculation for self-preservation in an alien element. Unlike fighting, it pits man against nature rather than against his fellow men. But it requires a certain degree of knowledge and coordination with the opponent, rather than mere opposition aiming at his destruction. Achilles fights a river god with a will to destroy him. Odysseus saves himself from the sea, a �38 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW natural element in service of his own divine nemesis, by floating on and swimming with the sea. He knows not to fight it, but to have confidence in the water’s power to support him.36 In this respect, swimming is like “rowing with the arms and legs”37 or sailing with the wind and current, rather than against them. Man’s ability to move in water is a key sign of his extraordinary adaptability, his ability to cross boundaries, and his capacity to utilize, as well as oppose, the powers of the natural world. In this regard it is Odysseus the sailor and swimmer, rather than Achilles the warrior, whom Homer depicts as a paradigm of human excellence. There are no swimming or boating events in either the funeral games or in Phaeacia. This kind of prowess is not yet an occasion for leisurely recreation or for competitive display or glory.38 But Homer clearly recognizes that it is in keeping with the other virtues of his third contender for the designation “best of the Achaeans.” As the raft nears Phaeacia, Poseidon whips up a great storm, “rolling before him a mighty wave” (mega kuma kulindôn, 5.296), and Odysseus’s knees and heart are “loosened” (or “melted,” luto, 5.406), in the Iliadic formula for dying warriors. In the dissolving element, the familiar metaphor suggests a more literal meaning than it has on dry land. Like Achilles in the river, Odysseus tells himself that an honorable death and burial on the Trojan plain would have been preferable to drowning (5.312). Homer even makes him think, at this moment, of the “dead son of Peleus” (5.310) who did not drown in the sea, but died gloriously in battle. A great wave “whirls” (elelixe) the raft around and beats down on him from “on high” (5.313-14), just as Scamander assaults Achilles. When the raft Odysseus has made with his hands can no longer withstand the assault of Poseidon, he heeds Ino’s exhortation to “swim with [your] hands” (5.344), to the land of the Phaeacians. Unlike the Iliad’s chivalric, horse-drawn heroes who carefully dress and arm themselves for battle, Odysseus rides one recovered raft plank “as though he were riding a horse” (5.371), and strips himself of Calypso’s FLAUMENHAFT 39 garments as he prepares to face his enemy. With “arms outstretched, eager to swim”(cheire petassas, nêchemenai memaôs, 5.374-5), he flings his naked body into the sea. He swims, and then “is driven,” or “wanders,”(plazeto, 5.389) for two days and two nights, and on the third day catches sight of Phaeacia. But he soon realizes that there are no harbors or low places on which to land; again, his “knees are loosed and his heart melted” (5.406). For Odysseus, as for Achilles in the deep river, it is not possible to “set both feet firmly” (podessi stêmenai amphoteroisi, 5.413-14). He clings to a jagged rock, until the waves rip him away. At this point, we are told that he would have perished, had not Athena given him “prudence” (epiphrosunên, 5.437). Homer does not mean that Athena saves him, but that he follows his own characteristic instinct not merely to oppose nature—the waves—with brute strength, as Achilles does the river, but to discern its behavior, as he did with Charybdis, and to coordinate his own powers with those of the sea. Thus, he makes his way “out from” (exanadus, 5.438) the main current of the wave, and “swims alongside” (nêche parex, 5.439) it to the mouth of a river. This river, like the Trojan Scamander, is called “fair-flowing”(kallirooio, 5. 441). Unlike Achilles, who impiously attempts to fight the Trojan river god, Odysseus prays as a wandering suppliant to the Phaeacian river god who stops the stream and holds back the waves. Odysseus lets his “knees and strong arms bend” (ekampse, 5.443-44) and emerges from the river to kiss the solid earth, a gesture unimaginable in godlike Achilles. That night he curls up in an improvised bed of dry leaves that protect him from “bitter frost and fresh dew” (5.467), watery enemies that still threaten to overcome him. The last leg of his journey home begins with this improvised shelter and the home offered by the hospitable Phaeacians. Nausikaa welcomes him by allowing him to wash off the brine and salty crust of the sea with fresh water from the now-calm river (5.224-26). As we have seen, Odysseus’s ability to make or to elicit offers of new homes does not preclude attachment to his �40 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW original home. Ithaca does not float like the windy isle of the shifty king Aeolus, the home of a peculiarly static and inbred tribe. Rather, it remains in place, awaiting the return of its king to his ever-aging wife, son, father, and subjects. Odysseus’s landfall on Ithaca is in the sloping harbor of Phorkus, another “old man of the sea,” whose headlands keep back the great waves of the open ocean. An olive tree grows beside a cave sacred to the Naiads, river nymphs who weave beside the “everflowing streams” (13.109), Thetis’s companions who had wept for Achilles in the watery deep. After twenty years at sea, Odysseus sleeps at last beside his own native waters. When Athena reveals them as his own, he again kisses the earth and prays to the Naiads, vowing to dedicate gifts to them. Just as he identifies the island by its flowing streams in the cave, so he is identified by Eurycleia when she washes his feet and the water in her basin “flows out” (exechethuso, 19.470). His homecoming culminates in the identification of the wedding bed he crafted from a still living, rooted olive tree. In contrast, Achilles meets his match in a turbulent foreign river on whose bottom his swift feet cannot find firm footing, and of whose waters his man-killing hands cannot get a hold. Fixed on the promise of unchanging eternity, Achilles loses touch with his past and rejects the prospects of a living future. Odysseus declines Calypso’s offer to keep him at her static island in the sea and to make him “immortal and ageless,” in effect, to make him stand still, in time. He chooses to return to his own island in the sea, where nothing has stood still in his absence. Paradoxical as it sounds, he holds onto a flowing human life in time. The peculiar nature of his relation with Poseidon is resolved in a strikingly Odyssean way. As punishment for helping Odysseus emerge from the threat of immobility and invisibility and return to life in a world of change, the Phaeacian ship that delivered him is immobilized, turned to stone, like Niobe at the end of the Iliad, and their city is covered over with a great mountain (13.149-52) and lost sight of forever. The enmity between amphibious man and FLAUMENHAFT 41 the unstable sea is to be concluded after the adventures that constitute the Odyssey. Odysseus is told in Hades, and he repeats the prophesy to Penelope when he returns home, that he will soon have to make another journey, this time inland on the solid earth. After traveling a great distance he will come to a place where the inhabitants are so unfamiliar with the watery, salty ways that have been his life, that they will mistake the oar he carries for a winnowing fan. Planting it among them, he will serve as an ambassador for the unruly god who has been his nemesis, and who is thus also responsible for some of his strengths. Life away from, as well as life protected from, the vicissitudes of Poseidon is not a full human life. The shifting sea of risks and the virtues it fosters is a more interesting, seasoned life than the immortal life of Calypso and the protected lives of landlubbers, Aeolians, and Phaeacians. Gods and Phaeacians may zip from element to element, “swift as birds on the wing or thoughts” (7.35; 5.50), but a mortal man must make his way through rough waters and seas of pains and troubles. The viable alternative to Achilles’ attempt to fix time and oppose watery flux is not a becalmed flat sea, or a freshwater lake with no “deep eddies,” but a life in time that builds, sails, swims, endures troubles, governs men, loves a like-minded woman, and generates a maturing son to continue life when his own time has come to an end. Epilogue The man who, at the beginning of the Iliad, claims to be the “best of the Achaeans” is nearly overwhelmed by the fluid, churning force of the Trojan river. In Scamander, Achilles faces an opponent beyond his experience. From this point on, he fights only on land, where his swift feet can make a firm stand or can outrun an opponent whose enduring shape is visible, and who runs in only one direction. But Homer’s use of the episodes involving Scamander points to a related fact about the “best of the Achaeans”: Achilles has his own tutelary river in his own homeland, �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 42 Phthia, the land where mortals waste away (phthiô) and die, where neither life nor time is fixed forever. Like Scamander (21.268, 326), it is called a “heaven-fed river” (16.174). It too marks, fertilizes, and protects the land, and from it occasionally spring forth mortal children like the Myrmidon Menesthius (16.173-78), just as Asteropaeus’s father sprang from the “wide-flowing Axius” in Paeonia. The proper name of the Phthian river, Spercheius, points to Achilles, for sperchô means “to set in rapid motion,” or, as a middle participle, “hastening, impetuous, without loss of time.” In Book Twenty-three, when Achilles prepares Patroclus’s body for the funeral mound, he cuts a “yellow lock” of his own hair to place in his dead friend’s hands. The Greek word for “yellow,” xanthê (23.141), might remind us of the immortal Trojan river, called Xanthus by the gods, against whom Achilles strives in Book Twenty-one. Now, at Patroclus’s funeral, he says that his father had vowed that he, Achilles, upon his return (nostêsanta, 23.145) to Phthia, would offer this hair and a hecatomb to Spercheius, and that he would sacrifice fifty rams into his waters. Such sacrifices were often dedicated to local rivers by boys (and girls) when they came of age.39 Hesiod says that the daughters of Tethys and Ocean, the nymphs, with the help of Apollo and their brothers the Rivers—which include “divine Scamander”—bring young boys to manhood.”40 That it was Peleus who made the vow suggests that for his swift-footed son, there can be no normal coming of age, and no return (nostos) to the swift-flowing river of his native land. Like the rest of his story, the savage slaughters and mock sacrifices near the Scamander in Book Twenty-one bear witness to the Homeric paradox that the fully developed heroic excellence exemplified by Achilles must alienate the hero from the very wellsprings of his own life. FLAUMENHAFT 43 1 After Troy falls, Aeneas undertakes the extended voyage that takes him from Troy to Italy. Homer only alludes to this future (20.302-08). 2 Oliver Taplin, Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford, 1992), 237. 3 Seth L. Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad (Berkeley, 1984), 75. 4 This seems to be an unstated motive for the ambush of Rhesus and his men and horses in Book Ten of the Iliad. 5 E. T. Owen, The Story of the Iliad (Michigan, 1966), 210-12. 6 Taplin, 228. 7 But see James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago, 1975), Note 15, 250. 8 Taplin, 224. 9 Proteus, the “old man of the sea” in Odyssey 4.365-570 is also hard to pin down. 10 Laura M. Slatkin, The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad (Berkeley, 1991), 103. 11 Slatkin, 113. 12 Perhaps this is why there are very few visual representations of this incident, either in extant Greek art or later. 13 Richardson, N., The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume VI: Books 21-24 (Cambridge, 1993), 72. Note to lines 21.233-50 on enjambment, and the progressive piling-up of sentences. 14 Atchity, Kenneth John, Homer’s Iliad: The Shield of Memory (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ilinois, 1978), 243. 15 Redfield, Note 15, 251. 16 Plato, Theaetetus 179E-180B; Aristotle, Rhetoric 1407b9-18. 17 Austin, Norman, Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer’s Odyssey (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), 112. 18 Austin, 113. 19 Sappho, LP fr. 130; Archilochus, West, IEG 196. , 20 *** Michael N. Nadler, Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer (Berkeley, 1974), 149ff. 21 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (New York, 2003), 167. �44 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 22 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Trans. Ellen Frothingham (New York, 1968), 114, 120-22. 23 S. E. Bassett, The Poetry of Homer (Berkeley, 1938), 156-57. 24 W B. Stanford, The Odyssey of Homer (London, 1965), I.xxii. . 25 C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York, 1970), 31. Quoted also in Mark W Edwards, Homer: Poet of the Iliad (Baltimore, 1987), . 322. 26 Aristophanes, Clouds, 379ff. Trans. Alan H Somerstein. The Comedies of Aristophanes, Vol. 3 (Chicago, 1982), 46. 27 Atchity, 243. 28 The word appears only at Odyssey 10.304 to describe the môly root that Hermes gives Odysseus. 29 Vera Lachman. Homer’s Sun Still Shines: Ancient Greece in Essays, Poems, and Translations (New Market, Virginia, 2004), 83-84. 30 Plato, Meno 81D. 31 Chapter 2 of Austin’s Archery at the Dark of the Moon is the best discussion I know about Homer’s “analogical” thought, the unity of the cosmos, and correspondence between human and natural order. 32 For an extended discussion of Odysseus, see Mera J. Flaumenhaft, “The Undercover Hero: Odysseus from Dark to Daylight,” Interpretation, Vol. 10, No. 1, January, 1982. 33 Derek Walcott. The Odyssey: A Stage Version (New York, 1993), 1. 34 Austin, 133. 35 Again, compare the sailable, steered raft that Odysseus builds with the merely floating ark that Noah makes, not by his own ingenuity, but by strictly following God’s instructions. Kass, 167-68. 36 B. Franklin, “Learning to Swim,” in The Ingenious Dr. Franklin: Selected Scientific Letters of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. Nathan G. Goodman (Philadelphia, 1974), 41-45. 37 38 Franklin, “On Swimming,” in Goodman, 48. Herodotus (8.89) remarks on the number of Persians who died at Salamis because, unlike the Greeks, they did not know how to swim. Thucydides reports that the Athenian ships preparing to sail to Sicily strove to outdo each other in appearance and speed (6.31) and raced with each other as they left Athens (6.32). Elaborate boat races begin Virgil’s FLAUMENHAFT 45 funeral games (Aeneid, 5) where the events have a more communal, or political, character than Homer’s. 39 Walter Burkert, Greek Religion. Trans. John Raffas (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 174-75. 40 Hesiod. The Theogony. Trans. Norman O. Brown (Indianapolis, 1953), 63. �46 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 47 Making Up Our Minds Robert Richardson With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.—Thoreau, Walden 1 “I…am sensible of a certain doubleness…” The feature of experience that Thoreau remarks upon here is both remarkable and commonplace. This sense we sometimes have of being apart from ourselves is an instance of what I believe to be the constitutive feature of human thinking, its doubling power. Robert Richardson is a tutor on the Santa Fe campus of St. John’s College. This essay is a version of a lecture he delivered at Santa Fe on February 2, 2005. �48 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW We notice things and notice our noticing; we observe events and appraise them, hear statements and affirm or deny them, act and assess our actions; we see one thing as being like another and employ it as a simile; we make something into a sign and, like a string around our finger, let it stand for something else. We count, tell time, chronicle the past, anticipate the future and memorialize the dead. We worry and regret. We can speak the truth or tell a lie. We play with words and pun; we laugh and tell jokes. We wear clothes, apply make-up and use deodorants. We accept little pieces of paper with faces stamped on them in exchange for the goods of life. Without “a certain doubleness,” without the ability to stand apart from the things and feelings we experience, and momentarily at least, even to be other than ourselves, we would not do any of this. “We are not wholly involved in Nature,” as Thoreau reminds us. Our doubleness brings us into the sight of ourselves and sets us apart from everything else. It marks us off from our animal kindred who, if they share in it at all, do not partake fully in the ability to observe themselves from afar. Animals close to us in evolutionary terms and those born and bred to share our domesticity display something like our doubleness at times, but this power seems rudimentary in them at most. Despite their lively awareness and evident intelligence, it would be a stretch to suppose they can stand aloof from themselves and appraise their own actions as humans habitually do. They are “wholly involved in Nature” in a way that we are not. We do have, it is true, moments of active work or play when, fully immersed in our actions, we think of nothing but what we are doing and do not think to watch ourselves doing it. These vivifying moments, complete and sufficient as they are, give us a sense of what it means to be at one with ourselves. When we experience it deeply and for its own sake, the power of witnessing can induce in us a blissful state of oneness, which is at the other pole from our immersion in RICHARDSON 49 immediacy. In such a moment the notion of an undifferentiated, enduring, and unalterable consciousness overarching all of existence and containing it, yet neither affecting it nor affected by it, is but a thought beyond. “Indra in the sky looking down” in Thoreau’s account is, according to the ancient Indian religion, a manifestation of the highest consciousness: “He is the unseen Seer, the unheard Hearer, the unthought Thinker, the ununderstood Understander.”1 “The witness, the sole thinker, devoid of qualities….without parts, without activity, tranquil, irreproachable, spotless.”2 as it is characterized in the Upanishads. This Vedic conception has affinities with the view found in the western theological tradition that the divine mind is eternally single, simple, whole, unchanging, and impassive. It knows no doubleness. (The old Greek gods were of a different sort. Sharing everything with humans but our mortality, they were as doubleminded as could be.) An animal never leaves nature. The Most High, according to many traditional accounts, lies beyond and never enters it. We dwell somewhere in the middle, between Nature and the pure Empyrean, confounded and confounding, looking up and down. One of our muddles here in the middle is what to think about our own thinking. That we can think about thinking at all is, of course, a consequence of our doubling power, but we are often confused by this ability even as we exercise it. What we are doing when we look at our thinking, how we look at it and what we think we see—as well as what words such as ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’ are doing in this context—are among the most vexing of questions. In thinking about these aspects of our experience I have arrived at beliefs which, although not unique to me, are far from the usual ones. My aim in what follows is to state my beliefs as boldly and simply as I can. It would please me to find that they are more widely shared than I suppose, but I am afraid I cannot count on this. To put the matter provocatively, I am not trying to sweep the cobwebs out of the mind, but to �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 50 sweep the mind out with the cobwebs. Preposterous as it may seem, I do not believe we think in our minds or even that we have minds to do our thinking in. 2 When we want to express our thinking we do a peculiar thing. With lips, teeth, and tongue we bite and rend and pummel the air. Out of our breath we sculpt our thoughts and send them on their way. The medium of the air—so nearly unresisting it scarcely seems to be a body at all—briefly, evanescently, takes the shape of thought and carries it abroad to rap at the portals of the public ear. Speech is a plastic art. Our words are not so much winged as wind-carved. Perhaps we ought to pause now and then in our palavering and pour a libation to the mellifluous air. It is utterly remarkable that so slight an alteration in such a thin and subtle medium could produce such great effects. Of all the capacities we have for shaping things this is surely the most potent. No human activity has done more, directly or indirectly, to change the world than the artful expulsion of these little bursts of air. Speaking is a public art and a public act. Once the art is acquired it may be privately employed but that is an accidental feature of it. The possibility of its private employment is derived and secondary, not primary or essential. An individual who learns to speak acquires what is never the learner’s alone. The common tongue belongs to all who speak it. It lives in the customary practices of its users. If all the beings who know how to employ it cease to exist, it dies with them. Its being is in its active use. While it is alive, it is a potent influence, yet it is nowhere locatable. A language, the common practices of a people’s speech, is not in the organs of propulsion or reception; it is not in the air between; it is not in the brains of its speakers and hearers. Its occurrence may require all of these, but it does not belong to or inhabit any of them. RICHARDSON 51 We can see, though, that there is a doubling here. The art of speech is more than the making and hearing of sounds. The sounds can be names that stand for things. In the giving of names we stand apart, like an Adam in Eden, and know both that the thing is other than the name and that the name stands in for it. This capacity arises from the doubleness already noted—the power to be seer and doer, observer and actor at once—and it greatly enhances it. Only with the burgeoning of speech, it seems, does our doubleness reach full and telling strength. In speech doubleness finds a vehicle that once and for all, for good or ill, transports us out of nature. Double now, our fate pronounced, we rise—or fall— into the world, there forever to contend with the partial stranger each of us calls ‘myself ’. Givers of names, bearers of names, we are now fully and forever beside ourselves. Language and doubleness are at least fraternal twins. To say which deserves the elder’s status is probably impossible. The evidence which would establish the birthright of either one is lacking. No testimony can be given until we have learned to speak, and then it is too late: the witness is impeached. Like talking, the doubling power is physiologically grounded and it, too, is an acquired skill. It develops over time, improves with practice and is enhanced by circumstances and structures which invite it and support it. We see this in children as they grow. Early in life they start to notice and attend to things around them and learn their names. They begin to distinguish between themselves and others, to ask questions, to deliberate and choose. They become capable of thinking about persons and things which are not immediately present, they undertake projects and pursue goals. In time they become aware of possible opportunities or dangers and learn to direct their own conduct and look out for themselves. The developing skills of language grow along with this process and are instrumental to it. Through doubleness and its linguistic accompaniments humans extend their awareness beyond what is immediate and present at �52 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW hand, thereby increasing their ability to meet their needs, satisfy more of their desires, and pursue their long term interests. Something like this must have happened to us as a species, too, although we cannot say how or when. Our remote ancestors, who were anatomically and perhaps emotionally very much like us, apparently existed for hundreds of thousands of years before they began to speak. Not very long ago in the span of evolutionary time, their doubling power developed and languages came to be. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps to buttress his claim that pity is so natural to humans that they could not even have learned it at their mothers’ knees, imagines the first humans living solitary lives practically from the moment of birth, gradually acquiring language, then becoming social beings. But this is surely backwards. Language and doubleness grow out of our social nature. In the presence of others who respond to our gestures, return our gaze, alter their facial expressions and aid or hinder us, we begin to speak and to recognize ourselves as belonging to a community which simultaneously contains each of us individually yet is separate and apart from us. We are not born into Nature, but into an established world, a world founded in our doubleness. This world is shaped by the language, customs, beliefs, institutions, artifacts, and practices of the people we are born among. It has developed over time, may have undergone many changes, and may be changing even as we are born into it. Any particular instance of it may be in conflict with itself, threatened from outside, and gathering or losing its influence, but it is our human home. It is what gives or denies meaning and significance to what we do. It shapes who and what we are, provides the boundaries—more or less plastic—of our thinking and acting, and establishes the grounds of worth. The self is the private counterpart of the world. It develops in dialogue with it, sometimes in discord and opposition, sometimes in seeming consonance. I am partly RICHARDSON 53 the story I tell myself, partly the story the others in my world may wish me to be, allow me to be or take me to be—and also something as yet to be disclosed in the on-going reciprocity of self and world. Neither the self nor the world is primordial. Both are artificial productions arising from human effort, articulation, and invention. (Artificial is not, here, the antonym of real.) Both are fluid to varying degrees. Each can change relatively independently, but changes in the one can, and often do, affect the other. Nothing metaphysical need be implied by the existence of this pairing. Self and world are names for patterns of activity that have been and may continue to be shaped by deliberation and choice. They are especially intimate and important to us since they represent for us the extremes of our existence; the mine and not mine; what I am and what I am up against, what I want and what is available to me. They are akin to poetry and myth, but not necessarily illusions because of that and certainly not without meaning. Our bodies and the natural forces at work in the things around us energize the stories of self and world and are in turn incorporated into their unfolding episodes. From our cultural surroundings, our personal experiences and our thinking—including forays beyond the cultural givens—we frame the story of the world, and under the impetus of our aspirations, interests, and fears we undertake to act in ways that will make the details of our own adventures in it come out as we want them to. When we use written marks to communicate instead of making sounds, our doubleness is doubly confirmed. If proof were needed for the fact of doubling, the writing and reading of any sentence would provide it. Without the conventional marks employed by the writer as stand-ins for words there would be no sentence to read, and if the reader were not able to see them as standing for words they would be taken only for the little squiggles they really are and they would have no other meaning. �54 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Writing, like speaking, depends upon and enhances our doubling power. It gives our words a more permanent body than air, extends their reach and greatly increases their sway. We are inclined to say that an author puts concepts, images, feelings, characters, or events in a text, but it would be more accurate to say that the writer, using the conventions of a written language, provides a set of tacit instructions which the reader follows in order to enact or constitute the thoughts or events which the work elicits. Literally speaking, there are no thoughts in any book. We are also disposed to say that the thoughts which the work conveys enter the reader’s mind and may be stored in the memory and later recalled. But it would be more accurate to say that in the act of remembering, the reader’s initial activities when encountering and comprehending the work are reiterated, rehearsed, or re-enacted and thereby reconstituted. Thus, just as we should circumspectly say there is nothing in the book, so we should also circumspectly say there is nothing of it in the mind or memory. When, as practiced readers, we look something up in a book, we do not attend to the marks on the page as such and scarcely notice they are there although they are the means by which we understand what the book says. When we remember something, the means by which the memory is activated are not available for our inspection, as the marks on the page are if we happen to distract ourselves by noticing them, but in both reading and remembering there are embodied procedures which make the acts possible. In the act of reading, static embodiments are reactivated by procedures dynamically embodied in living tissues; the procedures of memory are dynamically embodied in living tissues alone; we know how to read and to remember without, in either case, really knowing how we are able to do it. 55 RICHARDSON 3 It is surprising, when we stop to notice it, how much of our thinking lies openly before us. Thinking is manifest in all the things presently at hand. This table, the chairs, the carpet, the lights, the drapes, the pictures on the walls, the doors and windows, the walls themselves—all embody thinking. Our needs, interests, hopes, fears, and fantasies have forged out of the elements a multitude of things. Whether planes, trains, or automobiles the reality is the same: thinking makes them and thinking makes them go. In this respect, thinking is the least mysterious enterprise there is. We see it everywhere we turn and know it well. Thinking is made evident just as surely, if less tangibly, in the ordering of our common life. Courts, colleges, corporations, cities, states, musical concerts, and baseball games are all embodiments of thinking. Our organized forms of work and of play, of commerce and of art, are beings of thought. Seemingly more real than the events and things they order, they cannot be directly seen or pointed to and have no actual location in space and time. They show up only in the activities they circumscribe. The rules of the game, the charter of the college, the laws of the land, govern invisibly. Much metaphysical hay might be made of this if one were so inclined, but there is no need to loft the formal aspects of experience into eternity to preserve what is real in them. It would be pointless to ask, where is the justice system in the body politic? We can locate the courthouses and the statute books, but the system lives in the customs and practices, the activities of its constituents. Without buildings, books or human bodies, there would be no system, yet, real as it is, we cannot locate it in any one of them or all of them taken together. Again, we might ask, where is the English language? We can point to dictionaries and grammars, as well as books that are written in it, but the language is not in them. It lives in the habits and practices of those who know how to use it, but it is not in their bodies. The language is real, it has effects and �56 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW consequences, the world is different because it is employed, yet it is not anywhere. Speaking the language and thinking thoughts are alike in this respect. The organs that make them possible are locatable, but the language and the thoughts are not. Where is a game of chess or soccer? And where, we could also ask, are science and poetry? For that matter, where in the world is the world? It is amazing when we stop to think about it how many things there are that cannot be said to be in any place and yet are constantly assumed, repeatedly invoked, and powerfully consequential. We speak a language. We speak our minds. There is a similarity worth pondering here. There is a nearly unshakable conviction that the mind exists and can be looked into. Many tell us they have taken a look and have reported impressively on what they have seen. Withdrawing his attention from his surroundings and peering into his mind, Descartes plucked out his famous cogito. Hume took a long inward look and spied an assortment of discrete atoms of thinking which he called impressions and ideas. William James, stepping into the celebrated chapter on the stream of thought in his Principles of Psychology, says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.”3 In Kinds of Minds, Daniel Dennett declares, “It is beyond serious dispute that you and I each have a mind.”4 And “…each of us knows exactly one mind from the inside, and no two of us know the same mind from the inside.”5 We are not “something that is all outside and no inside like a rock or a discarded sliver of fingernail.”6 Although all people and all schools of philosophy, according to William James, affirm this inner realm, although many heroes of thought have dared the labyrinth hoping to see what thinking is really like when it is at home, I must remain outside and cannot go in. I have read the accounts of these interior expeditions often enough over the years but I have never been persuaded by their individual claims or managed to see how their mutually incompatible certainties RICHARDSON 57 might be forged into a comprehensible whole. I would cut a sorry figure now if, like some Quixote of consciousness, I plunged into this legendary space and went adventuring to see what I might rescue there, then returned to defend my fugitive darlings trolled up from the inner dark. No; better, I think, to close the hole. The putative effort to look into our minds, if nothing else, takes doubleness for granted; the agent examines the patient, although they are ‘really’ one and the same. The mind observes the play of mind upon the mental stage. As long as we are speaking metaphorically, and know that we are doing so, such fancies are innocent enough. Figuratively, ‘in’ will do. Taken literally, it is a dose that is fatal to our understanding. One important piece of evidence that this metaphor is taken literally is the fact that, ever since Descartes, thinkers of all sorts have made it the basis for what they consider to be a real distinction between the internal and external worlds: there is an inner world, intimately experienced, directly accessible, and certainly known, and there is an external world, which is represented in the mind in some problematic way that leaves its real existence doubtful. By some strange alchemy, what is so manifestly happening around us has been transmuted into an inner world with us, as knowers, somehow inside it. Once we have stumbled into this maze it is impossible ever to find our way back through our own mentations to reach the outside and see it directly and simply as itself again. I am not ignorant of the circumstances and the arguments that led to this way of thinking about thinking, but in my opinion this picture of an inner reality and a represented but doubtful external world out yonder is exactly backwards. To stay for the moment with this inside-outside distinction despite its dubious character, I would have to say that thinking is constituted outside us and then imported. What is out there surrounding the body, encountered by it and engaging it, is the real. The inner world is its imaginary �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 58 simulacrum, an invented counterpart. In making up our minds, we bring the outside in. I began with speech and language and spoke in passing of political and social structures as well as the making of things because these instances of thinking seem to me to have more to tell us than can be learned by trying to turn our gaze inward in acts of introspection. I want to stay on this outward path even though to nearly everyone else all the signposts seem so evidently to point the other way. 4 We are constantly telling ourselves how the mind works, and it is instructive to notice what we say. We forge an understanding, draw a conclusion, render a judgment, grasp a problem, shape an idea, build a theory, make a decision. We hit the nail on the head, are struck by a thought, see an idea clearly, approach a problem, keep things in mind, get a rough idea, have a touching thought. We apprehend and comprehend, but in either case, behind the Latinate terms for it, the plain English of it is, we grasp. All these motions of the mind are metaphors, grounded in our interactions with the things of daily life. Most of the time the mind is either a seeing eye or a grasping hand. The notion that the mind or consciousness does things—like a person moving in physical space—is itself a metaphor. The mind is, in short, the double of the body, its imaginary counterpart—and its mask. It only exists in a manner of speaking. Recounting his efforts to observe his “palpitating inward life,” William James says: “Whenever my introspective glance succeeds in turning around quickly enough to catch one of these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever feel distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking place within the head.”7 This picture of a mind pirouetting inside itself reminds us a little of the hope we had when we were children of stepping on our own shadow if only we were quick enough. We can eliminate such shadowy motions if we ascribe thinking to the body itself, something James often RICHARDSON 59 seems on the brink of doing. Time and again his inner exploration of the stream of thought seems about to beach on the shores of the body, but he backs water and paddles away.8 One aspect of his inward journey is particularly illustrative of the difficulties such ventures face. Describing his struggle to follow and observe his thoughts, noting how they seem to be concentrated in the neck and head, he says, “My brain appears to me as if all shot across with lines of direction, of which I have become conscious as my attention has shifted from one sense-organ to another, in passing to successive outer things, or in following trains of varying sense-ideas.”9 Here William seems to have forsaken the role of scientific observer and taken up his brother Henry’s art. An introspective faculty so agile and penetrating it overleaps the possible and spies the brain itself is simply too uncanny to be taken for a fact. We may describe the mind as Hume does as “a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations,”10 but the actors appear before the footlights costumed in raiment which the solitary spectator has unwittingly sewn backstage before the play began. Habits, conventions, language, and expectations are part of the story of what we see with our inward gaze. The inside story of our thinking is a work of inspired imagination. We do not look on thinking bare. The mind is an idea but there are no ideas in the mind. The mind does not produce thoughts; it is a product of them. The mind is a name for a complex of activities. It is nothing over and above these activities, and apart from them it has no being. In this it resembles such terms as the English language, the judicial system, the game of chess, the college, or the city. The mind is the ether of thinking. We would do better, I believe, to speak of minding rather than a mind. The verbal form represents the facts more perspicuously than the noun. Activities are the real subjects here, and not a thing that acts. To quote James again, “If we �60 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW could say in English ‘it thinks,’ as we say ‘it rains’ or ‘it blows,’ we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought goes on. ”11 Our many mindings, although they reside nowhere, still go about their business unimpaired. The activities we denominate as sensing, feeling, wishing, opining, believing, liking, and fearing go on undomiciled, as do imagining, judging, reasoning, and the like. Such terms, it is worth noting, are highly generic. When we think of the range of our desires, wishes, feelings, or beliefs we have to wonder if these general terms ever adequately express what occurs in any particular instance, especially when we notice how often these ways of minding infuse one another, commingling in varied ways and countless combinations. It is also true that many aspects of our thinking life are too indeterminate to be singled out and named. Subtle alterations of mood and inclination, flickering images, and passing fancies come and go without our pausing to acknowledge them, much less provide them with a moniker, yet they affect us and are often significant despite their lack of definiteness. In contrast to this, some of our mindings are not only specified distinctly but are ascribed to particular faculties: the imagination, the judgment, the intellect, the understanding, the reason, or the will. This helps satisfy our inclination to provide a mental doer for every thinking deed, even though there is nothing that actually answers to these names. A thorough renovation of our thinking would require us to renounce our inheritance and refuse to take title to them. The absence of most of them, outside of philosophical discourse, would probably go unnoticed but—having gained wide acceptance since its invention in Roman times—the will is now something of a popular favorite and likely to be missed. 61 RICHARDSON 5 In denying the existence of an inner realm I do not mean to deny that each of us has experiences uniquely our own and known only to us. Although a lot of what we undergo is not known to us at all, and a lot of what we know about what happens to us is known in the same way it might be known by anyone else since we use common words and concepts to recognize it, report it to ourselves and comprehend it, there is an irreducible something in each person’s experience that is that person’s alone. You cannot have my headache, and believe me, you wouldn’t want to. But if we look at this closely I think it comes to very much the same as saying that we have different bodies and different life experiences. I have mine with its sensations and you have yours and there is no possibility of the one being the other. We may mix our saliva in a kiss, but I cannot secrete yours and you cannot produce mine. We may extend our imagination to the fullest reach of its powers, but we can never know exactly what it is like to be each other—much less to be a creature like a bat. If the mind is a metaphorical construct, as I believe it is, and therefore not a place for thinking actually to be in, where is thinking then? In the body? Well, perhaps, but can we say just where? Often, as we struggle with a difficult problem or confront an issue important to us, we feel a mounting pressure in the chest, the heart pounds, the stomach churns. This might lead us to locate our thinking where most of humankind most of the time has felt it to be, somewhere between the navel and the chin. When we are not trying to locate thinking it just seems to hover around; it is present without being anywhere. Sometimes it seems to float slightly above and before us, as if somewhere nearby in the sky. The cartoonists’ use of the thought balloon may be as good a convention for locating it as any. �62 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW When we are conversing with a friend and trying vigorously to make a point, thinking seems to be located in the space between us. If we were cracking a safe we might feel it to be concentrated at our fingertips, and at the end of a stick if we were using it to feel our way in the dark over rough ground. With a little practice I believe we could learn to place it almost anywhere—on our back between our shoulder blades, or perched on our shoulder—if we were persuaded by a likely enough story to expect to feel it there. There is, of course, something experientially plausible about locating thinking in our heads. The vocal organs are in the neck and head and, since so much of thinking is a kind of silent speech, as the stranger points out in Plato’s Sophist, it is easy to feel that the mind is there, too. Likewise the organs of hearing, sight, smell, taste—and even touch if we consider the tongue—are in the same vicinity, so it is not surprising that we might come to take it for granted that our many mindings are housed somewhere in our heads. However, it is our present understanding of physiology and not the experience of thinking itself which leads us to locate thinking in our skulls where the brain is found. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein says, “nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.”12 So, too, there is nothing in the activity of thinking itself from which we could infer that it goes on in a brain. Although we frequently are aware of activity in many parts of our body—especially the heart and lungs, the digestive tract, and our major muscles—and we can increase our awareness of these activities to some degree by paying attention to them, we have no sensations from the part of the head where the brain is housed, and the brain, unlike some other organs of the body, does not enter our awareness. The unnumbered firings of its synapses, those diminutive and distant cousins of the lightning bolt, do not crackle in our ears. Thinking doesn’t gurgle, wheeze, hiss, or hum. This absence of sensible experience is laden with consequences and merits further consideration, but the main point of this RICHARDSON 63 quick survey is to see how irrelevant it is. No matter where we decide to place thinking in the body and no matter which bodily organ we attribute it to, when we look for it there, it is not to be found. Open head or belly or chest, look at brain, heart, liver, stomach, or spleen and nothing like thinking appears. There is no mind there. This is too obvious to need pointing out, perhaps. Still, it ought to cast a shadow of suspicion over the use of the word “in” when talking about our mental activities. The fact that “I do my thinking in my study,” and “I do sums in my head,” are grammatically similar expressions does not imply that both refer to equally locatable places where thinking actually occurs. Thinking is a mode of bodily activity. It is like walking, swimming, playing a musical instrument. There is no place where these activities reside when they are not occurring. The fact that I know how to play the piano does not mean there is music either in the piano or in me. Saying that thinking is a bodily activity invites us to compare it with other fundamental activities of the body. Breathing, like thinking, is something I would not do without my body. It seems locatable in a fairly straightforward way, even though there is more to respiration than simply filling the lungs with air and emptying them. All of its components (excepting, some might want to argue, its impulse) are physical things moving in physical space in detectable ways. Thinking is not so straightforwardly locatable. That the brain is a central organ in the process of thinking is surely true, but we cannot find our thinking there. The motions and activities in the brain are to some extent locatable, detectable, and measurable, but they do not reveal our thinking. In this respect thinking is like living. In both cases the body is indispensable. We say, speaking loosely, that life is in the body and when we die it departs. But if we are more circumspect, we realize that life is not a thing, and is not in the body except in a metaphorical sense. The body’s fundamental activity is living. All its organs, motions, and processes participate in this activity, although not all in the same way, of course, or �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 64 necessarily all at once. When the body is no longer active and all its motions stop, we say life departs although there is nothing to go anywhere or anywhere for it to go. In this way, life and mind are alike. They are substantive fictions that name complex activities and treat them as entities that are real. Not surprisingly, the effort to understand thinking has about it some of the same difficulties that confound the attempt to understand life itself. It is a wonder that life arises from a combination of chemical elements. No explanation seems commensurate with this amazing occurrence, just as no account seems to explain adequately how the energies of the body are sublimed into the vapors of thought. The body, to varying degrees and with alterable intensities, can be aware of itself and its activities, its thinking, its sensations, its feelings, and its impulses. It can also be aware of this awareness. Neither in the first instance nor the second is any other entity—substantial, spiritual, or metaphysical— required either as a medium or an agent. The body’s ability to do all this is prodigious, manifold, complex, astonishing— and not well understood. But it is the body and only the body doing it. There is nothing else to do our thinking for us. 6 The activities and excitations of our bodies, especially of our brain and nervous system, are correlated, we are sure, with our sensations, desires, ideas, and feelings, our thoughts of every sort. But how does this work? It may be as James says, that “the passing Thought itself is the only verifiable thinker, and its empirical connection with the brain-process is the ultimate known law.”13 Making this connection, however, is no easy business. One problem is that the physical part of the correlation is not open to direct inspection. Even if I can see or feel what I am thinking, I cannot see or feel my brain. Another observer cannot see directly what I am thinking, or see directly what my brain is doing, even if my skull is open and the would-be RICHARDSON 65 observer is looking inside with the finest equipment available. Seeing what is going on in the brain requires a lot more than simply looking. It is probably too obvious to need stating, but a scientist examining brain processes employs theories, models, and metaphors. The atomic theory of matter is taken for granted along with its attendant explanation of chemical reactions. The theory of electrical discharges and other more specialized theories about cells, neurons, and synapses, are part of the picture as well. It might even be necessary, as some are now suggesting, to utilize quantum mechanics and the indeterminacy principle. Additionally, some investigators embed the affairs of brain and mind in the context of evolutionary theory. Thus it is safe to say that no account of how the brain works can be direct and literal. Oddly enough we can see it do what it does only because we have garbed it figuratively in thought. Even to suggest the possibility of correlating thoughts and brain states might seem to imply that our mental life can be reduced ultimately to a complex of deterministic mechanical causes. But this prospect is less worrisome than it might seem to those who fear it and a great deal less likely than it is presumed to be by many who remain committed to it as the goal of their inquiries. One significant deterrent to such a mechanical mapping is the complexity of the task. To every subtle difference, distinction, nuance, and gradation of every different thought, feeling, insight, or perplexity, some specific bodily event or series of events—a brain-state or a brain-process—must correspond if we are to be told the whole affair. Imagine an account, in terms of neurophysiological activity, of all that any one of us has experienced since rolling out of bed this morning and arriving here—all that we have felt, imagined, remembered, considered, decided, seen, heard, tasted, liked, disliked, sought, or avoided. It would make for a mighty long story, even though for most of us nothing of much significance happened. But suppose a loved one had died, or we had �66 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW converted to Islam or become a socialist, survived a near-fatal accident, won the lottery, or been elected president? What would be the neurophysiological effects of such life-changing events? When the meaning and deliverance of everything changes, what goes on in the brain? Some physiological alteration must correspond to every change of every kind if the law which decrees their correlation is to be upheld. Where is the meter for this? Who will write the equations that capture it? Compared to this complexity and subtlety the motions of the planets are simplicity itself and the atom smasher, with its tinier and tinier fragmentations, a mere toy. The crux of the matter, however, is not the size of the task. The mode of explanation contemporary science allows in these matters—the correlation of a mental event with an underlying mechanism or mechanisms—can work in only one direction if it works at all. A physical change in the brain may be asserted to have a mental consequence, but as the one turns into, produces, or somehow causes the other, explanation loses its grip. The thought or feeling resulting from a change in the brain cannot enter as a term into the mechanical relationship that is said to have caused it. By the nature of the case it is immaterial and can have no mechanical efficacy. There is no mechanism on the thinking side of the presumed relationship that would make it possible for mental activities to have consequences. There are no levers to shift us from thought to thought and no thinking wheels to spin the brain. This not only makes it impossible to say how one thought leads to another but also to say how any thought can alter a brain state. There is an explanatory gap here that mechanistic explanations fail to bridge. Beyond this problem lies a deeper one. Scientific mechanism—somewhat ironically, given its historical roots— is a determined effort to explain natural phenomena without invoking ends, goals, or purposes. Thinking, however, is naturally forward-looking and goal-oriented in many of its manifestations. Whatever a complete account of thinking might ultimately look like, if it should ever emerge, it would 67 RICHARDSON have to do justice to our purposiveness, our capacity for selfdirection, our ability to deliberate and choose, our powers of originative making. These are aspects of thinking known to us directly, and are fateful in their consequences. Our powers of choice may not be always as extensive as we suppose, but they are real nevertheless. A science noticing that it could not exist or hope to go forward without them and thus enlightened by the vision of their actuality might in time pursue these powers to their natural ground and by describing their physical basis help us understand more fully how they do what they are able to do. But it will not work to rule out from the beginning and by fiat all purpose and direction and then attempt to conjure from this paucity the full story of how a human body thinks. This is not a demand that the idea of purpose be put back into our account of natural processes. It is only a recognition that whatever the place of thinking in nature may be, much of it is clearly purposeful and no tale can be persuasive which denies this telling fact. 7 Taking the mind out of the picture and acknowledging the body as the thinker ascribes to thinking its proper origin, gives credit where credit is due, and brings home to us the body’s true nature as an intelligent being. Even those researchers and theorists who take the reality of the mind for granted are unlikely to be satisfied until the mind’s doings are understood in terms of body and brain, so one must ask them what explanatory aid this imaginary entity actually provides. It seems to be a real hindrance, multiplying entities beyond necessity and requiring additional explanatory principles without producing cogency or clarity. We have thought the body and its powers too small. If we let our minds go and think again we may see that it is proper-sized and will suffice. The body and its energies are the foundation of the real. Although I know it only confusedly and imperfectly, I feel my body’s encounters, its urges, its aims and intentions, and know that my being is grounded there. I know some of its �68 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW capacities, am aware of many of its possibilities, and know its vulnerabilities all too well. I know it can be injured, get out of whack with itself, be invaded by other agents, and become diseased. I know that it grows old and dies. I am entirely a body, I can know only what can be known by my body and do only what it can do. In acknowledging this I do not deny to myself any of the real capacities or possible attainments that an embodied consciousness, mind or soul might claim, save one: I never have and never will go anywhere without my body. The end of my body is the end of me. In a bodily sense, I have some inner awareness: some of my innards make something known of what they are doing some of the time. But speaking strictly and literally I have no such inner awareness in a mental sense. I can be aware of my thinking, but I cannot see into my mind. Except metaphorically, I have no inner being, no inner life, no mind. Those elusive sprites of consciousness—bare sentiences, raw feels, immediate awarenesses, pure sensations and all their evanescent kin—are strangers to me. When I try to look for them, they fail to appear. If I could see my own unmediated thoughts I would be like a playwright seeing my own play without having written it. I can enter such a drama only by passing through the looking glass and becoming a fictional character myself. Although I have no inner life, in the sense in which it is usually avowed, I am not a robot or an automaton. I think and feel robustly and am vividly aware of it. I tend to muse incessantly and am constantly contending with myself. In fact, it is these musings and reflections, this almost obsessive monitoring and self-examination, which has led me to conclude that there is no mind lying open to our direct inspection and that we do not do quite what we think we do when we try to examine it. It is not the fact of these musings, feelings, urges, and sensations that is at issue here, but their nature and ground. 69 RICHARDSON What I am aware of when I am known to myself is my story, the life adventure in which I am engaged, and which I endure, enjoy, anticipate, and almost unremittingly recount to myself. I wake to it in the morning and, if I am able, put it to rest at night. My dreams rise out of it and into it. Beneath its episodes are energies, urges, inclinations, and desires whose origins and destinies exceed my understanding. I seek to guide them as they move me. I am boy and dolphin, black horse, white horse, chariot and charioteer; a protean shapeshifter that all the powers of science, philosophy, poetry, and myth have not pinned to earth or caused to yield its secret up. With its obscure prologue, its brief and feeble aftermath in public memory, this story, because it is the meaning of life, means as much as life itself. This is what passes in my experience for a soul. 8 Since ‘the mind’ is a story the body tells itself, how did it come to fall for its own fantastic tale? The lack of sensation associated with thinking is part of the answer. In physical work or play, when it is vigorous, the body lets us know it; the heart pounds, we begin to breathe rapidly and perspire. But we can think long and hard without ever breaking a sweat. Thinking arises with such magical ease—like a genie rubbed up from the lump of the body—nothing at all seems to be doing it or to be needed in order to do it. The casual way our thoughts drift off in memory or in reverie to far away times and places or worlds that never were makes it easy to suppose this mortal clay to be but a prison house from which we might be freed. We might, it seems, be able to think without a body. The myth recounted in Plato’s Meno, purporting to show that all knowledge is only the soul’s recollection of what it saw in a prior existence, is plausible enough as far as direct experience can testify: so much of what we know seems to come to us out of nowhere, bearing �70 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW no traces of its origins. Some more or less likely tale is always required to say how our thinking comes to us. But there is a darker side to the story. When thinking— bright Ariel spirit—looked down, detached and self-aware, and saw itself bound to the body of a beast more rude than Caliban, it revolted and began at once to sew itself a suit of clothes. But this disguise was not enough: the body and its excrements still offended the delicate appraisal of its own nostrils. Worse yet, it lived by devouring its animal kindred after tearing them limb from limb, and when it ceased to live it betrayed its earthy origins, succumbed to a foul corruption, stank to heaven and drew flies. Wanting no part of anything so base, thinking revolted, took out an option on a place in paradise and began to dream of a bodiless bliss. I would not claim much plausibility for this mythical portrayal of the ultimate doubling act, but without some such affront to our appraising gaze it is hard to understand what could have led one misguided expositor to say, and multitudes before and after him tacitly or explicitly to believe, “…I [am] a substance whose whole essence or nature consists entirely in thinking; and which for its existence, has need of no place, and is not dependent on any material thing; so that this I, that is to say the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body, and would not itself cease to be all that it is, even should the body cease to exist.”14 How desperate for safety and certainty a man must be to willingly undergo, even in thought, such extreme selfmutilation. Yet to this day we are haunted by this dictum of Descartes’—and still have trouble disbelieving it. 1 The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, trans. R. E. Hume (Oxford India Paperbacks, New Delhi, 1985), Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad, (-3.8.2) 117. 2 Upanishads, trans. Hume, Svetasvatara Upanishad, (-6.11) 409 and (6.19) 410. 3 William James, The Principles of Psychology, (Dover Publications, New York, 1950), Volume 1, 224. RICHARDSON 71 4 Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness, (Basic Books, The Science Masters Series, Perseus Books Group, New York, 1996) 8. 5 Dennett, Kinds, 3. 6 Dennett, Kinds, 14. 7James, Principles, 1.300, italicized in the original. 8James, Principles, 1.301-302, is a conspicuous instance of this. 9 James, Principles, 1.300. 10 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P . H. Niddick, (2d ed, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Bk.1, pt.4, ch.6, 253. 11 James, Principles, 1.224-225. 12 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1961), ppn. 5.633, p.117. 13 James, Principles, 1.346. 14 Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part 4. �72 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 73 What Good Are Friends? Robert Goldberg One might wonder whether theoretical books on friendship are really necessary. Aren’t we all thoroughly familiar with friendship from our own experience? Is there anything about friendship we can learn better from books? Perhaps, however, our experience of friendship has not always been free from disappointment, confusion, and doubt. For instance, there may be times we feel betrayed by friends. At other times, we may ask more of them than they feel they can give or, in fear of doing so, hesitate to ask as much of them as we would like. We may have felt guilty on occasion for not giving as much of ourselves to a friend as we might have. Such experiences can make us wonder who our friends really are and what kind of person we ourselves are. We may then resolve to be more careful about choosing our friends in the future and to do better by those we regard as true friends. Disappointment, confusion, and doubt, however, may be signs of problems with our very notions of friendship and of what a friend is: we may be expecting something more, or something other, than what friendship can deliver. Reflecting on the experience of friendship we might ask: Just what is a friend? Is he someone who loves you for your own sake? Someone who cares about you at least as much as he cares about himself? Is the true friend one who is willing to give up everything for you, including, if need be, his own life? Are there limits to what friends owe each other? We might also ask why we form friendships to begin with—whether out of some need we have for the assistance of others, or rather for the sake of the Lorraine Smith Pangle. Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Robert Goldberg is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. �74 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW enjoyment we derive from their company, or perhaps because of the loneliness we would have to endure without them, or from some other cause. Such questions take us to the heart of what it means to be a human being. In pursuing answers to them, we are led to radical questions: On what grounds, if any, do we have obligations to others, including those who are closest to us? Are we capable of the extreme selflessness that good friendship seems to require? Does a life that is by nature good need friendship? Indeed, Lorraine Smith Pangle’s remarkable book, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship, shows that the issues of the relationship of friendship to justice, of the possibility of selflessness in friendship, and of the naturalness of friendship form the central themes of a number of classic treatments of friendship, particularly the one on which she concentrates—Books eight and nine of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Pangle 5). The Ethics is a perennial favorite of St. John’s undergraduates, one of the most memorable books read in freshman seminar and one often referred to in subsequent years. Of its various themes, friendship may be the one that students and other modern readers can relate to most directly. Indeed, the Ethics is one of the few books we read at the College, and the only philosophic one, that gives substantial attention to friendship; two of its ten books are entirely devoted to investigating the nature of friendship and its place in a good human life. Not surprisingly, every student recalls Aristotle’s threefold classification of friendships developed in the second and third chapters of Book eight: there are friendships based on pleasure, those based on utility, and those based on virtue. But few remember the other twelve chapters of Book eight or the twelve of Book nine—and with good reason, for the rest of his analysis is not nearly so clear and concise as is his initial classification of friendship. It can also be disturbing, as Aristotle delves into such questions as whether we love others for their own sake or for our own sake and whether we really wish for our friends the greatest goods imaginable. GOLDBERG 75 Because we have so much at stake in understanding Aristotle’s teaching about friendship, and also so much difficulty in figuring out what that teaching is, it is a pleasure to recommend Pangle’s book to our community. Pangle provides just the kind of guidance a student of Aristotle needs in negotiating the twists and turns of his astonishingly complex, rich, and nuanced argument. All readers will find her book accessible and engaging. In a mere 200 pages of lively prose Pangle takes us through Books eight and nine of the Ethics, with fascinating excursions into Plato’s Lysis, Cicero’s Laelius On Friendship, and Montaigne’s Of Friendship. The book is chiefly an interpretation of Aristotle’s text, but it also compares and contrasts Aristotle’s views with the views of these and other thinkers and addresses the question why friendship is given so much attention by ancient thinkers while being largely neglected by such modern thinkers as Hobbes and Locke. True to its title, the book manages to provide a comprehensive treatment of the philosophy of friendship. For scholars, or those wishing to pursue alternative interpretations, the book has an additional forty pages of footnotes, largely treating other interpreters of Aristotle. These need not be read, however, in order to follow Pangle’s own argument; they are wholly supplementary in character. The Socratic Challenge Pangle uses Plato’s Lysis to pose the questions to which her analysis of Aristotle will eventually provide answers.1 According to Pangle, Socrates in the Lysis pursues the unsettling idea that all friendship is rooted in human neediness and defectiveness and is treasured only because and only to the extent that we hope to get from others things that we are unable to provide for ourselves. (20) �76 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW This appears to be connected with another of Socrates’ contentions in the Lysis, namely, that the good for human beings consists of those things that remedy the illnesses and defects of our bodies and souls. Hence, Socrates uses medicine as both the prime example of something good for human beings and the key analogy for the human good as such. We love people and things only insofar as we believe them to be good for us. This view seems to be contradicted by our experience of friendship, which suggests that it proceeds more from our virtues than from our deficiencies. Our capacity to love, to devote ourselves to our friends, to rise above self-interest and care for our friends for their sake and not our own—all this comes very close to what we mean by virtue. This capacity may even strike us as what is best in us. Perhaps in recognition of our experience, Aristotle begins his treatment with the observation that friendship either is a virtue or goes together with virtue. But Socrates, for his part, is unyielding in his insistence that friendship is rooted in our neediness. Thus the question arises: Will friendship prove to be an outgrowth or sign of our virtue and strength or will it prove to be rooted in our weakness and neediness? Pangle maintains from the start not only that Socrates’ argument in the Lysis is implausible but also that Socrates himself would admit as much. Citing various features of the argument, she suggests that he exaggerates the neediness at the root of friendship in order to make an important point. It might be true, she concedes, that the greatest or most important human goods have the character Socrates ascribes to them. If so, we, no less than the young men Socrates converses with, would have to come to recognize this truth if we are ever to become healthy in soul. But this leaves open the possibility that other goods exist that have the character not of medicines healing diseases but of activities we engage in once health is achieved. Pangle tempts us to think that friendship might be one of these. Prior to achieving health, however, we may actually be harmed by friendship if it makes us content to remain unhealthy in soul. Perhaps it would be GOLDBERG 77 more accurate to say that friendship in such a case is not genuine. Friends are supposed to be good for us, but if the love others have for us (and we for them) leads us to believe we possess a goodness we do not possess, we may never take the decisive step toward health. As Pangle puts it: The great comfort of feeling that one belongs to others, that they belong to oneself, and that one is loved for oneself just as one is tends rather to induce complacency. Pursuing the charms of such friendship can distract us from the task of thinking through what we need for true fulfillment, for these charms tend to mask altogether the neediness and unhealthiness of our souls. (35) Friendships that harm us by concealing our defects lack what we think of as an essential characteristic of genuine friendship—that it is something good for us, perhaps even the greatest good. At least until we become healthy, according to Pangle’s interpretation of the Lysis, friendship will have two roots: the main root of serious friendships (i.e., friendships between those aware of their defects and intent on correcting them) will be utility, and the root of friendship between the ignorant and needy who remain unaware of their defects will be kinship (35). So far, of course, we have been taking Socrates’ word for it that the souls of the unwise—our souls—are sick and needy. What this means, however, is fleshed out by Pangle only in the course of the book as a whole; it turns out that sustained reflection on our experience of friendship itself, such as we find in the Ethics, brings to light the very defects in soul that friendship can help to conceal. Aristotle’s Classification and Beyond Pangle’s treatment of the Lysis provides a helpful introduction to Book eight of the Ethics, which then appears as a response to the challenges posed by Socrates to our �78 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW unexamined opinions about friendship. In this light, Aristotle’s famous threefold classification of friendship looks like a deliberate rejection of Socrates’ view: it leaves room for precisely the kind of friendship Socrates denied the possibility of—that in which one loves one’s friend for his sake and not for one’s own. Aristotle includes among lovable things not only the pleasant and the useful but also the good (which seems to be something other than the useful). As Pangle explains, love of a friend who is good may not exclude his being good for you (and your loving him for his usefulness), but it allows also for loving the goodness in him without regard to its usefulness to yourself (38). However, as Pangle cautions, Aristotle also asserts that everyone “loves what is or seems best for himself ” as distinct from “the good” (43; Ethics 1155b23-6). If this assertion is taken to mean that the basis of our loving things or people is our belief that they are good for ourselves, then how exactly does Aristotle’s position differ from that of Socrates, according to which need is at the root of friendship? Aristotle thus leaves us with two possibilities, according to Pangle: either friendship between those who are good provides “the highest benefits to both partners” (and is just a special case of friendships of utility), or friendships of pleasure and utility are those that provide to the partners pleasure and all benefits (high and low) while “virtuous friendships are fundamentally different” (43). In accordance with the second possibility, Pangle contends, Aristotle speaks of friendship “for the sake of the useful” and of friendship “for the sake of pleasure” but of friendship “of the good” (my italics). This evidence may seem ambiguous: it could be taken to suggest, for instance, that, however friendships of the good may differ from other friendships, they are alike in being for the sake of the useful and the pleasant (and not for the sake of the good). And in any case, as Pangle shows, the picture with respect to friendship becomes steadily more complicated as we move away from Aristotle’s initial classification and into the intricacies of his full argument. GOLDBERG 79 We come to see, in fact, that Aristotle’s threefold classification of friendships is by no means his last word on the matter. For one thing, each kind of friendship has elements of the other two. If there are friendships based on virtue, the friends are also useful and pleasant to each other. By the same token, partners in friendships based on utility and pleasure may see each other as good, even if they do not live up to (or would even reject) the strict notion of human goodness that Aristotle articulates in the Ethics. As Aristotle himself observes, most human beings believe that they are basically good and that their best friends are, too (1155a31, 1166b34). Because we normally think well of ourselves and our friends, it seems that even friendships between those who do not possess genuine virtue may nevertheless be based partly on the supposed good character of the friends and not only on their utility and pleasantness to each other. Presumably, the chief difference between friends who are good in the full, Aristotelian sense of the term and those who are not is that the truly good are not mistaken about what human goodness consists in.2 Complicating things further, Aristotle soon comes to speak as if the fundamental ground of friendship is none of the three things he initially describes as lovable— pleasure, utility, and the good—but rather the similarity or likeness (homoiotês) of friends to each other (48; NE 1156b19-23; 1157b2-3; 1159b2-3). On this ground, friends who are not good may be friends no less truly than those who are good. The significance of friends’ similarity to each other will prove to be one of the key issues in Aristotle’s analysis of friendship, most notably when he comes to call the friend, in his famous and paradoxical formulation, “another self.” Montaigne, Aristotle, and Cicero on Devotion Key issues that surface before then include whether we can love friends and wish them well entirely for their sake without regard to our own good and whether genuine devotion or self-sacrifice is possible. Indeed, in one of the �80 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Ethics’ most provocative passages, Aristotle makes the case that each human being wishes the greatest goods for himself but only some of the greatest goods for his friends (8.7, 1159a5-12). His argument here, and a number of others he makes in regard to friendships where the parties are not each other’s equals (the subject of 8.7-8), calls into question our beliefs about friendship and is intended, according to Pangle, to incite in us a desire to examine those beliefs. Pangle describes the beliefs she has in mind movingly: . . . that love is the very core of what is precious in life, that loyal devotion, even to one who fails to return one’s love, is not foolish or ridiculous but is supremely noble, and that loving and being loved in return is the greatest blessing we can have as human beings. (64) In order to explore further the possibility that we are not mistaken in these beliefs, Pangle turns to a brief but illuminating examination of Montaigne’s “Of Friendship” and other essays, where he seems to support those beliefs. Although “Of Friendship” makes a powerful case for the view that friendship is the greatest good—“that the deepest longing of the human heart is for the simple communion of souls that occurs in true friendship” (56)—we come to see that “Of Friendship” actually supports rather than refutes Aristotle’s implication that friendship cannot itself be the greatest good. The problems with Montaigne’s case for friendship are pointed to by Montaigne himself. Among them is a problem with what he calls “noble generosity,” the desire to do good for one’s friend even at the expense of one’s own good, a problem that Aristotle himself will eventually take up. Pangle explains the problem this way: To be devoted to another is, after all, to be devoted to the good, the benefit, the utility of the other. But if each friend, being noble-minded as well as devoted. . . deeply desires to be a generous GOLDBERG 81 benefactor to the other, then being such a benefactor is in fact a greater good in the benefactor’s eyes than is the low-level good he gives away when, for example, he pays a friend’s debts. (69) After quoting Montaigne to show his awareness of this difficulty, Pangle gives an example of noble generosity that he offers in “Of Friendship”: To illustrate such noble generosity, Montaigne tells the story of Eudamidas and his friends Charixenus and Aretheus, to whom he bequeathed in his will not money, for he was poor and had no money to give, but the nobler opportunity of looking after his elderly mother and his unmarried daughter, and Montaigne tells us that both friends were well satisfied with the gift. (69) To clarify what she calls “a problem and indeed an absurdity” that Montaigne himself appears to be gently calling to our attention, she elaborates: The absurdity consists, at bottom, in a certain confusion or self-deception within each friend: Each is competing for the position he covets—that of selfless benefactor—but neither is willing to face squarely the fact that in doing so, he is seeking what he considers the greatest good for himself, and that this is a good he cannot share with the one he seeks to benefit. (69-70) In other words, the greatest good from this point of view appears to be one’s own nobility or virtue, which, in a sense, is purchased at the expense of one’s friend (cf. 124). In the case of Eudamidas, we can say that he did the nobler thing by giving his friends the opportunity to exercise their nobility. Had he taken the trouble to look after his elderly mother and unmarried daughter himself, he would have deprived his �82 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW friends of this opportunity. He thus took the greater good for himself, a fact Montaigne himself points to by calling the one who gives such opportunities to his friends “the liberal one.” As for why virtue may be so important to us, consider Pangle’s quotation from another of Montaigne’s essays (“That To Philosophize Is To Learn To Die”): “Among the principal benefits of virtue is disdain for death, a means that furnishes our life with a soft tranquility and gives us a pure and pleasant enjoyment of it, without which all other pleasures are extinguished” (72; my italics). How virtue or, more precisely, the belief in our own virtue, could have the effect of leading us to disdain death, and whether that disdain is justified, remains to be seen. The absurdity or self-deception we have just encountered—that one believes oneself to be more concerned with the good of one’s friend than with one’s own good—plays a central role in the analysis of friendship that Pangle, following Aristotle, develops in the course of her book; it is the one strand that runs through and ties together its various parts. A similar self-deception may operate elsewhere in our lives, whenever we believe we are devoted to something outside ourselves, as we learn in Pangle’s next chapter (4), “Friendships in Politics and the Family.” Commenting on Aristotle’s inclusion of religious associations among those that exist for the sake of pleasure, she speaks of the following “paradox”: Even at the moments at which human beings are most clearly seeking to lose themselves or transcend or sacrifice their self-interest in devotion to something higher, they are also pursuing their own good by ennobling or sanctifying their lives, if not also through the pleasure of good fellowship. (83) If people believe they have transcended or sacrificed their self-interest, and thereby ennobled their lives by devoting themselves to something higher, whereas in fact the GOLDBERG 83 enoblement they achieved was a greater good for themselves than the goods they gave up, their situation is indeed problematic. Leaving aside such knotty questions as whether the object of devotion was truly higher and whether a coherent notion of “higher” can even be given, there would appear to be no devotion here at all: such devotion to something or someone entails rising above oneself, but in this case one serves oneself, indeed, it seems the deepest and therefore most precious part of oneself.3 And where there is no sacrifice of self-interest, there is no transcendence of self and hence no ennoblement of the kind Pangle is discussing. As to the character of the good we might seek to acquire through our devotion, a suggestion emerges from Pangle’s fascinating chapter on Cicero’s dialogue Laelius on Friendship. The dialogue “explores the friendship and the self-understanding of two noble Roman statesmen” (105), Laelius and his much more famous and intellectually impressive friend, Scipio. Pangle helps us to see the shortcomings Cicero points to in Laelius’s understanding of himself as the devoted friend of Scipio. She shows us how Cicero “quietly indicates that much of Laelius’s attachment to friendship is fueled by the promise friendship seems to hold of providing a bulwark against misfortune and death,” a promise latent in the feeling of deserving that attends “noble acts of selfless devotion” (120).4 Pangle seems to be suggesting that this feeling of deserving may be a root, perhaps even the principal root, of the belief in divine providence, the belief in a cosmos not coldly indifferent to such acts or to the worthiness of those who perform them. But in light of the problem already encountered, the notion that we deserve (i.e., are worthy of or owed) something as a result of acting for the sake of our friends becomes problematic. And so Pangle speaks of the “confusion” or “incoherence in Laelius’s claim to deserve honor or other protection as a result of his great friendship for Scipio,” an incoherence visible in his “claiming at once that such friendships are life’s �84 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW sweetest gift and that they entail heroic steadfastness and sacrifice” (121). Aristotle and the Problem of Nobility in Friendship A passage in the next chapter (6) offers further support for the contention that we act with a view to our own good and not from selfless devotion to others. In the context of treating a type of utilitarian friendship that Aristotle calls “ethical” (Ethics 1162b21ff.), Pangle notes a tendency of human beings to shut their eyes to their own expectation of a reward for their virtuous acts, an expectation that often becomes visible only when they fail to receive one (if only in the form of an acknowledgment of indebtedness). On this tendency she observes, “Shutting one’s eyes to one’s expectations at the time of acting does not make the act disinterested, but only confused” (127). This tendency points to “a great paradox of the noble: It is only when one can be indifferent to any reward that one seems to deserve it.”5 The paradox appears to be this: ordinarily we do not think of someone’s working hard and ably for the sake of a reward as a disqualification for his receiving it—for example, in an athletic contest or in tracking down a fugitive from justice with a “price on his head.” The case of virtue is different. Here the purity of motive essential to virtue would be compromised by acting for the sake of reward. Rather than leave it at the assertion that the reward is our true motive, Pangle proposes as a thought-experiment “two ways to choose a virtuous action without confused expectations of reward.” One is to choose it knowing that it is bad for oneself and one’s happiness but nonetheless noble; the other is to choose it as not only noble but also intrinsically good for oneself, without expectation of reward (127-8). But do human beings ever act in either of these ways? Casting doubt on the first, Pangle wonders “whether such a disposition toward virtue and one’s happiness is humanly possible” (127). Her doubt is certainly plausible: it may well be that no one who wishes to act virtuously really believes that virtuous action is noble but funda- GOLDBERG 85 mentally bad for those who undertake it. Casting doubt on the second, she raises the suspicion that no one is so delighted by the purity of his own soul as not to harbor some hope of reward for it, also a plausible doubt. Having rejected these possibilities for avoiding confusion, however, Pangle proceeds to ask whether demanding that we banish all hope of reward for virtuous action and that we be content with the great good of having a noble soul is not “too strict a standard for perfect virtue”: couldn’t the reward be “a kind of icing on the cake,” something we might believe we deserve and expect to receive without the reward being the motive for which the virtuous action was performed (128)? Yet, as she notes, we have a sense that virtuous action is deserving of reward. This implies that “we are unsure of whether virtuous action is truly good in itself, or we consider it good to do it, but not as good as benefiting from it” (129). Pangle suspects that virtuous men secretly believe it is good to give but even better to receive and that they cannot choose virtue for its own sake but always act with a view to reward. She asks a provocative question: Can [virtuous men] be content endlessly to accept the lesser of two goods, endlessly to be on the less advantageous side of all their transactions with others, without reward? (129) If not, Pangle concludes, then they must always have at least one eye on the reward and are to that extent confused about their genuine motive. In addition to her own reasoning in support of this suspicion, Pangle has in mind several passages from the Ethics that suggest Aristotle himself agrees that the virtuous, no less than those who are not virtuous, aim above all at what they believe to be their own good. When treating Ethics 8.7, for example, Pangle cites Aristotle’s blunt assertion that “each man wishes for his own good most of all” and might not wish his friends all the greatest goods (59, 64). And in the two chapters that treat self-love (9.4 and 9.8), as she notes, �86 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Aristotle maintains that all the friendly feelings one has toward others one has toward oneself most of all (142; 170). Moreover, in Ethics 9.8—the first of two culminating chapters in his entire analysis of friendship—Aristotle himself makes the argument that Pangle has already found signs of in Cicero and Montaigne. In her words, this chapter indicates that “moral nobility is not something that accrues to the moral man incidentally as he goes about seeking to help his fellows; it is precisely the prize that he keeps his sights fixed upon.” Hence, “acts of apparent noble sacrifice, made by those who understand such nobility as the highest good, really are not acts of sacrifice at all” (175). She has prepared us for this conclusion by quoting such statements from 9.8 as the following: The morally serious man. . . will do many things for the sake of his friends and his fatherland, and if necessary he will give up his life for them. He will give money and honors and all contested goods, seeking above all the noble for himself. He would prefer to feel pleasure intensely for a short time than mildly for a long time, and to live nobly for one year than indifferently for many; he would rather perform one great noble act than many small ones. Those who give up their lives perhaps achieve this, and they choose great nobility for themselves. The morally serious man will give away money so that his friends may have more, for they thus get money, but he gets the noble: He assigns the greatest good to himself. (172; cf. Ethics 1169a18-29)6 Here again is the confusion to which Pangle, following Aristotle’s indications (as well as Cicero’s and Montaigne’s), has been calling our attention all along. The friend who sacrifices himself in the belief that it is noble to do so is really only trading a good he regards as lesser for one he regards as GOLDBERG 87 greater. If the nobility consists in the alleged sacrifice, there is no nobility here at all. The morally serious man is merely confused. Pangle uses this line of reasoning to show the irrationality of the view that the highest good for human beings can consist in sacrifice (or in virtue, if virtue is understood to consist in self-sacrifice or to demand it). Indeed, it is one of the chief points of Pangle’s book, following Aristotle, to expose the irrationality of this perspective (perhaps the perspective we all share to the extent we are morally serious). The irrationality of this perspective does not mean, however, that a rational human being will not act for the sake of others. That he may do so is confirmed for Pangle by Aristotle’s statement that “intelligence always chooses what is best for itself ” (176; cf. 1169a17). By reflecting on both the text and our experience, she arrives at the following conclusion: The intelligent mind always chooses what is best for itself as a rational mind, and this means acting intelligently, consistently, with self-command, and guided by a full understanding of its own deepest concerns which begin but do not end with the concern for personal happiness of the being whose mind it is. (179; my italics) In fact, Pangle’s examination supports the view that all human beings, including the devoted friend or the morally serious man, choose what they believe to be best for themselves. The person who believes he acts out of devotion to a friend does not in fact choose his friend’s happiness in place of his own; rather, he believes (in his heart of hearts) that his own happiness is best served through the nobility he believes he practices by “sacrificing” his own good for the sake of his friend. The intelligent mind differs from the rest, then, not in preferring what appears to be best for itself—the others do the same thing—but only in knowing what really is best for itself. That said, nothing that has so far come to light rules out the possibility that human beings, including the �88 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW most rational, will act for the sake of their friends as long as doing so is compatible with what they believe to be their own greatest or deepest good. If this whole line of argument is true, it would still have to be determined what genuine happiness consists in and what place friendship has in the life of one who has thought through the confusions about sacrifice, nobility, and virtue. However, Pangle’s statement that our deepest concerns do not end with the concern for personal happiness comes as something of a surprise. The thrust of her main argument appears to go in the opposite direction, and Aristotle himself argues in Book one that the individual’s end is happiness (see, e.g., 1097a30-4). Her formulation allows of two possible interpretations: that the rational mind (1) has concerns in addition to, but consistent with, the concern for personal happiness, or that it (2) has concerns for the sake of which it would be willing to give up personal happiness. Here in chapter nine Pangle argues that the rational mind or human being—the human being who has worked through the confusions she has treated and who is capable of living free of those confusions—might under certain circumstances give up his own good for the sake of a friend, though without any illusions about what he’s doing (i.e., without believing that he is thereby noble and hence somehow deserving). In support of this possibility, Pangle invokes the example of Socrates, who gave up “a few uncertain years in exile and in decline so that philosophy might win renown, and so that his young friends like Plato, who had as yet written almost nothing, might prosper” (181). She concludes: [T]he wisest man is the one most capable of both the truest self-love and the truest friendship, for only he has a mind that is perfectly good and lovable, only he can love what he is without inner conflicts, and only he can love another without illusions, without competition over the noble, and GOLDBERG 89 without surreptitious expectations of repayments or reward. (181) One implication of this conclusion is that it is possible to love another human being even after freeing oneself from all illusions that ordinarily accompany love. (I take Pangle to mean that it is out of love for Plato that Socrates could die at least in part for Plato’s sake.) A little into the final chapter of her book, however, we learn that this conclusion was only provisional. To see whether it stands we must first answer the question of the Lysis: “Why would one who is self-sufficient treasure another enough to love him?” (183). In other words, assuming self-sufficiency is possible, why might a person who has it nevertheless need friends? Is the Friend Another Self? The opening sentence of Book nine, chapter nine, which according to Pangle contains Aristotle’s “deepest reflections on the relationship of friendship to human neediness” (183), announces that it is disputed whether the happy man will need friends or not: “For people assert that the blessed and self-sufficient have no need of friends, because they [already] possess the good things” (1169b3-5). The chapter gives a series of six arguments, which seem to show that, contrary to this assertion, even a happy human being will need friends.7 The last three of those arguments appear to elaborate two suggestions of Aristotle’s we noted earlier but have not yet had occasion to examine: (1) that similarity is a basis of friendship possibly more fundamental than pleasure, utility, or virtue and (2) that the friend is another self. Indeed, this famous formulation, which is used only three times in the entire Ethics, appears twice in 9.9 (its first appearance came in 9.4). And although Aristotle doesn’t speak here of the similarity of friends, he does speak of the activity of one’s friend as one’s own activity, and “one’s own” or “the kindred” (to oikeion) seems to be closely related to similarity; the two were linked by Pangle in her treatment first of the �90 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Lysis and then in the Ethics (24, 48-9; but cf. Lysis 222b-c). Furthermore, in 9.9 Aristotle focuses on the activity of friends who are morally serious and whose activity is in that respect similar. Of the six arguments in this chapter, the first two (1169b8-10; b10-16) are brief, sketchy, and based more on “conventional opinion” than the remaining four, all of which have recourse to nature (186). The third argument (1169b16-21) merely asserts that “man is by nature a political being and lives together with others”; shortly after, Aristotle concedes (to those who deny that the blessed and selfsufficient need friends) that one who is blessed has no need of useful friends and little or no need of pleasant friends. But does this mean that he has no need of any friends? The last three arguments, which Pangle characterizes as Aristotle’s “most serious” (186), purport to establish the blessed (or happy) person’s need of friends on the basis of something other than utility or pleasure. What, then, is that something? Is it “the good,” as Aristotle’s initial classification of friendships would lead us to expect? According to Aristotle’s fourth argument, that something is instead the need the blessed person has to observe the actions of those who are morally serious or good. Pangle paraphrases this argument as follows: [I]f happiness consists in living and acting, if the activity of the good man is good and pleasant in itself, and if what is one’s own is pleasant, then observing the activity of good men who are one’s own friends will be choiceworthy, too. (186) If we look at the Ethics itself (1169b30-1170a4), we find that the full version of this argument contains seven premises in the form of if-clauses (five before he gives the then-clause plus two more at the end), whose truth Aristotle does not vouch for. Pangle shows that at least two of them are highly suspect. One is that we are more able to observe our neighbors than ourselves. This may be true of most of us, but in this chapter GOLDBERG 91 Aristotle is considering the blessed person, of whom Pangle says, “the mature, wise, truly happy man, who sees his neighbors with perfect clarity, has no inexplicable failure of understanding when it comes to himself ” (187; see her supporting reference to Aristotle’s Magna Moralia). The other suspect premise is that the activity of a friend is also somehow one’s own. Perhaps because Aristotle himself finds these premises suspect, he proceeds to his fifth argument, “which helps to put in perspective and explain the previous ones” (187). It improves on the fourth argument by giving due place to the fact that what matters most to us is our own activity rather than that of our friends. According to Aristotle, the life of a solitary is hard in that to be continuously active by oneself is not easy; it is easier to be continuously active together with someone else and toward others (Ethics 1170a5-6). If we act together with a friend, we ourselves will be more active. And, Aristotle adds, there might also arise a certain training in virtue from living in the company of good people. Pangle interprets Aristotle to mean that we have a tendency to flag and that an excellent companion can spur us on, inspire us, and confirm for us our own excellence. However, it seems that the fully formed human being under consideration here would not be in need of inspiring examples. This applies not only to moral action but to all endeavors, especially philosophy, which, in anticipation of Book ten, Pangle pays increasing attention to. She notes that in Book ten Aristotle will argue that “the wisest souls do not need company in order to remain active in philosophy” (188; indeed, Aristotle maintains not only that the theoretical man is least in need of other people but also that theoretical activity is the most continuous—see 1177a21-22 and a27-b1). This line of thought prompts Pangle to offer a striking suggestion: friendships at the peak of human existence would be “more tranquil and less intense” than friendships on the way up (189). In other words, the most intense friendships may be those between defective human beings. But what is the cause of the �92 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW intensity? Pangle does not spell it out but seems to have in mind here the need we have for those people whose assistance seems to us indispensable for acquiring the goodness we regard as a necessary, and perhaps even the sufficient, condition of our happiness. Perhaps because he has yet to account for the necessity of friendship in the life of someone at the peak of human existence, Aristotle moves on to his sixth and final argument—”his profoundest account of the necessity of friendship in the happy life” (189). This argument depends on a number of conditions (expressed in a complicated sixpart if-clause), one of which is that our enjoyment of our life or being comes from our awareness of our life, and another of which is that the morally serious man is disposed toward his friend as he is toward himself. After summarizing Aristotle’s complex argument, Pangle observes that it does not answer the question of why a happy man will need friends because it does not show that one will be disposed toward a friend as one is disposed toward oneself; the argument hasn’t proved that “friendship itself is a good thing” (189). Rather than consider this a fatal defect in the argument, as some other scholars appear to have done, Pangle takes a closer look at its details to see whether an argument for the necessity of friendship in a good life emerges from them. What she finds is this: in the light of our own mortality (one aspect of the determinateness or finite character of life that Aristotle refers to at 1170a20-1) “friendship becomes precious as a way of augmenting and intensifying the goodness—the full active aliveness—that we love and cannot keep” (190). Our aliveness depends not only on our being active but also on the awareness we have of our own activity, a point made by Aristotle partly through his choice of verbs. Our sense of being alive is heightened by engaging in activities with others who share our interest in them and whose responses therefore “reflect, confirm, and expand” our awareness. This, then, is the “deepest justification” of friendship: “its capacity to enhance the awareness GOLDBERG 93 of activity and pleasure.” The awareness of a friend engaging together with us in the same activity is good for us because it enhances our awareness both of our own activity and, as Aristotle makes clear again by his choice of verbs, of our very being—of our existing at all. No sooner has Pangle developed this argument, however, than she raises a most serious question about it: “How solid a good is this good of enhanced aliveness, charged as it is by our awareness of life’s brevity and the desire to find a compensation for it, if not to escape it altogether? Is it a good necessarily laced with self-deception?” (191) The selfdeception she has in mind here differs from the deception involved in our notions of devotion and sacrifice, which she has treated at length in the course of her book. This new deception has to do not with the belief that we have transcended and ennobled ourselves through sacrifice but with the bewitching power of friendship to draw us out of ourselves and thus distract us from thinking about the finitude of our lives. (The two deceptions have the same root, however: they are ways in which we cope with the awareness—always somehow present to us—of our own mortality.) Pangle spoke of a related deception when commenting earlier on Aristotle’s formulation in 9.4 that a friend is another self; at that time, she issued a caveat: A clue to the real meaning of this enigmatic expression is found in its other appearances in the Nicomachean Ethics. In each case, Aristotle shows how the friend who is loved as another self is, in some important way, cherished as an extension of oneself, an extension that can tempt one into the delusion that this other really is still oneself, and as such able to help overcome one’s limitedness and mortality. (152) That Aristotle has such a delusion in mind appears to be lent support by his prior use of a related formulation (in 8.12), which Pangle cites in this context. There Aristotle says of �94 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW offspring that they are “like other selves” to their parents, by having been separated from them (1161b28-9; my italics). Despite the possibility of these deceptions, Pangle maintains here (in chapter ten) that there is “nothing necessarily illusory about friendship’s power to magnify and enrich life, just as there is nothing necessarily illusory about the pleasure of being a source of good to friends”; we can enjoy the genuine good of enhanced aliveness that friendship offers just as long as we resist the temptation to escape the grip of mortality “by escaping ourselves altogether”—i.e., by going too far in “immersing ourselves. . . in the absorbing affairs of others” (191). At the same time, it is when we resist this temptation that we can be a genuinely valuable friend to another, helping him to attain the only solid happiness through “the shared activity of thinking and helping each other to think as clearly as possible.” This helping is itself a solid pleasure and hence an addition to our own happiness as long as we don’t fall prey to the illusion that we can truly live on in a friend when our own lives have ended. Drawing on the conclusion of 9.9, Pangle goes on to say that friendship is chiefly not about sacrificing for friends but living in company with them, and this means that friendship consists above all in conversation. As Aristotle powerfully puts it, living in company with others—in the case of human beings, as distinct from cattle— would seem to mean sharing in discussion and thought (1170b11-14). I must confess that I remain suspicious of Aristotle’s arguments purporting to establish the need for friendship in a happy life, including the last and most powerful one. To mention just a few of the grounds for my suspicion, Aristotle’s fourth and sixth arguments depend on three ifclauses with a total of thirteen often elaborate parts between them that issue in two very brief then-clauses.8 Why do the arguments take so provisional a form? Where does Aristotle either show that the conditions referred to in the if-clauses are true or at least state them unambiguously as his own views? In addition, there are not only the explicit assump- GOLDBERG 95 tions of the if-clauses but also more hidden assumptions in the various arguments. For example, in his preface to the sixth argument Aristotle points to the question whether human life is defined by perceiving or instead by thinking, but the sixth argument depends on the view that perceiving, not thinking, is paramount. In addition, four of the six arguments in 9.9 (including the three that Pangle calls, rightly in my view, the “most serious”) refer explicitly to the morally serious person, but, as Pangle has already shown, there is reason to think the highest type of human being (the happy one) is the one who is wise as distinct from the one who is merely morally serious and confused. Furthermore, Aristotle varies his terms in 9.9, referring not only to the morally serious but also at various points to the good and to the decent. Are these one and the same type, or is Aristotle calling our attention to differences among them that may be crucial to determining whether the blessed or happy human being has need of friends? For that matter, is to be happy the same as to be blessed and self-sufficient? If so, is self-sufficiency, and hence happiness, a possibility for human beings? And what does it mean to be blessed? By moving back and forth among these terms, Aristotle may be pointing to the question of whether the happiness we long for as human beings is available to us. Is he perhaps helping us to reason out the sort of happiness or contentment man at his best can achieve? And might it be the morally serious rather than the wise as such for whom friendship offers the sense of enhanced aliveness and for whom that sense is an essential ingredient of “happiness”? These are some of the stumbling blocks I find in accepting Aristotle’s well-hedged conclusion that “the one who is going to be happy, then, will be in need of friends” (1170b18-9; cf. b14-7, one last if-then sentence on which this conclusion depends). �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 96 Conclusion Whether or not I am thus justified in doubting Aristotle’s arguments for the necessity of friendship in a life by nature good, Pangle herself emphasizes that the good of friendship remains secondary to the greatest good available to human beings. Engaging in an activity together with friends may enhance our enjoyment of it as well as our awareness of being alive, but it is still activity itself that is the crucial ingredient in happiness. Having reflected on the experience of friendship no less than on Aristotle’s text, Pangle concludes that what “matters most for happiness. . . is not the companionship that friendship brings but the pleasures and good activities it augments, and even its goodness as an enhancer of life would not be so very good if it were not for the inevitability of death” (197). Furthermore, as Aristotle will conclude in Book ten, it is not just any activity but rather the activity of philosophy that can bring the happiness of which man at his best is capable (see especially 1178a4-10). Indeed, the argument Pangle has developed through the course of her book helps to prepare us for Aristotle’s rather surprising conclusion and to understand how the two books on friendship contribute to it (and therefore why they immediately precede Book ten). Pangle observes that in the books on friendship Aristotle . . . shows some of his reasons for judging even this finest of active lives to be not quite the best simply. Even when the grave confusions surrounding self-sacrifice are cleared away, Aristotle insists that practical, political activity (under which he subsumes the work of moral education) is too much driven and constrained by necessities to be simply choiceworthy in itself. (199) Once we see the true character of such activity, she continues, philosophy appears both as the invaluable source of the GOLDBERG 97 clarity we need if we are to be truly good and as the activity that is the most delightful in itself, one not forced upon us by immediate needs. In view of such considerations, the happiest of friendships appear to be “partnerships in which the capacity to see and enjoy and think and reflect is given the fullest possible scope” (199). Pangle is now in position to answer the question of whether friendship is, or is rooted in, virtue: the impetus to friendship, Aristotle has shown, comes largely from “weakness, deficiency, and confusion.” Thus the apparent disagreement with the Lysis is resolved. Book ten tellingly emphasizes “the self-sufficiency of the philosophic life, rather than the goodness of friendship within it.” With this in mind, it seems to me we could say that friendship between those who possess what we may call genuine virtue (philosophic wisdom) is based on nothing more than their similarity (the deep interest each has in understanding things as they are), the pleasure their companionship affords them, and their usefulness to each other (three grounds that have not been shown to involve, of necessity, illusion and selfdeception). If this is so, we could say that friendship between the best human beings differs from ordinary friendship in being admittedly based on nothing more exalted than similarity, pleasure, and utility. The strength of the best human beings would then be visible, at least in part, in their not even being tempted to believe that their friendship is rooted in or is an expression of self-transcendence. Pangle’s book always encourages us to return to the Ethics to test our conclusions and explore the issues further. It does so by fully engaging us in, and basing itself on, Aristotle’s dialectical analysis of friendship. Pangle has given us a superb study of that analysis, one that guides readers through Aristotle’s always dense and often uncertain arguments, helping us to follow his analysis in its gradual unfolding. If we ignore the details of Aristotle’s arguments, we learn what he merely seems to be saying; with Pangle’s highly competent assistance, we find that taking account of the details invariably leads us toward a deeper and more �98 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW adequate understanding of friendship.9 In addition, Pangle demonstrates how fruitful it is always to be thinking about our experience of friendship in order to bring to life what might otherwise remain sterile formulations and to enable us to use our experience and the text to illuminate each other. In reproducing here portions of what I take to be her central argument (which is far more ample than my abridgement of it might suggest), I have had to leave out much else that is compelling in her book, such as many more eye-opening thought-experiments and her evocative reflections on a vast array of phenomena associated with friendship, aspects of her study that make it not only thought-provoking but lively and even gripping to read. Pangle performs the invaluable service of placing Aristotle’s teaching (and not only Aristotle’s) within reach of the careful reader determined to understand what friendship is and what kind of good it is for human beings. Notes 1 Of special interest to the community is Pangle’s lively engagement with the argument of St. John’s tutor David Bolotin’s book on the Lysis, which includes an excellent translation (Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989]). 2 Even here, however, there is a complication: goodness or virtue is an ambiguous term in the Ethics; it could mean either moral virtue or intellectual virtue—and the two do not necessarily go together. Is the good man, then, the man of moral virtue, or is he the man of intellectual virtue? Pangle, though clearly aware of the distinction, sometimes leaves ambiguous the sense in which she, or Aristotle, is using the terms “virtue” and “goodness.” 3 Consider a kindred remark Nietzsche makes in responding to an objection to his critique of “disinterestedness”: “But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in return—perhaps something of himself in return for something of himself—that he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in order to be more or at least to feel that he was ‘more’” (Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 220; Vintage Books: New York, 1989). GOLDBERG 99 4 Perhaps this is one way in which virtue may lead us to a disdain for death, as Montaigne put it. 5 By “indifferent” I take her to mean that one would perform the act (1) even if one knew that there would be no reward of any kind for performing it and (2) even when it would be at enormous cost to oneself. 6 How Aristotle himself can know this remains unclear. It may require a thoroughgoing examination not only of oneself but also of others who believe they act virtuously not for their own sake but only or above all for the sake of others (or for virtue’s sake)—the kind of examination we see the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues engaging in (see, e.g., Meno 77b-78b). Aristotle may be offering not a definitive argument, then, but rather guidance in conducting this examination for ourselves, pointing out the crucial things to look for in examining ourselves and others. 7 The first three begin respectively at 1169b8, b10, and b16; the second three, at 1169b28, 1170a4, and a13. 8 St. John’s tutor Joe Sachs’ translation of the Nicomachean Ethics (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002) is the only one I know in English that accurately tracks these conditions. 9 This seems to me to constitute a proof that Aristotle’s writing demands the kind of ingenuity and attention to detail that Pangle brings to the Ethics: only thus does one uncover many genuine questions about and problems with both friendship and our opinions about it that we would otherwise have to say Aristotle failed to notice, thereby calling into question his competence as a philosopher. As to why he chose to write in so opaque a style, Pangle shows us that the subject matter requires such writing, not only because it is intrinsically complicated but also because it touches on many sensitive issues having to do with how we understand both ourselves as human beings and the character of the world we live in. � 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2006/2 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Curry, Elizabeth Hunt, Frank Sachs, Joe Flaumenhauft, Mera J. Richardson, Robert Goldberg, Robert Description An account of the resource Volume XLIX, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 2006. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_49_No_2 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c05ca667103a079d66679b0478d4d073.pdf 6c4a253f751ff6e97e0ac61cd9008d37 PDF Text Text The St. John’s Review Volume XLIX, number three (2007) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Elizabeth Curry The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P .O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2007 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Essays and Lectures Vedic Tradition and the Origin of Philosophy in Ancient India ........................................................... 5 James Carey The Forgotten Faculty: The Place of Phronêsis or Practical Sense in Liberal Education (Plutarch and Aristotle)............................................... 67 David Levine Reviews Friedrich Nietzsche. Prefaces to Unwritten Works; On the Future of Our Educational Institutions..........101 Jonathan Badger Jan Blits. Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.......................................... 117 John E. Alvis �4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 Vedic Tradition and the Origin of Philosophy in Ancient India James Carey 1 “Philosophy” is a term that turns up with variable frequency in presentations and discussions of the religious and speculative traditions of ancient India. There are those who maintain that philosophy is an Indian no less than a Western phenomenon. In support of this claim they point out that in ancient India there was a vast amount of speculation about the whole of things, how it is constituted and what its origins are, and that this inquiry came to expression in a variety of highly developed systems of speculative thought. There are others, however, who maintain that philosophy is a uniquely Western phenomenon. Philosophy, they claim, is not just speculation about ultimate causes. It is, rather, a whole way of life, one that is governed by the conviction that knowledge is to be pursued for its own sake, as an end subservient to none other, however so loftily conceived. This ideal emerged first in ancient Greece, and later on only under the influence of Greek thought. In the disagreement between these two groups, the latter appear at first glance to be on stronger ground. There was indeed plenty of speculation about ultimate principles in ancient India. There was arguably a wider range of such speculation there than anywhere else in the ancient world, Greece included. But speculation about ultimate principles is Mr. Carey is a tutor at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, currently on leave and serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the United States Air Force Academy. A shorter version of this paper was presented as a lecture at St. John’s College, Annapolis, in March, 1993. The present version is dedicated to the memory of Ralph Swentzell, Tutor, as an expression of gratitude for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Eastern Classics program at St. John’s College, Santa Fe. �6 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW as old as man and often does not rise above the level of superstition. Moreover, philosophy is not simply the love of wisdom, or the longing to see the whole, to see it clearly for what it is and without illusions. Philosophy is this longing, to be sure, but accompanied by a sense of obligation, or some kind of urge, to give a rational account of what it takes to be true, without appeal to external authority. In the West, philosophy has traditionally been regarded as one member of a pair of alternatives, the other being religion. The guiding lights of philosophy are reason and ordinary, verifiable human experience. Philosophy does not take its bearings, as religion does, by alleged disclosures from above that are supposed to transcend reason and ordinary experience altogether. That neither philosophy nor religion can be simply reduced to the other is not controversial. What is controversial is the claim that philosophy and religion are so opposed to one another that one and the same person cannot be both a philosopher and a believer. We are, of course, familiar with the arguments of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and Kant to the effect that reason cannot penetrate on its own to the first principles or the deepest stratum of being, that reason can recognize this limitation and can thereby infer its need to be supplemented by some kind of faith, be it only a religion within the limits of reason alone. But, against these arguments there are others, rather more widely accepted by philosophers, though until recent times less forcefully advanced, to the effect that religious belief contains, either in its explicit doctrines or in its implicit presuppositions, certain contradictions the affirming of which is incompatible with a fully rational life. In arguing for the emergence of philosophy in ancient India I shall make use of the narrow conception of philosophy as an enterprise of rationally autonomous enquiry, not simply distinct from but opposed to and in varying degrees antagonistic to religious belief. I shall argue for the emergence in ancient India of an atheism that under- CAREY 7 stood itself to be grounded in a rational consideration of the whole, and of man’s place within the whole. I shall not raise the question of whether this conception of philosophy is ultimately defensible but shall assume it as a working hypothesis, so to speak. Accordingly, I shall be working with a conception of philosophy that some might criticize as excessively narrow. I might criticize it that way myself. The justification for my procedure, however, is that I wish to show that philosophy, even according to this narrow, perhaps excessively narrow conception, did in fact emerge in ancient India. If this can be shown, then it can be shown a fortiori that philosophy less narrowly conceived also emerged there. It is not possible, however, to argue convincingly for a tradition of autonomous rationality without exhibiting something of the variety of forms it assumed, in particular, the main points of controversy and the rival claims and arguments of the contending parties. I shall be giving no more than a rough sketch, however, and I shall omit much that is relevant to my topic. I hope, nonetheless, not only to show that philosophy, however so rigorously defined, really did exist in ancient India, but to shed new light on the conditions of its emergence and the trajectory it assumed, and perhaps to communicate something of its flavor as well. Philosophy and religion both are ways of regarding ultimate causes, but philosophy is the younger of the two. In defining its way in opposition to that of religion, philosophy presupposes religion, not, of course, as something true, but as a mistake that it has managed to get beyond. Moreover, philosophy presupposes leisure, and human beings find leisure only within the life of political communities. Political communities are particular. They are particularized by nomoi, that is, by laws and other conventions, among the most important of which are religious nomoi. It stands to reason, then, that the peculiar character of the reigning religion would contribute something to the form that philosophical questioning of it assumes and to the prominence of certain themes taken up for specifically philosophical consid- �8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW eration. For this reason, we need a preliminary overview of early Indian religion. It must be admitted at the outset that we are handicapped somewhat. The attitude of the ancient Indians to history seems to have been one of ethereal indifference. We possess little in the way of chronicles, and most dates given for significant events are crude approximations at best, often having several centuries as a margin of error. 2 Sometime during the second millennium B.C., a people speaking an Indo-European language and calling themselves ¯ “A ryans”1 migrated from the northwest into the Indian subcontinent. A few centuries later their sacred hymns, prayers, and incantations began to be gathered into three collections called Vedas. A fourth Veda was later assembled. These hymns were not written down at first but were passed on orally from generation to generation by a priestly caste, to whose prodigious memory the preservation of the hymns was entrusted. Of the four Vedas, only the fourth, the Rg Veda, contains much that is of genuinely speculative interest. It consists of over a thousand hymns largely celebrating in the most disparate fashion a florid polytheism, somewhat akin to Greek religion and having almost nothing in common with the religion of the Bible. But the Rg Veda also contains material of a different sort, such as the so-called creation hymn, the beginning and conclusion of which are as follows: There was neither not-being (asat) nor being (sat) then. There was neither a space nor a heaven beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection?....That one [neuter - tat ekam] was breathing, windless, by its own determination [or spontaneity - svadha ]....Who may proclaim when ¯ this creation was produced? The gods [came] hither with the creation of this [world]. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Whether it established itself or did not establish itself, the one who CAREY 9 surveys it in the highest heaven alone knows. Or else he does not know.2 Such questions about ultimate principles, real and not just rhetorical, are frequently raised in the hymns of the Rg Veda. Occasionally, questions are raised regarding even the existence of the particular god celebrated in the hymn, and are left unanswered or answered with what appears to be strained conviction or, perhaps, irony. Striving for strength, bring forth a laud to Indra, a true one (satyam), if he truly exists (yadi satyam asti). One and another say, “There is no Indra.” “Who has beheld (dadarsa) him?” Whom then shall we honor?3 And from another hymn, He about whom they ask, “Where is he?” or say of him, the terrible one, “He does not exist,” he who diminishes the flourishing wealth of the enemy as gambling does—believe in him (srad asmai dhatta)! He, my people, is Indra!4 In spite of the prevailing polytheism of the Rg Veda, celebrated alternately in confidence and in perplexity, there are occasional suggestions of a tentative monotheism and, more remarkably, even of monism simpliciter.5 Monism, or the view that all is one and that the apparent plurality of things veils a more fundamental unity, is the prevailing perspective in the principal Upanisads, which emerged in the centuries after the Vedas were compiled. In these works certain other common features can be discerned that are characteristic of early or proto-Hinduism.6 Among these are belief in transmigration of the soul, karmic encumbrance, the concept of dharma or law, the caste system,7 and liberation as the end goal of all perfect self-knowledge. It is worth sketching each of these features briefly, since one or another of them, separately or in combination, comes to the �10 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW fore not only in the teaching of those speculative thinkers who present themselves as theorizing within the orthodox Vedic tradition, but even in the thinking of some of those who reject this tradition. There were wide differences of opinion among sophisticated thinkers regarding the most fundamental principles of Vedic tradition. In what follows, I shall emphasize those interpretations that, though far from being universally accepted by believers, were most provocative of a properly philosophical response and appropriation. I shall focus on, without restricting myself to, themes that are central to the principal Upanisads. The divine is presented there in a way that has little in common with the polytheism of the Vedas. The word “brahman,” which is neuter in gender, names the fundamental reality that lies behind the manifold and multiform world of appearances. Brahman, the hidden reality, is not many but one. The world as it appears, in all its manifoldness, is maya. This word is frequently translated as ¯ ¯ “illusion,” but one should not assume that maya is altogether ¯ ¯ unreal. It is rather the surface play of the fundamental reality. The world of appearances is illusion only to the extent that it is mistaken for the fundamental reality. But what intimation, we might ask, is there of an underlying unity? The answer is that there is one thing that is experienced as single and self-identical throughout space and time, throughout the multiplicity of spatial and temporal phenomena, and throughout even the manifold topics that thought takes up for consideration. This one thing is the self, the ¯tman. The self cannot be identified with the external a objects and internal concerns with which it is almost always preoccupied. The self in its purity is, we are told in one of the earliest Upanisads, “not this, not that” (or “not this, not this”neti neti).8 But to the very extent that the self is distinguishable from all appearances, inner appearances—including the individual thoughts that come and go—as well as outer, it seems to be indistinguishable from all other selves. The thought dawns that there is perhaps only one self, and that CAREY 11 the path to brahman, the fundamental unity underlying the manifold appearances of the world, is through selfknowledge. This knowledge is achieved in part by study and reflection, and in part by mastery of desires, which may, though need not, entail acts of physical discipline and austerities (tapas). It turns out, though, that the path to brahman is not exactly through knowledge of the self, for in the Upanisads the self is actually identified with the fundamental reality: ¯tman is brahman.9 Or, as it is also said, “That art a thou.”10 This core of indivisible individuality at the center of our being is paradoxically what each of us really is, what is common to us all, and finally the underlying unity supporting everything else that in any way exists. It is not only one but simple and self-identical. Brahman should not be confused with Brahma, which is ¯ the name, masculine in gender, of one of the three primary deities in the Hindu pantheon. Brahma is the creator, Visnu ¯ the preserver, and Siva the destroyer.11 In the history of Hinduism, cultic devotion to Brahma was superseded early ¯ on by devotion to Visnu and Siva, indicating a greater interest, even at the popular level, in the present and future manifestations of reality than in its originating source, a greater interest in what the world is and the limits of its transformations than in who made it or where it came from, a greater interest in constitution than in cause, one might say. Of the three gods, Siva is the most puzzling to the Westerner. He is described as the great ascetic and is typically depicted as meditating or dancing, wearing a necklace of skulls, and possessing three eyes, one of which is closed. When Siva opens his third eye, which is in the middle of his forehead, the world of appearances, it was said, will be consumed by fire. Siva is the destroyer of illusion. Returning to the less picturesque monism of the Upanisads, it is all-important to realize that brahman, or the fundamental reality, is not a person. Least of all is brahman a transcendent deity who has created a world distinct from himself, which he governs through law, awarding happiness �12 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW in rough proportion to morality, if not in this world at least in a world to come. Hinduism is, of course, not indifferent to the question of morality. Indeed, the vexing problem of how desire for the fruit of action can contaminate the moral purity of the action, and thereby render the fruit unattainable, is discerned as early as the Upanisads and is a recurrent theme in Hinduism, and in Buddhism as well. But in conspicuous contrast to the way this problem is conceived in the West, a moral theology is not invoked to manage it.12 Instead, the problem of the connection of the just deserts of action with the actions that merit them is addressed through the related doctrines of transmigration and karmic causality. If the self is indivisible then it is indissoluble. It cannot be naturally destroyed, and so it survives the death of the body. But the indestructibility of the self does not keep it from being encumbered with the moral effects of the acts it has committed. This encumbrance is called karma. Although a man may not experience in this life the effects of the karma within which he has encrusted his indestructible self, at death this karma binds the self to reincarnation. Moreover, karma causes the self to gravitate, so to speak, to a new incarnation and re-incarceration specifically appropriate to its moral history. By committing bad actions a man becomes bad and accumulates bad karma. At the death of his body he finds himself entering a new body and life worse than that from which he has just departed. How much worse that life is depends on how bad he was, and reincarnation as something subhuman is a distinct possibility. The indestructible self of a man who has lived a good life is reincarnated into a better life. As we shall see, though, reincarnation is not the only destination for the self. If one is reincarnated as a human being, the karma accumulated from the preceding life determines what caste one will be reincarnated into. The justification for castes in the sacred tradition is traced to a well known though mysterious passage in the Rg Veda describing the sacrifice and dismemberment of a primordial gigantic man called the CAREY 13 purusa, a word that in later works came to mean spirit, mind, intelligence, or consciousness. When they divided the purusa, into how many parts did they apportion him? What do they call his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet? His mouth became the brahmin; his arms were made ¯ into the Warrior, his thighs the People, and from his feet the Servants were born.13 This fourfold division has over the course of time become transformed into a great plurality of castes governed by all sorts of injunctions and prohibitions. The original fourfold division was not nearly so complex, nor, one is tempted to add, was it so perverse as what holds sway in India today. In the Arthasastra, a treatise on politics, written by Kautilya ¯ toward the end of the fourth century B.C., the specific duties of the original four castes are described as follows. The special duties (dharmas) of the brahmin are: ¯ ¯ studying, teaching, performing sacrifices for self, officiating at other peoples’ sacrifices, making gifts, and receiving gifts. Those of the ksatriya (the warrior or king) are: studying, performing sacrifices for self, making gifts, living by [the profession of] arms, and protecting beings. Those of the vaisya (the farmer or merchant) are: studying, performing sacrifices for self, making gifts, agriculture, cattle rearing and trade. Those of the sudra (or servant) are: service of the twiceborn [i.e., the members of the aforementioned three castes], engaging in an economic calling [viz., agriculture, cattle rearing, and trade] and the profession of the artisan and the actor.14 In addition to the duties of the special castes there are the duties proper to the four stages of life for the members of the three highest, twice-born castes, brahmin, ksatriya, and ¯ vaisya.15 These are the stages of student, householder, forest �14 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW recluse, and wandering ascetic, the duties of which are also specified by Kautilya. Additionally, there are duties common to all: “abstaining from harm, truthfulness, uprightness, freedom from malice, compassion, and forbearance.”16 The entire system of duties of the various castes and stations of life make up part of what is called dharma. This word could be translated as “law” as well as “duty,” depending on the context. No more than lex does dharma mean nomos or convention, that is to say, mere convention. It means rather the proper order of human life sanctioned, if not explicitly by the Veda, then at least by way of extrapolation and development of Vedic lore and tradition.17 It is supported by and expressive of karmic causality. Moreover, and of apparently greater importance to Kautilya, dharma, including the distinctions of caste, is the shield against barbarism and chaos. It is, of course, difficult for those of us living in the modern West to regard the caste system, even the less extreme form of it that held sway in ancient India, as anything other than arbitrary and unjust. It has been argued, however, that an egalitarian social order that does not degenerate rapidly into anarchy, followed most likely by tyranny, presupposes an economics of plenty. Instead of an economics of plenty, an economics of scarcity reigned in ancient India, as it did throughout the ancient world in general. It should not be forgotten in this connection that even democratic Athens made use of slaves. An economics of plenty, such as we have today, allows for a more just social order to be sure, even the possibility of equal opportunity for all. The price paid for this social order is the technological mastery of nature as a consequence of which machines can do the work—at least a lot of it—that slaves used to do. And, needless to say, the mastery of nature generates problems of its own, problems that were unknown in the ancient world.18 In any case, the dharma promulgated by the Veda not only allowed for but mandated study for three of the four castes while providing sufficient leisure for them to engage in it. And leisure, to repeat, is a CAREY 15 necessary if not a sufficient condition for the emergence of philosophy. The whole system of dharma was upheld by the king, who was, significantly, not a member of the brahmin caste but ¯ of the ksatriya or warrior caste. Kautilya writes that the king should employ the scepter or rod, that is to say, punishment, for the good of the people. For the rod (or scepter - danda), employed with due consideration, endows the subjects with dharma, material well-being (artha), and objects of desire (or pleasures - kamas). Employed badly, ¯ ¯ whether in passion or anger, or in contempt, it enrages even forest recluses and wandering ascetics, how much more then the householders? If not employed at all, it gives rise to the law of the fishes. For the stronger man swallows the weak in the absence of the wielder of the rod. Protected by him, the weak man prevails.19 The education of the king in the science of politics, (dandaka), more literally the science of wielding the rod ¯ (dandani ti), is treated at length in the Arthasastra. It aims at ¯ the formation of the sage-king, or raja rsi.20 Among the ¯ ¯ subjects studied by the king is ¯nvi ksiki or reasoning, to a ¯ which we shall return shortly. The end goal of all action is liberation (moksa).21 Liberation is, at the simplest level, release from the cycle of birth and rebirth, i.e., release of the self from karmic causality. Since the self is a pure unity it cannot be dissolved into its components. It is indestructible, and it does not need to be incarnate to exist. The liberation of the self from the cycle of birth and rebirth, then, is the union of ¯tman with a brahman. This liberation is most often presented as a state that can be achieved only after an indeterminate number of reincarnations through which bad karma is gradually shed. However, if at the end of even an exemplary life, a life in full accord with dharma, there remains any residue of bad karma, �16 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW there is no liberation at death. Bad karma can be shed only within a life, and not in the transition (most consistently regarded as instantaneous) from the previous life to the following. But if, within an exceptionally good life, bad karma is entirely eliminated, then there is no longer a barrier to union with brahman within that very life. There is no need to die in order to experience liberation. Seen in this light, liberation is essentially release from the ignorance that prevents one from recognizing the identity of ¯tman and a brahman. Although this ignorance can be regarded as due to bad karma, the attempt to apprehend this identity, and hence to achieve the highest possible state of existence, presupposes right action not as an end in itself but only as a means, as the taming of the passions that interfere with clarity of apprehension. Action in accordance with dharma, or, as we might say, morality, is for the sake of a non-moral end, namely the end of seeing the concealed, though immanent and impersonal oneness of all things, without the distraction of the desires that it is the wholly subservient and instrumental function of morality to moderate. It should go without saying that seeing the oneness of all things, and in particular the oneness of ¯tman and brahman, cannot be understood as a a union of love, for there is not the otherness that love presupposes. There is ultimately no seeing face to face, because there is ultimately only one face.22 3 So far we have not encountered anything that can be called philosophy, at least not as we have hypothetically conceived it. But it is clear that the relatively “demythologized” religion of the Upanisads does not present the same kind of contrast with philosophy that one finds in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In the latter religions the believer affirms allegiance to a personal creator and moral governor of the universe who transcends and is “wholly other” than his creation, and yet who loves it and commands love in return. In the religion of the Upanisads, the fundamental reality, even on the highly CAREY 17 questionable assumption that it can be called “God,” is impersonal. It is not the creator of the universe ex nihilo but is its inner core. Brahman is not strictly transcendent to, but, rather, immanent within, the world, and is so far from being “wholly other” as to be wholly the same. Unlike the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, brahman is not jealous. Hinduism has historically exhibited an exceptional willingness to concede that other religions also have insights into the reality that is concealed behind appearances.23 It has thus been able to assimilate other religions into itself with some success, although, not surprisingly, it has failed to do this with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Judaism and Christianity have not historically been major forces in India, disregarding, of course, the missionary efforts of the latter in the last few centuries. The case is different with Islam, which began to make substantial inroads into India during the tenth century A.D. The bitterness of the conflict, often bloody, between Hinduism and Islam is due in large measure to their radically different conceptions not simply of the divine but of what religion itself is. In this connection it is worth considering the sources of the Hindu analogue to what is known in West as revelation. The Vedic hymns are, in effect, the foundational sacred scriptures. Actually, “scriptures” is not quite the right word since, it is estimated, they were not written down until about 500 B.C., at the earliest. As we noted, they were memorized and recited by brahmins, who were entrusted with preserving ¯ them and keeping them a living force in rituals and teaching. The language of the Veda is an early form of Sanskrit. To preserve the original hymns from alteration in the course of recitation over millennia, the rules for euphony in different phonetic contexts and for morphological change were specified by Panini in his classic grammar, generally conceded ¯ by linguists who are familiar with it to be by far the greatest work of its kind in any language. It is not certain when Panini ¯ composed his grammar, or even whether it was originally written rather than composed orally and preserved in this �18 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW form until written characters came to be employed. In any case, Panini’s grammar virtually precluded further phonetic ¯ development of the language. Consequently, the sound of the Veda when recited today is arguably the same, perhaps down to the smallest nuances, as when it was recited in Panini’s ¯ time, if not earlier. It is all-important to recognize in this connection that the oral tradition of ancient India was entirely different from the oral traditions that Westerners have recently begun to show an interest in. Those who recited the Vedic hymns and appended works such as the Upanisads were mere vehicles for the most exact transmission of these works possible. The transmitter was anything but an integral component of what was being transmitted, unlike the narrator in many other oral traditions—the storyteller did understand himself to be part of the story. Consequently, the Indian tradition can be considered, for all practical purposes, literary, well in advance of the appearance of the written language itself. As in the case of letters proper, the best minds could address the best minds across centuries with a minimum of interference from intermediary transmitters. The word Veda itself means “knowledge.” It is cognate with the Greek word eidos. The knowledge that the Veda contains was acquired by the sages (rsis) of old. They did not acquire it as gift from a god. They acquired it, rather, through their superior powers of apprehension. This knowledge was passed on orally in the very form in which it was acquired. For that reason successive generations have access to it and it can be authoritative for them. This knowledge is acquired, moreover, not through seeing but through hearing, just as it was acquired by the sages.24 The sages heard what one hears when the Veda is recited today, though back then there seems to have been, mirabile dictu, no one doing the reciting. What the sages heard was the eternal though hidden articulation of the truth, or, as we might be tempted to say, thinking of Heraclitus, the logos. CAREY 19 I shall continue to use the term “revelation” to designate Vedic lore, though the term is inaccurate to the extent that it implies the self-disclosure of God, not to sages, i.e., to the wise, but to the elect. Hindus have difficulty understanding the Biblical concept of revelation, and many object to the term being applied to the sources of their sacred tradition.25 When the Muslims first began their conquest of northern India, about a thousand years ago, they were shocked to discover that the Hindus did not even pretend to have prophets.26 Still, “revelation” is the only word we have for the Vedic analogue of Biblical and Qur’anic revelation, and I shall ¯ continue to use it, not without misgivings, in speaking of what bears only a trace of resemblance to revelation as conceived in the West. Now, a distinction is drawn within early Hinduism between two levels of revelation. The primary revelation is called sruti, or that which was heard by the sages. It consists of the four Vedas and appended material, the Upanisads in particular. The secondary revelation is called smrti or that which is remembered. It consists of later works, some devotional, some legal, and some speculative. An instance of ¯¯ the latter is the Bhagavad Gi ta, which is sometimes accorded almost as much authority as sruti proper. This work is an excerpt from the Mahabharata, a gigantic Indian epic eight ¯ ¯ times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Because of the variety of material contained in the sruti, considerable controversy emerged among the learned as to the precise character of Vedic authority. So far I have sketched only the most central features of early Hinduism, emphasizing the sophisticated religious speculation of the Upanisads and ignoring entirely the polytheism of the popular religion.27 The highly sophisticated religious speculation of the Upanisads does not count as philosophy, as least not according to the conception of philosophy I have adopted on hypothesis. Nonetheless it is not difficult to see how philosophy could emerge in this intel- �20 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW lectual milieu. It was a period of leisure, mandated study, and, not least, freedom of speculation, including freedom to rethink and reinterpret the meaning of the Veda, which manifestly contains passages of religious skepticism and even satire.28 4 Sometime around the sixth century B.C. three systems of speculative thought broke with the Vedic tradition. These were Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata. All three denied the ¯ authority of the Vedas and, in particular, the caste system it supported. The first two are classified as religions. The third is something else. In Buddhism, as in Hinduism, one must distinguish between the popular belief and the philosophical appropriation. Whereas the Upanisads teach the substantial oneness of all things, Buddhism teaches the insubstantial voidness (or emptiness - sunyata) of all things. In the writings of the ¯ ¯ Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, who is thought to have ¯ ¯ lived and taught around the end of the first century A.D., the implications of this teaching are pressed home with dialectical force. To take a single example, against the doctrine of the voidness of all things, the Hindu opponent objects that if all things are void (sunya), then the very thesis that all things ¯ are void is itself void, and is thereby refuted. To this objection, Nagarjuna responds essentially as follows. It is ¯ ¯ indeed true that if all things are void, then the thesis that all things are void is itself void. But this consequence, so far from being a refutation of the thesis, is in fact an exemplification of it and contributes to its confirmation.29 The Protagorean relativist, familiar to us from Plato’s Theaetetus, cannot avail himself of so neat a defense. For the thesis that all theses are relative precludes itself from being absolutely true. The thesis that all theses are void, however, does not preclude itself from being absolutely true, if, that is, the Buddhists are right in holding that voidness (sunyata) is at the heart of everything ¯ ¯ that in any way is, including absolute truth itself. It would be CAREY 21 a serious mistake to think that the Buddhist doctrine of voidness is mystical or even intuitive. Buddhism, at least as it developed in India, regards inference, i.e., logical reasoning, as a valid means of cognition. The teaching on voidness is supported with reasons. As the Hindu thinkers discovered in their formal disputations with the Buddhists, the latter came to the occasion well armed. Needless to say, the Buddhist doctrine of voidness leaves no room for an eternal and substantial being, either immanent or transcendent. Indeed, it leaves no room for a being, strictly so called, at all. Every so-called being is but a phase of becoming, a segment of the indefinitely flowing causal sequence called “dependent arising” ¯ (prati tyasamutpada). According to Buddhism, the recog¯ nition of the absolute insubstantiality and dependent arising of all things is enlightenment. Enlightenment is liberation from attachment to what is insubstantial and transitory. It is liberation from deluded belief in permanence, from deluded belief in any eternal presence. There have always been, within Buddhism, a significant number of thinkers who have taught that the Buddha’s enlightenment was achieved through sense perception and inference exclusively, that is, through powers lying completely within the nature of man. Jainism shares much in common with Hinduism while, like Buddhism, rejecting the authority of the Veda. There is a ¯ line of sages (ti rthankaras) who have disclosed the truth about reality. Reality is ultimately dual. Everything is either soul or matter, and neither of these can be reduced to the other. It is expressly taught that there is no need to recognize any higher being than man. Jainism includes doctrines of karma, reincarnation, and liberation similar to those of Hinduism, and the same is true of Buddhism. But, given Buddhism’s doctrine of the insubstantiality of all things, and its denial of the substantial self in particular, it has the complicated task, which it does not evade, of addressing how it is that the exceptionless state of dependent arising can allow for encumbrance with karma, reincarnation, enlightenment, and �22 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW final liberation. The solution to this problem depends on the cogency of the Buddhist claim that continuity does not presuppose identity, at least not substantial identity. Both classical Buddhism and Jainism were regarded as, strictly speaking, atheistic, and neither seems to have made much of an effort to deny the charge.30 In Lokayata (also called “Carvaka”), the third school of ¯ ¯ ¯ speculative thought that denied the authority of the Veda, we find unabashed atheism, materialism, and hedonism. We know of this school for the most part only from excerpts of texts no longer extant but quoted, sometimes at length, by orthodox thinkers who not surprisingly dissociate themselves from what they are quoting. The following excerpt represents something of the teaching and spirit of Lokayata.31 ¯ An opponent [of Lokayata] will say, if you do not ¯ allow for something unseen [or invisible - adrsta] the various phenomena of the world become destitute of any cause. But we [members of the Lokayata school] cannot accept this objection as ¯ valid, since these phenomena can all be produced spontaneously from their own nature [or own being – svabhava].Thus it has been said [and here ¯ an earlier Lokayata text is quoted] – “The fire is ¯ hot, the water cold, refreshing cool the breeze of morn; from whom came this variety? [Answer:] From their own nature [svabhava] was it born.” ¯ The word translated here as “own nature” has two components, sva- which means “one’s own” or “intrinsic,” and bhava, which is the Sanskrit word for being, derived from the ¯ verbal radical bhu.32 The text continues. ¯ And all this has been said by Brhaspati [the legendary founder of Lokayata.] “There is no ¯ heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world. Nor do the actions of the four castes, orders [that is, stages of life], etc., produce any CAREY 23 real effect. The fire sacrifice [agnihotra], the three Vedas, the ascetic’s three staves, and smearing oneself with ashes were made by nature [or, perhaps less misleadingly, made by the elements dhatu-nirmita] as the livelihood of those destitute of knowledge and manliness. [Presumably the brahmins are meant here.] If a beast slain in the ¯ Jyotistoma rite [a Vedic sacrifice] will itself go to heaven, then why doesn’t the sacrificer offer his own father? ... It is only as a means of livelihood that brahmins have established here all these ¯ ceremonies for the dead—there is no other fruit [than what is found in this world] anywhere.” In an ancient drama, Prabodha-Candrodaya, which reflects the views of this school, a materialist offers a simple response to the question of why believers wear themselves out with fasting and other forms of mortification: “These fools are deceived by the [sacred texts] and are fed with the allurements of hope.”33 The name of this school, Lokayata, is derived from loka, ¯ the Sanskrit word for world. Sankara, a philosopher working within the orthodox tradition, writes of Lokayata as follows: ¯ According to the Lokayatika doctrine, the four ¯ elements alone are the ultimate principles—earth, water, fire, and air; there is none other. Only the perceived exists; the unperceivable does not exist. [Frank materialism and, indeed, nominalism.] Others should not postulate [that is, infer] merit and demerit from happiness and misery. A person is happy or miserable through nature; there is no other cause. [A denial of karma.] Who paints the peacocks, or who makes the cuckoos sing? There exists here no cause except nature. The soul is but the body characterized by the attributes signified by the expressions “I am stout,” “I am youthful”…. It is not something other than the �24 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW body. The consciousness that is found in [organisms] is produced in the manner of the red color out of the combination of betel, areca nut, and lime. [Conscience is at most a mere epiphenomenon of matter.] There is no world other than this one: there is no heaven and there is no hell: the realm of Siva and like regions are invented by stupid impostors…. Liberation is death, which is the cessation of the life breath. The wise ought not to take pains on account of it. [That is, there is no need to take pains on account of liberation since, being death, nothing more and nothing less, it is going to come upon the wise and the unwise alike. No effort is needed to bring it about.]. It is only the fool who wears himself out by penances, fasts, etc.34 Sankara wrote around 800 A.D., but Lokayata is much older. ¯ Its chief work, the Brhaspati Sutra, which is not extant, is estimated to have been composed around 600 B.C. And references to Lokayata teachings occur in other works estimated ¯ to date from an early period.35 5 The denial of the authority of the Veda by Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata, did not occur without provoking a response ¯ from the upholders of Vedic tradition. In the attempt to meet the various criticisms leveled at the authority of the Veda, six main schools of speculative thought emerged. These schools are usually spoken of as “orthodox”, which is a rough but not altogether misleading rendering of “astika,” (from Sanskrit as ¯ - “is”) which is employed to mean “accepting of sacred tradition”, that is, Vedic tradition. Over and against these are the “heterodox” or nastika (from na as - “is not”) schools of ¯ Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata. Each of these different ¯ schools is referred to by the Indian commentators as a view (darsana). They were schools in the sense that they had CAREY 25 su tras, or basic texts expressing the central tenets in concen¯ trated form, adherents, and a rich commentarial tradition of textual exegesis. Needless to say, as the schools developed, divisions emerged within them. There were, additionally, important thinkers working both at the margins of the schools and outside their confines. Formal, intermural disputations took place, and these are recapitulated and developed further in the commentaries.36 To get a clearer view of philosophy as it existed in ancient India, we need to undertake a brief survey of the orthodox schools. The range of themes taken up for specifically philosophical treatment is comparable in scope, at least, to what one finds in Western philosophy. Some themes strike the Westerner as not only unfamiliar, but exotic, and even bewildering, while others are familiar but approached and developed in unexpected ways. The task of our survey is twofold. We need to observe the philosophical mind at work on particular questions that are interesting in their own right. At the same time, we need to determine exactly where and how Vedic authority comes into the picture. For it is in assessing the character of this authority that we can estimate the extent to which philosophy in India succeeded in distinguishing its way from that of religion. The six orthodox schools are conveniently grouped in ¯ ¯ ¯ pairs. In the first place there is the Pu rva-Mi mamsa—Uttara¯ ¯mamsa pair. “Mi mamsa” means “inquiry”; “pu rva” and ¯ ¯ ¯ Mi ¯ ¯ ¯ “uttara” mean “earlier” and “later” respectively. Pu rva¯ ¯mamsa takes its bearings from the earlier part of Vedic Mi ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ lore, the Vedas proper, and Uttara-Mi mamsa takes its bearings from the later part, in particular, the appended Upanisads. Of the six orthodox schools of thought Pu rva¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ Mi mamsa is at first glance much the most orthodox. It is concerned with such things as the resolution of inconsistencies in the Veda, their claim to be an eternal revelation, and how sound can be the vehicle of revelation. These inquiries are all in the service of supporting the rule of dharma as the central Vedic disclosure relevant to human life. �26 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW ¯ ¯ ¯ Today one might be tempted to call Pu rva-Mi mamsa “Vedic ¯ fundamentalism” were it not for the cunning of its apologetics and the subtlety of its investigations, particularly into the nature of speech (vac), which in one Vedic hymn is ¯ presented as a goddess extolling herself as all embracing and the first of those who are worthy of sacrifice.37 Given the ¯ ¯ ¯ uncompromising determination of Pu rva-Mi mamsa to ¯ defend the Vedic injunctions to the letter, one might expect the texts of this school to betray the kind of blinkered irritability one often runs up against in those committed to the defense of indefensible positions. Instead, one finds there what is characteristic of the texts of almost all the schools, namely, a serene and fair minded statement of the most powerful objections that have been advanced against the tenets of the school in question, followed by a measured point by point rebuttal. ¯ ¯ ¯ Uttara-Mi mamsa is usually called “Vedanta,” literally, the ¯ end of the Veda, since its authority and the focus of its interest is the Upanisads. It is probably the school of Indian speculative thought best known in the West, as it has well known adherents in our time. There are several versions of Vedanta, but the most influential is Advaita-Vedanta, literally, ¯ ¯ non-dualist Vedanta. Its greatest exponent was Sankara, ¯ whose account of the heterodox school of Lokayata I quoted ¯ earlier. Advaita-Vedanta holds to the Upanisadic teaching of ¯ the oneness of all things, of the world as maya, and of the ¯ ¯ identity of ¯tman with brahman. Where, one asks, does the a manifold and illusory world that we mistake for reality come from? The world is not created, either ex nihilo or out of a ¯¯ pre-existent matter. The world is the play (or sport - li la) of 38 brahman. This play has no purpose outside itself. In particular, this play is not for the good of the world, a claim that Sankara supports by referring to a passage from the sruti, “It is not for the sake of all, my dear, that all is loved, but for one’s own sake that all is loved.”39 According to AdvaitaVedanta, brahman is both the efficient and the material cause ¯ CAREY 27 of the world. We might add that it is the formal and final cause as well. Another pair is Sankhya-Yoga. The Sankhya school is ¯ ¯ dualistic. The ultimate constituents of reality are nature and intellect, and this school gives an intriguing account of how the two are related. The word translated by “nature” here is prakrti. The components are pra-, kr-, and -ti. Pra- is equivalent to our prefix pro- and could be translated as “forth.” Kris the root of the Sanskrit verb for “to make” or “to do.” And -ti is a suffix that, like the Greek -sis, endows a verbal root with a nominal character indicating process, as with poiesis ¯ (making) or, for that matter, physis (nature or, more literally, growing). Prakrti is then making-forth.40 To the extent that this making-forth is an ongoing and immanent principle of production, and not the original and originating act of a transcendent creator, “nature” could hardly be a better rendering of prakrti. The etymology of this word reminds one of Aristotle’s discussion at the beginning of the second book of the Physics, where physis is presented as a principle of impersonal immanent governance, the source of motion and rest within the world, and is compared to a doctor healing himself.41 Like Aristotle’s nature, prakrti is both what makes and what is made. It is worth noting that the two Sanskrit terms I have translated as “nature,” namely, prakrti and, in my account of Lokayata, svabhava, are etymologically unrelated. The ¯ ¯ former names nature as process whereas the latter, which as we saw is derivative from the Sanskrit verb “to be,” names nature as being, primarily in the sense of essence. Parallel to prakrti and svabhava are the Greek terms, physis and ousia, ¯ which are also etymologically unrelated. The former, like prakrti, names nature as process, whereas the latter is derived from the Greek verb “to be” and, like svabhava, names nature ¯ as being, also primarily in the sense of essence. Since the Sanskrit and Greek terms developed prior to any influence of Greek speculative thought on Indian speculative thought or, so far as we can tell, vice versa, the correspondences are �28 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW remarkable. One might suspect that these linguistic developments were not entirely independent, in spite of the absence of any influence of one on the other. Because Greek and Sanskrit are related languages, one might be tempted to chalk up the comparable derivations of svabhava and ousia from ¯ the verb “to be” in their respective languages to merely coincidental exploitations of a possibility latent in protoIndo-European, the hypothesized common ancestor of the two languages.42 But the independent emergence of prakrti and physis within Sanskrit and Greek as names for the whole material order construed as immanent, ongoing, selfemergence cannot be easily dismissed as happenstance. On the contrary, there is every reason to think that these two terms came into being to express something already caught sight of in the nature of things, so to speak, and, moreover, that this discovery was the dawn of a properly philosophical orientation and outlook. The relationship between prakrti in the Sankhya school ¯ and physis in the philosophy of Aristotle is not limited to the central and common concept of “making forth.” Prakrti is animated to its activity by the presence of spirit. The word I am translating as “spirit” here is, again, purusa, which in one of the Vedic hymns we considered was the gigantic victim of a primordial sacrifice, a victim who, on being dismembered by the gods, served as the origin of the four castes. Not surprisingly, in the Sankhya system, the concept of purusa has ¯ become demythologized, as indeed had already happened in the Upanisads.43 By itself, spirit lacks any power to produce things, and is accordingly regarded as a pure “witness.”44 The relationship of purusa to prakrti is likened to a man who is clear-sighted but lame (purusa) mounted on the shoulders of a man who is sure-footed but blind (prakrti).45 The presence of spirit stimulates nature to evolve out of itself a manifold of beings. This evolution is from three elemental constituents (gunas), which, had nature not been excited to activity by the presence of spirit, would simply have remained in equilibrium. These three constituents of nature are called CAREY 29 sattva, rajas and tamas, for which there are no corresponding English words. Sattva is buoyant and shining; rajas is stimulating and moving; tamas is heavy and enveloping. Their functioning, we are told, is for a single purpose, like that of a lamp.46 Exactly how the upsetting of the equilibrium of these three constituents within primordial nature happens is problematic because spirit itself does not act directly on nature. Spirit engages in no action at all, but only in a pure beholding. On the other hand, nature cannot be so blind as to be totally unaware of the presence of spirit, since this very presence is what provokes nature to activity. The problem has a rough parallel, at least, in Aristotle’s conception of the relationship of the unmoved mover, who is pure intelligence (noesis noeseos), to what is moved, that is, to material nature. ¯ ¯ ¯ To be sure, for Aristotle, some moved things, such as the heavenly bodies and human beings, are themselves intelligent. But certain other things, such as particles of earth and other elements, which are also moved to their proper places at least ultimately by the unmoved mover, are as blind as blind can be.47 In the Sankhya school the modifications of prakrti, or ¯ nature, entail a complex and graduated evolution, one consequence of which is the individuation of purusa or spirit into individual selves, which results in a delusion as to what they really are. But prakrti, like Arisotle’s physis, also works for an end. The end is the overcoming of the delusion of the individual purusas. This overcoming of delusion is liberation. That prakrti can be construed as non-sentient and at the same time as nonetheless acting for an end, and furthermore for the end of another, is addressed in the Sankhya-karika, the ¯ ¯ ¯ fundamental text of this school, and in the commentaries on this text. The argument begins, characteristically, with an objection, in this case the objection of a theist. In an animal, many organic processes such as digestion have a purpose but nevertheless take place without the animal’s being conscious of them. So another being, an omniscient and powerful deity, in fact, must be invoked to account for these processes. After �30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW all, the objector continues, there cannot be purposes unless they are consciously intended, either by the organism or by its providential creator. To this objection the proponent of Sankhya responds with an example. Milk flows out of the ¯ cow for the sake of the calf, without any conscious intention on the part of the cow (much less, one might add, on the part of the milk). In a similar way, the whole of prakrti, which is non-sentient, can be understood to act for the liberation of another, namely, for the liberation of purusa. Neither divine intention nor any other conscious intention needs to be invoked. No intention needs to be invoked at all. Nature, prakrti, is purposive, period. The proponent of Sankhya then assumes the offensive ¯ and advances an argument against a divine, omniscient creator altogether. Every sentient being acting for a purpose does so either out of selfishness, that is, for its own good, or out of benevolence, that is, for the good of another. Neither of these motives could account for God’s creation of the universe. God cannot create the universe out of selfishness. For, on the hypothesis of the theist, he has all that he requires. Nor can he create the universe out of benevolence. For prior to the alleged creation of the world—which, incidentally, is not envisioned by either party to the dispute as ex nihilo—the purusas would be without bodies and organs, which are the source of their delusion. Consequently, they would not be afflicted, prior to creation, with anything that God could be aroused through benevolent pity to remove. Finally, if God created the world out of benevolence he would create only happy creatures. So, why are there so many unhappy creatures? The theist, obviously, cannot answer this question by attributing the unhappiness of creatures to their past deeds, as is required by the orthodox doctrine of karma. Prior to creation of the world, purusa, whether understood as one or many, cannot be understood to have encumbered itself with karma.48 According to the Sankhya school, the purposive action of ¯ non-sentient prakrti is neither amorally selfish nor morally CAREY 31 altruistic. It is amorally altruistic. Its purposiveness is an irreducible given, not to be accounted for by appeal to conscious design. After all, one would not infer conscious design unless purposiveness were apprehended first. The two concepts, purposiveness (understood as having an end or telos) and conscious design, can be kept distinct. As students of Western philosophy might be inclined to put it, the proposition that purposiveness presupposes conscious design is not an analytic judgment. It is a synthetic judgment. Its denial entails no logical contradiction: one is not logically compelled to infer conscious design from purposiveness. The existence of purposiveness is so obvious, particularly in living beings, that the theist does not argue for it and the atheist does not argue against it. Unlike the Medieval theologians who argued from teleology to the conscious intention of a divine artisan, and unlike the Modern philosophers and scientists who undertook a polemic against teleology because they feared admitting it would commit them to the existence of a divine artisan, the Sankhya school, like Aristotle, takes ¯ teleology as a given. It no more feels a need to account for the fact of teleology by appeal to a divine artisan than it feels a need to account for something equally mysterious, namely, a plurality of spirits or minds, by that same appeal. Purposiveness is, then, simply a feature of prakrti, just as consciousness is a feature of purusa. Neither of them can be convincingly accounted for by appeal to something as problematic as the intention of an omniscient creator since, again, no rational motive can be assigned for his creative act. The flowing of the milk from the cow to the calf is a paradigm of this purposiveness. It occurs without any intention from within on the part of the cow and without any intention from without on the part of a god. The Sankhya ¯ school of orthodox thought was openly atheistic. Sankhya is, as noted earlier, usually paired with Yoga in ¯ summaries of the orthodox views. There is more to Yoga than the system of physical discipline and exercises familiar to us in the West. Yoga employs the prakrti-purusa distinction, the �32 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW distinction between nature and spirit that we find in Sankhya, ¯ and, like that school, regards this dualism as irreducible. Unlike Sankhya, however, Yoga is theistic. However, it intro¯ ¯ duces the concept of the Lord (Isvara) more as an object of devotion than as a causal principle. The Lord can serve as the focal point of mental concentration. So envisioned the Lord is but one purusa among many, though unique in his eternal freedom from illusion and perfect cognition.49 In some respects he seems to function chiefly as an ideal to approximate. The remaining pair of orthodox schools is Nyaya¯ Vaisesika. Their concerns and investigations appear, at first glance, at the greatest remove from the Veda. The best known teaching of the Vaisesika school is atomism. More significant is its attempt to categorize all that in any way can be said to be. Though Vaisesika is at least nominally theistic, its attenuated theism is hardly central to the ontological investigations it undertakes, and the sincerity of its theistic commitment was called into question by philosophers of other Indian schools, both ancient and modern.50 The Nyaya school is interested in the question of how ¯ knowledge is possible. According to this school, knowledge involves a knower, what is known, the means whereby knowledge is attained, and the act of knowing. The means of valid cognition that are admitted by the Nyaya school are ¯ perception, comparison, inference, and verbal testimony. “Perception is that knowledge which arises from contact of a sense with its object, and is determinate, un-nameable, and unerring.”51 Perception is determinate in that its object is present in clarity and distinctness, and it is unerring because falsity occurs only in propositions. The argument that perception is un-nameable is directed against the claim that all cognition has a linguistic structure. A thing can be perceived for which we do not yet have a name. And when something we perceive has already been given a name, the name is not a part of the perception proper. Communicating the name of a thing to someone who has never perceived the CAREY 33 thing does not, by itself, produce for him a perception of it. And even when someone has at his disposal a name for something he actually has perceived, calling up the name does not produce a genuinely determinate perception of the thing.52 The Nyaya school developed, independently of Aristotle, ¯ a theory of the syllogism and principles of reasoning. Rather than three steps—major premise, minor premise, conclusion—the Nyaya school distinguishes five steps in the ¯ syllogism, at least as it is employed in disputation. These are: proposition, reason, example, application, and conclusion.53 They are ordered as follows, with the favored example. 1. The proposition to be established: Sound is noneternal. This step indicates that in disputation reasoning is directed from the beginning toward a conclusion that it intends to establish. The conclusion rarely pops up as an unanticipated proposition, resulting from the fortuitous conjunction of a major premise with a minor, which just happen to have a middle term in common. Not that such things do not occur, but they never or almost never occur in a formal disputation. 2. The reason why the proposition is affirmed: Because it is produced. In effect, this step is an anticipatory relating of the major premise to the minor. 3. An example founding what is, in effect, the major premise: A dish, which is produced, is not eternal, so—unless our opponent produces a counter example at this point—we say that everything that is produced is non-eternal. If the opponent cannot at this point name a counter example invalidating the major premise, the latter �34 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW has to count as established and true. 4. The application or reaffirmation: Sound is produced. This is, in effect, the assertion of the minor premise on the heels of the major premise if the latter has been established by the example, i.e., if the opponent was unable to produce a counter example in the preceding step. 5. The conclusion: Sound is non-eternal. This should, of course, be the same as the proposition stated in the first step. It is nonetheless a separate step in the inference. The first step announces the project. The last step concludes it. Comparison, or knowledge by analogy, the third means of valid cognition admitted by the Nyaya school is “the ¯ knowledge of a [new] thing through its similarity to another thing previously well known.” The fourth and last means of valid cognition is verbal testimony. There is clearly a decreasing reliability reflected in the order in which the four means of valid cognition are listed. Perception was said to be unerring. The same was not said for inference, since there can be faulty inference, a problem treated specifically in the Nyaya-Sutra. Comparison is ¯ obviously less reliable than inference, since the fact that two things, one of them familiar and the other unfamiliar, have a certain feature in common does not, by itself, justify the inference that every feature the one has, the other has as well. Just as inference needs to draw its examples from the more reliable perception, so comparison needs to anchor itself in the more reliable inference and perception. By implication then, verbal testimony, the last mentioned means of valid cognition, is the least reliable of the four. It is, as we say, “hearsay.” It is a means of valid cognition in that it might be true; but, then again, it might not be true. Some combination of the other three means of valid cognition must be employed CAREY 35 to determine whether the verbal testimony comes from a reliable source rather than from a child, a lunatic, or an impostor. And yet verbal testimony is the sole means for the transmission of the Veda. Consequently, we can infer that the Nyaya school regarded Vedic authority as less than fully ¯ reliable, except when buttressed by other, more reliable, means of valid cognition. This inference is supported, as we shall see, by the curious example that the Nyaya-Sutra uses in its treatment of the ¯ syllogism, an example that recurs throughout this text: the non-eternality of sound.54 6 Of the six schools that professed allegiance to Vedic tradition, ¯ ¯ ¯ Pu rva-Mi mamsa could appear to have been the least specula¯ tively adventuresome. Among other things, it did not accept the Vedanta teaching that the phenomenal world is illusion. ¯ Things are pretty much the way they appear. Pu rva¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ Mi mamsa affirmed a rather prosaic and sober, even tough minded, realism—with one big exception. This school based its argument for the authority of the Veda on its presumed eternity. In accounting for the revelation of the Veda, the ¯ ¯ Mi mamsakas had argued that it was quite literally heard by the sages of old. We today no longer hear the Veda because it is covered by a veil, so to speak. Unlike the sages we lack the discernment to hear through this veil. The Veda is a hidden but nonetheless eternal sound. An eternal sound is ¯ ¯ conceivable, argues the Mi mamsaka, because sound is incorporeal. Being incorporeal, it is not subject to decay and dissolution. ¯ ¯ ¯ The prime concern of the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school, as the ¯ ¯mamsa Su tra indicates, is the explication of first line of the Mi ¯ ¯ ¯ dharma, i.e., right conduct or duty. The medium whereby dharma is announced is sound (sabda), which construed as ¯ verbal testimony is a means of valid cognition. Now, an interesting principle of reasoning in formal disputation, as ¯ ¯ ¯ practiced and urged by the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school, is that ¯ �36 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW any proposition advanced, and therefore any verbal testimony, must count as true until and unless it can be shown to be false.55 The only way verbal testimony can be shown to be unreliable is if its author can be shown to be untrustworthy or if the testimony is itself preposterous. The first line of attack will not work if the Veda—in particular, the sound of which it is constituted—is eternal. For verbal testimony cannot have an untrustworthy author if it has no author at all, either human or divine. Atheism is one ¯ ¯ ¯ of the tenets of Pu rva-Mi mamsa, not in spite of, but because ¯ of its, adherence to Vedic tradition. Its atheism is not extracted from the Veda, but read off it, so to speak, as a kind ¯ ¯ of meta-atheism. The Mi mamsaka asks, with a perfectly straight face, if the Veda were composed by a god, might he not be inclined to exaggerate his accomplishments a little bit, to lie, in fact? How can we rule that possibility out? The truth of the Veda is most plausible on the assumption that it is ¯ ¯ eternal. And it can be eternal, so the Mi mamsaka argues, only if it has no maker, that is, no author. The second line of attack, trying to show that the contents of the Veda are preposterous, will not work either. ¯ ¯ ¯ For example, the opponent of Pu rva-Mi mamsa asks, “How ¯ do you know that all this [the Veda] is not like the utterance of lunatics and children? After all, we find in it such sentences as ‘Trees sat the sacrificial session.’”56 To this objection the ¯ ¯ Mi mamsaka responds that all such sentences can be interpreted figuratively. This particular sentence is merely a poetic way of indicating the centrality and solemnity of the sacrificial session. The polytheism of the Veda can also be, and in fact has to be, demythologized. Of greater concern are the dharmic injunctions. There are statements about the fruits of dharma that seem to be contradicted by facts. But they cannot really be contradicted by the facts, for the fruits are all future relative to the enjoined action. If promised fruit follows shortly after the enjoined action, the truth of the Vedic promise is confirmed. If it does not follow shortly after the enjoined action, it will most assuredly follow later on. CAREY 37 Reincarnation is invoked. If the fruits of enjoined actions do not follow in this life, they will most assuredly follow in the next life. But what of people who receive fruits in this life that the Veda declares are consequent only to specifically enjoined actions, which these same people say they never performed? These people are wrong. They did perform these actions, only not in this life but, rather, in a preceding life. The Vedic promise is not contradicted. In spite of such ingenious ways of interpreting Vedic assertions that seem on the face of it not to be true, there is a ¯ ¯ ¯ marked tendency in Pu rva-Mi mamsa to downplay declar¯ ative statements in the Veda across the board and to emphasize those that are prescriptive only. The basic concern is always dharma, that is, what ought to be done. As such, a Vedic injunction cannot be contradicted by anything that sense perception or any other means of valid cognition might determine about what exists. Put another way, the ought, precisely because it is not derived from the is, cannot be contradicted by the is. What might appear to be the weakness ¯ ¯ ¯ of the Pu rva-Mi mamsa position, namely the virtual ¯ detachment of the ought from the is, turns out to be its strength. But free floating dharmic injunctions presuppose at least the declarative sentence that the Veda is eternal, and consequently that the sound, the sabda, that reveals these injunc¯ tions, is eternal. This claim is so odd, not to say weird, that one is inclined to tone it down. Is it possible that the sounding of the Veda is to be understood figuratively, perhaps as a metaphor to indicate the eternal order of things having come to expression in language proper? No. The sounding of the Veda is not a metaphor. The Veda is literally sounding, sounding and resounding eternally through the cosmos. Indeed, the very letters that go to make up the verses in the Veda have an eternal sound.57 Put together they constitute an articulation that is more than just noise, and these articulate sounds are those that one hears when the Veda is recited. The recitation that we hear only manifests a sound that is already �38 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW and always there. The word and the utterance manifesting it are, we are told, analogous to a pot and the lightening manifesting it in an otherwise dark night.58 Just as the lightening does not cause the pot to come into being, so the utterance does not cause the sound to come into being. The lightening only manifests the pre-existent pot, and the utterance only manifests the pre-existent sound, which in the case of the Veda is the very sound of eternal truth that the sages heard. The eternally sounding Veda is in a language. That language—it will come as no surprise—is Sanskrit. We can perhaps see more clearly now why it was critical to freeze the development of the Sanskrit language, particularly its sound, early on. In any case, however strange we may find the notion of an unmanifest eternal sound, however much of an exception it is to everything we experience in the production ¯ ¯ of sound, the Mi mamsaka makes his point: “Prove, without begging the question, that the Veda is not eternally resounding throughout the universe. That you cannot hear it is a trivial fact that does not contribute materially to the proof you need.” The counter-argument for the non-eternity of sound, in the example that the Nyaya school appears at first glance to ¯ have taken out of nowhere simply to illustrate its syllogistic theory, is directed quite obviously against the teaching of the ¯ ¯ ¯ Pu rva-Mi mamsa school. But, more strikingly, this counter¯ argument is directed against the very concept of sruti, of “what is heard,” construed as an eternal foundation of sacred ¯ tradition.59 According to the Nyaya school, it is not sufficient to say that sound is eternal simply because of its incorporeality. On the basis of perception and reasoning, i.e., on the basis of experience, we know sound to be produced. At least, we have no experience of an unproduced sound. From the perspective of the Nyaya school, an admission of the possi¯ bility of an unproduced sound would be something like an admission of the possibility of miracles, which are by definition wondrous occurrences that are exceptions to the regularity and continuity of experience. Indeed, sabda, i.e., ¯ CAREY 39 ¯ ¯ ¯ verbal testimony, as understood by Pu rva-Mi mamsa, would ¯ seem to be the miracle, the miracle par excellence, one might say. The possibility of such a thing would not only undermine the authority of sense perception and reasoning, it would undercut the possibility of there being any thing like nature in the strict sense of the word. To this concern the ¯ ¯ Mi mamsaka would respond that the Veda, though wondrous indeed, even miraculous, is not an exception to anything. It is an eternal miracle. The Veda is the norm. Precisely because it is eternal it cannot be construed as an interruption to the regularity and continuity of experience. There was a sustained controversy between the Pu rva¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ Mi mamsa and the Nyaya schools on the character of Vedic ¯ authority, turning on this very issue of the eternity of sound. In the controversy, the primacy and timeless validity of Vedic revelation, advanced by the putatively ultra-orthodox Pu rva¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ Mi mamsa school, takes the form of an argument against the existence of a creator God and for the eternity of the world, precisely so the Veda can be understood to be uncreated and its authority unqualified. The counter-argument for the temporal character of Vedic revelation, and its subordination to sense perception and reasoning, advanced by the epistemologically oriented Nyaya school, takes the form of an ¯ argument for a creator God and against the eternity of the world, precisely so that the Veda can be understood to be created and its authority qualified. If we are right in our contention that the root of the Naiyayika denial of an eternal ¯ sound is, in effect, a denial of miracles, then it has to count as a capital irony, at least from the Western point of view, that this denial had to be supported by an argument for the existence of a creator God. The depreciation of Vedic authority, and thereby of Vedic tradition, in the orthodox Nyaya school is not announced ¯ with trumpets. It can be discerned in the choice of a wry example adduced ostensibly just to clarify a simple logical distinction. �40 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW That word is called “too generic” which, while applying to the thing desired to be spoken of overreaches it. For example, the brahmin-hood [i.e., ¯ the priestly caste that transmits the Vedic tradition]—which is denoted by the term “brahmin”—is sometimes found to be concomitant ¯ with “learning and character” and sometimes found to over-reach it, i.e., not be concomitant with it….60 Nyaya was not the only orthodox school to call into ¯ question, however so delicately, the authority of Vedic tradition. The Sankhya-karika begins with a discussion of the ¯ ¯ ¯ various kinds of pain and how they can best be removed. Among pains are mental pains, of which several are mentioned, two of them being fear and “the non-perception of particular objects.” The text addresses this matter bluntly. The revealed (or scriptural - ¯nusravikas) means a [of removing pain] is like the perceptible: it is verily linked with impurity, destruction, and excess (atisaya); different in form and superior thereto is that means derived from the discriminative knowledge of the manifest, the unmanifest, and the knower [i.e., the discriminative knowledge touted by the Sankhya school]. ¯ The appended commentary explicates this text as follows. The means of removing pain, consisting in the direct discriminative knowledge of the intellect (purusa) as apart from matter, is contrary to Vedic means and hence is better. The Vedic remedy is good inasmuch as it is authorized by the Veda and as such is capable of removing pain to a certain extent; the discriminative knowledge of the intellect as distinct from matter is also good; and of these two, the latter is better, superior.61 CAREY 41 Vedic testimony is recognized by the Sankhya school and by ¯ every other orthodox school (astika-darsana) as a means of ¯ valid cognition. Indeed this recognition is what stamps a school as having an orthodox teaching (astika-mata). But ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ except in the case of Pu rva-Mi mamsa, and to a lesser extent ¯ Vedanta, the authority of Vedic testimony is tightly circum¯ scribed. We are told shortly after the passage just cited that Vedic testimony is limited to what cannot be controverted by the other means of valid cognition (perception and inference for the Sankhya school) and to what is not accessible to them. ¯ This formulation could appear to be only the flip side of the ¯ ¯ ¯ Pu rva-Mi mamsa principle that any proposition advanced in ¯ disputation has to count as true until refuted. But in the Sankhya teaching it is not clear what is left over as the specific ¯ matter for Vedic authority. For, in the passage just quoted, the Sankhya school’s superior knowledge of the manifest (vyakta) ¯ and the unmanifest (avyakta) is explicitly contrasted with Vedic testimony, to the disadvantage of the latter. Even concerning the unmanifest,62 then, the “discriminative knowledge of the intellect” advocated by the unabashedly atheistic Sankhya school is superior to Vedic authority, to ¯ which this school nonetheless concedes a measure of ambiguously defined validity. My earlier remarks on Sankara, arguably the greatest philosopher India has produced, might have seemed unduly meager. Sankara wrote near the beginning of the eighth century A.D., and so his teaching is somewhat off topic in an introductory account of the origin of philosophy in ancient India. Moreover, it is not possible to present an adequate summary of his complex, ingenious, and extended elaboration of Upanisadic monism in a few paragraphs. One issue, though, is of particular relevance in the present context. Sankara speaks both of an impersonal brahman, which, just as in the Upanisads, is identical with one’s own innermost self (atman), and of a personal lord (or governor - ¯svara), who ¯ i qua lord would have to differ from one’s self. Or so it would seem. One way of managing this two-fold interpretation of �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 42 the highest principle is to say that Isvara is simply the way brahman is experienced under the conditions of illusion, which after all is the illusion of multiplicity and otherness. Devotion to Isvara has the salutary effect of elevating the mind above preoccupation with worldly worries and desires, which are mistaken for the self—a confusion of empirical ego with transcendental ego, a Kantian might say. Detachment from worldly concerns, which devotion to Isvara helps effect, is a necessary condition for realizing the identity of brahman and ¯tman, and, concomitantly, for enlightened recognition a of the illusoriness of all multiplicity and otherness, including not only the world but also any lord distinct from the self. One might have expected Sankara to reserve the term ¯svara solely for contexts in which he is speaking of the world i as it appears and our efforts to penetrate through this veil to what is fundamentally real. But such is not the case. Sankara is disinclined to treat Isvara as illusory even when regarded from the most privileged perspective of enlightenment.63 Accordingly, one could infer a commitment to theism on Sankara’s part, given his virtual identification of Isvara and brahman. But, then, the realization that, through this very identification, Isvara also becomes identical with ¯tman could a as easily lead one to the opposite inference. It should be remembered that, for Sankara, Isvara is the material cause of the phenomenal world as well as its efficient cause, a teaching rejected by his more theistically oriented successors in Vedanta. Moreover, in spite of using Isvara and brahman ¯ more or less interchangeably, Sankara explicitly teaches that ¯ the Lord’s lord-ness (i svaratva), presumably his lordship over the world and over man within it, is ultimately illusory. And in the sentence, “[H]e who, having been led to be brahman, is consecrated to sovereignty does not wish to bow to anybody,” Sankara the philosopher momentarily removes his mask.64 7 CAREY 43 In the Arthasastra of Kautilya (c. 300 B.C.), whose description ¯ of the duties pertaining to the four castes I cited earlier, we find a limiting of Vedic authority similar to what we have seen in some of the other orthodox schools. After describing the contents of his treatise in the first chapter, which is primarily on politics, Kautilya devotes the second chapter to an enumeration of the sciences (vidyas). The four sciences are ¯ ¯ksiki or analytics, the Veda, economics, and the science ¯ ¯nvi a of politics. The first science mentioned is the science of ¯ reasoning. Since ¯nvi ksiki is listed as a science, and not just a a ¯ means of valid cognition, it would seem to have, like the other three enumerated sciences, a subject matter of its own. For this reason it has occasionally been translated as “philosophy.” But we shall use the more precise translation of “analytics,” understood as the science of reasoning.65 Shortly after his enumeration of the four sciences, Kautilya quotes Brhaspati, whom he does not specify as the founder of the heterodox Lokayata school. “Vedic lore is only a cloak ¯ (samvarana) for one conversant with the ways of the world (lokayatravid).”66 Kautilya himself takes exception to this ¯ ¯ Lokayata reduction and includes Vedic lore within his ¯ enumeration of the sciences, giving as his reason “since with the help [of these four sciences] one can learn dharma and material well being.” He then proceeds immediately to a discussion of analytics, explicitly citing the Lokayata school ¯ or system as one instance of it. Sankhya, Yoga, and Lokayata—these constitute ¯ ¯ analytics. Investigating by means of analytics dharma-and-non-dharma [dharmadharmau - a ¯ Sanskrit copulative compound] in Vedic lore, material gain and loss in economics, good policy and bad policy in the science of politics, as well as the relative strength-and-weakness [balabalau ¯ copulative compound] of these [three sciences], analytics confers benefit on the people, keeps the mind steady in adversity and in prosperity, and brings about proficiency in thought, speech and �44 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW action. Analytics is ever thought as the lamp of all sciences, the means of all actions, and the support of all dharma.67 This passage is interesting for several reasons. In the first place, Kautilya includes Lokayata, along with Sankhya and ¯ ¯ Yoga, as part of analytics, in spite of the fact that he has just quoted Brhaspati, the founder of this school, as limiting science to economics and politics. Kautilya evidently thinks that at least some of the claims of Lokayata can be appro¯ priated by his own ostensibly orthodox account, which includes a defense, of sorts, of the very tradition that was excoriated and mocked by this arch-heretical school. Moreover, according to the passage under consideration, analytics is autonomous. As in Western philosophy, reason is subject only to its own laws. It is analytics that determines the scope of dharma in Vedic lore, this latter being apparently less than fully coherent or sound in its own proper realm. Even more strikingly, analytics investigates both the strength and the weakness of Vedic lore. One can hardly imagine a similar formulation of the relation of reason to revelation by a pious Jew, Christian, or Muslim.68 Nor can one imagine any orthodox believer saying that it is reasoning, and not sacred scripture or holy tradition, that brings about proficiency in thought (including belief?), speech (including prayer?), and action (including the performance of sacrifices?).69 Most interestingly of all, in the final clause of passage, which is the final clause of the chapter, Kautilya assigns to analytics, rather than to Vedic lore, the “support of all dharma.” This mystifying conclusion is clarified in the chapter that immediately follows, the scope of which is limited to what Kautilya wishes to say about Vedic lore itself. Since he has said that analytics is the “support of all dharma” we expect him to employ reasoning, and not just an appeal to authority, in making his case for why Vedic lore is beneficial. This expectation is not disappointed. After a preliminary listing of the Vedas by name and the topics they include, Kautilya says in the third sentence of the chapter: CAREY 45 The dharma laid down in this Vedic lore is beneficial, as it prescribes the special duties (svadharma) of the four castes (varnas) and the four stages of life. This sentence, the first substantive sentence in the chapter, must be read as an expression of analytics, of the science of reasoning, in the thought of Kautilya himself, and aimed at clarifying the relative strength of Vedic lore in the “support of all dharma.” The sentence gives the reason for why Vedic lore is beneficial: it prescribes the duties of the four castes and the four stages of life. This reason is meant to be accessible not just to the orthodox but to anyone reading the treatise, including adherents of the anti-Vedic Lokayata school, who, ¯ Kautilya implies, should have known better.70 8 We are now in a position, at last, to see what exactly constitutes orthodoxy in those schools and thinkers who acknowledge the authority of the Veda while nonetheless subordinating Vedic lore as a “means of valid cognition” to perception and reasoning, that is, to powers possessed by man as man, powers that are independent of the hearsay of unknown sages living in the remote past. The break with Vedic tradition occurred with the emergence of the three heterodox schools of Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata. ¯ Although the first two of these are typically classified as religions, all three of them are atheistic, the last one exuberantly so. Of the six orthodox schools that formed within early ¯ ¯ ¯ Hinduism, Sankhya is atheistic and so is Pu rva-Mi mamsa. ¯ ¯ Nyaya is theistic, though, as we have seen, its theology is ¯ advanced at least in part as a counter to the excessive claims ¯ ¯ ¯ for Vedic authority made by the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school. ¯ Vaisesika adopts the theology of the Nyaya school, though ¯ theism is even more tangential to the atomism of the former than it is to the logicism of the latter.71 Vedanta, taking its ¯ bearings from the Upanisads, emphasizes the identity of the self with brahman and the ultimate oneness of all things, and �46 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Sankara’s Advaita-Vedanta, in particular, has no room for ¯ God in anything remotely resembling the Biblical sense.72 Yoga alone is unambiguously theistic, though Isvara serves there more as an object of devotion and mental focusing than as a causal principle per se. Still, the adherents of all six of these schools, and the independent, no-nonsense political realist Kautilya as well, concede at least some authority to the Veda, with exactly how much varying from school to school and from individual to individual. It is by virtue of this concession that these thinkers understand themselves to be situated within the Vedic tradition, however daring their speculative ventures. But why do these thinkers bother to concede any authority at all to the Veda? Kautilya tells us why, and he tells us as clear as day, in the passage from the Arthasastra we just ¯ considered: the Veda is beneficial. It is beneficial because it prescribes the duties of the stages of life and of the four castes.73 But the stages of life are subsumed under the caste system, since they pertain only to the top three castes. Who, then, we are led to ask, benefits from the caste system? Kautilya’s explicit answer is that the whole people benefit.74 The more pertinent answer, which he leaves us to infer, is that the life of free inquiry, exhibited even in the most orthodox of these so-called orthodox schools, itself benefits from the caste system. We noted that economic circumstances, not just in ancient India but in the ancient world in general, simply could not support an egalitarian social order. Whatever its injustices and to whatever abuses it led, the rule of dharma, of which the hierarchy of castes was much the most conspicuous embodiment, permitted the leisure and mandated the literacy without which philosophy could not emerge. And it permitted surprisingly candid depreciation of the authority of sacred tradition. The interpreters of dharma and of sacred tradition in general, namely, the members of the brahmin caste, enjoyed an unparalleled freedom of specu¯ lation. Within the orthodox schools of speculative thought we see monism, dualism, an attenuated monotheism, and CAREY 47 ¯ atheism, with a deity or lord (i svara) forcefully denied, simply ignored, identified with the self, and construed as distinct from the self as part of a technique for disengaging the mind from worldly concerns; arguments for the necessity of creation and arguments against the possibility of creation; ontological categorization of different kinds of entities; logical and epistemological investigations; inquiries into the material constitution of the world with cases being made for and against an irreducible atomism; idealist and realist accounts of the phenomenal world; and, with surprising frequency, a distinct ranking of the authority of sacred tradition below reasoning and ordinary perception, which is a giant step toward dismissing the possibility of miracles out of hand. And this broad range of speculation can be found within the sphere of what passed for orthodoxy. Now, although most brahmins may well have accepted in ¯ complete sincerity the whole of Vedic lore, at least to the extent that it formed a whole, it is virtually certain, I think, that more than a few paid only lip service to it. Of these, some may have insisted on the authority of the Veda because of the social privileges accorded them by the caste system it mandated (though it should be noted that the brahmins were ¯ themselves subject to a variety of strictures, social and otherwise). But it is highly likely that some brahmins upheld ¯ this authority solely because of the intellectual freedom it granted them. They appealed, in a tour de force of resourcefulness, to religious authority in support of a social order that uniquely guaranteed the possibility of unimpeded questioning and inquiry.75 To repeat, the brahmins were not subject to any ¯ authority other than that of the king. And the king, who came from the warrior caste and not from the brahmin caste, did ¯ not have the authority to teach the Veda. He was not in a position, then, to compel the brahmins to toe a more conser¯ vative line in their speculations and queries. Furthermore, there was no ecclesiastical structure, and there were no creeds.76 The way to whatever wisdom is naturally available to man was, for the brahmins, wide open. ¯ �48 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Some of the most astute scholars of the tradition of speculative thought in ancient India have admitted that they find the adherence of the orthodox schools to Vedic authority inscrutable, given the sophistication and independence of their views on the question of ultimate origins and on the question of Vedic authority itself. It is remarked, with something amounting to dismay, that the logical, physical, and (with a few exceptions) even metaphysical speculations in these schools are not supported by appeal to Vedic lore but by appeal to reasoning and ordinary experience.77 The express adherence of the orthodox schools to Vedic authority is often put down to a thoughtless cultural bias, as though it never occurred to the orthodox thinkers that the caste system might be mere artifice and convention, in spite of the fact that the heterodox schools, whose emergence provoked the orthodox response, had taught precisely that. 9 It has been claimed that philosophy originates with the discovery of nature, more particularly with the discovery of the difference between nature and convention, nature being an intrinsic governing principle inherent in the world, as distinct from an extrinsic governing principle, i.e. a creatorGod, transcendent to the world. We saw earlier that the concept of prakrti, particularly as developed in the orthodox Sankhya school as a teleological, though unconscious, ¯ intrinsic governing principle, corresponds in large measure to the Greek concept of physis. Another close correspondence is found in the concept of svabhava, which, I noted, can be ¯ translated as “own being” or “own nature.” Lokayata ¯ contrasts svabhava directly with unseen causes and indirectly ¯ with Vedic injunctions, both ethical and ritual, that is, with convention. That the uncaused nature of things, their own being, could emerge in explicit connection with a critique of convention in the heterodox Lokayata school should, then, ¯ come as no great surprise. That nature did not emerge in CAREY 49 explicit connection with a critique of convention in the orthodox schools, even the most venturesome of them, should also come as no great surprise. The precarious state of svadharma prevented nature from being opposed to convention within the orthodox tradition. But for this reason a theme conspicuously present in Western philosophy is conspicuously absent in Indian philosophy. Although the nature of consciousness, mind, and intellect are central questions, the question of man as such does not receive much of an investigation. The reason for this otherwise unaccountable omission is that even before the question is asked the answer is given, appalling in its starkness. Man as such is the caste animal. But how, the student of Western philosophy will ask, could genuinely philosophical natures endure the injustice of such a system? To this question a sophisticated brahmin might ¯ respond, “It was precisely the passion for justice, coupled with the attempt to elevate the fundamental principle of reality, brahman, above all concern with justice, that led to the doctrine of karma: one gets exactly what one deserves, without any assistance from on high. One’s present caste standing is determined by the moral quality of one’s past deeds, just as one’s future caste standing is determined by the moral quality of one’s present deeds. What’s that, if not justice?” But it’s just a myth. “True, but it’s a salutary myth. After all, isn’t it one of the discoveries made by philosophy itself that all political communities have, and must have, their myths, their noble lies, about justice?” You’re right of course, but…. “And while we’re at it,” our sophisticated brahmin ¯ might continue, “let us not forget that the philosopher as philosopher, in the West no less than in India, necessarily gives wisdom a higher place than morality in his scheme of things. What business does a philosopher have being indignant?” (Profound silence.) Seen in the above light, the ethical order of law and duty, of dharma, supported by Vedic tradition, simply could not be taught in the orthodox schools to be merely conventional, to �50 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW be only one way among others, to be “just our way.” The thinkers in these schools taught, quite understandably, that Vedic dharma was the right way simply. But it is likely that the more speculatively bold among them upheld Vedic dharma solely for the reasons mentioned earlier. At any rate, it is incontestable that, by institutionalizing a system in which status and power were vested in different castes, a system in which learning was the sine qua non for the higher if less politically powerful, though nonetheless independent, caste, the Veda, as interpreted by the brahmins, also institution¯ alized the possibility of speculative boldness, or philosophy.78 Still, one might object, is not the knowledge that this socalled speculative boldness aims at merely a means to something else, namely liberation? And is not knowledge, as an end in itself, the goal of philosophy properly understood? There is a twofold response to this question. In the first place, it is by no means clear that knowledge is conceived by all, or even by the greatest, Western philosophers as an end in itself simply. They might say that the end in itself, at least for human beings, is happiness. If knowledge contributed not to the happiness of the knower but to his unhappiness, philosophy as a way of life could hardly be defended except in moral terms. And a moral defense of philosophy would hardly be congenial to philosophy, at least not as I have narrowly defined it.79 In the second place, though knowledge in Indian philosophy is indeed in the service of liberation, liberation is not first and foremost liberation from successive reincarnations. It is, first and foremost, liberation from illusion, i.e., liberation from ignorance. Certainly a demythologized concept of liberation would have occurred to those orthodox thinkers whose allegiance to the Veda was mainly prudential. In any case, knowledge, and neither mere belief nor moral action and dutiful fulfillment of Vedic ritual injunctions, was in several of the orthodox schools held to be the sole path to liberation. More precisely, knowledge was held to be both the necessary and the sufficient condition for liberation, or to be CAREY 51 liberation simply. Knowledge for its own sake, knowledge as an end in itself, then, cannot be regarded as a specific feature of philosophy in the West in contradistinction to philosophy in ancient India. One of the curiosities of the Indian speculative tradition was its tendency to become more, not less, theistic with the passage of time. One cannot help but suspect that the growing theistic orientation was occasioned in part by external developments, especially by contact with Islam following the Muslim conquest and with Christianity during the British raj. A number of articulate and well known Indian thinkers of the last two centuries, apparently construing themselves as something like good will ambassadors to the West, have offered popularized accounts of Indian speculative thought that have exaggerated the affinities between Vedic tradition, including the philosophical tradition, and the revealed religions of the West, particularly Christianity. At the other end, Westerners in search of an alternative religious experience, free from the scrutiny of a judgmental God, have claimed to find in Hinduism a less guilt-ridden spirituality, one that is less dogmatically divisive and more accepting of people for what they are.80 All this has led to the familiar picture of Indian thought as almost uniformly mystical and intuitive, a caricature that a number of scholars, Western and Indian, have taken pains to correct.81 Students of the rationalist tradition of the West, from Parmenides through Thomas Aquinas right on up to Husserl, as well as students restricting their attention to the contemporary analytic scene, are not inclined to regard what strikes them on first hearing as an amorphous mix of meditation and compassion as a substitute for thought. Few of them are aware that the ideal of rational autonomy, to which they themselves are committed, shaped the life of the mind in ancient India as well. The study of Indian philosophy provides an important perspective on Western philosophy, a perspective from which Western philosophy can be viewed from without but not from �52 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW above, and as an alternative rather than an opponent. In particular, the study of Indian philosophy sheds unexpected but welcome light on a theme dear to Western philosophers, namely, the choiceworthiness of the philosophic life itself. In the West the great antagonist to philosophy has been revealed religion. The truth-seeking philosopher cannot be indifferent to the possibility that the Truth might choose to reveal itself, or rather himself, to man. For such revelation, undertaken at the initiative of the divine and eclipsing in significance everything man could find out about ultimate principles on his own, would render the achievements of philosophy paltry, to say the least. Not surprisingly, then, Western philosophy has invested a lot of energy in trying to rule out this possibility, so much so that, viewed from the outside, it can appear to be more interested in convincing itself of the rightness of its own way than in apprehending ultimate principles and ontological truth. Indian philosophy, on the other hand, devotes little attention to justifying itself. It has no comparably great antagonist. For Vedic religion, as interpreted in the various schools of orthodox speculation, is, as I have tried to show, not a religion of revelation, at least not in the Biblical sense. The existence of the divine, or the closest thing there is to the divine, namely brahman, does not imply limitations on what man can achieve in the way of knowing ultimate principles and ontological truth on his own. Quite the contrary. Of course, the Western philosopher might say that it is not just the possibility of revelation, of a disclosure undertaken at the initiative of the divine, that is worrisome to philosophy. Quite apart from the special problem of election that is part and parcel of the concept of revelation, the possibility that there is a being who, right now, possesses the very wisdom that the philosopher does not possess, but only loves, is humbling. To this concern the Indian philosopher would respond that it needn’t be regarded that way at all. Certainly not, if ¯tman is a indeed brahman, not just later on in some kind of misty hereafter but here and now. He would attempt to reassure his Western counterpart on this point: “That art thou.” It is just CAREY 53 a matter of realizing this fundamental and ultimate truth, he would add. And he would ask what experience the Western philosopher has had that causes him to persist in doing battle against an opponent so immature and unworthy of serious consideration as is Biblical religion. I shall not venture to suggest an answer to this question on behalf of the Western philosopher82 The primary purpose of this paper has been to argue that philosophy, even according to its most austere conception as rational atheism, did in fact emerge in ancient India.83 After all, if philosophy is natural to man, if it is not just the dispensation of an inscrutable historical fate, then one would expect it to have emerged, given enough time, wherever it was not impeded. The impediments to the emergence of philosophy are absence of letters, absence of leisure, and the presence of a religious or political authority hostile to unfettered speculation about the whole, its essential constitution and its ultimate foundation. These impediments were not operative in the speculative tradition of ancient India. It would be surprising, then, if philosophy had not emerged there, assuming that historicism is wrong and that the classical Western philosophers were correct in their assessment that philosophy is natural, that it is a permanent possibility coeval with man. Notes 1 I have adopted the current Romanization convention for Sanskrit terms, with one exception: I have rendered anusvara prior to labials with an ¯ “m,” but in all other cases with an “n.” 2 Rg Veda 10.129 in A Source Book in Indian Philosophy, ed. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 23. Hereafter cited as Sourcebook. (In the interests of greater literalness and consistency, I have modified some of the translations from this text and from others that I cite. I have entirely retranslated certain passages.) Compare 10.121 (24-25). On the original relation ¯¯ of being and non-being, see Bhagavad Gi ta (ed. and trans.Winthrop Sargeant (Garden City, NY: Doubleday), 9.19; 11.37; and especially 13.12: the “beginningless” (anadimat), which is neither being nor non¯ ¯¯ being, is identified with brahman. Compare also Bhagavad Gi ta 2.16. �54 3 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Ibid. 8.89.34 (Sourcebook, 34). Compare 10.121 (24-25). 4 Rg Veda 2.12.5 in The Rig Veda: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (London: Penguin, 1981), 161. 5 See, for example, 1.164.6 (Sourcebook, 21) and 10.114.5, quoted in The Vedic Experience—An Anthology of the Vedas, ed. and trans. Raimundo Panikkar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 660. 6 Vedic religion gradually turned into Hinduism. Although a distinction can be made between them, I shall, in the interests of simplicity, treat them as earlier and later stages of one evolving phenomenon. 7 It is sometimes said that the original fourfold division should be understood as a division into classes, and that only the polymorphous divisions that subsequently emerged should count as caste divisions. This distinction, however, cannot be insisted upon. The bewildering multiplicity of castes that came into being later on appears to have emerged ¯¯ out of the forbidden mixing of the original four. See Bhagavad Gi ta 1.4044 and Laws of Manu 7.24, 8.352-353, 8.418 (Sourcebook, 186,177, 187). There was also a certain overlap in the usage of the terms “class” (varna) and “caste” (jati) in the so-called “Epic” period of ancient India. ¯ See Wilhelm Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), 350-53. The term “caste” has the advantage over “class” of naming not merely a group into which one happens to be born, but, due to karmic causality, the group into which one deserves to be reborn. “The problem of a potential injustice of such exclusion [of the su dra, or ¯ servant, from the Vedic ceremonies of initiation] is…easily resolved by referring to the doctrine of karma and rebirth, which explains and justifies the current caste status and allows for a future ascent to higher stages” (Ibid. 72; cf. 349. See Chandogya Upanisad 5.10.7; Manu 9.335, ¯ 12.9 in Sourcebook, 66-67, 188, 173). Louis Dumont, in his important and controversial study, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), refers to this karmic justification of caste (359, n. 25g.), but he can hardly be said to give it proper emphasis, although it supports his claim that hierarchy is an essentially religious concept (6566). Dumont himself tries to limit the term “castes” to the later development and uses “classes” to name the original distinction. But in the original distinction we also find the separation of status from power that Dumont rightly insists is constitutive of Indian society, ancient and modern, a separation that is not readily suggested by the word “class.” In this paper I use “caste” in referring to the original fourfold division. Since it is only about this fourfold division that I shall be speaking, there should be no confusion. 8 Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 4.5.15, in The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, ¯ 2d rev. ed., trans. Robert Hume (Delhi: Oxford University Text, 1931), 147. The whole clause “sa eva neti netyatman” (with sandhi) is translated ¯ CAREY 55 by Hume as “That Soul is not this, it is not that,” which is fine except for the fact that ¯tman is more literally rendered as “self ” than “soul.” The a Sanskrit text, moreover, does not distinguish between small and large case letters. The demonstrative pronoun is presumably intended to distinguish between the ¯tman, i.e., the genuine self in its purity, and the familiar a though spurious self that is absorbed, one might say, in maya. ¯ ¯ 9 Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 1.4.10; Chandogya Upanisad 3.14.4; 8.7.4; ¯ ¯ 8.10.1; 8.11.1. These two Upanisads are of great antiquity. See also Mandu kya Upanisad 2; Isa Upanisad 4-6, 15-16; and Mundaka Upanisad ¯ ¯ ¯ 2.1.2-4,10; 3.2.9. (These texts are all contained in The Thirteen Principal Upanishads.) The threefold relationship of brahman, maya, and ¯tman ¯ ¯ a forms something of a parallel to the threefold relationship of thing-initself, phenomena (the total complex of which is nature), and transcendental ego that one finds in the philosophy of Kant. 10 Chandogya Upanisad 6.9-13; 8.11.1: tat tvam asi. ¯ 11 Nor should brahman be confused with brahmana, the name of a ¯ member of the priestly caste. To avoid confusion I shall adopt the convention, employed in Sourcebook and other texts, of transliterating the latter term as “brahmin.” ¯ 12 In the West, philosophy has been concerned with validating itself as the most choiceworthy way of life. It has been concerned in particular with showing that the philosophical life is more choiceworthy than the life of simple piety, that is, than the life of devotion and loving obedience to the loving command of a providential God. The evidence closest at hand for the existence of such a God is found in our moral experience. The moral view of the world, which originates out of this experience, postulates God as the ultimate author of the moral law, or as moral judge, or both. A central project of Western philosophy, then, has been the critique of morality, especially of such concepts as radical freedom of the will, transcendent law, and dutiful obedience as the unconditioned condition of the human good. There is no comparable critique of morality in classical Indian philosophy. The reason is that in the Hindu religion, at least in the sophisticated religion of the Upanisads, the divine is neither the author of a moral law nor a moral judge, nor providential in any sense recognizable in Biblical religion. The doctrine of impersonal karmic causality lies entirely outside the theological problematic except insofar as it supports an equally impersonal concept of the divine. See, for example Sankhya-Pravacana Su tra 5.2. (Sourcebook, 450). ¯ ¯ 13 Rg Veda 10.90.11-12. Compare Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 1.4.10-15; ¯ ¯¯ Bhagavad Gi ta 4.13; Manu 1.31. 14 Kautilya, Arthasastra, ed. and trans. R.P Kangle (Delhi: Motilal ¯ . Banarsidass,1988), 2:1.3.4-7, hereafter cited as Arthasastra. ¯ �56 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 15 The expression “twice-born” refers to the initiation (upanayana) or investiture with the sacred thread that the members of the upper three castes undergo. It is likened to a second birth. 16 Kautilya, 1.3.13. 17 Kautilya, 1.3.4-8. I shall use the general expression “the Veda” to refer not only to the four Vedas but also to the appended treatises that were accorded comparable authority in the tradition. Kangle makes the following observation: “[A]ctually it is only in the Dharmasu tras, a ¯ branch of the Vedanga Kalpa, that the duties of the varnas [castes] and ¯ ¯sramas [stages of life] are laid down in detail” (2:7). This fact may help a explain why su dras were not permitted even to study the Veda. ¯ 18 See Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy (Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press,1959), 37 and Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books,1969), 11-12. 19 Arthasastra 1.4.11-15. On the separation of the political from the ¯ religious, see Dumont, 263-93. On the concept of danda as legitimate force, see pp. 302-03, where Dumont quotes the following passage from the Mahabhvrata: “if there was on earth no king bearing the stick of ¯ punishment, the stronger would roast the weaker as fishes on a spike.” See also Manu 7.22. In this connection, it is worth noting that a rise in caste status within a single life occasionally happened as a result of political exigency, a state affairs expressed in the dry aphorism, “Whoever rules is a ksatriya.” See A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (Calcutta: Rupa and Co., 1954), 92. 20 Arthasastra 1.7. ¯ 21 There are other end goals, namely, right action (dharma), wealth (artha), and pleasure (kama); but these end goals are subservient to liberation, which is, above all, liberation from ignorance. 22 Hume, in his translation of the Katha Upanisad (The Thirteen Principal Upanishads) renders the second half of 4.2.1 (353) as “A certain wise man, while seeking immortality, introspectively beheld the soul (Atman) face to face.” The translation is marred by the inexplicable insertion of the phrase “face to face,” which corresponds to nothing in the Sanskrit text, at least as it appears in Eight Upanisads, (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1989), 1:180. There the text reads, without sandhi, as follows: kas cit ¯ dhi ras pratyak ¯tmanam aiksat ¯vrttacaksuh amrttvam icchan. a ¯ a 23 “Those who, even worshiping other divinities, sacrifice with faith ¯¯ (sraddha) sacrifice also to me,” Bhagavad Gi ta 9.23. Compare Exod. 34:14; Deut. 29:17; Ps. 96:5; John 4:22; 1 Cor.1:20. CAREY 57 24 The Sanskrit verbal radical “vid-” means “know,” not “see.” The root sense of “veda” does not refer to sight, though this sense is present in the Greek “eidos” and “idea” (which were originally preceded by a digamma having the sound of an English “w”) and also in the closely related Latin “video” and English “vision.” All these words are conjectured to have derived from the Indo-European root “weid-”, which itself may not have referred exclusively to sight. Two conjectured derivatives of “weid-” in English that do not refer exclusively to sight are “guide” and “wit.” Cf. Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo European Roots (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 74. 25 There is nothing in Hinduism, at least in the sophisticated Upanisadic tradition, that is comparable to, say, God’s election of Abraham. 26 Cf. W Halbfass, India and Europe (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 29. . 27 It should go without saying that faith (sraddha), particularly in the ¯ carrying out of ritual performances, and devotion (bhakti) are central to religious Hinduism, however marginal they may be in this or that speculative school. Such concepts are not absent from the Upanisads. Occasionally, however, what at first glance seems like an unqualified theism turns out, on close inspection, to be quite different. See, for example, Katha 1.2.23. There the self (atman) that reveals (or discloses, ¯ vivrnute) its own (or its own character, svam) is not exactly “a thou” ¯ since it is ultimately the same as the self that is seeking it. Hume (The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, 350) divines “the first explicit statement of the doctrine of Grace (prasada)” just a little earlier in this section, at ¯ 1.2.20. To his credit, however, he notes that prasada can also mean ¯ tranquility, that it unquestionably has this meaning in other Upanisadic passages that he cites, and that the greatest commentator on the Upanisads, namely, Sankara takes the term to mean precisely tranquility, and not grace. See Eight Upanisads: With the Commentary of ¯¯ Sankaracarya, trans. Swami Gambhi rananda, (Calcutta: Motilal ¯¯ ¯ ¯ Banarsidass, 1989) 1:153-54. That prasada, in the philosophical tradition ¯ at least, presupposes advance preparation and discernment (not to mention merit) on the part of the recipient, if that’s even the word for it, further distinguishes this notion from the Biblical conception of grace. 28 See, for example, Rg Veda 7.103; 9.112; 10.86. 29 ¯ Vigrahavyavartani , Sections 21-24. ¯ 30 “The worship of the Buddha is merely an act of commemoration. The popular gods were introduced into Buddhism in its more religious form to serve as objects for meditation,” Sourcebook, 273. Sokyo Ono, in Shinto: The Kami Way (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1962), gives the following account of the adjustment that, after an initial period of conflict, allowed for the peaceful coexistence of Shinto, which is the �58 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW native religion of Japan, and Buddhism, which had been imported from without. “[I]n the eighth century a compromise was reached which resulted in the teaching that the kami [Shinto gods] were pleased to receive Buddhist sutras as offerings and to hear them recited in worship. As a consequence, Buddhist temples were established alongside shrines, ostensibly to satisfy the kami, make them into Buddhist believers, and finally raise them to the level of buddhas” (85-86). One wonders if the Shinto gods, in coming to recognize their own insubstantiality, were supposed to have converted to atheism. 31 Excerpted from the Sarvadarsanasangraha in Sourcebook, 233-34. I have added some commentary within brackets, in this text and in the next one cited, to bring into sharper relief the central claims of this school. 32 W Halbfass speaks of the “intriguing etymological kinship” of the . Sanskrit bhu with the Greek phy- from the Greek word for nature, ¯ physis, is formed. On Being and What there Is: Classical Vaisesika and the History of Indian Ontology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 21-22. On the Indo-European root bheu-, see Watkins, p. 8, and the table of sound correspondences on p. 111. In the first passage that I quoted from the Rg Veda, the word I translated as “own determination,” which can also mean spontaneity, namely svadha, includes the component sva, as does ¯ ¯¯ svabhava. Note the use of svabhava in Bhagavad Gi ta 5.14; compare with ¯ ¯ sambhavami, “I originate myself.” in 4.6. ¯ 33 Sourcebook, 248. 34 Sarvasiddhatsangraha, in Sourcebook, 234-35. I commented on some of ¯ these passages in my article, “On the Discovery of Nature,” The St. John’s Review, 46/1, (2000): 127-28, 141. ¯¯ See, for example, Baghavad Gi ta 16.8, and compare 18.71. One occasionally comes across materialist speculation even in the sruti, the most venerable sources of Vedic tradition. See, for example, Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 2.4.12; compare Chandogya Upanisad 8.7-8 ¯ ¯ 35 36 A close equivalent in the West can be found in the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, the articles of which commence with a statement of objections to the thesis being proposed, followed by a quotation from authority, often but not always scriptural, and, after this, a comprehensive argument in favor of the thesis, typically without appeal to authority, and, in conclusion, responses to the objections seriatim. 37 Rg Veda 10.125. The dividing up of speech by the gods, referred to in the third verse of this hymn, reminds one of the dismemberment of the purusa in Rg Veda 10.90. CAREY 59 ¯ Brahma-Su tras 2.1.33 in Brahma-Su tra-Bhasya of Sri Sankaracarya, ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯¯ trans. Swami Gambhirananda, (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1983). 38 ¯ Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 2.4.5. See Brahma-Su tra-Bhasya of Sri ¯ ¯ ¯ Sankaracarya, 360. ¯¯ 39 40 “The Discovery of Nature,” 122 ff. 41 Physics 199b31. 42 That philosophy may have emerged more naturally where IndoEuropean languages were spoken would hardly prove that the emergence of philosophy was an accident of linguistics. After all, it is at least thinkable—if not so easily sayable these days—that some languages are naturally superior to others, precisely because they are more in tune with what is fundamentally real or at least suggest a wider range of possibilities for thought. See Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Metaphysik, 2d. ed. (Tübingen:Max Niemeyer Verlag 1958), 43. See the English translation by Ralph Manheim, Introduction to Metaphysics, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 57. In any case, the conditions favoring the emergence of philosophy in ancient India were, as I argue in the sequel, not so much linguistic as theologico-political. 43 See, for example, Brhadaranyaka 1.4.1; Katha 1.3.11, 2.1.12; Isa 16. ¯ ¯ 44 There are a plurality of purusas, in the Sankhya school. But they are all ¯ of the same kind, so the system can still be regarded as essentially dualistic. 45 Sankhya-Karika 21 in Sourcebook, 424. This analogy, however, cannot ¯ ¯ ¯ be pressed too far, since for Aristotle the divine intellect does not, as final cause, direct nature in quite the same way that the lame man being carried would presumably direct the blind man carrying him. 46 ¯¯ Sankhya-Karika 13 in Sourcebook, 429. In the Bhagavad Gi ta it is said ¯ ¯ that the gunas are present everywhere, even among the gods in heaven, and that they, too, originate out of prakrti (18.40; cf. 3.33). 47 Physics 922b19; cf. Metaphysics 1072b14. ¯ ¯ ¯ Sankhya-Karika 56-57 in Sourcebook, 442-43. The Pu rva-Mi mamsa ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ school makes similar arguments against divine creation of the world. The notion that the play of brahman, and not any purpose outside of this play, is responsible for the phenomenal world may have emerged in response to arguments against creation such as the above. Sankara at least argues this way. See his commentary on Brahma-Su tras 2.1.32-36. ¯ 48 49 50 Yoga Su tra 1.23-29. (Sourcebook, 458-459). ¯ Halbfass, On Being and What There Is, 231; cf. 70 and 271. Halbfass’s study is a comprehensive account of Vaisesika and contains translations of some of the more interesting ontological texts of this school, 237-69. See �60 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW also Archibald Edward Gough, The Vaisesika Aphorisms of Kanada (New ¯ Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975, originally published in 1873). Knowledge of the truth is explicitly said to be the highest good in Aphorism 4, and this may be implied as early as Aphorism 2 (see the commentary on pp. 2-3). In Aphorism 3, authoritativeness, presumably of the Veda, is linked to what is said in Aphorism 2. After Aphorism 4, the author gets down to business, namely, categorizing all that exists, beginning with substances (dravya): earth, water, fire (tejas) air, ether, time, space, self (atman), and mind (manas). Halbfass points out that the ¯ “radical [Vaisesika] innovator…identified space, time, and ether, with God.” On Being and What There Is, 217. 51 Nyaya-Sutra 1.1.4 in The Nyaya-Su tras of Gotama, trans. M. M. ¯ ¯ ¯ Statisa Chandra Vidyabhu sana, rev. and ed. Nandalal Sinha, (Delhi: ¯ ¯ Motilal Banarsidass, 1990), 3. Compare The Nyaya-Sutras of Gautama, ¯ trans. and ed. Ganganatha Jha, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), 1:111, ¯ ¯ ¯ hereafter referred to as Jha. Jha’s four-volume edition of the Nyaya-Sutra ¯ ¯ ¯ includes a massive amount of commentary, both traditional and more recent. 52 Compare Aristotle, On Sense and Sensible Objects 442b9. 53 Nyaya-Sutra, 1.32-39 in Sourcebook, 362-63. Jha, 1:355-445. Note ¯ ¯ that Steps 3, 4 and 5 virtually replicate the classical syllogism familiar in the West. Whatever is produced is non-eternal; sound is produced; [therefore] sound is non-eternal. Steps 1 and 2 of the Nyaya syllogism set ¯ the stage for what we might call the syllogism proper. Step 1 is the enunciation, and this is rarely omitted, even in the West. It suffices to think of the propositions of Euclid’s Elements, the articles of Thomas’s Summa Theologica, and the “Antinomies” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, all of which commence with an announcement of what is about to be demonstrated. Step 2, which is the most dispensable of the five, foretells and encapsulates the syllogism that is about to occur. What is most peculiar in the Nyaya syllogism is the use of an example—a single ¯ one suffices in the absence of a counter example—to establish the major premise. The syllogism implies the presence of an opponent not so much as the target of an elenchus but, rather, as a kind of conscience to check the introduction of less than fully evident major premises. 54 In the Nyaya and Vaisesika schools, sabda “is of two kinds: noise ¯ ¯ (dhvani) and articulate alphabet sounds (varna).” John Grimes, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 287. In the English version of the Nyaya-Sutra to which we have been referring, one ¯ and the same Sanskrit term, sabda, is variously rendered as “sound,” ¯ “word,” and “verbal testimony.” 55 This principle occurs in a slightly different form in the syllogistic of the Nyaya school, where, as we saw, a universal proposition can be estab¯ CAREY 61 lished as a major premise by means of a single example, unless the opponent can advance a counter-example. 56 See Sourcebook, 491. 57 Slokavartika, trans. G. Jha, in Sri Garib Das Oriental Series, no. 8, ¯ (India: Sri Satguru Publications), 460. 58 Slokavartika, 416 59 Grimes, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy, 301 and 339. See ¯ ¯ Bruce Perry, “Early Nyaya and Hindu Orthodoxy: Anvi ksiki and ¯ Adhikara,” Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the ¯ Humanities 59 (1997): 455. “Vacaspati [a Naiyayika] thus contends that ¯ ¯ the ultimacy of reasoning consists in the ability to teach someone the validity of the Veda and the nature of the objects of knowledge. That these cannot be conveyed without reasoning is a bold enough claim. That Nyaya actually establishes the validity of the Vedas is extraordinary. The ¯ Vedas, which define orthodoxy, are now dependent on reasoning. It follows that Nyaya is the most fundamental of the orthodox sciences, ¯ since it is the means by which orthodoxy itself is established.” 60 Nyaya-Sutra 1.2.13, Commentary; Sourcebook, 365; cf. Jha, 1:571-72. ¯ 61 Sankhya-karika 2 in Sourcebook, 427; Gerald Larson, Classical ¯ ¯ ¯ Sankhya, 2d rev. ed. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979), 256. Compare ¯ ¯¯ Bhagavad Gi ta 2.46 and 2.52. 62 Not insignificantly, “the unmanifest” according to Sankhya is nature. ¯ The products of evolving nature, among them the particulars that lie before our eyes, are “the manifest.” The relationship between the unmanifest process of production and the manifest products is comparable to the relationship between natura naturans and natura naturata, respectively, in the philosophy of Spinoza. The complexity of Sankara’s account of ¯svara is treated by Paul i Hacker in “Distinctive Features of the Doctrine and Terminology of Sankara,” in Philology and Confrontation, ed. W Halbfass (Albany: SUNY . Press, 1995), 90-91: “What characterizes God as creator of the universe and Lord of the universe…is ‘dependent on restriction through illusory upadhis [deceits, or adventitious connections, i.e., the conditions of ¯ maya].’ It is possible to conceive of God as creator and Lord of the ¯ ¯ universe only in the context of mundane existence….” And yet, “[t]he term ¯svara can be replaced for brahman everywhere….With ¯svara…is i i seldom [sic!] connected the notion that there is something illusory about it.” Not surprisingly, Sankara has sometimes been accused of an unaccountable “illogicality” in his account of ¯svara, in spite of an i abundance of evidence attesting to the fact that his logical acumen was extraordinary. 63 �62 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 64 Vakyabhasya on the Kena Upanisad, cited in P Hacker “Relations of ¯ ¯ . Early Advaitins to Vaisnavism” in Philology and Confrontation, 38. The word translated as “sovereignty” here is svarajyam. Compare Chandogya ¯¯ ¯ Upanisad, 7.25.2, where it is said of anyone who recognizes the omnipresence of the ¯tman (self), “he becomes sovereign” (sas svarat a ¯ ¯¯ bhavati). Whereas Gambhi rananda (564) translates svarat as “sovereign,” ¯ Hume (261) translates it as “autonomous,” which is somewhat more accurate. The components of this word, in stem form, are sva and raj— ¯ literally, “own king.” It is worth noting here that Sankara explicitly calls attention to a significant privilege of the ¯tman: its logically indubitable a existence. See Sarvepalli Radharkrishnan, Indian Philosophy, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, Centenary Edition, 1989), 2:476. 65 Perry, 466, n. 16. 66 Arthasastra, 1.2.5. See the gloss of the Malayalam commentary (Cb): ¯ “[Vedic lore] only serves the purpose of preventing people from calling [one conversant with the ways of the world] a nastika [one who does not ¯ accept the authority of the Veda].”(Arthasastra, 2:6). ¯ 67 Arthasastra, 1.2.11. ¯ 68 Compare The Decisive Treatise, Determining What the Connection is between Religion and Philosophy, in which Averroes similarly shows how the interpretation of the Qur’an can be carried out in a way that is ¯ compatible with the aims of philosophy. 69 It goes without saying that reason was not universally accorded such authority and autonomy in ancient India. Perry, (450, 465), cites the following colorful passage from the Mahabharata 12.173.47-49: “I was a ¯ ¯ savant (panditaka), a logician, a despiser of the Veda, devoted to worthless analytics, the science of reasoning (or logic, tarkavidyam), an utterer of logical doctrines, a speaker with reasons in assemblies, both a reviler and haughty in speech against the twice-born concerning Vedic rituals, heterodox (nastika), and a doubter of everything, a fool and a ¯ self-styled learned man: the full fruition of which is this—my being a jackal, oh twice-born one.” It stands to reason that this text and others that Perry also cites would have made sense only if certain individuals, perhaps even whole schools, were well known to be living this questionable life of autonomous inquiry. Compare Manu 12.95. 70 Consider, in this connection, the following passage from Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing: “Of the superstitious ‘books of the astrologers,’ the [Jewish] scholar mentions one by name, The Nabatean Agriculture, to which he seems to ascribe Hindu origin; and of the Hindus he says in that context that they are a people who deny Divine revelation (the existence of a ‘book from God’)” (123). “[T]he possibility is by no means excluded that the originators of some of the superstitious practices CAREY 63 or beliefs, and hence perhaps the authors of some of the superstitious codes, were themselves philosophers addressing the multitude….[The Sabeans] believed in the eternity of the world, i.e., they agreed with the philosophers over and against the adherents of revelation as regards the crucial question” (124). “It is perhaps not absurd to wonder whether books such as The Nabatean Agriculture were written, not by simpleminded adherents of superstitious creeds and practices, but by adherents of the philosophers” (125). “Avicenna’s esoteric teaching was expounded in his Oriental Philosophy, and he is said to have called that teaching ‘oriental’ because it is identical with the view of the people of the orient” (126 and n. 98). Strauss refers his readers to studies on these themes by others, but to my knowledge, he does not undertake a further exploration of the possibility of an Indian philosophy, properly so called, in his own published works. See, however, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 7. 71 It has been suggested that passages in Vaisesika texts that refer to “liberation” might be later accretions, perhaps added in response to accusations of heterodoxy. Cf. Halbfass, India and Europe, 271. 72 That the non-dualism of Advaita-Vedanta is truly theistic was ¯ challenged by later Vedantists, who abandon strict monism in favor of some form of dualism that allows for an ultimate and not merely aspectual distinction between the human self and brahman. 73 “An important consequence of accepting the Vedas as valid is that the whole orthodox social order (varnasrama), which derives from the Veda, ¯ has to be accepted as valid as well” Perry, 465. 74 Arthasastra, 2.9. The classic if extreme expression of the necessity of ¯ staying within the confines of the caste to which one has been assigned by karma accumulated in a previous life is the following: Better one’s own dharma defective (that is, defectively performed viguna) Than another’s dharma well performed; Doing the action (karma) prescribed by one’s own nature (svabhava) ¯ One does not incur guilt. ¯¯ Bhagavad Gi ta 18.47; 3.35 and Manu 10.97. Compare Socrates’ use of the phrase “to tou hautou prattein” at Republic 433a ff.; see also 434c1. 75 Not surprisingly, neither the Buddha nor Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, were members of the brahmin caste. However, Brhaspiti, the ¯ legendary founder of Lokayata, appears to have been a brahmin prior to ¯ ¯ his apostasy. All teachers in the orthodox schools were, of course, members of the brahmin caste since the brahmins alone were permitted to ¯ ¯ teach the Veda. 76 Consider the observation of S. Radharkrishnan, “The Brahmins are not ¯ a priesthood pledged to support fixed doctrines, but an intellectual �64 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW aristocracy charged with the moulding of the higher life of the people,” Indian Philosophy, 1.112. Needless to say, this “moulding” can take a variety of forms. For example, “According to all Indian traditions [the emperor Candragupta—fourth century B.C.] was much aided in his conquests by a very able and unscrupulous brahman advisor ¯ called…Kautilya,” A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India, 51. The ruler “is told [by Kautilya] to go the length of having his secret agents disguised as gods, and allowing himself to be seen in their company, in order that his simpler subjects may believe that he mixes with the gods on equal terms” (84). 77 Daya Krishna forcefully asks exactly what is meant by acceptance of the Veda in the so-called orthodox schools, but after persuasively ruling out the inadequate answers usually given to this question, he seems to abandon the question itself. Indian Philosophy; A Counter Perspective (London: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7 ff. 78 “…mit Hülfe einer religiösen Organisation haben [die Brahmanen] sich die Macht, dem Volke seine Könige zu ernennen, während sie sich selber abseits und ausserhalb hielten und fühlten, als die Menschen höherer und überköniglicher Aufgaben” (#61); […with the help of a religious organization the brahmins appropriated the power of naming kings for the ¯ people, while they held themselves, and felt themselves, apart and outside, as men of higher and supra-royal tasks.] Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Kritische Studienausgabe 5, ed.Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 80. 79 Cf. n. 12. 80 It goes without saying that Western admirers of Hinduism are rarely inclined to offer a spirited defense of the caste system. 81 I have in mind Surendranth Dasgupta, Daya Krsihna, Wilhelm Halbfass, Paul Hacker, Natalya Isayeva, Jitendra N. Mohanty, and Dale Riepe, to name just a few. 82 For a possible answer to this question see Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 8- 9. 83 If this is true, it follows that what is most distinctive about the West is not philosophy but the Biblical God. Glossary of Terms Advaita - non-dualism (i.e., monism), a branch of Vedanta ¯ ¯ ¯nvi ksiki - analytics, reasoning a ¯ ¯tman - the self a CAREY 65 brahman - the fundamental reality brahmin (brahmana) - a member of the priestly caste ¯ ¯ dharma - law or duty Isvara - the Lord karma - the effect of one’s actions on the self Kautilya - a political philosopher and author of the Arthasastra ¯ ksatriya - a member of the warrior caste (the king is a member of this caste) Lokayata - a heterodox school—materialism and hedonism ¯ maya - illusion; the world of appearances ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ Mi mamsakas - adherents of Pu rva Mi mamsa ¯ Nagarjuna - A Buddhist philosopher and dialectician ¯ ¯ Nyaya - an orthodox school—logic and epistemology ¯ prakrti- nature purusa - spirit; intellect; person; witness ¯ ¯ ¯ Pu rva-Mi mamsa - an orthodox school—Vedic apologetics ¯ sabda - sound: verbal testimony ¯ sandhi - adjustments for euphony within and between Sanskrit words Sankhya - an orthodox school—fundamental dualism of ¯ nature and spirit Sankara - an Indian Philosopher and proponent of AdvaitaVedanta ¯ smrti - that which is remembered - secondary “revelation” sruti - that which was heard by the sages - primary “revelation” = the Veda su dra - a member of the servant caste ¯ sunya - empty; sunyata - emptiness - the fundamental ¯ ¯ ¯ ontological concept of Buddhism svabhava - own being; nature ¯ svadharma - lit.“own duty” i.e., one’s duties as a member of a given caste Upanisads - speculative treatises appended to the Vedas ¯ ¯ ¯ Uttara-Mi mamsa = Vedanta; an orthodox school—based ¯ chiefly on the Upanisads Vaisesika - an orthodox school—atomism and categorization �66 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW vaisya - a member of the farmer-merchant caste Veda - generic name four the four Vedas and appended treatises Vedanta (lit. “end of the Veda”) - an orthodox school based ¯ on the Upanisads vidya - science; knowledge ¯ Yoga - an orthodox school, paired with Sankhya ¯ Some tips on how to begin pronouncing Sanskrit words Macrons over “a,” “i,” and “u” indicate a lengthening of these vowel; “s” and “s” can both be pronounced as “sh;” and “c” is pronounced approximately as English “ch.” The letter r (note the dot under it) is a vowel, not a consonant (the consonant does not have a dot under it), often pronounced by Westerners as “ri” but closer to “er” uttered quickly and with a hint of a trill. Otherwise, the letters can be pronounced pretty much as written, ignoring the dots under consonants, which signify that they are cerebrals and not dentals. Native speakers of English have difficulty distinguishing between cerebrals and dentals, since the English dental is actually a cross between a genuine dental and a cerebral. I have rendered the nasal, anusvara, prior to labials with an “m,” but ¯ in all other cases with an “n.” Unvoiced non-aspirated consonants are hard to pronounce without hearing them in contrast to unvoiced aspirated consonants. For example, Sanskrit aspirated “ph” is pronounced exactly like English “p”; Sanskrit unaspirated “p” has no English equivalent, that is, no air is expelled when it is pronounced. Voiced aspirated consonants, such as Sanskrit “bh,” are hard to pronounce too. 67 The Forgotten Faculty: The Place of Phronêsis or Practical Sense in Liberal Education (Plutarch and Aristotle) David Levine We think in generalities; we live in details. Airport terminal display Reading maketh a full man, Conference a ready man, And Writing an exact man. Francis Bacon Would a new Plutarch even be possible [today]? Nietzsche1 1. Prologue in Seminar Educations tailored to each person are better than those given in common. Aristotle2 The title of tonight’s talk, The Forgotten Faculty, is ambiguous, deliberately so. One might have anticipated a talk on the role of the teaching faculty in modern higher education, in particular the regrettable subordination of the teaching function to other lesser ends in today’s universities, thereby distorting its proper role. Important though this subject is, this is not my subject tonight. Indeed, it is our good fortune at St. John’s that the faculty is rightly understood to be at the very heart of the college, the David Levine is a tutor and former dean on the Santa Fe campus of St. John’s College. This is the Dean’s Lecture, delivered on August 27, 2004, in Santa Fe. �68 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW ministers and stewards of what we call the Program. We tutors are not content with imparting bare skills and empty generalizations, not satisfied with conveying the results of our own or others’ thinking without requiring that you develop your own capacities for such thoughtfulness. We have learned from Plato’s Meno that lecturing and learning are not correlates like throwing and catching. Thus we don’t lecture at or ‘talk down’ (katagorein) to you. In our view it is the question, ¯ and not some answer, that is the proper instrument of education. We begin each class accordingly. Last night your seminars began with a question. Perhaps at that moment, or perhaps somewhat later in the evening, a member of the seminar, a tutor or fellow student, asked a question or made a remark that “spoke to you,” that is, it seemed “tailor-made” just for your learning, that bore on your perplexity, your state of understanding then and there. In “speaking to you” it spurred you to further reflection. It somehow enabled you to step over your settled or unexamined view and opened up a horizon of possibility hitherto unforeseen. All of a sudden you were engaged as never before; you were propelled forward; you had an investment in jointly finding out where it all led. In short, you were actively engaged in that joint enterprise we call conversation. You were on your way to discovery. The question or remark that prompted all this was not so much leading as opening, not a disguised commentary but an invitation to exploration. It didn’t necessarily provide the missing link of an incomplete thought process but, rather, made you think about how you had been thinking and, in so doing, cleared the way for discovery, or it offered for consideration something that opened a window of unsuspected prospects. Such remarks or questions may have been coincidental, but they may also have been a tailor-made question that artfully and with foresight made for greater thoughtfulness. How is this possible? To help us with this we need to take a bit of a detour with the help of two authors on the program, Aristotle and Plutarch.3 69 LEVINE 2. “Human Beings Like to Talk” They fought their countries battles and conducted their campaigns in their talk. Pyrrhus 1.5314 Aristotle is not an especially funny man. But there is a remark in the Nicomachean Ethics—a book freshmen will spend long hours studying this spring—that makes me smile at least, one that suggests a very wry and penetrating way of looking at the world, in particular at human life and our foibles and pretensions. He observes that human beings like to “talk,” in particular we like to talk about human excellence or virtue (aretê). Indeed, by so “philosophizing,” we think we are being “serious human beings” (spoudaios).5 We all recognize this tendency to speak more loudly with words than with deeds, to posture without actually being effective, to “philosophize” and “pontificate” in the worst senses of those terms (as well as to second guess, to play Monday morning quarterback, to presume to know what one should have done “if I were only there”—in short, to enjoy the barbershop or coffee shop conversation, etc.). There is much in Aristotle’s wry remark, but minimally he is seeking to redirect his reader (“transpose them,” Heidegger), and this in a decisive way, to get us to see that the “truth” of such reflections and discussions—of what has come to be called “ethics”—is not to be found in the talking, and surely not in a “theory,” but can only be in the life lived and the numerous individual deeds out of which a life is made. Human beings like to talk, to be sure, but Aristotle, and we, are interested in much more than just talk. So let us turn tonight to someone who sought to look carefully at “lives,” the writer of Lives of the Illustrious Greeks and Romans, the first century political philosopher Plutarch. In his work we see men of action who are often also thinkers and who are distinguished by their judgment as much as by their actions. They lived their lives one insight at a time—as we all do—yet with such quality that their actions �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 70 are not a staccato series of events, but reflect and have their source in a more developed faculty. These are men who are not content to just talk but to act and live fully, if not also well. 3. Much More than History Antony was so great that he was thought by others worthy of higher things than his own desires. Lives, Comparison of Demetrius and Antony 2.535 There is another reason why we should turn to Plutarch. I was walking out of the bookstore last fall and about to turn into the coffee shop, when I overheard a sophomore say to a friend, somewhat puzzled and maybe even a little exasperated, “Why are we reading Plutarch? It’s only history.” At that point, turning around, I interjected the enthusiastic remark of Rousseau (actually he was quoting Montaigne at the time), and I quote, “Plutarch, he’s my man” (“C’est mon homme que Plutarque”),6 hoping thereby to encourage a reconsideration. I don’t know if it helped that student, but it did spur me to undertake a course of reading this past year from which I tried to answer this question and understand the enthusiasm for Plutarch on the part of so many of our program authors. For these authors—and they number not a few,7 including, in addition to Montaigne and Rousseau, Shakespeare, Montesquieu, most of the founders of our country (Franklin, Madison, Jefferson), Emerson, Nietzsche, Tolstoi, etc.—for them he is not “just history” but much more, a teacher of a higher order.8 Though I read all of Plutarch’s Lives—all 1,451 pages!— I have to admit that it was only a first reading for most of these, and in general this is a new arena of exploration for me. Nevertheless, drawn by the question, I ventured forth. Now here I am before all of you, presenting my first formulations for your consideration (1.27). As in seminar, I trust that I am among friends, friends who help each other to think better, more precisely and deeper, about one another’s first or LEVINE 71 nascent thoughts. Thus this dean’s lecture, my “annual essay” if you will, is indeed an essay, an attempt, a first effort of discovery with all the attendant uncertainty that such a venture always entails—as many of you know well from your own efforts of discovery. Thus your generosity and forbearance will be called upon this evening. In reading Plutarch we are invited to re-enter9 the realm of the city, of the “political” (politikê) in its original meaning: the realm of the probable and the unlikely, of the inadvertent and the deliberate, the unpredictable as well as of “signs and auguries,” of strife (2.42) and harmony, fortune and misfortune, good and bad (2.104) (where “things can be otherwise,” according to Aristotle). We re-enter, in short, the world in which we actually live our lives, “worthy of memory,” Plutarch would say (1.49, 100, 583; 2.61), indeed, worthy of our deepest consideration. Here not everything is easily seen. With some things we need assistance, a magnifying glass if you will, in order for them to be brought to fuller view. Plutarch helps us to experience the contest, travails, and challenges of the soul by portraying it writ large,10 so to speak, in the public arena, on the world stage and on the field of battle.11 Alongside the virtues—moderation, justice, courage, prudence—we experience the encompassing, worldly context in which virtue fights to raise its head and become effective: jealousy, fear, ambition; betrayal, flattery, avarice, cultural decline, and ambition; privilege, shame, superstition, hatred, rivalry, and ambition; avarice, disillusionment, panic, self-interest, and ambition.12 Here we are given an opportunity to reflect on the distinctive features of lives lived, their relative effectiveness, their weighty consequences, and their manifold difficulties. In reading Plutarch we experience the complexity of the attempt to give order to human life in the city with Lycurgus and Numa Pomplius; the precariousness of virtue with Themistocles, Aristides and Marcus Cato; the havoc of tyrannical ambition with Pyrrhus and Lysander; the limited effec- �72 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW tiveness of justice with Lucullus; the disasters consequent upon excessive caution with Nicias and Crassus. We experience also the lamentable loss of prudence with Pompey; the ineffectiveness of absolute principles with Cato the Younger; the transformation of excessive tenderness into its opposite with Alexander; the futility of virtue when undermined by life’s circumstances with Phocion; the unbridled desire for glory with Agis; the suspect powers of eloquence with Demosthenes and Cicero; and, of course, the dominion of passion with Antony. Amidst these abundant and luxurious life stories— “histories” he sometimes calls them—are observations perhaps neither bound nor diminished by time: we are encouraged to reflect on “the ages of man,” the causes of political change, on statesmanship as the “art of the possible,” the political force of character and example (paradeigma), the ambiguity of greatness and the liabilities of success. We are asked to reflect as well on the fate of youthful optimism; the clash of virtue and misfortune, the psychodynamics of human failings; on self-transformation forced by rude experience, the absolutist language of the passions, the self-justifying linguistic universes of the vices; on the pathological strategies of ambition, and the moral intractability of wealth. These, and many more, are indeed “worthy of memory.” Before we proceed, one further remark. In presenting Plutarch’s mature reflections, we are reminded of Aristotle’s concern about young people:13 young people, he says profoundly, are, well, young. And this presents a difficulty. Because young people lack life experience, he says, they do not make good observers and students of “politics,” that is, they do not make good students of their own lives in the city, in the polis. Here Aristotle does not mean to be insulting, only honest. For experience can only be one’s own. It cannot be taught, and surely cannot be borrowed or poured from one person into another. It requires time and judgment. Thus for 73 LEVINE Aristotle, there is no alternative to “growing up,” to overcoming isolating adolescence and becoming a person of experience—“mature.” So it falls to us during our period of personal transformation at the College (beginning this evening) to resolve to overcome this lack, through careful reading (1.201) and greater thoughtfulness, that we might be “strengthened by [such] experiences (1.646),” made better students of our own lives in the polis and better able to navigate its often-bewildering seas. 4. The Liberal Art of Life Writing Everyone has faults; not everyone has virtues. Goethe It is in bagatelles that nature comes to light. Rousseau At various moments throughout his work, Plutarch steps back and reflects on the activity of writing lives. On the first such occasion, what strikes him above all is the benefit to himself of such exercises: It is for the sake of others that I first commenced writing [what he here calls] biographies [he says, yet] I find myself...attaching myself to it for my own [sake]; the [excellences] virtues of these great men serving me as a sort of looking-glass [or mirror] in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life. Indeed it can be compared to nothing but daily living and associating together; we...entertain each successive guest, view their ‘stature and their qualities,’ and select from their actions all that is noblest and worthiest to know. (Timoleon 1.325) �74 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW “What more effective means to one’s [own] improvement [than associating with what is excellent is there]?” he wonders. He then elaborates: My method in the study of history, is...by the familiarity acquired in writing, to habituate my memory to receive and retain images of the best and worthiest of characters. I thus am enabled to free myself from any ignoble, base, or vicious impressions...by the remedy of turning my thoughts....to these noble examples. What is striking about this passage is that for Plutarch this kind of writing is first of all a liberating (and hence a liberal) activity, freeing and enabling him to shape himself as he seeks to give shape to the lives of others. He here draws on two ancient nomic principles:14 (1) we become like those with whom we associate. This he extends to writing and books: we become like that about which we think and like those from whom we choose to learn.15 And its correlate, (2) we are moved to imitate what we admire,16 or what one might call the principle of emulation. “The mere sight of a conspicuous example of excellence,” he says, immediately (euthus) brings one to admiration (thaumazesthai) and therewith brings one to imitate the doer. Indeed for Plutarch there is nothing like the “living example” of human character (1.99).17 The beautiful,18 he says, moves one to action towards it (to kalon eph’hauto praktikos kinei kai praktiken euthus hormen entithesin) (Pericles 1.202; 2.2-3).19 As a result he “thought fit to spend his time and pains” associating with these illustrious Greek and Roman “guests” for the benefit both of himself and us. Let us note, especially for our work here at the college, the many rewards of writing that reach beyond the final product. Writing can be an occasion for self-discovery and self-improvement. It is the process, after all, that is enabling.20 Later he compares writing lives to portrait painting. He says, we first must do “honor” (2.245) to our subject and that LEVINE 75 means, in the case of human beings, to capture “the stature and qualities” of the person and not be content with external likenesses (the mere “face”). Yet there is a question of judgment here. He writes: As we would wish that a painter who is to draw a beautiful face, in which there is yet imperfection, should neither wholly leave out, nor yet too pointedly express what is defective, because this would deform it21...so it is hard, or indeed perhaps impossible, to show the life of a man wholly free from blemish....any lapses or faults that occur, through human passion or political necessity, we may [generously] regard...as the shortcoming of some particular [excellence] virtue, than as a natural effect of vice...[and this] out of a tender[ness] [aidoumenous: respect] to the weakness of nature. (Cimon 1.643-4) Conspicuous in this reflection is a different principle of care from what we are accustomed to. It judiciously abstains from journalistic realism, and above all from that sensationalism by which we are daily overwhelmed by our media. It seeks rather a measured rendering of a whole life, without at the same time ignoring or exaggerating the negative (see 1.699; 2.285, 394). Discretion, in this view, is the better part of realism: discriminating, weighing, focusing, estimating (2.394), selecting (2.445), and finally diagnosing22 (1.699). On yet another occasion he forewarns his readers that he is not—as we might first think and as he himself sometimes says—an historian, “collecting mere useless pieces of learning” (1.699), but rather that he seeks to “epitomize” the lives of his subjects. It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. [For] the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of [excellence and deficiency] virtue �76 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW and vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or [even] a jest informs us better of the character and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles.... Therefore, as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men. (Alexander 2.139)23 So I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men. The outside of a human being reveals the fullness of the inside, more than we might think. Little things, after all, are not any the less significant for their being little or not obvious; they are only harder to discern. It thus falls to us as readers of Plutarch to seek to emulate his perspicacity, to attend to the fullness of being he presents to us. That this might require that we not be unduly taken by the great and the eventful (and “what is done publicly in open day” (1.469)) in favor of the private and the small means that we too must resist our own inherited tendency to look at things from an historical perspective24 (see also 1.698)). Plutarch’s psychographic art, then, entails a different kind of insight, one that sees past the obviousness of “weighty matters” to the telling marks, however small, that bespeak and “epitomize” a soul.25 77 LEVINE 5. “A Subtle Logic of Discrimination” It works in practice but unfortunately not in theory. French Diplomat26 Plutarch relates this story about Caesar: Seeing some wealthy strangers at Rome, carrying...puppy-dogs...embracing and making much of them, [he] took occasion not unnaturally to ask whether women in this country were unused to bearing children.... By th[is] prince-like27 [that is, indirect] reprimand [Caesar] gravely reflect[ed] upon persons who...lavish upon beasts that affection and kindness which nature has implanted in us to be bestowed on those of our own kind. (Pericles 1.201) While we may not particularly like this example—we may ourselves have puppy-dogs—Caesar’s and Plutarch’s intent can be made plain otherwise: human beings do not always attend to what serves them best, indeed what nature would have them do. “With like reason,” Plutarch says, may we blame those who misuse the love of inquiry and observation which nature has implanted in our souls, by expending it on objects unworthy of the attention either of their eyes or their ears, while they disregard such as are excellent in themselves and would do them good. We can misdirect our attention to unworthy objects. We can even misuse our love of inquiry, philosophy. He continues, whereas [T]he mere outward sense, being passive... perhaps cannot help taking notice of everything...be it...useful or unuseful; in the exercise of his mental perception every man...has a �78 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW natural power to turn himself...to what he judges desirable. Therefore it becomes a man’s duty to pursue...the best and choicest of everything, that he may not only employ his contemplation but may also be improved by it.... A man ought [then] to apply his intellectual perception to such objects as...are apt to call it forth and allure it to its own proper good. We see here a suspicion of abstract speculation, of that theorizing that takes us away to the remote reaches of thought—the “clouds,” in Aristophanes’ image—“mere theory,” as we and Plutarch sometimes say (Dion 2.543)— and away from the things that bear most on our own lives. We have control over that to which we apply our “intellectual perception,” yet paradoxically, in Plutarch’s view, we do not always apply ourselves well to what would do us the most good. “We find such objects,” as we have seen, “in the works of excellence (aretês ergois),” he says, “which also produce in the mind [even] of mere readers...an emulation and eagerness that may lead them on to imitation....” (1179b8-11). No less than life experience, reading provides such formative examples. Understandably wary, Plutarch is not condemning philosophy here (as some might: see 1.47628). On the contrary, he seeks rather to focus his philosophic attention, and therewith to redirect ours, back onto its “worthy and proper objects.”29 In being so constrained, philosophy remains no less indispensable to the perfection of human life: How else can one find one’s bearings amidst the turbulence and tides of fortune but through that human insight which enables us, amidst it all, to be thoughtful, farsighted, circumspect, principled, and steady? This he brings us to see repeatedly (for example, 1.329, 336). Thus as we read Plutarch’s accounts, the reader is brought to a new manner and degree of acuity, to a new sensitivity to the rich complexity of human things, ordinary and extraor- LEVINE 79 dinary. Each life is different. Each figure vigorously seeks to make a life of distinction out of circumstances that are, well, never quite “tailor-made,” but rather challenging, threatening, and over the course of a career, hard to sustain. Each “story” is treated, not abstractly, but with the attention to detail that brings forth what is original and properly its own. The active judgment and skills necessary to live such lives of distinction—and write about them—is itself exemplary. The higher degree of acuity aspired to is revealed in a reflection on two of his subjects: Phocion and [Cato] may be well compared together...for assuredly there is difference enough among virtues of the same denomination, as between the bravery of Alcibiades and that of Epaminondas, the prudence of Themistocles and that of Aristides, the justice of Numa and that of Agesilaus.... The mixture both of lenity on the one hand, with austerity on the other; their boldness on some occasions, and caution on others; their extreme solicitude for the public [etc...] so that we should need a very nice and subtle logic of discrimination to detect and establish the distinctions between them. (Phocion 2.247) Plutarch’s Lives are such gold mines of subtle distinctions. They actively attempt to flesh out the overly broad categories of abstract “theories of ethics” and, to be sure, that of the natural generality of language.30 Plutarch paints his characterological studies with a subtlety of observation known to us from playwrights and novelists, embedding each in their life circumstances, rich in variables and innumerable vectors. In this regard the Lives needs to be seen as a necessary complement31 to our tradition of theoretical accounts of “ethics,” allowing us to consider the fate of the effort of virtue in the world, to consider the formative importance of circumstance, the variety of courses of development, and the real consequences of personal decisions, however large or �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 80 small. He was concerned that this was what the liberal arts did not teach often enough (2.440). Moreover, in Plutarch’s own artful approach to writing we have seen a different sort of touch, one that is properly self-interested, discreet, measured, judicious, and self-reflective. All this brought me to wonder whether there wasn’t a different “sensibility” made evident here or more precisely, I would venture, even a different faculty of discernment at work. It is not just that we have here a different line of sight. Rather, there seems to be brought to light another rational excellence, one that has its distinction in revealing the richness of the particular as opposed to the breadth of generality, that allows us to focus on the life lived as opposed to the one that is, as we have come to say somewhat emptily, “ideal.” 6. Phronêsis It is not possible to understand phronêsis and sophia under the guiding line of the Kantian distinction between practical and theoretical reason. Heidegger32 We are thus presented with a paradox of sorts: we are asked to consider a mode of thoughtfulness that is not speculative (1141b1), yet is deeply rational, that is not as “profound” as theoretical wisdom (1141a21; Lives, 2.181), perhaps, yet is more important for human life (1140b30). Aristotle may be of help in considering this paradox. In the middle of his account of the shaping of human character—Chapter 6 of The Nicomachean Ethics—we find an extended reflection on our possibilities for thoughtfulness. He looks first at the various objects available and concludes that there is not just one faculty, not one “reason,” but multiple modes of truth, artful know-how, deductive knowledge or science, and wisdom among them. In addition he introduces us to another active condition (hexis)33 that LEVINE 81 may be unfamiliar to us, however one that proves to be distinctively human: phronêsis.34 Let us step back. Aristotle does not think as we do.35 We see this, for example, in his very different understanding of “choice,” a concept especially important to us today. Choice, according to Aristotle, is not just some “personal preference” we willingly stick with. In his view “...without intellect and thinking [and] without an active condition of character (1139a33-4; also 1145a4f),” choice is nothing but blind selfinsistence. Moreover, we tend to focus on choice in the abstract, either on the intention or on the outcome by itself. But for Aristotle choice is part of an integrated event “since [with] action there is no such thing as doing well or the opposite without thinking or [without] character.” We will see in a bit why this must be so. He begins his exploration of this special capacity by asking us first to consider what sorts of people we say have “good sense.” Preserved in our languages is a recognition of a unique mode of insight evident in persons whose perspective on human things, on people and circumstances, is particularly sound. A person of “singular judgment,” we might say: a wise grandfather, a seasoned friend, a native truth teller, a parent—in short, people who have taken their long experience and made it bear on their and others’ lives. He puts it this way: they are people who are “able to deliberate beautifully about things that are good and advantageous for [themselves]” (1140a23-4), those also who know what is “conducive to living well as a whole.” We look to people who are not necessarily concerned to know things “in general” but rather to those whose life experience has been brought to bear on their own lives, and equally, those who are not shortsighted but seek to see how each particular event and act might contribute to one’s overall good. This focus on the particularity of events and actions brings Aristotle to point out the obvious yet for us surprising conclusion, namely, that “there is no [necessary] demonstration of these things, since all of them are capable of being �82 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW otherwise” (1140a31-4).36 Nevertheless, despite being indemonstrable, Aristotle is emphatic that these things are not therefore untrue. That they are not matters of theoretical knowledge does not invalidate them—does not make them, as we might say, matters of “mere opinion,” and surely not “merely relative.” (Their truth therefore is not to be dismissed as merely mundane, merely demotic, or merely ontic.37) Our question becomes, if not knowledge per se, what faculty is at work discerning what is to be done? Here Aristotle introduces phronêsis, a faculty difficult to translate, rendered variously as practical sense, practical judgment, practical intellect, particular reason (Thomas), circumspection (Heidegger), prudence, and indeed sometimes practical wisdom. “[Practical sense] is a truthdisclosing active condition (hexis alêthê meta logou pratikê) involving reason that governs actions, concerned with what is good and bad for human beings” (1140b3, also b20).38 This will take some explaining. Phronêsis, or practical sense, differs from those other faculties that have to do with “what is everlasting” in that it is of “the part of the soul concerned with opinions,” that is with the world of change we live in, the world Plutarch invited us to consider seriously. Though concerned with opinion, it is not some mere “idea” that Aristotle is looking at but something “far more deeply interfused” (Wordsworth). He brings us to see this by observing that such a developed capacity is not something one can “forget.”39 While we might forget one of the zillion Greek forms or a proposition in Euclid—not a good idea—we are speaking of a different kind of thing, a state of being of the soul, a developed state of readiness, of incipient action. And like riding a horse or mastering a craft, he points out that, while it can be perfected, once possessed we can’t “lose” it.40 We always thereafter somehow have it.41 This points to a deeper mode of having. Indeed, we even think we see such a deeper source in other animals. Concerning other species, Aristotle observes LEVINE 83 “that that which discerns well the things that concern itself is possessed of [a kind of] ‘practical sense’” (1140a25). Animals are said to have such a sense of what is best for them. We mean thereby that they have a “capacity for foresight about their own lives,” that is, they act in such a way that they do not justly blindly react to some present stimulus but in a way that secures their overall good. By way of contrast, Aristotle gives the embarrassing human example of the early Greek philosophers Thales and Anaxagoras, whom people unfortunately said were “wise but not possessed of practical sense” (1141b3f.). He here highlights the paradox of the overly theoretical man, who knows divine things, perhaps, but not his own good. In so doing Aristotle puts the man of practical sense into further relief: “one who is a good deliberator simply is one who, by his reasoning, is apt to hit upon what is best for a human being among actions” (1141b12-3), he says; such a person responds not to the demands of a syllogism but to that of circumstance, and their reasoning ends, not in some abstract proposition, but with action. (Phronêsis “lives in action” [Heidegger].) Plainly this entails a different kind of reasoning, one that “is not only about what is universal but [also] needs to discern the particulars [in their difference] as well...since action is [finally] concerned with particulars” (1141b15).42 Practical sense is thus that unique faculty that is able to integrate particulars—this, that, and the other this and that— into a larger view that leads to action.43 Again contrasting the theoretical man, Aristotle points out that “those who have experience are more adept at action than those with knowledge [alone]” (1141b17). That’s why we admire our grandfather or friend; because they have done things that show that they have learned the lessons of life and can turn them to account to what one should do next. Experience with particulars, Aristotle emphasizes here, is the more valuable in this regard.44 �84 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Indeed, it is this same capacity to deal with particulars, he notes, that is also at work on the world stage—brought so vividly to view in Plutarch—as in our own efforts to live well. “The political art is the same active condition as practical sense” (1141b22f). The ability requisite to craft a specific political decree—not a general law but a specific mandate— must have in view “an action to be performed as an ultimate particular thing” (cp. 1137b11-32). So just as the artisan crafting a chair, just as our own efforts to do the right thing in given circumstances, the lawmaker is not well served by generalities alone but must think the circumstances through to a specific recommendation. This too, according to Aristotle, is a species of knowledge. But of what sort? Aristotle sees a kind of middle between art and wisdom. While “it is clear that practical sense is not knowledge [in the sense of science], for it is directed to an ultimate particular” (1142a22), Aristotle is emphatic that “knowing what pertains to oneself [and knowing what one should do in a particular circumstance] is [yet] a species of knowledge” (1141b33). But how? At this point Aristotle notes something of interest. Practical sense, he observes, would seem to focus on ...the opposite extreme from the intellect [nous], for intellect is directed at ultimate terms of which there is no articulation, while practical sense is directed at the ultimate particular of which there is no knowledge [technically speaking] but only [simple] perception [aisthêsis]—not the perception of the separate senses, but the sort of [“intellectual perception” (Lives, 1.201)] by which we perceive that the ultimate figure in mathematics is a triangle. (1142a22-30)45 Surprisingly, the example that Aristotle gives to highlight the particular mode of insight that is practical sense comes from geometry. We “see” that the smallest figure into which a rectilinear plane figure can be divided is a triangle. We see it. 85 LEVINE He thus asks us to consider another mode of access to things in their completeness as wholes that he also calls “perception,” though of particulars that are sensible only to the mind’s “eye,” an intellectual perception, if you will.46 7. “An Eye Sharpened by Experience” The manner of forming one’s ideas is what gives character to the human mind. Rousseau47 Before we proceed, let us step back for a moment and look at the requirements of responsible action. In the earlier chapters, Aristotle was at pains to point out that to act well requires a great deal of thought and experience. It requires that we somehow have a world of things in mind all at once, as the rightness of any action “results from what is beneficial in the end for which, the means by which, and the time in which it ought to occur” (1142b28).48 Action is through and through specific and circumstantial, responsive to the many vectors that need to be factored into consideration in order for some appropriate good to be accomplished. Thus our question: what kind of thinking can integrate such particularity in its particularity? Other than a name, we may still be hard pressed to see what it precisely is, to identify it in its own right. Aristotle thus turns to other like-seeming faculties to contrast and therewith to delimit it. For example, one might think that what we are talking about is someone who is skilled at thinking things through (angchinoia; 1142b14f). While there is some overlap here, Aristotle at this point says something by way of contrast that, if not shocking, may at first make no sense to us as a reply. He says: “someone who lacks self-restraint or someone of bad character will...deliberate badly.” He does so first that we might see that we are not looking just for some “mental agility.” Rather, we seek a deeper, more responsive source. Surprising though it may be, one’s thinking, he suggests here, is deeply dependent on one’s character. He therewith challenges us to make a �86 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW connection between things where today we see no connection. Might we mean by “practical sense” a kind of astuteness of judgment (sunesis or sagacity), then? Yet “practical sense is something that [also] imposes obligations, since the end that belongs to it is what one ought or ought not to do” (1143a710). And astuteness is satisfied to identify distinctions (“mere theory,” Lives, 2.543). Perhaps then we mean another form of thoughtfulness: “the right discrimination of what is decent,” considerateness (sungnôme), if you will? All these various examples—skilled thinking, astuteness, considerateness, practical sense—converge for Aristotle to the same meaning: “All these capacities are directed at things that are ultimate [as well as] particular.... All actions are among the things that are particular and universal” (a27-30),49 and this requires a different and separate faculty to apprehend (1139a9-11). This brings Aristotle back to his earlier observation about the similarity of theoretical intellect and practical sense. He now sees that it is the same fundamental activity, though differently directed, that is at work in both universal and particular knowledge. For Aristotle, thought, whether theoretical or practical, is always rooted in specific experiences and it is intellect, we now learn, that allows us to apprehend these specific beginnings. “Intellect [nous],” he observes, “is directed to what is ultimate on both sides, since it is intellect and not reason [or speech, ou logou] that is directed at both the first terms and the ultimate particulars” (1143b1-6).50 On the one side, intellect discerns the ultimate, first terms of logical demonstration. And on the other, the very same faculty, in thinking about action, sees the other sort of “premise,” the ultimate, if contingent, particular. “Of these [particulars],” he says, “one must have a perception and this [ultimate] perception [aisthêsis] is intellect.” But by “intellect,” we now learn, Aristotle means even more than the apprehension of these beginnings. He asks how the several perfections he’s considered become useful to us. It is not through theoretical wisdom (sophia) that they LEVINE 87 become so. Indeed, truth be told, “Wisdom contemplates nothing by which a human being will be happy” (1143b19). Rather it is this other faculty phronêsis that “is concerned with things that are just and beautiful and good for a human being [;] these are the things that it belongs to a good man to do, and we are not more able to perform these actions [merely] by knowing about them” (b21f). At this point we may still be having difficulty seeing that practical sense is more than a latent potential (a “capacity”). Rather, we have to understand it as an active condition, a fullness of thought that seeks to actively integrate circumstance and experience in a complex calculus issuing in an action. And for Aristotle knowing does not get us to such a developed and active readiness of soul. It is rather practical sense, phronêsis, that allows us to so engage the world (1139b1-7). Seeing the soul as an integrated whole (and not made up of disparate parts, distinguishable though they may be), Aristotle now returns to his earlier perplexing insight that the character of our minds is dependent on the character of our characters. “The work [ergon] of a human being,” he says, “is accomplished as a result of practical sense and of excellence [virtue] of character” (1144a5f), for “the starting point [of thoughtful action]...does not show itself except to a good person.” This, Aristotle observes, is plain from its opposite: vice warps our perspective and makes it difficult for us to see what is good. Thus he concludes it is the “eye sharpened by experience” (1143b9) that sees what is beautiful as an end or highest good of action and gains its active state only with virtue (1144a31-2; Sachs paraphrase).51 Good judgment about the right action issues only from a person of like quality. (Good sense here reclaims its double meaning.) To be effective, excellence requires even more than the having of goodness. It requires an activating intelligence (nous), Aristotle says, the kind of intelligence that “carries over into action,” or what he calls “virtue in the governing sense” (1144b12f).52 And it is precisely this that “practical” �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 88 sense makes possible53 (b17: “does not come without practical sense”54). Phronêsis is thus not just one among the several human excellences: “all the excellences will be present [only] when one excellence, practical sense, is present.” Here we see that phronêsis is the enabling excellence.55 Moreover, at the very beginning of his book, Aristotle emphasized that we must first discover what is the principal activity or work, unique to a being, for it is the perfection of this “work” that leads to its fulfillment or happiness. We here learn that it is practical sense that is the prerequisite to that fulfillment, our fulfillment.56 This conclusion is striking both for what is said and who says it: Aristotle, the man who for the tradition represents the speculative philosopher par excellence. Yet it is Aristotle here who urges us to develop “that other intellectual excellence,” as the virtue that will enable us to think well and that is the one most important for “our own proper good” and for our lives together in the city. 8. The Looking Glass He did not know how to govern free men. Lysander 1.594 It is a hard thing to give laws to the Cyrenians, abounding [as they do] in wealth and plenty. Lucullus 1.661 Such a view of the centrality of phronêsis is shared by Plutarch. Indeed here we see why the reading of Plutarch is so valuable. Many things in his work are “worthy of memory,” but unlike abstract treatments, the Lives display pre-eminently the interplay and indeed the consequences of character and practical sense in the world of circumstance. We are brought back to our place in the city, re-concretized in our thinking, our thoughts firmly founded on the rich soil of unmediated experience.57 This Plutarch understood to be 89 LEVINE the proper role of “history” and “biography” in liberal education. But not only “in theory.” Just as he discovered for himself, it is Plutarch’s profound hope that his readers would find in the “looking glass” of his texts experiences wherein their own capacities for “subtle discriminations” might be developed and their practical sense honed. He hoped as well that we would find therein people from whom we might “gain experience,” both of what to avoid—and there are plenty of lessons there to be found—and of those rare individuals whose excellences might inspire us to emulation. Thus for those wondering, “Why are we reading Plutarch? It’s only history,” we would propose this as the beginning of a reply. So we ask you to reopen the book on “that other intellectual excellence,” phronêsis or practical sense, and reclaim its priority for our lives. Minimally, by so doing we would become more attentive to the complexity of human things and the richness of the world before us; maximally we would develop our fine judgment and perhaps begin to live up to that with which we choose to associate ourselves (2.445). So we ask you as well to emulate Plutarch—not just by being “strengthened by the experience” (1.201, 646) of reading him—but also by ourselves taking up the “looking glass” of writing as a medium of self-discovery wherein we may shape ourselves as we seek to discover the shape of things. 9. Postscript in Seminar: The Faculty of the Faculty Good judgment goes with the way each one is educated. Aristotle58 Lastly, let us return to where we began: seminar. By a somewhat long and oblique route, we have been exploring a faculty of knowledge, distinctive to human beings, that �90 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW focuses on the confluence of the general and the specific. At the outset we spoke about an ability that good tutors and students possess that enables them to so craft their questions or remarks that they are not only generally apt but are tailormade thoughts aiding learners in their personal struggles to find their way through the confusions of a developing conversation. That is, our prompting questions or nudging remarks might be “just right” both for the larger context—the seminar conversation as a whole—and for you, the learner with your particular degree of readiness and openness to possibilities. Such just-right questioning presupposes a knowledge both of the particular and the general; it requires that capacity, I would submit, that Aristotle identifies as “practical sense.” Thus we see that speaking is not the same as thinking. It is more complex. When we speak, we not only think about something but also speak to someone. Speaking is thus biintentional (or bi-prepositional, if you will). And it is this additional to-ness that is required for a conversation to be successful, for genuine communication to take place. This toness seems also to require an additional sense, that sense of aptness, that practical sense that enables one to speak to someone in their particularity, “where they are,” not to mention at the right time, in the right way, etc, or all the qualifiers that, for Aristotle, distinguishes practical sense. Indeed, this is the distinctive excellence of a teaching faculty59 (as opposed to a research faculty): to hear where a particular learner is “coming from” and design our response “to order” that our question or comment might help them as they seek to find their way to discovery. In the midst of perplexity, what we want and need as learners is not a lecture or a theory but helpful, specific, “practical” guidance. (Phronêsis is not unique to the faculty, though perhaps it is more developed there.) Thus we do our students and one another a disservice when we do not offer an opening question but give a closed answer; we fail as a faculty when we fall back into being professors, and you fail as students LEVINE 91 when you fall back into being passive scribes. As we learn from Plato’s Meno, answers and abstracted, deracinated, blind thoughts do not help us to find our way to Larissa. Such tailor-made teaching (10.9, 1180b8-9) can only happen in a place small enough for genuine conversation, where faculty are present to their students and not lost in their own thoughts, where we are all attentive to the learning trajectories of one another, and where—and this is equally important—students likewise are insistent that they must find their own way to discovery. So we ask you to make such a place a reality, to seek to question well, to make your efforts of inquiry such that they further both your own learning and that of your fellow learners. And may we continue to say: Good question! 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in Hard Times, #71 in Philosophy and Truth, ed. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 117. 2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Publishing, 2002), 10.9.1180b8-9. All references to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—hereafter NE—are from this translation. 3 All references are from Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Dryden (1683) and rev. Arthur Clough (1864), 2 vols. (New York: Modern Library, 2001), hereafter Lives. 4 See also Demosthenes 2.396: They were “...better able to recommend than to imitate virtues of the past.” 5 NE, 2.4.1105b11-13: see also 1112a10; 6.10.143a1-20, 1179b5. 6 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 240. 7 Montesquieu: “What Histories can be found...that please and instruct like the Lives of Plutarch? ... I am of the Opinion with that Author, who said, that if he was constrained to fling all the Books of the Ancients into the Sea, Plutarch should be the last drowned.” And Emerson: “A bible for heroes.” For an even longer list of those influenced by Plutarch, see Roger Kimball, “Plutarch and the Issue of Character,” Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 18-21. �92 8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW A question we should ask of all the authors on the program. 9 “Re-enter” because we live in more than one world, we moderns, with our abstract thoughts overriding and prisming our experience. 10 Compare Plato, Republic, Book 2, where we are asked to see the city as the magnified image of the soul. 11 “The Greeks invented the art of biography as an exercise in moral philosophy. The lives of “pre-eminent” statesmen and generals were to serve as ethical exemplars—both good and bad—for the rest of us, subject as we are to the same all-too-human appetites and temptations. Thus the early years of an Alcibiades, an Alexander, or a Cicero were mined by Plutarch for anecdotes that might reveal an unchanging and essential character; its elements becoming more manifest during the crucible of adulthood and thereby accounting for the subject’s ultimate achievement” (Victor Davis Hanson, Commentary, vol. 116, no. 5 (December 2003): 53-4. 12 “Beware of ambition, as of all the higher powers, the most destructive and pernicious” (1.609). “For men whose ambition neither seas, nor mountains, nor unpeopled deserts can limit, nor the bounds dividing Europe and Asia confine their vast desires, it would be hard to expect to forbear from injuring another ...when they close together. They are ever naturally at war, envying and seeking advantages of one another, and merely make use of those two words, peace and war, like current coin, to serve their occasions, not as justice, but as expediency suggests...” (Lives, Pyrrhus 1.527). Also, “...the innate disease of princes....” (1.523) 13 NE 1.3.1095a1-10: “Therefore good judgment goes along with the way each one is educated.... For this reason, it is not appropriate for young people to be students of politics, since the young are inexperienced in the actions of life.... And since the young are apt to follow their impulses, they would hear such discourses without purpose or benefit.... And it makes no difference whether one is young in age or immature in character, for the deficiency doesn’t come from the time, but the living in accord with feeling and following every impulse.” Also 6.8.1142a12-20: “A sign of what is being said is why young people become skilled geometricians and mathematicians, and wise in respect to such things, but they do not seem to become possessed of practical judgment, and the reason is that practical judgment has to do with particulars, which become known by experience, but the young are not experienced, since it is length of time that produces experiences.” See also 6.9.1143b 10-15, and Lives, Lucullus, 1.661. 14 Plato, Republic, Books 2-3. LEVINE 93 15 As we recognize in proposing a “great books program” for one another’s improvement. 16 “For the mere sight itself of a shining and conspicuous example of virtue in the life of their prince will bring them spontaneously to virtue, and to a conformity with that blameless and blessed life of good-will and mutual concord, supported by temperance and justice, which is the highest benefit that human means can confer; and he is the truest ruler who can best introduce it into the hearts and practice of his subjects” (Lives, Numa Pompilius, 1.99). In this respect, there is little one can say that can approximate the radiance of the paradeigma or example: “Now there’s a man!” Indeed it may not be something that lends itself to logos, “to argument and proof ” (cp. 1.420). Plutarch thereby helps us to restore our attention to what is imposingly present even in our small worlds. Martin Heidegger in Plato’s Sophist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), renders paradeigma as “striking example”: “they show the universal through the obviousness of some particular case, through a definite example. This is the way to produce conviction in others. This is the way of epagogê (Posterior Analytics, 71a8).” “To elucidate what is familiar already at the outset is rather a matter of epagogê, the mode of clarification proper to straightforward perception. Epagogê is clearly the beginning, i.e. that which discloses the archê [the source]; it is the more original, not epistêmê” (25). How to articulate what is revealed thereby remains a question for us: do “striking examples” show the universal through the particular or the fullness of the particular? See also Emmanuel Levinas, “Without Identity,” Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2003), 61. 17 Aristotle too urges us to take our bearings by those who are serious (spoudaios, paradeigma). They provide a standard or reference (not just an illustration or instance) by which to act, from our direct experience of their influence and from our reading of their deeds. 18 To kalon: the beautiful; see NE 3.6.1115b12-13: “…for the sake of the beautiful, since this is the end that belongs to virtue.” See Sachs, NE, p. 49, n. 61. “Measure, proportion and harmony are in the nature of things and we have a direct responsiveness to them that orients us in the world” and “Measure, Moderation and the Mean,” The St. John’s Review, vol. 46, no. 2 (2002): 9. 19 “The supreme arts of temperance, of justice and wisdom, as they are acts of judgment and selection, exercised not on good and just and expedient only, but also on wicked, unjust, and inexpedient objects, do not give their commendations to the mere innocence whose boast is its inexperience of evil, and whose truer name is...simpleness and ignorance of what all men who live aright should know.... The ancient Spartans, at �94 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW their festivals, used to force their Helots to swallow large quantities of raw wine, and then expose them at the public tables, to let the young men see what it is to be drunk. And though I do not think it consistent with humanity or with civil justice to correct one man...by corrupting another, yet we may, I think, avail ourselves of the cases of those who have fallen into indiscretions, and have, in high stations, made themselves conspicuous for misconduct.... In the same manner, it seems to me likely enough that we shall be all the more zealous and more emulous to read, observe and imitate the better lives, if we are not left in ignorance of the blameworthy and the bad” (Lives, Demetrius 2.445). As we become what we do, so we live out what we have become: “...their fortunes carried out the resemblance of their characters” (2.446). 20 95 Physiognomy does not reveal itself in large features, nor character in great actions. It is in bagatelles [trifles] that nature comes to light. The public things are either too uniform or too artificial; and it is almost solely on these [public things] that modern dignity permits our authors to dwell” (Rousseau, Emile, 240-1). 26 From a Cartesian perspective, this may be taken as an expression of regret; though in this context it is intended as a conundrum of our onesidedly abstract orientation. (Related to me by Roger Kimball.) 27 The obliqueness of prince-like discretion. 28 See Plato, Apology of Socrates. 29 Levine, ‘I Hate Books,’ or Making Room for Learning, 3. 21 Cp. the pimple on the nose of the Miller (Chaucer, Prologue, Canterbury Tales). 22 In Plutarch, medicine is frequently the metaphor of the diagnostic political art—knowledge of “the causes of disorders in the body politic” (1.609): see 1.215; 2.125, 286, 336, 560, 565, 699. 23 “Marks and indications of the soul,” see 1.337, 469, 479; 2.61, 285, 294, 324, 374, 596. Also see Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.10.1-8. 24 Nor is he thus a “biographer.” Though he uses both terms, biography and history, Plutarch is at pains to show that his is of a very specific sort, unlike what we have become accustomed to expect. The history of these terms would be interesting to explore. 25 LEVINE Here we see the origin of Montaigne’s and Rousseau’s admiration for Plutarch. “Those who write lives,” says Montaigne, “are more suited to me to the extent that they are interested in intentions more than in results, in what takes place within than in what happens without. That is why Plutarch is my man” (see n. 6). “Plutarch excels in these very details into which we no longer dare to enter. He has an inimitable grace at depicting great men in small things; and he is so felicitous in the choice of his stories that often a word, a smile, a gesture is enough for him to characterize his hero. With a joking phrase Hannibal reassures his terrified army and makes it march laughing to the battle which won Italy for him. Agesilaus astride a stick makes me love the Great King’s conqueror. Caesar passing through a poor village and chatting with his friends betrays, unthinkingly, the deceiver who said he wanted only to be Pompey’s equal. Alexander swallows medicine and does not say a single word; it is the most beautiful moment of his life. Aristides writes his own name on a shell and thus justifies his surname. Philopoemen, with his cloak off, cuts wood in his host’s kitchen. This is the true art of painting. In this respect, Plutarch is seeking to reinitiate the Socratic turn back to the city, though with a specifically ethical intent (see Plato, Phaedo). It is thus not only modern thought that tends to the excessively theoretical or abstract. In line with this, he does not read Plato as an “idealist” (see Dion 2.543-550), but reads the dialogues as embedded in the world (a cave though it might be) leading thereby to action. As we see as well, he is not unaware of the precariousness of such an undertaking by philosophy even here. 30 Consider the problem of equity at NE 5.10.1137b11-32. 31 Just as the modern novel complements the abstractness of modern philosophy. 32 “Phronêsis is not a speculation about archê and the telos of action as such; it is not a [theoretical] ethics, not a science, not a hexis meta logou monon [an active condition according to reason alone] (6.5 1140b28),” Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 40-2. 33 Hexis is variously translated as habit, disposition, active condition. We miss what is essential therein if we fail to see it as a developed, if incipient, mode of activity, an “active having” (Sachs). It is not just a propensity, predisposition, orientation, or even mere capacity or potential, but an active state of readiness that manifests itself when circumstances require, an immanent responsiveness, if you will. “Intelligence carries over into action,” Aristotle will say later. Consider the sense of fullness and vitality that comes with growth and discovery, an inner resourcefulness ready to emerge. 34 What is notable about Aristotle’s classification of the faculties of the soul is his singling out of a capacity that we today don’t even admit as a human capacity. It is here claimed to be different in kind from our general intelligence. Indeed the largest part of Book 6 is dedicated to the introduction and disclosure of phronêsis. See note 53. �96 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 35 Aristotle presents a different view of the development of character (“ethics”). His is not a backward looking ethic, a genetic psychology where one is defined by one’s first beginnings. Human motivation is not limited to hidden or subconscious sources. Rather, Aristotle’s view is forward-looking, a growth psychology, an end directed and open to new possibilities. The future is defining, and not just the past. Character formation thus supersedes developmental histories, maturity supersedes “coping mechanisms.” 36 Cp. NE 1.3.1094b22-24: “…it belongs to an educated person to look for just so much precision in each kind of discourse as the nature of the thing one is concerned with admits; for to demand demonstrations from a rhetorician seems about like accepting probable conclusions from a mathematician.” 37 “Phronêsis is a hexis of alêtheuein [truth disclosing active condition], a disposition of human Dasein such that in it I have at my disposal my own transparency. For its themes are the anthopina agatha [human goods]. And it is a hexis of alêtheuein which is pracktike, which lives in action” (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 37). Also “Phronêsis dwells in praxis still more than in logos,” (96) and “Phronêsis is nothing if it is not carried out in praxis” (115). 38 Who do we think of as having such a “truth disclosing condition”? The examples Aristotle entertains range from those overseeing a household to political figures, and in this context he gives the wonderfully ambiguous example of Pericles, the ruler of Athens at the outset of the Peloponnesian war (and whose full ambiguity is seen in Plutarch’s account). 39 It is at this point that Heidegger makes his famous observation: “...Aristotle has here come across the phenomenon of conscience. Phronêsis is nothing other than conscience set in motion, making an action transparent. Conscience cannot be forgotten” (Plato’s Sophist, 39). That phronêsis is not an inferential, reasoning faculty does not mean that it is an “intuitive” faculty. It is “the other intellectual virtue.” Moreover phronêsis for Aristotle is not given in its perfection but can and indeed needs to be developed. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1982), 278-89; and Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 72-82. Earlier Heidegger writes: “For one who has learned to understand an author it is perhaps not possible to take as a foundation for the interpretation what the author designates as the most important. It is precisely where an author is silent that one has to begin in order to understand what the author himself designates as the most proper” (32, 43). Here we see the origin of deconstruction: the premises of one’s thoughts are often inexplicit, hidden even from the thinker himself. This would seem to be an over-reaction to the problem of embedded presuppositions. For it LEVINE 97 would make all science, all knowledge, mysterious, if not meaningless, where it might only be unreflective (not necessarily wrong). Moreover it would seem to mean that ‘truth’ ultimately resides in one’s premises. While our conclusions are only as good as our premises, truth resides in the author’s developed view as well. A house stands even if we can’t see its foundations; its strength is evident in the sturdiness of the whole. 40 Gadamer puts this into relief thus: its antithesis is blindness not error (Truth and Method, 287). 41 Aristotle notes that while it is true, in a certain sense, that “...it is absurd for anyone to believe that...practical sense is the most serious kind of knowledge, if a human being is not the highest thing in the cosmos” (1141a21; also b1)—and for Aristotle we may not be the most important beings in the cosmos—still, without forgetting the bigger picture, this faculty remains the most important for human life, lest we not live life well as a whole. 42 “Phronêsis makes the situation accessible; and the circumstances are always different in every action” (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 20); “This circumspection [mode of circumspective disclosure] isolates that with which the action, the bringing into being, begins” (32); “Phronêsis is the inspection of the this-here-now, the inspection of the concrete momentoriness of the transient situation” (112). 43 It is thus a mistake to think of practical insight as the subsumption of the particular to the universal. For example, Thomas Aquinas: “...we must say that the practical intellect has a beginning in a universal consideration, and, according to this, is the same in subject with the speculative, but its consideration terminates in an individual operative thing” (Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C.I. Litzinger (Notre Dame, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1964/1993), 361 (#1132)— hereafter Commentary). Or again: “...to frame a decree that is simply the application of universal reason to a particular practicable...” (381 [#1199]). For Thomas practical intellect is thus a subspecies of theoretical intellect, the act of practical judgment the application of a universal rule to a specific situation. Whereas Aristotle says that the uniqueness of phronêsis lies in its simple apprehension of ultimate particulars, Thomas sees it in the subordination of specific wisdom to theoretical wisdom. Here we see the beginning of the loss of phronêsis as a separate faculty with a unique purview and, with the loss of continuity with the things of our world, the increasing estrangement and subjectivity of thought (the skeptical spectator), with the end result that this faculty, phronêsis, is largely eclipsed or lost sight of in modern thought. All thinking becomes abstract thinking. See notes 31 and 54 above. The alienation of the Cartesian ego is not far behind. This is the beginning of a much larger study for us. See Burt Hopkins, “Jacob Klein �98 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW and the Phenomenological Project of Desedimenting the Formalization of Meaning,” The St. John’s Review, vol. 47, no.2 (2003): 65. 44 For Heidegger (Plato’s Sophist, 97) the benefit of experience is the amount of time to accumulate enough experiences to “dominate the manifold”—not the time necessary to refine and mature one’s judgment to the range of possibilities, to weigh their respective worth, to assess the manifold factors as each adds yet another vector to the complex calculus of phronêsis. 45 Sachs directs us to De Anima 431a14-18 and b3-10 as well as to NE 1109b23 and 1126b4. Attention to the fundamental role of intellect was highlighted for me in freshman seminar two years ago by the perspicuous questioning of Jackson Carpenter, for which I am grateful. 46 Cp. Thomas, Commentary: “However it is not apprehended by that sense which perceives the species of proper sensibles...but by the inner sense which perceives things sensibly conceivable. Similarly in mathematics we know the exterior triangle, or the triangle conceived as singular, because there we also conform to a sensible conceivable singular, as in the natural sciences...” (384-5 (#1214)); “Prudence, which perfects particular reason, rightly to judge singular practicable relations, pertains rather to this, i.e. inner sense” (#1215). “Aristotle says that we know such things by perception, not the perception of any one of the five senses, but the sort by which we perceive that a triangle is the last kind of figure into which a polygon can be divided (1142a 28-30). This sort of perceiving contains thinking and imagining, but what it judges, it judges by perceiving it to be so.... “such things are among particulars, and judgment is in the act of senseperception” (1109b23-4). But this is the calmly energetic, thought-laden perception, Sachs, “Three Little Words,” The St. John’s Review, vol. 44, no. 1 (1997): 12, 15. 47 Emile, 203. 48 Aristotle’s formulation of the utter specificity of action: NE 2.3.104b23: “...the ones one ought not, or when one ought not, or in a way one ought not, or in as many other ways such distinctions are articulated.” See also 2.4.1105a3-35: “...with the things that come about as a result of the virtues, just because they are a certain way, it is not the case that one does them justly...but only if the one doing them does them in a certain way, if one does them first of all knowingly, and next, having chosen them and chosen them for their own sake, and third, being in a stable condition and not able to be moved out of it.” 49 Thomas says this beautifully: “...the man who considers the common features alone will not know how to proceed to action by reason of this generality,” Commentary, 354 (#1111). LEVINE 99 50 “At 1142a23-27, [it is said] that intellect and practical judgment stand at opposite extremes, directed at the unarticulated and individual terms of thought and the ultimate particulars of perception. The two extremes are now said to be united in the one faculty of intellect, that contemplates the universals contained in the ultimate particulars, which can be the only terms for a knowledge of truth. The same activity that holds a particular thing together is at work on the soul even in perception. Thus the claim that a single power stands at the root of theoretical and practical knowing rests on the ultimate conclusions of the highest kind of philosophy, which are arrived at in Bk. III of On the Soul and Bk. XII of the Metaphysics. Here that claim asserts the unity of the human being” (Sachs, NE, 114, n.168). See 1141b15. 51 NE 1113a29-b1; 139b4-5;1143b13-14;1144b30-32; and Sachs, NE, 117, n. 173. 52 By “governing sense”, Thomas reminds us, we mean that which will allow us to “govern ourselves” above all, Commentary, 377 (#1185). 53 Thus it is the case, Aristotle says, that human excellence cannot be “...just an active condition in accord with right reason,” as Socrates seems to say at times, for example in the Meno (though see Gorgias), “but one that [must actively] involve right reason” (NE 1144b25). 54 This is puzzling. Since choice is rational desire for Aristotle, it is inseparable from action. Yet here it is intellect that is the motive agency underlying action. Our new question: what is the relationship of reason and desire in Aristotle? 55 “The two highest modes of alêtheuein [truth disclosure] [in Aristotle] are phronêsis and sophia” (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 39.) 56 Lest we still think that he is speaking of some merely practical ability like “cleverness” [deinos], Aristotle once more helps us by making a distinction. We’re not just speaking about some natural craftiness or shrewdness. “...Cleverness enables one to do the things that are conducive to the object one sets down and to achieve it... [However] if [one’s] object is base, [then this ability] is shameless...” (1144a22-29). Practical sense is not cleverness, though it too presupposes an ability to achieve ends. 57 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 288, and Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 25. 57 NE 1.3.1095a1-2. 57 Indeed, this is the virtue of all good conversation (Venkatesh). �100 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 101 Kultur and the Obligations to Philosophy Jonathan Badger Michael Grenke’s translations of Nietzsche’s On the Future of Our Educational Institutions and Prefaces to Unwritten Works offer readers of English a previously unavailable view into Nietzsche’s thought. These works have not received as much attention as perhaps they deserve, and Grenke’s careful and astute English rendering of them is likely to change this. Grenke’s strategy is to capture the subtleties of Nietzsche’s prose by means of a rather extreme literalism. As Grenke points out in his preface, this has occasionally resulted in difficult English, but it succeeds in preserving Nietzsche’s peculiar punctuation and diction, which are often “corrected” in commercial translations. Grenke’s translations offer an utterly reliable reflection of Nietzsche’s phrasing and word-play. Key terms are flagged with their German counterparts, and there are ample footnotes to qualify the renderings of ambiguous terms. Grenke has compiled and organized relevant portions of Nietzsche’s own notes and drafts for these works, and has included them in appendices for both books. His approach allows the reader to track the use of terms through these texts, and he is meticulous and disciplined in his stated aim of leaving the task of interpretation to the reader. In this respect, these translations are exemplary. In addition to the translation and a general introduction by Grenke, each of the items in the Prefaces is accompanied by a short and illuminating essay. These are written by Mathew K. Davis, Lise van Boxel, and Grenke himself. Friedrich Nietzsche. Prefaces to Unwritten Works. Trans. and ed. Michael W . Grenke, South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005. Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. Trans. Michael W Grenke, South . Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004. Jonathan Badger is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. �102 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Each work emerged as a completed whole in the year 1872, and the two are deeply connected to one other. For instance, one of the prefaces in Prefaces to Unwritten Works is called “Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational Institutions,” and Nietzsche suggests that it be read before On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (Prefaces, 28). Both books focus our attention on the individual Nietzsche calls the “genius,” a luminary who sees beyond the horizons of his particular time and place. The genius is unafraid to smash tablets and to propose new configurations for human community. Nietzsche depicts the genius sometimes as a philosopher and other times as a poet or “artist” (see below). The genius is a theme Nietzsche addresses in detail elsewhere,1 but these two books specifically address the question of our response to the genius. How should we respond to the presence of such an individual? Nietzsche’s view here would seem to be that the presence of the genius— be he prophet, poet, or philosopher—carries with it a specific imperative for the rest of us. We are obliged to allow ourselves to be lifted by genius. How do we do this? Nietzsche’s answer seems to be what he calls “culture” (Kultur). A genius’ vision can in principle be transferred into a group in the form of a culture or “way of life.” This way can elevate the non-genius far above his natural capacities and include him in the work of genius. Moreover, the proper work of the non-genius includes preparing for the next appearance of genius in the world, and this work is made possible by the culture, which organizes and ennobles the activity of the non-genius. The Prefaces offers a set of meditations on why Kultur is necessary, and On the Future of Our Educational Institutions displays a high level thinking-through of what this might actually mean in practice at the first stage of implementation, namely at the level of education. BADGER 103 The Prefaces Prefaces to Unwritten Works is Grenke’s edition of a work originally entitled “Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books,” which was a book handmade by Nietzsche himself and presented as a gift to Cosima Wagner in 1872, with the expectation that Richard Wagner would also read it. The care with which Nietzsche prepared this little volume, clearly intended for highly regarded readers, should alert us to its importance as a glimpse into his own conception of his larger body of work. Many of the themes taken up in the Prefaces are recognizable from Nietzsche’s published corpus, and we can clearly see the outlines in it of Nietzsche’s well-known conceptions of time, history, morality, and art. The compactness and concision of his presentation, however, shows us an example of how Nietzsche might have wished his philosophy to be presented or introduced to intelligent, educated non-philosophers. This should be of interest to anyone who aspires to understand Nietzsche. On first glance the topics of the five prefaces seem quite disparate. Their titles are: 1. On the Pathos of Truth 2. Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational Institutions 3. The Greek State 4. The Relation of Schopenhauerian Philosophy to the German Culture 5. Homer’s Contest Grenke’s introduction helps us see the common threads that unify these topics. What most conspicuously emerges is the theme of culture. Nietzsche views culture as crucial to the proper development of human life. Modern civilization seems stunted by either a lack of culture or bad culture. Nietzsche challenges his readers to foster a new culture of health, which aims to turn us toward the genius. �104 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW The order that Nietzsche envisions holds the genius in a place of distinction: he is either the focus or the founder (or both) of a culture; the culture is an ongoing context in which the rest of us lead elevated lives as we look toward the genius and take our bearings in the light of his insight and creation. Genius alone would seem to be a kind of meaningless dead end. Authentic genius propagates itself through culture, so that the entire community can be enriched, and also so that a new genius can eventually be brought into being. For Nietzsche there are two classes of genius, “the genius of wisdom and of knowing,” who is the philosopher, and “the genius in his universal concept,” who would seem to be the artist or poet (13, note 1). The question of which of these is actually primary is complex. In the Prefaces Nietzsche at times locates the philosopher at the center of culture, while at the same time he characterizes the artist as one who can create a culture. It would seem that the two are not easily separable. A second unifying thread running through the Prefaces is the theme of time (8-9). Human beings perceive time as the annihilator that separates them from their natural vision of themselves. We love ourselves and our products, and this love suggests that these things should persist, should be. Time, however, destroys them. We respond to time metaphysically through philosophy, art, history, culture, politics, and war. This second thread turns out to be more fundamental than the first: culture emerges as a response to the problem of time. In the first preface, “On the Pathos of Truth,” Nietzsche is explicit regarding time as a fundamental problem for man. We recoil at the specter of everything disappearing into time; it offends us. One response is to link together the “great moments” into a chain that runs through the millennia: this is the “fundamental thought of culture” (22). This rebellion against time also brings about the notion of “truth.” Truth stands outside of time, and hence is not subject to its destructive power. Nietzsche recognizes Heraclitus as an BADGER 105 exemplar of the genius who explores this kind of truthpositing in a life-affirming manner. Heraclitus, however, is exceptional in this respect. The general run of philosophers falls short of “art,” which aims to live, while “knowing” achieves only annihilation (27). “Truth” is potentially annihilating in that it is indifferent to human dignity and well being: truth informs us that human life is a short-lived, insignificant anomaly flickering in a remote corner of an indifferent universe. Yet truth is necessary in order for us to escape the annihilation of time. This, it would seem, is the pathos of truth. This preface sets out the terms and the tone for the other prefaces, which explore various aspects of culture, namely, what is its source, who is responsible for it, and what should be its proper end. The next preface, titled “Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational Institutions,” builds on the previous preface’s critique of “truth.” Nietzsche here challenges the reader to set aside his former education so that he might escape into a position from which he may grasp the “authentic problem.” Only then can the reader understand the nature of Nietzsche’s proposal for a radical reformation of education, a reformation that seeks to establish a culture that takes its bearings from the greatest achievements of philosophy and poetry of the past, and that seeks to make ready the appearance of new geniuses in the future. Nietzsche is not explicit about what this “authentic problem” is. In his introductory essay to this preface, Matthew Davis persuasively argues that the “authentic problem” is the problem of truth, articulated in the previous essay. The pathos of truth is approached culturally by means of education. The next preface is on politics, and thus we see a path forming in the sequence of prefaces: a theoretical insight into the problem of truth, followed by an educational response, leading into a formulation of a political structure. This is a practical response to the unifying themes mentioned above. Time is the fundamental problem, and it can be mitigated by “truth.” �106 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Truth is posited by philosophy and given life by means of culture, which in turn must be established through education and politics. Philosophy, education, politics. It is striking that the concern for education is prior to politics. The next preface, “The Greek State,” tells us that a consolation for the outrage of time is a species of politics Nietzsche identifies as “artistic culture,” for which he credits Plato. He seems here to appropriate and exploit the Republic’s city in speech for the purpose of illustrating a highly ordered “artistic culture” that places the genius at the top and orders all of life according to the insights of the genius. “Plato’s” completed “state” sought the “ever-renewed generation and preparation of the genius” (57). The state in its best form does not view the individual as dignified in himself, but rather values the individual as an instrument of genius. The individual is lifted above his natural condition of moral and intellectual feebleness (and above his fleeting life) to become part of the work of the genius; each ordinary life is thus brought into the realm of genius and culture, and thereby beyond the immediate threat of annihilation. Nietzsche notices the irony of the fact that the poets are ejected from this city, which Nietzsche has associated with the artistic culture, but he also notes quite correctly that the Republic is a product of “poetic intuition and painted with bluntness” (57). Further, we must ask how Nietzsche would account for the fact that “Plato” places the “genius of wisdom” (the philosopher) at the top of this “state,” when Nietzsche has identified this genius as derivative from the “genius in his universal concept” (the artist). Again, he acknowledges this contradiction, but passes over it quickly, calling it a symptom of a struggle internal to Plato, who still suffers from the influence of Socrates. Nietzsche calls his interpretation of Plato’s “hieroglyph” the “secret teaching of the connection between the state and the genius” (59, emphasis Nietzsche’s). Nietzsche then turns to a practical, contemporary challenge that emerges from this analysis. To what should his BADGER 107 contemporary Germans look as they contemplate what a proper culture would look like? His response to this question is Schopenhauer. Nietzsche offers no account here of Schopenhauer’s philosophy; he only notes that he is “their” (the Germans’) single philosopher in the nineteenth century (69). He suggests that they begin with the philosopher and then consider what culture belongs to him. Nietzsche conspicuously avoids doing this work for his readers. He challenges them to work out for themselves what the culture of their time should be, and how they should derive it from a particular philosopher. Again, strangely, Nietzsche has selected a genius of knowledge—that is, a philosopher—for his starting point. Thus, by this point in the Prefaces a rich set of questions has emerged, and Grenke intelligently frames many of them in his essay that accompanies this preface (60-4). The final preface, “Homer’s Contest,” addresses the culture of combat. We children of modernity have difficulty affirming any sort of goodness in war. Our desire is for a world of peace. Nietzsche poses a challenge for us. Our desire for peace is a desire to escape nature, to escape time and become eternally at rest. We must ask ourselves if this is possible or best. Is it a meaningful solution to the annihilating effects of time? To get at this question, Nietzsche leads us back through the horrors of the Trojan war, deeper into the world of the Homeric gods, and deeper still, back into the primordial divinities of Hesiod, who describes a reality ruled by the “children of the night.” This is a world of cruelty, deception, and death—the fundamental reality. The battles of the Titans, says Nietzsche, represented a relief from the primordial condition of chaos and disorder. Battle is “grace” and “salvation” (83). Two kinds of strife emerged from this initial condition: one is merely cruel, seeking only discord, while the other is jealous and ambitious and seeks distinction and pre-eminence. This second type of strife is “good” strife; it leads men �108 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW toward excellence and is life promoting, despite its violence. It is this good strife that Nietzsche says characterizes the Homeric contests as exemplified at Troy, and this is an answer to the question why Homeric poetry seems to exult in the glorious horror of warfare. In her introductory essay to this preface (70-80), van Boxel argues that this insight extends to our fundamental desire to see the world coherently, to render it as intelligible. Conflict tames the primordial chaos and thereby establishes measure. Prior to battle, nothing is measured against anything else; nothing is knowable. Battle is the means to establishing the measure of one against the other. The greater is established, and thus order is established. Further, the greater points us toward the good, which we begin to see more clearly. Through the establishment of measure by means of combat, the world is rendered not only intelligible but also moral (77-8). Nietzsche’s formulation is obscure. He claims that the pre-Hellenic, Oriental genius envisions a motion out of primordial chaos and cruelty by means of strife. This motion passes first through “disgust in existence, to interpretation of this existence as an expiating punishment, to belief in the identity of being there [Dasein] and being guilty” (83). The Hellenes take up this conception and extend it into a vision of the “good strife”: the life-promoting violence leading to victory and excellence. Another feature of this Homeric-Hellenic view is the conviction that an ongoing subservience to a single master is undesirable. There will be many geniuses and they must clash and mix. [O]ne removes the over-towering individual, [and] thereby now again the contest of forces awakes: a thought that is hostile to the “exclusivity” of genius in the modern sense, but which assumes that, in a natural order of things, there are always more geniuses who reciprocally incite [each other] BADGER 109 to deeds, as they also reciprocally hold [each other] within the borders of measure. That is the kernel of the Hellenic contest-idea: it abhors solitary mastery and fears its dangers; it requires, as a means of protection against the genius—a second genius. (89) Thus, although every gift must disclose itself in fighting, this is not a call to a master-slave ordering. It is rather a call to a recognition of the agonistic character of human being and seeing. Finally, this view of being suggests that volitional action is not possible without fighting. For Nietzsche, the Greeks discover what it means to be free. In the absence of the contest neither the Greek individual nor the Greek culture can find measure, and thus cannot direct themselves. The danger for post-Hellenic civilization is degeneration into the primal chaos. Without the noble strife there is a sliding back to cruelty and vengeance. Without ongoing strife and combat man may not remain properly human. Nietzsche was conscious that the ideas he formulated in these prefaces were unfashionable in 1872. They are perhaps even more unfashionable now. The liberal West has become quite unified in its preference for individual rights and peace. Even the proponents of particular war efforts do not defend war on the basis of its salutary effects on soldiers or culture; it is regarded as a necessary evil, instrumental for political and strategic ends. The stated aims of Western military action are the removal of brutal despots, the elimination of threats to security, and the restoration of regional stability. However paradoxical or contradictory, modern war is for the sake of peace and prosperity. We wage wars to end wars. Nietzsche challenges a belief so deeply held that it is perhaps not even recognized as a belief. We modern liberals do not regard love of peace as an article of faith; it is, rather, experienced as a recognition of a manifest good. This makes it difficult to hold Nietzsche’s challenge in front of us. �110 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW It is nevertheless important that we take up this challenge. If we reject Nietzsche’s claims about war, does this mean that we reject the Homeric presentation of human life? If we reject Nietzsche’s vision of the individual’s relation to the genius through culture, does this mean we must reject Plato’s Republic? Or can we rest secure in the belief that Nietzsche offers us flawed readings of these works? Would we say that our readings of Homer and Plato are superior to Nietzsche’s? The mastery and power of Nietzsche’s presentation makes it difficult to dismiss his readings out of hand, but perhaps we have some room to maneuver. Could it be that Nietzsche intentionally misrepresents Homer and Plato for the sake of co-opting them into his project? Or is it that he emphasizes particular aspects of them for the sake of shocking their modern readers into seeing that at some point we must make a choice between our modern prejudices and our admiration for Homer and Plato? How would we make such a choice? At the very least this would involve two considerations: First, we should carefully examine the opinions that pull us so powerfully toward perpetual peace and universal autonomy—opinions that lead us not only to recoil from the realities of war but also to withdraw from the idea of the genius and the “cults” that follow in his wake; second, we should read Plato and Homer very carefully—is there any chance that Nietzsche is right in saying that we tend to impose modern sensibilities upon them and thereby distort or obscure their significance? On the Future of Our Educational Institutions Nietzsche’s series of lectures delivered at the University of Basil in the winter of 1872, called On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, was a public reading of a dialogue set in an idyllic forest wilderness near the banks of the Rhein in late summer. The interlocutors are an old philosopher, his younger companion, and two passionate university students wielding pistols. A dog also participates in the drama. There BADGER 111 is in fact a great deal of dramatic action in the dialogue; as Grenke points out in his introduction, there is “shooting, shouting, singing, wrestling, a star falling, a torch-lit procession, a musical signal, and, of course, biting.” Because the speeches are situated within a drama, we are challenged to interpret them accordingly. Where do we locate the voice of Nietzsche? The lector identifies himself with one of the young students, but the weightiest monologues come from the old philosopher. Moreover, of the two students, the “friend” is the more articulate. Finally, as a young academic, the philosopher’s “companion” seems to occupy the lector’s social position and professional status at the time these lectures were delivered. The central topic of discussion is education. What is it, and how should it be achieved? What is its relationship to politics and the “state”? Along the way we encounter the concept of “culture.” According to the philosopher, many seem to believe that becoming educated means becoming “cultured.” What does this mean? Is this something to which we should aspire? What are the alternatives to it? What is culture and what is its proper status within a regime? One of the primary concerns of the dialogue is the democratization of education, which seems to imply—or at least coincide with—a trivialization of the activity and the production of countless subfields of study, all of which fail to comprehend the greatness of ancient philosophy and poetry, as well as the greatness of modern German visionaries such as Goethe. Central to this loss is the deterioration of proper language study. Contemporary Gymnasium students, says the philosopher, are not only unable to read ancient Greek in a way that gives them access to the power of Plato and Sophocles, but they are also unable to speak and write German properly. They have sunk to the level of “journalism” (2.45-57; 3.73). This newfangled education purports to make students independent in their thinking, allowing them to eschew authority and to write about whatever they please, as though �112 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW their untutored inclinations were highly valuable. This generates a smug and unjustifiably aloof student who remains uninitiated into philosophy, says the old philosopher (5.1057). These students learn to be contemptuous of authority, but, says the philosopher, they pay for their “grandiose illusion of freedom through ever-renewing torments and doubts” (5.111). Contemporary education indulges the personality and the particular. It celebrates the individual and his quirks. Proper education, says the philosopher, “should be purified from the imprint of the subject and carried out above the interplay of the times, as the clear mirroring of the eternal and unchanging essence of the thing” (4.97). The two students naturally resent this critique and point out that their Gymnasium education has cultivated them and given them a taste for science, which they presume to be clearly good for mankind. The philosopher scoffs at the proposition, and remarks that he feels “terrified” by this development (5.105); this scientistic culture has spawned an industry of degenerate erudition that marks an escape from authentic life and culture. A danger the philosopher sees is that, in the absence of philosophic leadership within the educational institutions, the students with the greatest capacity grow to despise themselves under “the unendurable burden of standing alone” without a true teacher (5.112). Another danger, he warns, is the seduction of the best students by false gods, namely, perverse ideological and political movements. The philosopher is deeply concerned that the state has taken control of pre-university education to use for its own insidious ends. The production of serviceable citizens who are unmoved by greatness is at odds with philosophy’s interest in education. The old philosopher persuades his little audience that the purpose of proper educational institutions is to cultivate the soil in which philosophy can flourish. These institutions would acknowledge that philosophy is extremely rare, and requires extraordinary effort. Out of the multitude of students only a few would be sufficiently BADGER 113 endowed to participate in the work of the philosophic schools, of which there would only be a small number in all of Germany. A small number of teachers would emerge from this rarified sample of students, and even these would only serve as laborers in the service of bringing forth the rarest of breeds, the philosopher himself. Those with “second- and third-class gifts” can thus be brought to their full potential and can contribute to the work of philosophy. (4.97) As we consider this dream, we must remember that this is not Nietzsche speaking, but a character in his lecturedialogue. This does not mean that Nietzsche does not intend to advance such a vision of education and philosophy, but we are obliged, as we are with Plato’s Republic, to hesitate to conclude that this is Nietzsche’s blueprint for education. We are encouraged, however, to consider what we think the proper relationship is between philosophy and educational institutions, and how this relationship stands with respect to the regime in which we live. Can educational institutions peacefully service both the needs of the nation and the demands of philosophy (or more broadly, the demands of genius2)? This raises a more fundamental question for us. Do we view philosophy as an activity with an imperative? That is, does it call us and make demands of us? If it does, how does this call stand with respect to our “individuality,” our “persons,” and our inclinations about what a good life should be? Do we view philosophy as merely instrumental to our individual lives; that is, do we grapple with philosophic texts only so much as is pleasant and convenient for our personal inclinations? Do we view philosophy as merely a good exercise for thinking and talking about difficult matters, for the sake of a higher quality of discourse in personal life, in business life, in political life? Is philosophy then merely a handmaid to the ordinary affairs of life? It is likely that most of us within the academic traditions of liberal democracies in the twenty-first century do not respond with vigorous principled support to the idea of a �114 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW culture of genius. We tend to believe that the artifacts of genius are to be read and considered seriously either within an enterprise of historical inquiry, or with a view toward a kind of personal enlightenment. Some of us even go so far as to believe that these notable books can help us navigate the political and social questions of our own time. It is unusual, however, for anyone to approach them out of a sense of service to something else, something higher to which one feels obliged to subordinate oneself. Academics and their students dabble in texts that strike their fancy. The old philosopher of Nietzsche’s dialogue claims that, for the best students, the consequences of this casual, personal relationship with genius are confusion, doubt, and selfloathing, as well as an unwarranted arrogance. The alternative he offers is initiation by a teacher into the proper study of philosophy within a culture that surrounds genius. The student is brought into a central region of the culture, and this gives the education authenticity and authority (5.11013). The student is brought into the work of philosophy for the sake of philosophy. A question emerges: Are we the servants of philosophy, or is philosophy an instrument for our “personal” ends? If we answer in a manner that suggests that philosophy does carry an imperative, then we must follow that imperative or reject philosophy. If we follow it, will there be implications not just for the individual but also for human life generally or at least for the worldly community within which philosophy appears? 1 2 See Gay Science, 361; Human, all too Human, 1.126,157-168. I speak specifically of philosophy here, although Nietzsche’s conception of the genius would seem to be broader. To be safe we might speak of “the artist or philosopher.” I frame the issue in terms of philosophy for several reasons. As noted above, Nietzsche makes the distinction between “the genius in his universal concept” and “the genius of wisdom,” and we might take care to preserve this distinction in our general understanding here. One might reasonably conclude that the proper focal point or BADGER 115 center of a Kultur would be “the genius in his universal concept,” and this would not be the philosopher, but rather “the artist.” This, however, does not appear to be Nietzsche’s application of his terms. He observes and valorizes Plato’s placing philosophy in charge of the ideal regime; he names the philosopher Schopenhauer as the best source for a new German culture; and in On the Future of Our Educational Institutions the account of the ordering of the institutions comes from the “old philosopher.” We can therefore speak here in terms of philosophy and its relation to politics and educational institutions, though we should be mindful of the subtle relationship between Nietzsche’s “philosopher” and his “artist,” which a more complete analysis of Nietzsche’s thought would explore. See Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, for an explicit account of the distinction, as well as his view that this distinction is transcended by certain pre-Socratic philosophers. �116 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 117 Jan Blits and the Virtues of Commentary John E. Alvis The sprightliest thinker of our time once presented a lecture on the virtues of Jane Austen beginning with a list most of the audience considered an enumeration of defects: few settings within unimproved nature, no symbols, tame emotions, language under restraint, no derangements of plot, no authorial confidences, predictable outcomes, or unabashed moral assessments. Implicit in the lecture was a gentle reproof of the manner of fiction writers well regarded, though, by comparison with Austen, overwrought, as well as of the taste of a readership similarly impolite in its avidity for strong sensations. Timely and welcome, one might suppose, would be something on similar lines but directed against presently influential literary critics, too many of whom are, to the extent permissible by academic conventions, sensationalists. Yet, since not the least objectionable of the preoccupations of contemporary critics is their insistence upon telling us more of other critics than we need to know, offering a corrective by better practice seems preferable. For that we can applaud the example set by writers such as Jan Blits in his five books on Shakespeare, and most recently in his study of Coriolanus. Blits has the good sense to realize that each of Shakespeare’s major plays affords material sufficiently abundant to require book-length treatment for its elucidation. He devotes an entire volume to Julius Caesar (The End of the Ancient Republic: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar), another to Macbeth (The Insufficiency of Virtue: Macbeth and the Natural Order), another to Hamlet (Deadly Thought: Jan Blits. Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Lexington Books, 2006. John E. Alvis is a Professor in the Department of English, the University of Dallas. �118 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Hamlet and the Human Soul), and a book on A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Soul of Athens: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). His newest volume, Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, is occupied with the play probably composed last of the group Shakespeare drew out of Plutarch’s Lives. Confining himself to a single play enables Blits to do more than is usually done in the way of discerning connections. One of the more striking of such discoveries occurs with the discussion of the play’s “two endings.” Shakespeare seems to have directed his story to one conclusion with the success of the family embassy that turns back a vengefully triumphant Coriolanus, yet he ends the play a second time with the actual slaying of the title character, since returned to Corioles, the city on behalf of which he had warred against Rome. Blits makes sense of this peculiarity in the play’s construction by perceiving the first climax as the defeat of spirited ambition, and the second as the destruction of the hero’s soul, his death coinciding with his inability to see that his insistence upon a virtue unconditional has continued to the end to make him the victim of conditions set by meaner souls. At times the dividend of dwelling upon a single play lies in detecting overtones of particular words or phrases that modify each other over wide intervals of text. Such a concentrated focus may also allow leisure for observing differences in superficially similar incidents, or for developing the implications of certain repeated imagery, e.g. body parts for members of Rome’s political organism, beast metaphors applied to opponents, and diseases as figures for political disorders. The tight focus also facilitates attention to Shakespeare’s arrangement of incidents into a plot that conveys dialectical thought by dramatic means. The focus of the dialectic, announced in Blits’s title, is the relation between a particular kind of civil society and the distinctive human type that regime has produced. Coriolanus’s “spirit” and “soul” have their genesis in his “city,” yet Shakespeare reveals within his protagonist a persistent conflict with the ALVIS 119 community that has educated him in spirited ambition and has by public acclamation conferred his honorific name. But the chief benefit of Blits’s approach is that by attending to one play at a time, it encourages the supposition that each play is a complete and coherent body of thought rather than an exhibit from which evidence may be extracted in service of a critic’s thesis. You will notice that the thematic parts of Blits’s various book titles make use of no words alien to Shakespeare’s own usage. This is a departure from the widespread practice of blazoning titles that advertise intent to examine their subject from perspectives generated by modes of thought ill sorting with Shakespearean diction. It is refreshing to readers more used to immodest titles that decry, say, Hegemony engaged in exploiting the dispossessed, that promise a Deconstructing of some Ideology, or that propose to demonstrate Undecideability (sic) vaporizing some Text hitherto deemed determinable (Marxist powers, ideology, and writings exempted). Blits’s satisfaction with a Shakespearean vocabulary for rendering Shakespeare’s thought permits his audience a less mediated acquaintance with whatever play he discusses. The critic does not obstruct so much the reader’s access to the thought of the poetry. Students complain of teachers who persist in standing between them and the light emitted from an author. Some rare teachers know how to remove the impediment, and come to know as well the happy result that occasionally follows, that of learning simultaneously with the class. As far as it appears possible to do so, Blits writes in the way of a teacher receptive to this lesson. Spirit, Soul, and City further distinguishes itself by its organization. Contemporary expectations prescribe for the commentator a vantage from the heights of which he will profess to look over the head of the author whose work he has contracted to elucidate. By preferring a topical division of his own devising to the progression of action of the poem, he declares his superiority to his subject. Blits adopts a more modest but to my mind a more fruitful address to the task. He �120 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW proceeds as the progression of the play prescribes, following its development from act to act, scene after scene, line by line. Conventional Shakespeareans will object to arranging discussion in this manner and might well dismiss the result as a mere “commentary.” Readers who seek to understand Shakespeare rather than tame him might wish for more such commentaries. From Blits we can collect the useful lesson that an important dimension of the thought of the play comes into view once we appreciate the dramatist’s development of thought by repetition, congruence and incongruence, echo and dissonance, and progression and retrogression, all of which one best grasps when interpretive comment adheres to plot. Never mind that college must caution students not to peg their argument to the plot. They need not try this at home. Still, Blits understands, and guides his reader to understand that a Shakespearean play is already a course of imaginative reasoning. Its logic will reveal itself to patient attention operating consecutively rather than synoptically. Obviously the risk incurred by such an organization is that, as some parts of the play may interest us more than others, a commentary proceeding in accord with the plot may not sustain a constant interest. In this case, happily, a strong theme prevents Blits’s commentary from plodding. He never permits us to lose sight of his principal argument: that the play examines a Roman republican community in tension with a hero at once its product and the most serious challenge to its survival. The book gives us to see something universal, what one might call an anatomy of the excellences—accompanied by an exposure of the limitations—of spirited ambition; this in conjunction with scrutiny of a perennial problem confronted by all civil societies: how to regulate such outsized souls as are required for defense of a nation. While a nation must enlist men emulous for honor, it must also secure justice and due respect for the less strenuous temperaments these warriors lead in battle and govern during peaceful interims. To put it another way, Shakespeare’s Republican Rome rejects both items of advice Aristophanes ALVIS 121 puts in the mouth of his Aeschylus in Frogs. Shakespeare has depicted a republic that insists upon rearing a lion within its walls; yet having done so refuses to permit the lion to rule. In Shakespeare’s version of Rome’s history, the republic contrived somehow to survive until the advent of Caesar, or, alternatively, until the city-state had extended its imperial dominion as far as it ever would. The explanation for Rome’s durability may lie in the republic’s ability extemporaneously to produce at various crises institutions that in their eventual arrangement answer to the Aristotelian scheme of a mixed regime balancing every constituent interest with some other. Blits assists us in perceiving how such a mixed polity can preserve itself from external threats by breeding ambitious generals, and yet produce families that will defy their own blood when the ambition or indignation of such men should threaten their country. Blits displays one field of learning not evident from his previous treatment of Shakespeare’s Rome in The End of the Ancient Republic. His present work puts to effective use a knowledge of the precepts and method of classical rhetoric gleaned from Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, and Quintillian. The benefit comes with his explication of the set speeches of major characters. Persuasive speech was the operative art of statesmanship for thinkers of classical antiquity. To understand rhetoric entails grasping the practical implications of adapting political principle to political circumstance. Blits understands this significance of rhetoric and thus he understands something essential to what Shakespeare would have his more serious readers comprehend. Blits also shows a command of ancient Latin historians more reliable than one meets in any Shakespearean now writing. In contexts where other scholars might guess that Aristotle or Cicero may have crossed Shakespeare’s mind, this study cites appositely a half dozen classical texts, chapter and verse, as well as such moderns as Machiavelli, Hobbes, even Hegel, when appropriate. �122 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Coriolanus seems to be thought of now as impressive theater, but not comparably impressive when regarded as a course of thought. It certainly has failed to enjoy the reputation for philosophic scope or penetration accorded Lear, Hamlet, and even Macbeth. Possibly the philosophic substance of the work unfolds to readers themselves habituated to the sort of speculative thought Shakespeare would have learned in the Elizabethan schools and from the books favored by his contemporaries. His affinities seem to lie with the tradition of thinking one discovers in Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch, classical political philosophy inclusive of ethical analysis and rhetoric, its practical political instrument. The title of Blits’s book assumes this tradition by taking “spirit” to mean thumos (spiritedness, ambition, indignation), “soul” to mean an unstable compound of reason, spiritedness, with appetitive and aversive passions, and “city” to mean a civil constitution combining a form of government with a purpose of promoting a national way of life. Such thinkers as I’ve mentioned were concerned with understanding the interrelatedness of human character and political institutions, the latter including religious, educational, and what in our day are termed “social” or “cultural” assumptions relating to marriage, family, manners, and pieties. The presiding questions for this tradition were the proper ordering of the individual soul together with the ordering of a regime most conducive to encouraging such souls. Shakespeare adheres to a similar syllabus with the significant addition of his concern to understand these issues as they have been affected both by historical conditions perhaps unanticipated by pagan classical thinkers—that is to say, distinctly Christian and modern conditions—and by challenges to classical thought posed by Machiavelli and Bacon. This way of thinking, attributed by Locke to “the old philosophers” and becoming less and less familiar today, Blits finds congenial. That difference in intellectual training and disposition accounts for the superiority of the book to other recent studies of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. This author ALVIS 123 manifestly understands the mode of thought I have just described and can therefore come closer than his contemporaries to tracking Shakespeare’s thought. Much closer. � 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2007/3 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Curry, Elizabeth Hunt, Frank Sachs, Joe Carey, James Levine, David Badger, Jonathan Alvis, John E. Description An account of the resource Volume XLIX, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 2007. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_49_No_3 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1a697005dca7268e63bac35e6e95b22e.pdf eb60186b80459d17f556c7e34a85d691 PDF Text Text The St. John's Review Volume XL, number one (2007) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Peter Ara Guekguezian The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore. ©2007 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John's Public Relations Office and the St. John's College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW �3 Contents Essays and Lectures Aurum Antiquum: Reflections in and on Virgil's Aeneid .............................................................. 5 John C. Kohl, Jr. Reviews The Finest Fruits of Reason Michael Comenetz's Calculus: The Elements ............ .43 M. W. Sinnett Occasional Pieces The Sting of the Torpedo Fish .................................... 53 Christopher B. Nelson For the Graduate Students in Classics at Yale ............. 61 Eva T. H. Brann �4 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW �5 Aurum Antiquum: · Refle~tions In and On Virgil's Aenetd · John C. Kohl Jr. Part 1: Heroic Tension in Aeneid 5 and 6 Palinurus Virgil's Aeneid leaves the attentive reader with many puzzles. One such puzzle pertains to the de~th of Palinurus in books 5 and 6. On the voyage to Italy that closes book 5 (S.838-71) Aeneas' helmsman Palinurus is enticed at night by the god Somnus: since the seas are calm with a following wind and no threat is on the horizon, steering itself is not needed; one can take a break from the helm altogether. Palinurus vigorously opposes this suggestion and clings to the tiller all the more tightly, so much so that when Somnus overwhelms the sailor with drugs, he falls into the sea, dragging the tiller and part of the stern with him. Aeneas laments his missing helmsman: "Palinurus, having trusted too much in the calm sky and sea, you shall lie naked on unknown sands." However, when the two meet next in Hades (6.337-83) Aeneas betrays nothing of his former judgment, asking Palinurus, "Which of ,the gods tore you from us and plunged you into the open sea?" Palinurus, unaware of what we had been told, replies that it was not by a god but by chance !forte), that he had slipped John Kohl is an alumnus of St. John's College (1961), a retired biologist (Ph.D., 1967) and an amateur classicist. He has taught Greek, mathematics, and 'physical and biological sciences in liberal arts programs at Shimer College, The College of St. Thomas More (fexas), and Thomas More College (New Hampshire) and has held research positions in mammalian mutation research, in chemical defense, and most recently in cancer immunotherapy at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, where he currently resides. �6 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW and, grabbing the tiller for stability, dragged it and part of the stern into the sea. Nor was he washed up a corpse on the beach, but made it alive to the rock cliffs of the shore where barbarous natives killed him and threw him into the breakers, and now his body awaits burial. This discrepancy is usually attributed to Virgil's having composed books 5 and 6 at different times and having not yet worked out fully the differences in the death of Palinurus; 1 however, I think that here in the underW-orld rhe poet is deliberately posing counter-lessons in how to read the fate of the sailor. Charles Segal explains the two contrary aspects: The apparent discrepancy is only a difference in the point of view and in the mode of narration. In 5 the story is told in the third person by the omniscient narrator with the full panoply of epic conventions. In 6 the victim tells the tale as he experienced it. Like any victim of a sudden catastrophe, he does not know exactly what happened. Indeed, his vagueness about the 'great force' that tore off the rudder (6.349) is only a subtle reflection of the skill with which Virgil has kept apart and yet reconciled the divine and human levels. 2 According to Segal, in book 5 we have the comprehensive, divine view of Palinurus' death, and in book 6 a personal, human view of the same action. The act itself, Palinurus' disappearance into the sea together with part of the ship, is shrouded in mystery, and becomes ambiguous, enigmatic. Yet, there is a Homeric precedent for this death, a Homeric counterpart, that of the young and hapless shipmate of Odysseus, Elpenor (x.552-60; xi.51-80), who got drunk in Circe's house, forgot he was at the top of the stairs, fell down, and broke his neck. 3 So the same sort of accident befalls on the one hand Aeneas' trusted, prudent, and skilled helmsman �KOHL 7 and on the other hand Odysseus' young, inexperienced, and indiscreet shipmate. Games And Underworlds The points of comparison that Virgil raises in the Palinurus episode constitute a subtle invitation to look at the other principal episodes in the fifth and sixth books of the Aeneid in light of one another and to consider the Virgilian episodes in relation to their respective Homeric counterparts. An overview of the episodes in the upper world of Aeneid book 5 and lower world of 6 suggests that such a comparison is warranted and, therefore, possibly illuminating. Aeneas announces five contests for the Sicilian games (5.45-71): a ship race, a foot race, a boxing match, an archery contest, and a javelin throw. In addition, however, a riding display by the boys (the lusus Troae), not given in Aeneas' initial agenda, takes place after the fourth (archery) contest, and the last of the announced contests, the javelin throw, is never held. The Sicilian landing and activities are a prelude to Aeneas' visit to Hades in the sixth book where there are, similarly, five major encounters of Aeneas in the underworld: first, with his lost and unburied helmsman Palinurus; second, with Dido; third, with his half brother and former comrade Deiphobus; fourth, with the punished souls in Phlegethon as described by the Sibyl; and, finally, with his father Anchises and posterity in the Blissful Groves. This indicates paired associations seriatim of the respective episodes in each book. Substantial portions of both of these books also have their respective Homeric counterparts. In the fifth book the funeral games instituted by Aeneas in honor of his father, Anchises, clearly invite comparison with those instituted by Achilles in Iliad XXIII in honor of his beloved Patroclus. 4 Only four of the eight events in Iliad XXIII correspond with those in Aeneid 5: a chariot race, a foot race, a boxing match, and an archery contest. Virgil has recast the first and longest event in the Iliad (XXIII.262-650), the chariot race with five challengers, as a ship race between four boats selected from �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 8 the fleet as a whole, which is the most lengthy athletic contest in the Aeneid (5.114-285). 5 Similarly, the five encounters in the Aeneid have parallels with the respective five encounters in Odysseus' visit to Hades in Odyssey xi: first, with his unburied shipmate Elpenor; second, with his mother Anticleia; third, with his comrade. Agamemnon; fourth, with. the punished in Hades including a brief conversation with Heracles; and, finally, with the prophet Tiresias, which in the Homeric order .actually comes between the first conversation with Elpenor and that with Anticleia, but which has a parallel in Aeneas' visit with Anchises. A comparison of Aeneid 5 and 6 with the two Homeric parallels thus yields a rich complex of associations. In order to explore these associations· systematically, the five events in Virgil's games will be discussed in order. Each contest is first examined in light of its Homeric counterpart in the Iliad, then compared with the respective encounter in Virgil's underworld; and lastly the underworld encounter is cast against its counterpart in the Odyssey. The general scheme is diagrammed below. 3 4 Chariot race Foot race Boxing Archery Aeneid 5 Ship.race Foot race B,oxing Archery Troy Game Aeneid 6 Palinurus Dido Deiphobus Tartarus Elysium Antideia Agamemnon Herades Sequence 1 Iliad 23 Odyssey 11 Elpenor 2 5 Ship Race The drama in both the Homeric and Virgilian accounts of the race depends upon the· layout of the race course, which in each consists of an outward-bound leg, a turning point, and an inward-bound leg to the finish line. In the Iliad it is on the inbound stretch that Apollo and Athena contest with one another to decide the race between Eumelus, the front runner �KOHL 9 and Apollo's favorite, and Diomedes, Tydeus' son and Athena's champion, who is in hot pursuit. Thanks to Apollo, Diomedes loses his whip, but Athena restores it, breathes new strength into Diomedes' horses, and in her anger goes after Eumelus' car and breaks the pole of his chariot, causing a wreck. Antilochus now rashly challenges Menelaus for second place by forcing the older hero to draw his team off the course in a narrow passage near the finish line in order to avoid a collision. For this act, the young man's second place finish is later challenged by Menelaus at the awards ceremony and he is rebuked: young warriors, no matter how valiant, must learn to remember their place in the face of their betters. Virgil elegantly reworks the elements of Homer's race to draw significantly different lessons. The narrow place in the racecourse is resituated at the; turning point itself, where two of the four ships fail of their own choosing. Gyas' ship, the leader on the outbound course, enters the turn, but the ship's pilot, Menoetes, fearing rocky shoals there, steers too wide and loses the lead. For his timidity, Menoetes is pitched into the sea by Gyas, and the ship loses its pilot and the race in the bargain. Next, Sergestus, challenging Mnestheus for the lead, rashly takes the inside course, where his ship founders on the rocks. Mnestheus' ship, taking the middle course, flies through the gap like a startled, frightened dove, leaving the embarrassed Sergestus to free his ship and later slink back to port like a wounded snake. Now the race is between the survivors of the turn, Mnestheus and Cloanthus. As in the chariot race, the gods decide the victor, but only after Cloanthus vows sacrifice and libations to the host of divinities of the sea and harbor did Portunus " ... with his own great hand [drive] him on his way: swifter than wind or winged arrow the ship speeds landward and found shelter in the deep harbor" (5.241-43). Aeneas' conversation with Palinurus in Hades constitutes a counter-lesson to the boat race. As we have seen, Palinurus claims here that no divine agency was involved in his fall �10 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW from the helm, that it was solely by chance, although we also see that Palinurus struggled against his sleeplessness on the fateful night. If we view this again in light of the Homeric counterpart Elpenor, we learn that such accidents happen to the skilled and responsible as well as to the young and inexperienced, even though Palinurus prudently tried to resist his misfortune, while Elpenor seemed totally unaware of his. Foot Race There is a similar reworking of Homeric precedents in the second contest on Sicily, the foot race. Three contestants are racing for the finish line in Homer's story, Oileus' son, Ajax, Laertes' son, Odysseus, and Nestor's son, Antilochus, who by now has learned to respect his betters and is in last place. Odysseus calls on his patron Athena, who not only assists her favorite with added strength but also causes the challenger, Ajax, to slip in the path on the dung from the sacrificial bulls, much to the amusement of all onlookers. Ajax's complaints and Antilochus' deference do win the former second prize at the awards ceremony. The field in Virgil's race is much wider than in Homer's; in fact, we do not know exactly how many racers there are, but seven-Nisus, Euryalus, Diores, Salius, Patron, and two Sicilians, Helymus and Panopes-are named. The pair, Nisus and Euryalus, the former the lover of the latter, is first and third, respectively, as they come into the home stretch; only Salius in second place separates them. Here Virgil presents an episode altogether analogous to and reminiscent of Homer's but with a shift in its comedic emphasis. Unlucky (infelix) Nisus slips in the slippery blood (not dung) which, poured forth by chance (forte) from the slaughtered calves, had soaked the ground and green grass in the path of the runners. Nisus, seeing Salius now as the leader, trips him up, allowing his beloved Euryalus to win the race. No divinity has intervened here, and the end of the race, rather than relying entirely on the befouled and risible aspect of Nisus to achieve �KOHL l1 a humorous pathos, dissolves in a comedic wrangling over prizes. Salius vehemently claims first place and fraud. Meanwhile, the comely Euryalus, his eyes filled with tears over possible loss of victory, is winning favor with the crowd, and Dibres, who would finish fourth and out of the money if Salius wins, is protesting on behalf of Euryalus. When Aeneas compromises by ruling in Euryalus' favor but giving Salius a prize anyway, out of pity "for the fall of an innocent friend," Nisus now (successfully) puts in for a prize on his own behalf. The prize awarded Nisus, a shield captured by Aeneas from a Greek, foreshadows an incident later involving the pair in much darker circumstances. In the first real action of the Italian war, described in book 9, the pair is clispatched at their own suggestion from the besieged Trojan camp to get relief from Aeneas. As they pass through the sleeping, wineladen Italians at night, the pair takes advantage of the situation to work havoc on the enemy forces like the celebrated night expedition of Odysseus and Diomedes in Iliad X. Unlike the Argive night expedition against the Trojans, which proves wholly successful, that of the two young Trojans against the Italians has a different outcome, primarily because of the pair's avidity here for booty, as it was for prizes earlier. Nisus, whom we know as a good runner, could have escaped through the enemy lines to Aeneas, but his loyalty to his companion, the captured Euryalus, a loyalty which led to a comic scene earlier in Virgil's narrative, now in the darkness of war proves fatal to both. The counter-lesson to the foot race is furnished by the second of Aeneas' principal encounters in Hades, Dido, who answers Aeneas' earlier silence at Carthage (4.331-96) with her own: in the face of such intense passion, words falter because they are from her point of view unnecessary. Aeneas, conversely, feels he owes her an explanation, but the explanation he finally gives her in Hades-that he left her unwillingly (invitus)-is weak and of no avail: hers was a love unrequited. If the death of Nisus was the culmination of love fulfilled, then in this counter-lesson Dido's death was the �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 12 culmination of a love unfulfilled. What we seem to have at the center of such passions in either case is death, which renders the value we place upon passionate love ambiguous. The intensity of the passionate relationships here is heightened further by the parallel in the second major episode in Horner's Hades (xi.155-224), Odysseus' meeting with his mother Anticlea, who wasted away and perished in grief over the absence of her son. In the Odyssey it is the ebbing of passion, not its waxing, that proves fatal. Boxing Match The boxing contest in the Iliad (XXIII.653-99) is a relatively short and direct affair. After Achilles has called the contest and set forth the prizes, Epeius, "son of Panopeus and a man valiant and big and with the looks of a prizefighter" (XXIII 664-65), stands up to take on any and all challengers. Only one in the silent crowd rises to challenge him, Euryalus, whose father Talaus, had been a good boxer. Epeius makes good his appearance and repute and very quickly and magnanimously dispatches the challenger, Euryalus. Virgil reverses this pattern of events in the boxing contest on Sicily: it is the reluctant challenger, Entellus, who eventually vanquishes the favorite, Dares. But the match does not start out that way: the older Entellus flails wildly at the more nimble Dares, loses his balance, and takes a fall on his own. This marks the turning point in the fight. In Homeric turning points we would ordinarily have the arrival of a hero or a god, who would advise and rally the oppressed warrior, lighten and breathe strength into his limbs, and then retire as the tide of affairs reverses. But no god directly enters into Virgil's account here (5.450-57), nor are we privileged to learn what Entellus thinks and says to himself: Eagerly the Teucrians and Sicilian men stand up; a shout mounts to heaven, and Acestes first runs forward and in pity lifts his aged friend from the ground. But neither downcast nor dismayed by the �KOHL 13 fall, the hero returns keener to the fray and rouses strength from his wrath. Shame, too, and conscious valor kindle his strength. Heatedly he drives Dares headlong over the entire arena with redoubled punches, right and left. Entellus, loser of the first round of the fight, will be declared victor in the second round when the contest is halted to prevent the very death of Dares himself. The course of events here reminds us of a broader theme: the Trojans, losers at Ilium in the first round, will be the eventual winners overall in Italy. Such a reversal has its broad appeal. There is a widespread impulse to cheer on the underdog and a perennially engaging fascination with turnings in the tides of affairs of men, whether they be in real battles or in athletic competitions. The roots of this impulse and this fascination lie in the hope and in the curiosity that things are not what they seem and that appearances may be deceiving. Here in the games anger, shame, and honor have erupted to transform old Entellus, the one appearing physically weaker, into a furious fighter of overpowering strength. Pulling the vanquished Dares from the fight, Aeneas says to the overmatched warrior: "Unhappy man, how could such frenzy seize your mind? Don't you see the other's strength and the changed will of the god? Yield to heaven" (5.465-67). To Aeneas this sudden transformation of Entellus can only be attributed to the subvention of a god and to a change in the favor of a god. Has a god chided Entellus and brought him to a new sense of himself? The counter-lesson to the boxing contest is found in the third of Aeneas' major encounters in Hades, that with Deiphobus, who recounts how his wife Helen betrayed him on the fateful night when Troy fell. She seemed to be a faithful wife and, trusting in her, Deiphobus sleeps, while Helen, actually an enemy accomplice, disarms the house and allows the enemy entry. Thus surprised and with his guard �14 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW down, Deiphobus is killed and mutilated. Entellus also seems to be what he is not, a weak old man and not much of a match for the younger and nimble Dares. But there are numerous instances both in team and individual sports where the favored contestant, deceived by the poor reputation and weak appearance of the opponent, becomes overconfident, prepares poorly for the contest, and does not prosecute it with vigor, trusting that the outcome has or will soon be settled favorably. As a consequence the favorite is surprisingly defeated in an upset. From Dares' perspective, is not this an alternative explanation for the result in the boxing contest suggested by the juxtaposition here? The Homeric parallel is found in the third major encounter of Odysseus in Hades, that with Agamemnon, who tells his visitor of his betrayal and murder at his homecoming by his deceitful wife Clytemnestra and her companion Aegisthus. This is an unseemly and shocking deed, so much so that the victim is totally unprepared either tactically or in spirit to defend himself and falls, "slaughtered like a bull in a manger," Agamemnon says. Archery Contest The archery contest, the last of the contests described in the memorial games to Anchises, parallels in most of its details the archery contest in the Iliad, penultimate in the sequence of events ordained by Achilles. The goal in both is to hit a dove, tethered to the top of a mast. Twice as many men (four: Hippocoon, Mnestheus, Eurytion, and Acestes) compete in the Aeneid as in the Iliad (Tencer and Meriones), and Virgil's account of sixty lines (5.485-544) correspondingly goes beyond Homer's twenty-five line episode (XXIII.859-83) in its emotional depth. ·The first of Virgil's contestants, Hippocoon, misses and the dove flutters her wings in terror as she perceives the force of the arrow in the quivering mast. Then Mnestheus succeeds with his shot, like the first of Homer's contestants, Tencer, in severing the cord holding the dove to the mast: " ... off to the �KOHL 15 south winds and black clouds she sped in flight" (5.512 f.). Then the dove, "now happy in the open sky and clapping her wings beneath a black cloud," is transfixed by an arrow from the third of Virgil's competitors, Eurytion (as by Homer's second, Meriones): "Down she fell, dead, left her life amid the stars of heaven, and, falling, brought down the arrow that pierced her." Virgil's subjective sympathy for the victim here far surpasses that of Homer, who simply describes the dove at one point as "timorous" (XXIII.874) and her flight. as "circling" (XXIII.875). Consequently the pathos is not captured and concentrated by the successive reversals of fear, freedom, exultation, and sudden end as in the Aeneid, nor is the transfixed bird, the epitome of death, brought to earth for all to examine but, rather, dove and arrow fall separately. The counter-lesson to the dove killed in flight is furnished by the fourth of Aeneas' major encounters in Hades, the visit to Tartarus. In contrast to the senseless loss we feel at witnessing the sudden death of a happy innocent-the dove in flight-here we witness those who have committed crimes, the guilty, and who are now being punished. The whole of Tartarus is encircled thrice with walls, then with flames, and entered by a gate of adamant, which is guarded by Hydra and surmounted by an iron watchtower where sleepless Tisiphone stands watch. There is no escape. The Sibyl, who says she was instructed by Hecate, tells Aeneas of the inmates, their crimes and punishments: the Titans, the twin sons of Aloeus, Salmoneus, Tityos, Ixion, and Pirithous-all challengers of Jupiter's reign-and those guilty of fratricide, of fraud, of adultery, of betrayal of their kin, and of treason. The admonition is given by Phlegyas, most miserable of all: "Learn to be just and not to slight the gods" (6.620). This sums up the lesson, though the Sibyl adds that it is impossible for her to recount all the forms of crime and their punishments. The Tartarean visit has its Odyssean parallel in the last episode in Hades in Odyssey xi where Odysseus sees Minos giving judgment; Orion with his club; Tityus being pecked in �16 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW his liver by vultures because he had raped Zeus' consort, Leto; Tantalus being tempted; Sisyphus rolling his rock repeatedly up the mountain; and Heracles, who stole the dog Cerebus from Hades. Odysseus wanted to stay to see "men still earlier," such as Theseus and Pirithous, but he is afraid of being immobilized in Hades by Persephone and her Gorgon's head, so he leaves. Of those whom he does see, only Tityus' and Heracles' transgressions are specifically mentioned. In general, Odysseus is more attracted to these and the others by their notoriety rather than by their infamy, and the punitive dimension in the Homeric adventure is not strongly brought out, unlike that in the Virgilian parallel. Returning to the archery competition on Sicily (5.519f.), we are left with the fourth competitor, Acestes, who is yet to shoot. The prize has already been taken, yet Acestes still draws back his bow and launches his arrow into the empty sky. On this a sudden portent meets their eyes, destined to prove of lofty presage; this in after time the mighty issue showed, and in late days terrifying seers proclaimed the omen. For flying amid the airy clouds, the shaft caught fire, marked its path with flames, then vanished away into thin air; just as often shooting stars, unloosed from heaven, speed across the sky, their tresses streaming in their wake. Unlike the three earlier contests, there is no direct point of contact between this sign and anything in the comparable Homeric event. Acestes is the fourth and supernumerary competitor in the archery program, and his action goes beyond anything that is conceived in analogy with Iliad XXIII. The flaming arrow thns assumes a significance in the drama of the Aeneid that lies beyond the action in the Homeric epics and retutils us to Virgil's poem itself to find its proper reference. The description quoted above (5 .522-28) doubtless recalls the earlier shooting star shown by Jupiter to �17 KOHL Anchises (2.692-700), who like Acestes stood before a prize, Troy, which had been lost. The Lusus Troiae And so, as the dust of the contest clears, we have what is known as the Lusus Troiae, in which sons parade across the field on horseback under the proud and attentive gaze of their fathers: "The Dardanians greet the bashful boys with cheers and rejoice as they gaze, seeing in their features their sires of old" (5.575-76). The scene gives precise expression here to the term "religion," binding the sons to the fathers, and through them, to the forefathers in an unbroken line of temporal succession. The first part of their equestrian maneuvers (5.575-87) appears to consist of mock charges and combat. The second part (5.597ff.) emerges as a sort of intricate dressage: Just as once on lofty Crete the Labyrinth produced a track woven with blind alleys and possessed a perplexing trick in its thousand paths, where for one following the signs insoluble and irremediable wandering awaits, so scarcely otherwise do the sons of Tencer entangle their tracks and weave their flight and battle games, like dolphins swimming through the watery seas who divide the Carpathian and Libyan waters and play amid the waves. 6 The counter-lesson to the celebration of Trojan youth on Sicily is the parade of future Roman greats on the Fields of Elysium, which Anchises shows Aeneas at the conclusion of his visit to Hades. In Virgil's depiction, it is as if Aeneas is situated at the stationary hub of a rotating wheel on whose periphery various Roman figures are affixed; he looks up at the section moving in the upper world to see youths moving from past into future, then looks down at the section in the lower world to see heroes moving from future into past, �18 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW about to be recycled to the upper world. Anchises explains to Aeneas the doctrine of palingenesis, i.e., purgation in the underworld and rebirth above, as they watch the succession of Romans. How does this transgenerational rejuvenation take place? The capacity to describe it is beyond us, since it involves a reversal in the usual temporal order. Aeneas sees only the barest, iconic presentation of his Roman successors processioning by in a direction opposite to his and not their growth, development, or interrelationships. Tiresias, the blind Theban prophet and counterpart to Anchises in this scheme, warns Odysseus that Poseidon is angry over what Odysseus did to the Cyclops Polyphemus and will make his return voyage difficult. If Odysseus really desires a peaceful death at an old age, then after getting home he must journey far inland to a place where oars are no longer recognized as nautical implements and perform a funeral over a sailor's cenotaph. Tiresias also gives Odysseus a second warning: if he and his shipmates harm the Cattle of the Sun on the island of Thrinicia (which the ancients later identified as Sicily), then only Odysseus will come home, in a foreign ship, and after much time, so that he will have to contend with insolent suitors for the hand of Penelope. In all this Odysseus hears much but sees very little from Tiresias, and what he does hear is given as conditional instructions-if you do this, then that will follow. Aeneas hears from Anchises, and also sees much, but what he does hear and see is given unconditionally. Heroic Tension The parallels between the events in Aeneid books 5 and 6 and those in Iliad XIII and Odyssey xi, respectively, do not simply focus our attention on certain elements of the action but also contrast the lessons of the Virgilian events with those of their Homeric counterparts, that is to say, the new with the old. Thus in the first event, the chariot/boat race, we have moderate resolve and the positive assistance by the gods �KOHL 19 (Virgil) vs. interference and disruption by the gods and respect for betters (Homer); in the second, the foot race, pious love and loyalty (Virgil) vs. humiliation by divinities (Homer); in the third, the boxing match, spirited determination and resolve in the face of disgrace (Virgil) vs. magnanimous strength (Homer); .and in the last event, archery, persistence in the sacrifice for the larger goal (Virgil) vs. the celebration of skill (Homer). In Hades Palinurus' struggles (Virgil) contrast with Elpenor's ineptitude (Homer), Dido's passion (Virgil) with Anticlea's loss of passion (Homer), Helen's treachery not only to her family but also to Troy (Virgil) with Clytemnestra's murder of her husband for her lover (Homer), guilt and punishment in Phlegethon (Virgil) with crime and notoriety in Tartarus (Homer). Collectively, the Virgilian readings center upon civic virtues rather than individual virtues in the Homeric counterparts. This is not surprising. Virgil's special concern, as pointed out by Maurice Bowra/ "is the destiny not of a man but of a nation, not of Aeneas but of Rome," whereas "Homer concentrates on individuals and their destinies. The dooms of Achilles and Hector dominate his design; their characters determine the action." Curtius captures this contrast as one between sapientia (King Latinus) and fortitudo (Turnus); Putnam detects in Aeneas an irreconcilable difference between freedom and force, and Desrosiers that of the patient, enduring, nearly comedic type of Odyssean hero and the decisive, active hero whose pride prefigures a tragic doom in the manner of Achilles. 8 Thus a tension emerges between the spirit of the Augustan Age of Peace and its ethical ideals and the spirit at ancient Troy with its celebration of human excellence and valor. . . The parade on the fields of Elysium is perhaps the most conspicuous of the lessons in book 6 that pose interpretations contrary to those of the corresponding events in book 5 but it is not the only such lesson. In fact all the lessons do. Thus we have, in the first place, an accidental occurrence (Palinurus �20 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW in the underworld) placed in opposition to occurrence due to divine intervention (Palinurus on board ship, and the ending of the ship race). In the second, passion that is altruistically directed (Nisus and Euryalus in the foot race) is in opposition to passion reflexively directed to one's own fulfillment (Dido in the underworld). In the third, victory by wrathful spirit (Entellus in the boxing match) opposes victory achieved by exploiting disinterest and dispiritedness in the opponent by surprise (Deophobus in the underworld). In the fourth, death or injury as innocent victim (dove in the archery contest) stands opposed to death as guilty transgressor (the prisoners in Tartarus). In the fifth and final pair, events arising through individual striving and skill (boys in the Lusus Troiae) are opposed to those predestined as part of an atemporal cycle or plan (the parade in Elysium). In general, these alternatives reflect an elemental, Lucretian interpretation of motives in which an agent is acting autonomously for himself or herself alone, placed in opposition to a traditional, providential interpretation of motives where figures past, present, or future, and remote from the agent lay claim to that agent's actions and intentions. Once again we are brought back to the tension between the two heroic types: the man of fortitude, confidence, skill, and strength, mindful of his own prowess in light of his forebears, and the man of prudence, negotiation, patience, and persistence, mindful of and guided by thoughts of his posterity. Aeneas, a refugee warrior from the plains of Ilium is well acquainted with the first type of hero. Through his Odyssean journey to Italy, home of his Dardanian ancestors, and his prophetic experiences there, most especially in Hades, he has now become acquainted with the second heroic type. If such interpretations as we have given to the events here indicate Virgil's concern with Aeneas and his mission, we expect, therefore, that the second or "Iliadic" half of the poem will be dominated by a man who represents the fusion of these complementary types as the complete hero. Such a man will display courage, martial skill, and �KOHL 21 prowess, while acting as leader and statesman in adjudicating and resolving disputes. In judging these disputes, he will be aware of the contradictory motives and lessons pertaining to each action, which will enable him to reach a just decision in each case. As Aeneas emerges from the underworld, soon to face this civil strife and deal with its resolution, which he does entirely successfully, we might expect him to be a much more complex figure than before, laced with contradictory motives and the task of resolving them. This would add an interiority, a dimension of depth to his soul. But of the psyche of the Trojan leader we learn nothing directly. There are no monologues reported, nor internal dialogues, nor even the occasional battlefield self-exhortation, any of which might have revealed this psychic space. The terms "wooden" and "frigid" have sometimes been applied to this frustrating aspect. Yet Virgil's silence here may be a tacit invitation to the reader to reflect upon the character and formation of the beneficent leader as well as a quiet comment on how little Aeneas is directly in control of his own destiny and that of his people, being instead like a cipher in a cosmic account, told by powers largely beyond his knowledge. Part 2: Regarding Virgil's Golden Age Aura Discolor How much, then, of his mission does Aeneas in fact understand? If his project itself-to lead his Trojan refugees out of the dying city and found a new Troy somewhere else-is straightforward, the symbol attached to that project, the golden bough, is problematic. The symbol has had many interpretations, but is distinguished above all by being the fusion of opposites: the natural shape and properties of regeneration and growth contrasted with the artificial ones formed of refined metal and having a sheen and a crackling �22 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW sound in the wind. To found the new Troy, then, is to plant a contrivance that must yet regenerate and grow naturally. In a well-known study, "Discolor Aura: Reflections on the Golden Bough," Robert Brooks reflects on his subject in this way: The poet has expressed life and death, both as opposites, in the wisdom of the Sibyl, and as union in the will of Aeneas. The human actors have reached the impasse of inner experience and outward observation, two irreconcilable aspects of reality. The golden bough is the necessary and external sign demanded to resolve the antinomy, and bears a fundamental relation to it? Later in the same study Brooks returns to the opposition: The essence of the golden bough is the contrast between its lifeless nature and its organic environment. But we cannot stop here. Obviously the image of gold must express other relevant associations; otherwise lead or iron or stone would have done equally well. Brooks attaches considerable importance to the bough's appearance at the moment of its discovery (6.204): discolor unde auri per ramos aura refulsit. ("With diverse hue shone out amid the branches the gleam of gold.") 10 The word aura, a play on aurum, normally has no visual sense but rather denotes an. atmospheric emanation, while the gleam is discolor, variegated and not a pure color. Discolor aura, then, is a strange way to describe the brilliance of gold and suggests a secret, enigmatic, even sinister quality of the golden bough. In Hesiod we read that Cronos held sway over a golden age of men, but the old god was deposed by his son Zeus and sent to Tartarus, and a new, inferior silver age of men was initiated, followed by further declensions of men down to our present iron age. But in Ennius' later account the destiny of Cronos (Saturn) does not quite work out that way: he finds �KOHL 23 refuge (cf. lateo) in Italy, in Hesperia, land of the ancient Latin folk. In the Aeneid King Latinus later greets the Trojan delegation, telling them (7.202-04) that the Latins are of the race of Saturn, and Evander will later explain (8.314-27): Native Fauns and Nymphs used to inhabit these groves and a race of men born of tree trunks and the hardy oak, for whom there was neither custom nor culture, nor did they know how to yoke oxen, lay up wealth, nor spend their gains, but branches and harsh hunted fare for sustenance nourished them. First from heavenly Olympus carne Saturn fleeing the arms of Jove and an exile from his lost kingdom. He united an unruly race dispersed among the high mountains, gave them laws, and chose to call it Latium, since he lay safe in this country. Under this king were the ages which they say were golden. So calmly he used to rule the people in peace, then little by little there followed a worse age of duller hue (deterior. . .ac decolor aetas). So into this worse age ·of duller hue now steps a new man, Aeneas, who forges a (re)union between his Trojans and the Latins. Is the diverse hue of the golden bough, the token and emblem by which he gains access to Hades and thence to his mission in Latium, reflected later in the age of duller hue in which that mission is carried forth in the second half of the Aeneid? Conversely, is the decadent, discordant, discolored age, which Aeneas seeks to resolve in Italy, heralded by the variegated aura of his golden bough? That is, does the decadence in the post-golden ages have its roots in the golden age from which it declines? Decolor Aetas Virgil intends that his hero Aeneas prefigure his own patron Octavian, whom Anchises describes to Aeneas, as we have �24 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW seen, as the promised one, the son of a god, who will reestablish the Golden Age in Saturn's Latin land, and spread a Roman Empire. He also appears on Aeneas' brazen and golden shield (8.675-81), a double flame corning forth from his face and the Julian star upon his head as he commands the fleet at the triumphal battle of Actiurn. To indicate what is at stake in this Augustan picture, a brief sketch of the mythological background of this golden figure is important. As in much else in Virgil's epic, it is instructive to begin by way of comparison with Horner and in particular with the principal figure of the Iliad, Achilles. Laura Slatkin11 has called attention to the legend in Pindar's Eighth Isthmian Ode that Thernis had counseled the gods that the nymph Thetis marry a mortal rather than the divine Zeus or Poseidon, since the son of such divine union would challenge father Zeus and overthrow the entire Olympian order. Thus Thetis marries mortal Peleus instead, and the son is the half-god Achilles. But at Troy Achilles now becomes a similar threat to his commander in chief Agamemnon, an inferior man, to whom, nevertheless, he must pay honor by yielding the captive Briseus. It is at this point (Iliad !.503-10) that Thetis puts to Zeus the request that her son Achilles be properly honored. The subsequent action does not relate primarily to the hegemony of either Zeus or Agamemnon but rather to how Zeus works out the end of Achilles in the Iliad and whether the hero's short-lived life and glorious end constitute a just, fitting response to Thetis' request. Achilles amidst the carnage of the ensuing war, the death of his beloved Patroclos, and the retributive killing and desecration of Hector exacts tribute from Argive and Trojan alike. In the extraordinary last scene of the poem Achilles has in effect12 already achieved his goal as ruler and is enthroned as king of Hades, where he will later lament to visiting Odysseus that he would rather be a slave among mortals than hold his present regal station. We are left to wonder whether such excellence among men can only be so rewarded. �KOHL 25 The compass of the Aeneid's action, in contrast to the Iliad's, is not from the heights to the depths of heroic fortune but the past, present, and future of successful statecraft. In comparison with the Iliadic myth, the central problems raised by the Aeneid do not relate to the justice due a central heroic figure such as Achilles but to the very existence of a city in the face of a civil war, a city in which just dispensation might be given. In this sense, the problems upon which Virgil's epic turn might be said to be antecedent to those of its Homeric prototype. A practical reading of the Iliad in this light suggests at a minimum that preservation of the city is favored when the best men are not situated in subordinate positions. Such inverted circumstances often lead to internecine strife among leaders, which, in turn is often fatal to the city as a whole. The problem of civil war is faced directly in the story of Atreus and Thyestes. In one common version of the myth, there is a dispute between the two brothers, Atreus (father of Agamemnon) and Thyestes, over the kingship of Mycenae. A ram with a golden fleece, a symbol of election, is born into Atreus' flock. With the aid of Atreus' wife, whom Thyestes has seduced, the golden ram is stolen, and Thyestes assumes the kingship. Hermes then persuades Atreus to desist until the course of the sun is reversed, which Zeus then accomplishes. Again, let us first take note that the questions upon which this myth centers do not focus on the two fraternal antagonists and their doom but upon the very survival of the political order of Mycenae, which will be torn asunder if and when the two brothers collide in civil war over the kingship. Only some outside, extraordinary intervention is able to avert this destruction, in this case Zeus' action. The Statesman The mythic context of the Aeneid, as disclosed in an important contribution by Jacob Klein, 13 turns on the myth of Atreus and Thyestes and, in particular, on the re-embodiment and extension of that myth in the story of the reversed �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 26 cosmos in Plato's dialogue The Statesman. Virgil probably read and discussed this dialogue with Octavian. A reading of Virgil's ancient biographies, notably those sections attributed to Suetonius in Aelius Donatus and that of M. Valerius Probus, indicates that Virgil was in the circle of patronage of Octavian long before the principate. Virgil's lifelong interest in philosophy seems at first to have centered upon the Epicureans and later shifted to the Platonists. 14 If we turn our attention to The Statesman itself, however, it becomes evident that the Atreus{fhyestes myth is not quite the entire story the Stranger wants to discuss with young Socrates. The two had spent their previous discussion, in effect, trying to find out what a ruler was, and by a laborious, dialectical process had arrived at a provisional definition of a ruler as a guide over human beings, a "shepherd of the people" as is usually applied to Agamemnon at Troy. But men can seize power by various means, usually violent. What distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate rulers? If I say, "Obey my orders!" to you and a group of your fellows, what compels you to do so? or not to do so? It is this question that leads them to the Atreus/Thyestes myth in the first place and to the witness of Zeus especially. What is the pathos by which the restoration of the throne to Atreus is enforced? Thus the Stranger in Plato's Statesman is led to tell of the god's action directly (268E-274E), where the god reverses the course of the world from the ever more chaotic age of Zeus to restore the earlier, Edenic age of Saturn or "golden age." The Ever-Recurring Return The Stranger explains: During a certain time the god himself joins in guiding and rolling around all in its motion, while at another time, when the periods have at length reached the proper measure of time, he lets it go, and of its own accord it turns back in the opposite direction, since it's a living being and endowed �KOHL 27 with intelligence from him who put it together in the beginning. (268C-D) One is fancifully reminded of a spring-driven toy or top that one winds up at the beginning, then lets go of until the toy or top runs down, becomes wobbly, and tips over, at which point one winds it up again. And the stranger adds that bodily things like the cosmos can't go on forever in one direction like the divine, but this winding up and running down is the next best thing to it. (269A-270A) Translated into political terms, we see a society originally face-to-face with the divinity that organizes and inspires it. Then the divinity retreats into the background. As the generations of men proceed one after another, the original divine memory becomes ever dimmer, the inspiration weaker, the inhabitants more forgetful of their origins, the organization more corrupt, and the society more dissolute. We see Plato's concern for this weakening reflected in many other dialogues: the myths of recollection in the Meno and Republic, the replacement of defaced images by fresh images in the Symposium, magnetic chains of iron rings hanging from a lodestone in the Ion, et cetera. In the face of dissolution, a renewal by a divinity is then required. But what then is suffered by the cosmos during this liferestoring winding-up? young Socrates asks. This leads to further elaboration of the Stranger's myth. (270Bff.) There is, in fact, great destruction of humans at this time, the Stranger declares, and only a small part of the human race, having had many strange experiences here, has survived to tell the tale. The renewal, we infer, is a violent one, a period of protracted and most destructive civil war, and the reversal is. indeed a cosmic reversal. Time itself is reversed; everything is put back to its original condition; memory itself is now put out of question. Things are not begotten in succession but spring up out of the earth on their own accord. There are no special bonds of kinship and no special claims thereby on wealth and power. Creatures do not eat one another and do not have to �28 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW labor for their food; strife and competition are thus eliminated. Men may even have the power of conversing with other animals. Such is the Edenic life of men during the reign of Cronos when the god himself is their shepherd and unlike that of the present age of Zeus, who remains aloof. So, once the universe is turned back and the earthquake, shock, and destruction resulting from the end of the old age subside, the new epoch takes over; however, the material element in the cosmos persisting from previous times gradually takes over and prevails. The cosmos therefore becomes more and more fierce. Men require special assistance from the gods (Prometheus, Hephaestus, Demeter, Dionysus) and finally a more extreme intervention is warranted to reverse the whole order again. But here (274E2) a difficulty arises: the two interlocutors are in search of the statesman and his art. If Cronos as shepherd of the people is the paradigmatic statesman, then Cronos has no statecraft, no art, because Cronos in the golden age has nothing to do, neither to feed or lead men nor to care for them at all. The good statesman is a statesman paradoxically by not having to exercise any statecraft. This puzzle, which we may perhaps characterize as that of the philosopher-king, will send the conversation of the two off again in search of the statesman and his rule. Here we will leave them and turn back to look at the story in a wider context. The Statesman myth has been reexamined more recently by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who begins his discussion with a passage from the peripatetic Dicaearchus, a student of Aristotle, a passage that in turn was cited by Porphyry in his treatise de Abstinentia. 15 According to Dicaearchus, the Golden Age, which in his account actually existed and was not an idle fiction, was home to men who were vegetarians and had food in abundance, though not in superabundance, lives devoid of property, social conflict, and wars and a style of living simple and frugal, symbolized by the acorn. These Golden-Age people lived under the direct patronage of Cronos, who is according to Vidal-Naquet "an extremely �KOHL 29 ambiguous divine personage." Vidal-Naquet asks, What does Dicaearchus' text acquire from the past and what does it conceal? Vidal-Naquet finds an answer to his question in Theophrastus' tract On Piety where this era is portrayed as a period of vegetable consumption and animal sacrifice, which apparently has succeeded vegetable sacrifice and has actually appeared as a substitute for human sacrifice: thus, vegetable-human-animal. These fourth-century speculations of Dicaearchus and of Theophrastus and later of Porphyry are built on a theory of actual progression or evolution from one earlier stage to the next. In this progression Cronos emerges as a terrible, cannibalistic god and the golden age as an age of enormous ambiguity from a political standpoint. Virgil's account of Saturnus in the Georgics and especially in the Aeneid draws in many of its aspects upon Ennius' translation of Euhemerus' account of Saturn.' 6 But Euhemerus' Saturn used to dine on mortal flesh (until Jupiter put an end to it) and he was not beneficent god; Saturn in Virgil, on the other hand, is a vegetarian and a benefactor. Do wild men become tame in the age of Cronos, or do tame men become wild (cannibalistic) in this epoch? Since we are moving from one kind of man, one kind of animal, to another, we cannot say. But two contrary attempts, two contrary movements, have been made, according to VidalNaquet, to bridge the gap. In the "upward" movement, we import the civic order into the virtues of the golden age, a tendency expressed by the Orphics and Pythagoreans; in the "downward" the entrance into the Golden Age is tantamount to making contact with bestiality, expressed in various Dionysiac practices. In some cases, notably in Euripides' Bacchae both movements are present. The ambiguity even seems to reach The Statesman in a somewhat lighter, more playful fashion. The Stranger asks the young Socrates whether men were more blessed in the reign of Cronos or now in the reign of Zeus? They decide that it depends on whether men in the first age engaged in philosophical conver- �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 30 sation with the animals or merely ate, drank, and gossiped with them. (272B1-D1) In the Aeneid itself this ambiguity surfaces in the figures of the Cyclopes. When we first encounter them in book 3 of the Aeneid, they are the sheep-grazing, cannibalistic savages with whom we are familiar from Horner's Odyssey. But in the Aeneid's sixth book we learn of and in the eighth book we see the Cyclopes of Aetna, skilled metal workers in Vulcan's shop who set to work on Aeneas's shield. In contrast, Horner's Hephaistos in Iliad XVII works on Achilles' shield alone, and the robot-like, wheeled tripods he has made cannot be compared to Vulcan's Cyclopean assistants, who have names ("Thunderer," "Lightning," "Fireworker") and who respond to Vulcan's exhortations. Clearly some sort of Cyclopean transformation has taken place, of which, however, we receive no further information. On the deeper ambiguities in Virgil there will be more to say later; now we move on to other aspects of the Golden Age in Plato. History Colin Starnes17 brings our attention to the eighth book of Plato's Republic where, having concluded along with the other interlocutors their description of the best state, the true aristocracy, Socrates and Glaucon embark on a description of the other, inferior ones. These Socrates subsumes under four types: tirnocracy, (whose principle is honor); oligarchy (wealth); democracy (liberty); and-worst of all-tyranny (power). They then talk about the ways in which one type may collapse into the next, inferior one. Socrates prefaces this discussion with the following observations: Hard as it is for a state so framed to be shaken, yet, since all that comes into being must decay, even a fabric like this will not endure forever, but will suffer dissolution. In this manner: not only for plants that grow in the earth, but also for all creatures that move thereon, there are seasons of �KOHL 31 fruitfulness and unfruitfulness for soul and body alike, which come whenever a certain cycle is completed, in a period short or long according to the length of life for each species,IS Seen in the light of Socrates' discussion of the political forms in the Republic, the myth of the golden age in the Statesman has sufficed to bring to light a new conception of social history. As Klein points out, the myth does not rest on the old, "organic" conception as seen in the Republic, according to which the social order goes through successive cycles of growth, maturity, senescence, and death like the life cycle of an annual plant, but rather on a revolutionary conception, where at the beginning of each cycle there is a revolution, a reversal, a renovative overthrow of the previous, senescent, decrepit age, and the restoration of the new age, which then gradually declines. In turning the course of events back to a golden past, the statesman turns back and binds the political order back to its ancestral foundations. This gives a deeply religious character to Roman politics and, conversely, as Hannah Arendt has explained, a deeply political character to Roman religion: In contrast to Greece, where piety depended upon the immediate revealed presence of the gods, here religion literally meant re-ligare: to be tied back, obligated, to the enormous, almost superhuman aud hence always legendary effort to lay the foundations, to build the cornerstone, to found for eternity. To be religious meant to be tied to the past, and Livy, the great recorder of past events, could therefore say, Mihi vetustas res scribendi nescio quo pacta antiquus fit animus et quaedam religio tenet ('While I write down these ancient events, I do not know through what connection my mind grows old and some religio holds [me ]'). 19 �32 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Negatively, as in the case of transgression, it is the loosing, the releasing from these bonds of religio either by the restitution of damages or by the paying of a like penalty that constitutes just absolution. 20 Positively, the religious sense of the Romans, which was cultivated at funerals by the presence of ancestral death masks and the giving of orations honoring ancestors as well as the recently departed, has been observed to contribute significantly to the formation of future generations of Roman citizens. For who would not be inspired by the sight of images of men renowned for their excellence, all together and as if alive and breathing? What spectacle could be more glorious than this? Besides, he who makes the oration over the man about to be buried, when he has finished speaking of him, recounts the successes and exploits of the rest whose images are present, beginning from the most ancient. By this means, by this constant renewal of the good report of brave men, the celebrity of those who performed noble deeds is rendered immortal, while at the same time the fame of those who did good service to their country becomes known to the people and a heritage for future generations. But the most important result is that young men are thus inspired to endure every suffering for the public welfare in the hope of winning the glory that attends on brave men. 21 In Virgil's epic this conception, eminently both religious and political, centers upon that revolutionary figure, pious Aeneas, from whom the poem takes its title. The variegated hue of the golden bough by which he gains access to Hades is an external sign of the union of life and death, of freedom and force, fused in the character of Aeneas. But this union, which characterizes the hero and pervades his age, only extends so far. In subsequent generations of men this union �KOHL 33 progressively falls apart; the ages become inferior. Thus to extend the metaphor: the brilliance of the variegated hue now diminishes as the elements successively separate to form ever-duller colors. 22 Further, turning the cosmos back to its pristine condition is accompanied by much destruction and civil strife, as Plato's Stranger reminds us. The gold of the golden age thus achieved is a gold alloyed with sadness and loss. This, I suggest, is another meaning of the bough's discolor aura. There are other dark aspects of the golden age as well. In the eighth book of the Aeneid, as we have already seen, Evander describes to Aeneas Latium's past (8.314-36); from this description it is fairly clear that Saturn, overthrown by his son Jupiter, came as a refugee amongst the aboriginal, primitive peoples of Italy, to whom he was a political and cultural hero, ruling in peace. This Saturnian age then gave way to debased societies as warfare and acquisitiveness supplanted the Saturnian element, a decline aided and abetted by waves of invaders. The Latins under Latinus are remnants of this aboriginal Saturnian element, as is made clear by various other allusions in the poem as well. 23 Now come Evander and Aeneas, exiles from foreign lands and both descendants of Jupiter. Aeneas is persistently and vehemently opposed throughout the poem by Saturnian Juno. Her wrath against Aeneas and the Trojans is announced at the very beginning of the epic (1.4) and is sustained nearly until the end (12.842). In two soliloquies (1.37-49; 7.293-322) and in three conversations (Helenus to Aeneas: 3.435-40; Juno to Allecto: 7.331-40; Juno to Jupiter: 10.63-95) Juno makes clear the reasons for her antipathy: her beauty has been slighted in favor of others (the Judgment of Paris); her husband cheats (Dardanus, the Trojan founder comes from the dalliance of Jupiter with Electra), and her own children are not pretty to look at Uuventa has been spurned by Jupiter in favor of Ganymede, and Mars and Vulcan generally are not attractive figures either). In contrast, Aeneas' mother is �34 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Venus, the winner of the Judgment of Paris, and both Aeneas and his Trojan companions are described as handsome, beautiful people. Witness the taunts of Numanus at Ascanius and the encamped Trojans at 9.598-620 and the protest of Iarbas to Jupiter at 4.215-18: the Trojans are effeminate, foppish people, incapable of fighting. The very sight of these beautiful Trojan dandies, we imagine, makes Juno angry-a properly Saturnian sentiment. Finally and more broadly, there is the prediction that a Trojan remnant will someday establish itself and overthrow Carthage, Juno's favorite city. Mythological orthodoxy within the foregoing context thus indicates that restoration of the golden age in Italy would entail bringing Saturn or at least his representatives out of hiding and reestablishing them. But the divine allegiances are all wrong for this. Juno, the chief opponent of Aeneas, and her associates-Turnus, Latinus, the Latins, Jutnrna and allies-are of Saturnian stamp and resist the new order in Italy, while Aeneas, Evander, and the Trojans and their allies are the J avian protagonists of that new order. The institution of the new order represents, therefore, the complete subversion of the Saturnian elements and not their reinstitution. But Aeneas' institution, as we have seen, is quite precisely advertised as setting up the return of the golden age, which Virgil's own patron Octavian, descendant of Aeneas' Jovian line, will reestablish in Saturn's Latin land, and from which will extend a golden empire (6.789-800; 8.675-81). How, then, can the usurpers of golden Saturn properly found a golden age? There are two ways to look at this new foundation, and here the recent critics are sharply divided into two camps. Advocates of the Empire, the "Augustans," point to the final reconciliation of Juno and Jupiter in which the latter will declare her to be not only Saturn's other child but also his sister (12.830) and are well aware of the century of civil strife and confusion that marks the late Republic; they will look at the amalgamation of the Saturnian and the Jovian as a complete solution to the dynastic and political problems of �KOHL 35 the, past. The Saturnian gold will be alloyed with the Jovian iron to produce a metal of stronger characteristics, if duller hue. But the scene of this reconciliation is somewhat ambiguous. Jupiter sees Juno seated on a cloud above the battle, watching the final battle between Aeneas and Turnus, and they exchange decisive words in the following dialogue, beginning with Jupiter: "The end is reached. You have had the power to chase the Trojans over land or wave, to kindle monstrous war, to mar a home and to blend bridals with woe. I forbid you to try any more." To which Juno with submissive expression responds: Because indeed, great Jupiter, this as your will was known to me, I left unwillingly Turnus and the earth: you would not have seen me alone on an airy seat to suffer fair and foul, but girt in flames I would have stood beneath with the very ranks and dragged the Teucrians into hostile strife. Juturna I confess I persuaded to help her miserable brother and I approved that she dare greater things for his life, but not spears nor stretch the bow. This I swear by the implacable fountain head of Styx, sole dread ordained for gods above. And now I truly yield and I give up the fight in loathing. (12.803-06) Juno had in fact earlier told Jutnrna this: "If you dare anything more favorable for your twin, do it; it is fitting. Perhaps better things may follow for the unhappy." (12.152-3) While not openly encouraging Juturna to do battle on behalf of her brother, these words do not discourage it either. Consequently, Juno's later vehement denial before Jupiter, who has reproached her for the fact that Juturna now faces Venus on the battlefield, may indicate that Juno's withdrawal has less to do with a fundamental change of heart and more to do with the implicit external threats of her brother. Under this view, the new golden age is not the voluntary melding of the Saturnian and the Jovian but the �36 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW involuntary usurpation of Saturnian by the Jovian. The new age is really the age of iron; instituted by political force and by poetic craft, it has been gilded in Saturnian guise to produce a shaded gold. The Saturnian partisans of the old Republic will say that by sleight of hand the Jovian has been substituted under the appearance of the Saturnian, and they were clear about the Augustan parallels. As put by Ronald Syme, one of the exponents of this point of view, In the Revolution the power of the old governing class was broken, its composition transformed. Italy and the non-political orders in society triumphed over Rome and the Roman aristocracy. Yet the old framework and categories subsist: a monarchy rules through an oligarchy. 24 This line of reasoning has been carried forward by Inez Scott Ryberg, who writes: But if one side of Virgil's picture of Latinus is Saturnian, the other side is Roman. He appears wearing the trabea, the traditional garb of the Roman king; he presides over Roman customs, the opening of the Gates of War and the making of treaties; he resists the breaking of the alliance with the Trojans and will take no part in the unrighteous war. 25 This ambivalent picture of Latinus carries over to an ambivalent position of Augustus: "That the new Golden Age of Augustus will embody the qualities of the reign of Saturn is an important part, but only part, of the concept." Thus, she suggests, the phrase said of Augustus, aurea condet saecula (he will establish the golden age) has the overtones condere lustrum (to establish the purifying sacrifice) and condere urbem (to establish the city). This overtone or "echo," according to Ryberg, "hints, with 'flattering ambiguity,' that the founder of the new Golden Age will be like Jupiter, the son greater than his father who brought to a close the reign �KOHL 37 of Saturn." But here, I think, we find a deviation from the scheme we have been exploring: rather than successive restorations of the golden age, we have successive challengers to it, each challenger aspiring to overthrow and outdo his predecessor, a scheme not devoted to achieving political stability but, if anything, to undermining it. Virgil in his poem does not resolve the status of the golden age. Like his mentor, Plato, he shows us much, tells us little, and moments of resolution seem rare. In the case of the bough, it is a symbol, and it has a certain power, namely of guaranteeing Aeneas passage through the underworld, but not much more. There is, in Brooks' critique, no "transcendent quality, passing beyond the contrasts of nature to an ultimate harmony. . .it is unnatural, embodying the contrasts of nature, rather than the supernatural, transcending them." The bough is received and exercised in ritual silence. "The rite is effective," Brooks comments, and the hero receives his power, but not the knowledge of what that power should mean... The amor which impels him to pass living into death receives no answer. This deeper antithesis of success in action/frustration in knowledge is the central and fundamental significance of the golden bough. Certainly it is this which effects that curious distortion of the language at the moment of the bough's discovery. Discolor aura: not the light of revelation, but the dubious and shifting colors of the magic forest. In similar manner, the more we turn back to pursue and to restore the golden age, the more this age seems to recede into the past. It becomes a dim, indistinct, and shifting glow, the object of a quest that is ever-to-be-completed. Saturn remains hidden, and with him hides that direct apprehension, that illuminating knowledge of man's true estate. That to which we keep turning back is instead a counterfeit Saturn, a Jupiter disguised as Saturn, or perhaps a sort of negotiated �38 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW cobbling together, an amalgamation of elements of the two. Thus, the same antithesis of success in action/frustration in knowledge, which Brooks uncovered as the central and fundamental significance of the golden bough, discloses itself here also. As a result, we have the constituting of a new political order without the express declaration of its constitution; we have a new beginning, a novum principium, but without the enunciated new principles. To indicate this intermediate, indeterminate quality 'which seems to pervade Virgil's poem, Brooks says, "the Aeneid is a work in limbo," and he concludes his study with an allusion to Dante's well known exposition of that place in the fourth canto of the Inferno, where Dante's Virgil tells us that because he is unbaptized he is lost, and without hope he lives in longing. But unlike Dante, I would suggest that "limbo" in its original meaning is not a place of darkness but a place at the edge of things. Those who fell under the sway of the old order, the pagan "ancients," were drawn and moved by the figures of Aeneas, of Anchises, Ascanius and others, no matter how dimly descried. In a distant, indistinct way virtues were made visible, although unlike for Dante and the People of the Book, they could own little true explanation. Notes 1. SeeR. D. Williams, P. Vergili Marionis Aeneidos Liber Quintus (Oxford, 1960), xxv-xxviii. 2. Charles Segal, "Aeternum per Saecula Nomen, the Golden Bough and the Tragedy of History: Part 1," Arion 4 (1965): 617-57. 3. Citations are based on the Oxford editions of Munro and Allen (third, 1920), Allen (second, 1917), Mynors (corrected, 1972), and Burnet (1901) for the .Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Statesman, respectively. 4. "In fact, all of Virgil's poem is modeled on what you might call a mirrored reflection of Homer's," we are told by Macrobius in his Saturnalia, "you have only to compare the two passages." Macrobius: The Saturnalia, Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Percival Vaughan Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). The passage quoted is from book 5, chapter 2, section 13. Macrobius goes on �KOHL 39 to identify over one hundred half-line to two-line parallels between Virgil and Homer. Georg Nicolaus Knauer in his more recent work, Die Aeneis und Homer: Studien zur poetischen Technik Vergils mit Listen der Homerzitate in der Aeneis, 2nd ed. (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979), expands the list to over five hundred such parallels. 5. AB if to emphasize the nautical and equestrian parallels, Virgil borrows part of his description of the start of the boat race from a passage in which spirited horses are described in the third book of the Georgics (5.144-45 = G 3.104-05). 6. The labyrinthine associations of the Trojan riding display are elicited by John L. Heller, "Labyrinth or Troy Town?" The Classical Journal 42 (1946): 123-39. 7. C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan and Company, 1945), p. 35. 8. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 173; M. C. J. Putnam, The Poetry of the Aeneid: Four Studies in Imaginative Unity and Design (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965.), xiii - xiv and pp. 191 194; R. V. Desrosiers, "Two Greek Concepts of the Hero and their Echo in Virgil's Aeneid," unpublished lecture, Berlin, N.H., 1989. 9. American Journal of Philology 74 (1953): 260-80. 10. The sections pertaining to the Cronos discussion in Hesiod are found in Works and Days, 109-201 and Theogony, 736-885, and those in Ennius in Euhemerus, 8-65 and Annals, 25-29. 11. The Power of Thetis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Zeus' obligation to honor her son is fulfilled through the unfolding of the events on the plain of Troy. I have traced Zeus' latent direction of the principal actions here in "Design in the Iliad Based on the Long Repeated Passages," Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (1994/5): 191-214. 12. See Eva Brann, Homeric Moments, Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002), Chapter 13, ''Achilles as Hades and Achilles in Hades." This interpretation makes it all the more striking that Priam, guided by the psychopomp Hermes, has come to Achilles to ransom the body of his son from the underworld so that it might be properly honored by and among the living. And so they held funeral for Hector tamer of horses. 13. Jacob Klein, "The Myth of Virgil's Aeneid," Interpretation: A journal of Political Philosophy 2 (1970): 10-20. [Also in Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, ed. by Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis: St. John's College Press, 1985): 269-84.] Klein speculates �40 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW that the frequent Homeric references throughout the Aeneid, which the poet has deliberately transposed or otherwise modified elements in the Homeric originals, reflect the reversals in the Statesman myth. Further, Macrobius' discussion of such occurrences in Virgil at the very center of his Saturnalia, a dialogue that is reported as taking place at the winter solstice when the sinking sun is now reversing its course, also suggests such a revolutionary view. And Aeneas' Dardanian homecoming to Latium where the whole Homeric cycle begins (in an extended sense) now situates Virgil as the poet ancestral to Homer, thereby rendering some plausibility to Virgil's enigmatic boast that it was easier to steal Neptune's trident or Hercules' club than a verse from Homer. 14. As recorded by Henry Nettleship,Ancient Lives ofVergil, with an Essay on the Poems of Vergil in Connection with his Life and Times (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1879). Later writings also support Virgil's reputation as a Platonist: "Emperor Severus Alexander. . .Vergilium autem Platonem poetarum vocabat eiusque imaginem cum Ciceronis simulacra in secunda larario habuit, ubi et Achillis et magnorum virorum." "Emperor Severus Alexander... used to call Virgil the Plato of poets and he kept his portrait, together with a likeness of Cicero, in his second sanctuary of the Lares, where he also had portraits of Achilles and the great heroes." See The Scriptores Historiae Augustae, with an English translation by David Magie, Ph.D. (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1953), Vol. 2, 21.4. Klein (loc. cit.) calls our attention to part of an interpolation by an unknown hand in a 15th century manuscript of Donatus' biography of Virgil: audivit a Silane praecepta Epicuri cuiits doctrinae socium habuit Varum. et quamvis diversorum philosophorum opiniones libris suis inseruisse[t] de animo maxime videatur. ipse fuit Achademicus. nam Platonis sententias omnibus aliis praetulit. "From Silo Virgil learned of the teachings of Epicurus. Varus was his companion in this doctrine. And although he seems to have inserted the opinions of opposing philosophers in his books with great intent, he himself was of the Academy. For he preferred the views of Plato before all others." See Jacobus Brummer, ed. Vitae Vergilianae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912), apparatus plenus, pp. 32-3. 15. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Plato's Myth of the Statesman, the Ambiguities of the Golden Age and of History" pp. 285·301 (Chapter 14) in The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and forms of Society in the Greek World, trans Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) 16. Patricia Johnston, "Vergil's Conception of Saturnus," California Studies in Classical Antiquity 10: 57-70 (1977). 17. "The Eternity of Rome: Virgil's Doctrine and its Relation to Plato" in Philosophy and Freedom: The Legacy of James Doull, ed. David G. Peddle �KOHL 41 and Neil G. Robertson (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp.·· 181-200. For Starnes the primary elements corrupting and thus ultimately destroying the city "have to do with the random, irrational aspect of nature that is in principle impenetrable to human knowledge because we can only have sure and certain knowledge of what is both fixed and universal-that is, the Forms or Ideas." (p. 190) 18. The Republic of Plato, translated by Francis MacDonald Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 269 [546A]. Socrates goes on in this passage to associate political instability with the instability of human generations. Certain marriage numbers govern the procreation of perfect children, thus assuring the perfect continuity of generations and perfect order in the city, but it is difficult to determine such numbers and inferior children are born out of season, leading to disharmony. 19. From "What Is Authority?" in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 121. The citation is from Livy's Annals, book 43, chapter 13. 20. See Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), Chapter XII, esp. pp. 439-42. 21. Polybius, The Histories with an English Translation by W. R. Paton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1923) Book 6.53.10-54.4. 22. "Moreover, the more minute the particles into which anything is pulled apart, the more readily it is perceived that the color gradually fades away and is extinguished: as happens when purple wool is torn up into small parts; the purple and scarlet colour, brightest of all, is wholly scattered apart when the wool has been pulled apart threadwise; so that you may learn from this that the particles breathe away all their colour before they are dispersed apart into the seeds of things." Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 2. 826-33, W. H. D. Rouse translation in the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 3rd ed. rev., 1937). 23. The allusions to the Saturnian character of Latinus, Turnus, and Juturna, on the one hand, and the Jovian associations and descent of Aeneas and Evander, on the other, have been recently discussed by Richard F. Thomas, "Between Jupiter and Saturn: Ideology, Rhetoric and Culture Wars in the Aeneid," The Classical ]oumal100 (2): 121-47 (Dec. 2004-Jan. 2005). 24. The Roman Revolution (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1939), introductory chapter. �42 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 25. Inez Scott Ryberg, "Virgil's Golden Age," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 89:112-31 (1958). For a recent survey of the ambivalent and contradictory ways the golden age presents itself in Virgil's poetry and their various critical interpretations, see Christine Perkell, "The Golden Age and its Contradictions in the Poetry of Virgil," Vergilius 48 (2002): 3-39. �43 The Finest Fruits of Reason Review of Michael Comenetz's Calculus: The Elements M. W. Sinnett The Principle of Sound Learning is that the noise of vulgar fame should never trouble the cloistered calm of academic existence. Hence, learning is called sound when no one has ever heard of it; and 'sound scholar' is a term of praise applied to one another by learned men who have no reputation outside the University, and a rather queer one inside it. If you should write a book (you had better not), be sure that it is unreadable; otherwise you will be called 'brilliant' and forfeit all respect. -F. M. Cornford Microcosmographia Academica: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician Of the making of textbooks about the calculus there is no end, and, as Steerforth says to young "Daisy" Copperfield, "there never was a more miserable business." It's not that they prove to be "unreadable"; much worse, they're not meant to be read in the first place. Reading, after all, is an intensely personal enterprise replete with risks and responsibilities, and offering consequences uneven and unpredictable at best. Textbooks, on the other hand, are intended to be successful, and therefore proceed without reference to or dependence upon such quaint contingencies as the judgment and perseverance of individual students. (That they accordingly do nothing to foster the judgment and perseverance of individual students is perhaps a trifle inconvenient from the standpoint of anyone with the interests of education at heart, Michael Comenetz, Calculus: The Elements. World Scientific Publishing Co., 2002. M. W. Sinnett is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College. �44 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW but there's no doubt of its being good for business: The intellectual and spiritual vices reinforced by most textbooks strengthen the market for more of the same, a nice example of what systems analysts call a "negative feedback loop.") "Success" is defined in terms the modern world owes to B. F. Skinner: the subjects are to be conditioned into the reliable performance of certain operations, the origins and meaning of which remain soothingly obscure. The colorcoding of components of its presentation, for example, practically allows a modern text to read itself to the students, and since even this may fail to produce the desired results, many textbooks now include a computer disc in order to offer "interactive guidance," as well as, in a warm and supportive voice, the text's personal encouragement: "I am your friend. Trust me. Math is fun." A week's worth of class, meanwhile, demonstrates that the blue, purple, magenta, and brown bits (constituting roughly 900AJ) of the text can be safely ignored; the important parts are the section summaries (in red, for easy reference) and the worked examples (in green, the color of life). These, in turn, are keyed to vast arrays of repetitive and uninteresting exercises which sufficiently disclose, in and of themselves, the venerable pedagogical principle governing the whole: monkey see, monkey do. It was not always so. In the age when men were formed of gold, there were texts in the land that were also booksgood books withal, perhaps even great books. Hardy, Whittaker, Courant, Spivak, Apostol. These were the names of high places, points of entry and the means of apprenticeship to the professions of science. The latter, the two volumes of Calculus by Tom M. Apostol of CalTech (known to us as "the gospel according to the Apostol Tom"), was the constant companion for four solid semesters of any of us in the University's departments of science or engineering. It was a book we not only read and re-read, but also poured over, despaired of, rejoiced in, feared, hated, loved, savored, �SINNETT 45 emulated. It was a book of which we hoped to be found worthy. These modern texts seem rather the work of a pygmy race. Nor, in most respects, does the work under review, Calculus: The Elements by Michael Comenetz, bear comparison with these great treatises; in its scope, intended audience, and purpose, it is poles apart. And yet, in one essential way, it both invites and survives such comparison, for Comenetz's text is also a book, a very good book, a book that demands and rewards careful reading and reflection. The beginning of Calculus is with the "problem of calculus," and comprises brief discussions of five types of inquiry about physical and mathematical objects for which neither classical Greek geometry nor medieval Islamic algebra provide adequate resources. By way of proposing "lines of thought" that lead naturally to "the problem," Comenetz asks us to consider (1) the density and mass of a wire; (2) the growth rate and total volume of some quantity in threedimensional space; (3) the velocity, acceleration, and distance traversed by a "particle" in space; (4) the accumulation of quantities such as velocity and momentum through the operation of a force over time; and, (5) certain quantities associated with curves, such as the areas bounded by a curve or the inclination of a curve. In each case, a problem entirely amenable to classical or medieval treatment under conditions of appropriate uniformity becomes wholly intractable under the circumstances of variability often prevailing in the world around us. If the density of the wire, for example, is uniform-that is, if the ratio of mass to length is independent of the size or location of the segment of wire consideredthen the ordinary algebraic operations of multiplication and division are sufficient to express the relations between these quantities: density is the quotient of mass by length, and hence, mass is the product of density with length. If, on the other hand, the density of the wire varies with length, as one expects in practice, then the "generalizations of notions of quotient and product" that appear in Chapter Two are called �46 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW for. As the reader proceeds through the situations described in (2) through (5) "the same problem presents itself again and again to the eye that knows how to look;" namely, the problem of understanding the mutual determination of quantities whose relation is non-uniform. That such relations prevail between quantities routinely experienced in the physical world suggests an essential feature of the calculus that Comenetz is determined we shall see. This mathematics arises not through turning away from the world, but through active engagement with it. This connection with (what Eric Voegelin would call) the "engendering experience" of the subject is sustained throughout. Questions from the first chapter are employed in the second in order to motivate the introduction of the integral and derivative. Problem (1), in particular, pertaining to the mass of a non-uniform wire, plays the central role in introducing the "integral" as a generalized sum of differential quantities reflecting the variations in the wire's density along its length. The notion of integral is then more briefly applied to the components of problems (2) through (5), which pertain to the accumulation of quantities over space or time. The process is then repeated in terms of the components of these same problems that pertain to the generalized quotients expressing the infinitesimally local character of the phenomena in question. Beginning again with the wire, the "function" m = m(x), which gives the mass of the wire at each point x along the wire's length, is used to define the density of mass at x as the "limit" of average densities over a sequence of decreasing intervals containing x. This notion of "derivative" is then applied to the corresponding components of problems (2) through (5); that is, to the determination of the strictly local characteristics of the quantities being considered. Thus, just as Comenetz in Art. 2.4 applied the definite integral in calculating the area bound underneath the graph of a function, so in Art. 2.9 he turns to the computation of the graph's slope at an arbitrary point. The careful arrangement of the problems, with geometric properties of �SINNETT 47 graphs corning last, permits smooth transitions between the two halves of Chapter Two and between Chapters Two and Three. The use of the definite integral to discuss the area bound by a curve over a fixed interval (Art. 2.4) leads naturally to the "indefinite integral" (Art. 2.5) interpreted as a function giving the area bounded by the curve over a variable subinterval. The question that then naturally arises (even if not explicitly forrnulated)-how fast this variable area is changing-leads to the discussion of the derivative (in Art. 2.6 and following). Lurking in the background, of course, is the Fundamental Theorem, which Cornenetz reserves for the following chapter. The immediate transition to Chapter Three is also effected by means of problem (5) on the geometry of curves, where (especially in §2.9.9 on "Differentiability") he presents examples that raise rather difficult questions as to the existence and general properties of derivatives and integrals. We therefore turn from the physical problems that motivate the concepts of "integral and derivative" in Chapter Two to a largely mathematical account of the processes of "differentiation and integration" in Chapters Three and Four. Here the emphasis is upon an orderly mathematical account, which proceeds from an heuristic discussion of limits and continuity, through an abstract (though not rigorous) definition of the derivative, to the delineation of differentiation formulae for standard categories of functions and the general algebraic properties of differentiation. The explicit statement of the Fundamental Theorem then leads to discussion of indefinite integrals, the formulae for definite integrals corresponding to known derivatives, and to the further applications of differentiation in determining mathematical properties of functions and of their graphs. This approach is continued in Chapter Four, where "local" properties disclosed by derivatives are applied to "global" properties best characterized by the generalized summation of definite integrals. Thus the chain rule for the differentiation of suitable compositions of functions leads to �48 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW techniques of integration such as "substitution," "parts," and "partial fractions." We discover in general that the applicability of integrals is as various as our ability to build differentials of relevant quantities. The two chapters of pure mathematics then lead to two more of applied mathematicsspecifically, to the study of equations containing differentials (a.k.a. "differential equations"), and again the same inverse relationship between "differentiation and integration" is found: the equations that express physical processes as relations between derivatives can be solved (at least in these elementary circumstances) by means of integration. Perhaps the most beautiful thing in Calculus is Comenetz's seventh chapter on "plane curves." Nowhere else do we see so clearly the historical background that modern analysis has transformed. The tools constructed in preceding chapters are the means to a simplified and very clear discussion of the "arc length" and "curvature" of smooth, non-intersecting curves in the Cartesian plane. Precise references to the Lemmas of Part 1 of the Principia permit Comenetz not only to connect his account with that of Newton, but also to show what is at stake in both. Instead of a characterization that applies to a figure as a whole, as in the geometry of Euclid or Apollonius, the modern approach, which begins with Newton and applies to a much wider class of curves, characterizes curves in terms of their "local geometry" (Art. 7.3); that is, it characterizes them in terms of their behavior in neighborhoods of individual points. The qualities that are truly "intrinsic" to such curves, such as "arc length" and "curvature," are therefore most naturally defined analytically. This chapter includes a number of examples in which the analytical definition of curvature is beautifully illustrated in terms of the geometrical figure known as the "osculating circle"; but in the end it is curvature as a function of arc length, k = f(s), that determines the curve independently of all geometric considerations. And this use of arc length as an independent variable expressing position "along" a curve allows a smooth transition to the final topic of the �SINNETT 49 chapter, a lovely yet brief treatment of the generalization of the Riemann integral known as the "line" or "contour integral." The elegance and cohesiveness of this chapter is but the clearest example of a general feature of Comenetz's Calculus; namely, that it is a carefully thought-out and entirely selfcontained whole. The five problems briefly discussed in Chapter One return time and again, and develop in tandem with the mathematical language they help to motivate. Because they demonstrate the depths that open up through the appropriate analytical concepts and techniques, the problems not only receive extensive discussion in their own right, but also necessitate the application of the virtually all the mathematics that Comenetz presents. Even the concluding chapter on Taylor series, which might at first seem to have been tacked on, provides the author a chance to survey the journey on which he has led the reader. Thus, there are no loose ends. Indeed, as the book concludes, we are invited to "contemplate," not the five platonic solids as at the close of Euclid's Elements, but "the elegant formula" for the power series computation of n/4, and to recognize in it "the depth that yields the finest fruits of reason." Its elegance notwithstanding, there is also something disquieting about the wholeness of this book; in particular, there is something artificial-not to say unnatural-about Comenetz's invitation to contemplation, which is as if to suggest that we have arrived someplace special. No such invitation is forthcoming from Euclid at the close of Book 13, since none is needed, except in the case of perverse moderns such as myself whose cosmic piety on that august occasion was all too rapidly swept away in a torrent of rather obvious, and rather blasphemous, questions. (What do "Platonic solids" look like in n-dimensions? or in a locally compact topological vector space? or in a Banach space? Are there Platonic solids in a Banach space? Hilbert space, sure, but Banach space? What happens if ... ?) For those who come freshly to Euclid-which in a just world would include every �50 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW literate person-the urge to contemplation arises ineluctably from the movement of the text itself; one contemplates because it's the natural thing for anyone who (thinks he) dwells in a cosmos to do. Modern mathematics, by way of contrast, promulgated by inhabitants of the universe, is fragmentary by nature. Consummations are therefore illusory, and wholes are inseparable from the idiosyncrasies of authors, as witness the fact, which Comenetz knows perfectly well, that from any point in Calculus one can ascend vertically into the theoretical ionosphere and never be heard from again. This, in turn, is simply further evidence of the perspective that guides Comenetz's careful arrangement of his material in the first place; since this mathematics is exegetically related to the order of the physical world, to entertain seriously some final wholeness about it would be to indulge oneself in the fantasy of (what Paul Feyerabend calls) "the conquest of abundance." Our true place in the order of things is more aptly described by Newton's famous metaphor (suggested by the cover of Calculus) that we moderns, at best, are as small boys playing on a beach and diverting ourselves in finding now a shinier pebble or a more curious shell, while "the great ocean of truth" lies undiscovered before us. Comenetz has indeed presented his readers a cornucopia of "the finest fruits of reason," but ten more volumes of such would still imply that the greatest harvest is yet to come, indeed, that the greatest harvest will always be yet to come. These considerations also lend urgency to the question for whom Calculus: The Elements is intended. It certainly has the features of a textbook, including sets of "questions" with "answers [in the back]," a "topical summary" keyed to the appropriate articles and sections of the text, and a "reader's guide" that, among other things, offers alternative routes through the material. It is somewhat difficult to imagine, however, the nature of the course (or courses) in a conventional college or university to which it would be appropriate. It is clearly not intended, on the one hand, for the training of mathematicians. The book is indeed full of delightful �SINNETT 51 surprises for the mathematically-minded reader (integrals and derivatives clearly presented prior to, and with nothing more than a "cautionary" remark about, limits; a definition of continuity that clearly derives from general topology; and numerous intimations of a beautiful generalization of calculus known as differential geometry), but it contributes little to the learning that the beginner would require in order to notice them. Only a few of the central theorems of the subject are formulated as such, and even these cannot be rigorously proven given the relegation of such things as a precise ("epsilon-delta") definition of limit to brief discussions in fine print. On the other hand, it seems too demanding for the "calculus for poets" course and has the wrong practical orientation for the "calculus for business administration" course. Nor is it appropriate to a class of science or engineering students, in which context it would be judged both deficient and superfluous at the same time, deficient in certain necessary technical matters and superfluous in offering a good deal of instruction in physics that would be more exhaustively taught elsewhere. Precisely as a coherent and self-contained whole, Comenetz's Calculus is a terminal introduction to a non-terminal subject. One can easily imagine it enticing its reader to further study, but it is difficult to see how such study could be undertaken without the reader, at least in part, starting over someplace else. This is not to deny, however, the worth of reading Calculus. To the contrary, members of any of the categories mentioned will profit from the perspective, not to mention the idiosyncrasies, presented here. But perhaps it is not categories of readers that Comenetz has in mind. Perhaps it is only when we stop thinking about categories of readers (as authors of mere textbooks never do )-perhaps it is only when we consider who, and not what, the readers are-that we discover the "actually existing individual" (Kierkegaard) for whom this book is a godsend. What, in the end, does it achieve? What does it do? And the answer is that it doesn't do anything. It's a book not a machine; it's meant to be read, �52 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW and wondered at, and reflected on, and struggled with. It can be said to make the case for mathematical physics as among "the finest fruits of reason," but even this only for those who have eyes with which to see, and energy with which to persevere, and courage with which to inquire. It is hard to imagine the person willing to undergo the risks of genuine reading who would not profit from, and delight in, what Comenetz offers. A painful duty, thus, confronts me: Calculus: The Elements is, in my opinion, definitely not unreadable. Comenetz, therefore, as I need hardly add, cannot be judged a sound scholar. Alas! �53 ~ The Sting of the Torpedo Fish fj:-- Christopher B. Nelson Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught? Or if not teachable, is it acquired by practice, or if neither, whether men possess it by nature or in some other way? So begins Plato's dialogue, Meno, opening as abruptly upon the reader as my remarks have upon you this afternoon. You freshmen will spend a good part of this year with Plato, his frustrating protagonist, Socrates, and this very dialogue, Meno, in both English translation and the original Greek. I think I am on relatively safe ground in saying that the reason we spend so much time on the Meno is that this dialogue belongs peculiarly to this college; it is deeply rooted here. I hope to expose a few of those roots this afternoon, but let me first return to the beginning. Tell me, Socrates, if you can, whether human excellence can be taught? If not, whether we can acquire it by practice? Or if neither of these, whether we are born with it or it comes to us in some other way? Meno's question is interesting, for it appears to go to the heart of some very big questions that all of us share: what does it mean to be human? and how can we be better human beings? Parents would love to know how to raise children who are improvements on themselves; all parents want what is best for their children. Teachers would be happy and honored above all others if they could teach their students virtue. As for students, why else are you here but that you Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis Campus of St. John's College. This is the Convocation Address to the Class of 2010, delivered at Annapolis on August 23, 2006. �54 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW believe that some answer might be given to Meno's question: What is the right path to virtue? How might I acquire hnman excellence? But Meno's question has its flaws. For one, it comes ont of the blue and without context. We are supposed to know, somehow, what Meno is talking about. We are assumed to have a common vocabulary and even a common nuderstanding of basic concepts. Speaking of vocabulary, some of you will have noted that I translated the Greek in two different ways when I repeated Meno's question in English, an exercise you freshmen will undertake as you try first to discover what is being said and what it means before asking whether it is true. Such attempts at translation will be first steps to getting at the root of Meno's question. Socrates appreciates what is at stake in Meno's question. He thns goes straight to the heart of it with a response that would confound any student hoping to receive the almighty truth from a teacher. Socrates in effect says: how can I say how virtue is acquired when I don't even know what it is? And worse, Socrates then says that he has never met any other person who knows what virtue is. He entreats Meno to help him understand what Meno thinks it to be. Meno makes the attempt, responding confidently with what he has heard from other teachers, repeating their opinions as his own. Yet, under Socrates' questioning, Meno finds himself disowning the opinion he began with. After two false starts, Meno begins to get uncomfortable with Socrates' examination. When Socrates begs him to start over yet a third time, Meno tries to divert the conversation from the question of virtue to the problem with Socrates: Socrates, I certainly used to hear, even before meeting you, that you never do anything else than exist in a state of perplexity yourself and put others in a state of perplexity. And now you seem to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and �NELSON 55 simply subduing me with incantations, so that I come to be full of perplexity. And you seem to me, if it is even appropriate to make something of a joke, to be altogether, both in looks and in other respects, like the flat torpedo-fish of the sea. For, indeed, it always makes anyone who approaches and touches it grow numb, and you seem to me now to have done that very sort of thing to me, making me numb. For truly, both in soul and in mouth, I am numb and have nothing with which I can answer you. And yet thousands of times I have made a great many speeches about virtue, and before many people, and done very well, in my own opinion anyway; yet now I'm altogether unable to say what it is. It is beginning to look as if Meno has no interest in the answer to the question and is more concerned with his image or reputation than with the truth. On the other hand, Socrates is not satisfied; he still wants to proceed with the search for an answer. He is also willing to conduct the search with Meno, a man who seems to have no thoughts of his own. Socrates, in wishing to proceed, has done two things: he has told Meno that he will serve as Meno's teacher if Meno will let him, that is to say, that he will join Meno in the search; and he has told the reader that he is willing to do so because he might actually learn something from Meno. He is truly open to the possibility that the teacher may learn from the student-any student, even Meno. So, Meno, what is virtue? Meno now tries a sting of his own, challenging Socrates with a classic learner's paradox: either we know something or we don't. If we know it, we don't need to search for it. But if we don't already know what we are looking for, how will we ever recognize it when we see it? Socrates will not be deterred by Meno's attempt to bring the conversation to an abrupt halt. Instead, he takes Meno's problem seriously and answers �THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 56 in two ways. First, he repeats a myth he has heard that suggests that learning is a kind of recollection, which requires an exercise of responsibility for learning by the one doing the learning. Learning does not occur when someone else, a teacher for example, tries to put knowledge into a student. Instead, it is an act of recovery, in some way, of something already known to us. When Meno demonstrates that he doesn't get it, Socrates resolves upon a way to show Meno what he means, asking Meno to observe carefully as he examines one of Meno's slave boys about a problem in geometry which is new to him, a problem that can be demonstrated by a drawing in the earth-a problem, not incidentally, that you will be working on in your mathematics tutorial with Euclid. The slave boy reaches a point where he expresses with confidence an answer that is false, an answer that he comes to understand as wrong a few moments later under Socrates' questioning. The slave boy tries again with the same result. Socrates asks him to start over, just as he did with Meno a little earlier. He asks the boy to produce another answer, and the slave boy says: "Indeed, Socrates, I do not know." Socrates turns to Meno, and by extension to us, and says: Do you see, Meno, what advances he has made in his power of recollection? He did not know at first, and he does not know now, what is the [answer]: but then he thought that he knew, and answered confidently as if he knew, and had no difficulty; now he has difficulty, and neither knows nor fancies that he knows. Meno: True. Socrates: Is he not better off knowing his ignorance? Meno: I think that he is. �NELSON 57 Socrates: If we have made him doubt, and given him the "torpedo's shock," have we done him any harm? Meno: I think not. Socrates: We have certainly, it would seem, assisted him in some degree to the discovery of the truth; and now he will wish to remedy his ignorance, but then he would have been ready to tell all the world again and again [the answer he gave at first?]. Meno: True. Socrates persuades Meno that the slave boy simply would not have been ready to inquire and learn the truth without first being reduced to perplexity. The torpedo's shock not only did not hurt, it positively helped; it was the condition for the learning that did occur (and the slave boy did go on, with Socrates' help, to find the solution to the geometry problem). Socrates has shown us, the readers (and Meno, if he were listening), that understanding our own ignorance is necessary for learning to take place, especially understanding our ignorance of the everyday, common things we thought we knew well. When we can look at the familiar and suddenly realize that we really do not understand it, when we can look at what we always thought we knew, and ask "what is this thing?" then we are ready to learn and well along the path to better understanding. In that state we are truly torpid, just as the slave boy was, and we bring a sense of wonder to our search. This wonder comes not from something we understand, but rather from our desire to understand, what we sometimes call a love of learning, born not in understanding but in ignorance. Socrates has done something else in his demonstration. He has also shown us the power of discovering what something is not, and helped us see that knowing what something is not is much more than knowing nothing; it is a �58 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW kind of "knowing ignorance," an "intelligent perplexity" that comes from trying out and discarding false notions. He has also helped us see not only that we do not know what virtue is, but also that we do not even know what learning is. We now look at Meno and see that he is a slave: a slave to his pride, a slave to the opinions of others, unwilling to examine what he clearly does not understand. Meno's problem is not that he is ignorant, but that he has no desire to be free from the shackles of that ignorance. We look at the slave boy and see that he is free; free from the false notions he has been carrying around with him, free from barriers to learning. This freedom, strangely, comes not from the certainty of knowledge but from the recognition of his ignorance. Let me return to the place where I began, when I said that this dialogue of Plato's is deeply rooted at the College. We want you to acquire the freedom of Meno's slave boy, the freedom that allows you to acknowledge the one certainty in life: "Indeed, Socrates, I do not know." Recognition of that certainty is the path to learning things that will belong to you, not just repeating things that belong to others. We also want you to have practice with the tools you will need to acquire this freedom, tools that will help you to listen and to read attentively and deeply, to express yourselves intelligibly and precisely, and to measure and reckon the world in which you live accurately and comprehensively; tools that will help give shape to your understanding who you are and where you live, and what your responsibility is toward others and the world you inhabit together, the world of the body and the world of the spirit. We live with a deep paradox at the College, one that you will confront right at the outset. We have made very deliberate choices about what should and should not be included in this all-required curriculum (and there are many, many excellent works that are not on the program list simply because there is no room for them in just four years). Yet we tell you that, for all the conviction we may have that these �NELSON 59 choices constitute the best undergraduate curriculum we can devise, this conviction is not grounded in the answers these books purport to give but in the questions they raise. When we say that this college is committed to radical inquiry, we mean inquiry into the very traditions and books that have shaped the world into we are born. This is why we are not ashamed to admit that, although we are called an institution of higher learning, we really do not know what learning is. We share the conviction, nonetheless, that it is worth the search to find out. When we welcome you to St. John's College, we are welcoming you to join us in a search that we imagine will sustain all of us for all of our lives, a search for origins and foundations that will be firm enough to support the good life we each wish to live. We call on you to join us as fellow lovers of learning, not as would-be scholars. One of the things you will discover as you read the several Platonic dialogues on the program is that they demand your engagement. They ask for you to reflect on how you might respond to Socrates. So, let me venture into the conversation of the Meno with a small, tentative reflection on the question Socrates puts to Meno: "What is virtue?" My thoughts, at least for now, are these: the way to virtue may require that we come to know our great weakness, our own ignorance. This ignorance is common to all who are less than divine; it is something we share with one another in our humanity. If there is a connection between knowledge and right conduct, it is likely to be found in our ignorance and in the humility it inspires, in seeing that every single one of us has a long, long way to go toward understanding, in the endless search for truth. I suspect that human virtue lies somehow coterminous with this strange path toward knowledge, which is a path through ignorance and therefore available to us all. As we are not likely to attain great heights of knowledge, it is more likely that we can share with each other the great peaks of desire. It may be that the love of learning, more than the attainment of understanding, is what binds us together most tightly. It may also be this love of �60 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW learning which impels us to great acts of virtue, like the virtue we will be asking you to exhibit every day in class: helping your classmates to experience the loving sting of the torpedo fish, helping them see that you too have a lot of baggage to unload, and coming to see that learning is best pursued in a community of lovers of learning, each seeking what is best for the others. And now I see that I have found my way to a typical difficulty experienced by all Socratic interlocutors. I have tried to say something about the nature of virtue, in terms of loving and learning, when I'm not sure I know what these are. So, let me leave you with this question: Tell me, freshmen, what is this love of learning that has brought you to our door, and where does it come from? For I do not know, although I am happy in the thought that we have this much to share with each other for four full glorious years. Welcome to St. John's College! May you experience the sting of the torpedo fish early and often. May the sting never hurt, but help you along the path toward understanding and freedom. �61 For the Graduate Students in Classics at Yale 1 Eva Brann I'll begin by thanking you for coming to listen to me on a busy weekday. As far as I know, a sense of guilt was not a recognized affect in the pagan world where about forty-nine percent of my moral allegiance lies, otherwise I would apologize to you-apologize for being about to suggest to you a way of life, a way that may not jibe with your purposes and plans as graduate students who have chosen your place in the academic organization of studies at a large university, as I did over half a century ago. The least I can do, however, is to give you my bona fides, although, as I will tell you in a moment, I did not exactly keep the faith. About fifty years ago I haunted Phelps Hall, as you do now. The tutelary deities of those days were called Bellinger, Bennett, Dawson, Immerwahr, Silk. I recall them with the tenacious affection that the young conceive for their teachers. Not that we were all that well taught: we learned not what we needed to know but what our professors wanted to teach. It is my impression, gained from our students' reports and appointment interviews, that you graduate students are far more rationally and rigorously prepared than we were. Perhaps that, too, has its downside. In any case, our teachers were giants, but our education was haphazardly splintered. Nonetheless we scrambled ourselves into some semblance of learning, but above all we achieved what we really wanted: to get to Greece, or Rome, or wherever our hearts lay. Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean on the Annapolis campus of St. John's College. The occasion for this talk was the award of the Yale Graduate Alumni Association's Wilbur Cross Medal as well as the celebration of the sixtieth year of Yale's Directed Studies, a Great Books Program. It was delivered on October 12, 2006. �62 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW I went to Athens, full of philhellenic fervor. It was an uneasy first year at the American School of Classical Studies. I learned that the Hellas of my dreams-partly, I guess, a legacy of my German childhood, but more, I like to think, tbe manifestation of some aboriginal memory-was most reliably accessible in the secure irrealities of my imagination, as I was before long to learn that the Greeks were most inexpugnably alive in the volumes of my then incipient library. Yet tbe place, Greece itself, was pervading my reading and imagining with its sensory lucidities: the pungent aroma of the thyme at landfall on Ceos after a wild, nauseated crossing from Sunion, the backlit blown poppies growing on Hymettus, but above all the then still pristinely diaphanous atmosphere of Attica, which gave sensory truth to Aristotle's saying that light is the activity of a transparent medium (De Anima 418 b9). Unfortunately this numinal landscape was overrun by latter day squatters, the modern Greeks. I must have been infected with tbis attitude from my elders, but I certainly colluded in it. It was only eventually that I began to wonder with some empathy what it must feel like to be the rightful yet very remote heirs to all that broken and buried glory. We archaeologists were, in any case, called to be intent on ruins above ground which were meant to be salvaged from the daily business of a modern-and then very poor-city, and from the detritus-a treasure trove to us-from which we scraped the earth away, careful trowelful by trowelful. Not that I did that myself; I wasn't any good at it, capable of sweeping away millennia at a trowel-stroke, while inspecting at puzzled length what a discerning eye would have immediately identified as discombobulated fill. Also, I was intimidated by the Greek workmen who had been competently at this job for generations. But I saw what we were doing, and I studied what we brought to light. For one thing, there was a melancholy to it. A colleague of those years, Seth Benardete, once said to me that Roman buildings were enhanced by ruination, while �BRANN 63 Greek temples were diminished. It seemed true, but why? I now think it is because Roman edifices anticipate romanticism, as it were, for they have in them something that lends itself to the deconstruction into that suggestive incompleteness which is indeed one characteristic of the romantic. A cracked Roman column will gather around itself a pastoral veduta; a Greek column drum will focus the eye on its collapsed perfection. For romantic is what the Greeks are not, at least at their canonical best: plan and detail participate in each other reciprocally; ruination cannot enhance them. A shorn or broken temple or treasure house is a kind of animadversion on passage. One might say, fancifully, that temples disapprove of time. I am going somewhere with these divagations. (You will, by the way, forgive all the vocabulary. There is an expansive pleasure in being among people who, by reason of their profession, are able to decode, even if they don't know, all the excellent words our Grecolatinate Auglosaxon English holds in store for us.) What I'm wandering toward are all the intellectual aporiai, the perplexities, that bedeviled that essentially glorious first year-the intellectual ones, I mean; I'll spare you the personal ones brought on by youth and Attic nights. These perplexities were far more engaging than the mere, idly sweet melancholy of being too late in history. First I should say that I fell heart and soul into the activity that engendered these perplexities. I was endlessly lucky and still feel full of gratitude for falling in with an organization like the American Excavation of the Athenian Agora-if there are many like it. To put it succinctly: these were fanatics; they worshiped at the (anum of scrupulousness: of digging technique, of cataloguing protocol, of generous collegiality. In the fifties not all the foreign schools were up and running, and visiting unhoused scholars would marvel at the institutional hospitality they received. The Agora was a model for canonicality: everything that was done was done exemplarily, from spelling to photography, from restoration to exhibition. There was a kind of communal concentration on the work, �64 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW any JOmmg of two sherds, each discovery of a pottery workshop or (glory of glories) of a pot painter, every convincing serialization of artifacts was noted with interest. I got into this meticulous enterprise in a way I can't account for to this day. I was invited to come down from Soudias Street on the slopes of Lycabettos to the Agora below the Acropolis. Homer Thompson, the director, took me through the show rooms where the unpublished potsherds were laid out and asked me what I'd like to work on. I pointed at some attractive looking stuff; never was there a luckier index finger. It landed on the Late Geometric and Protoattic pottery, the period when the black praying-mantislike figures of the Dipylon funeral amphorae were morphing into rounded polychrome human representations, and the funerary somberness was replaced by sometimes intentionally comical exuberance. I might inject here that that very inclusive respect for all times and populations of the Athenian market place which is now doctrine in the humanities was practiced earlier in the American excavation, perhaps there first and most paradigmatically. But there was-or seemed to me-to be something behind it, something tacit but palpable, which lent both backbone and pathos to the studious objectivity of the research: everyone knew that there was a center, quite literally evident in the study vitrines of our museum and workrooms, the Stoa of Attalus. There was a culmination, a standard, a reference point: the Athenian mid-fifth century, the Classical Period. No one would have dreamed of saying so, but it was known, the way in a decently egalitarian community everyone knows to whom the aristeia would go if there were to be a competition, but no one has the bad taste to say so. I left archaeology. One way to explain it is that there were just too many issues no one had the bad taste to broach. I might as well mention the tacitly proscribed word: it was philosophy. My leaving was, in a very mild way, felt to be a �BRANN 65 defection by those who had helped me and meant me to have a career in archaeology. I still feel a twinge. We were all deeply engaged in our work. I remember a night when those funereal stick-figures off a Geometric pot marched across my brain in a dream. But what was that work? We were erecting what had fallen and turning up what had been buried, often in actual graves. Were we mounting a renaissance for real life or a reburial in display cases? What, to leap to the largest context, was the human intention behind all those latter day "-logies" and "-graphies"-archaeology, topography, chronology, epigraphy? What did we mean by reaching back into time, resurrecting the dead through their artifacts and making what was earliest appear latest? I recall sitting in my apotheke, my work and storage room, with all those eighth- and seventh-century pots, when Homer Thompson, who was not only a brilliant but an attentive director, stuck his head in and asked, "What's new?" What could be new? I was cluing out laboriously what the most ignorant potter's ten-year old paidion would have known as a matter of course. A friend and I once figured out that it took fourteen times as long to study one of those little oil lamps the excavation produced by the thousands as it did to make one. What were we doing? Were we not systematically and well-intentionedly, yet literally, abusing what we had seized on in research? Take drinking cups: kotylai, skyphoi, kantharoi-I could type and serialize them, yet I'd never drunk from one of them; it would have been against protocol. Take ancient texts: we mined them for topography, chronology, prosopography, but we didn't read them, not as words meant to tell human truths. I learned the lingo, the serviceable dialect of the trade, the necessary initiation into the mysteries of the guild, one dialect in the very language you are now learning to speak with aplomb. I used it appropriately, but did I know what I was saying? �66 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW Archaeology is, if anything, grass-roots history. Who can doubt that there is Herodotean history? Historia is inquiry; of course one may inquire, as he does, into great and wonderful human deeds to keep them from falling into oblivion. It makes immediate sense. But historical research as an academic discipline, and particularly archaeology, is concerned also with pots and pans and babies' potty chairs. (The Agora has several.) A sophisticated intellectual structure is needed to warrant the study of what one might call "deedlets," ergidia (to coin a term) rather than a deed, an ergon, a significant action. For we should wonder under what hypothesis the essentially surd realia of the long dead begin to speak: how does an artifact, especially an undistinguished one, express its maker's world? And how should we care: engagedly to learn of our advances and our losses, or objectively, just for the heck of it, just because what is buried beneath asks to be exhumed, just as a mountain is climbed because it is there? I spoke, as we all did, of development: pot-shapes developed, evolved. How, by what detours through the potter's vision-governed hands, did inorganic pieces re-enact the evolutionary lines of organic species? We spoke of chronology and were intent on establishing datings, but what was time that it could be accounted for through excavational strata, the spatial laminations of time, as it were? The measurement of time by motion is problematic enough, but its visible capture in vertical stasis-nothing is more anathema to an excavation than a disturbed stratification-is terminally puzzling. We all talked of proportion: the masked standard was classical harmony. The degenerate members, say of a series of amphorae, were long and lank, while earlier examples were refreshingly, finely young, and tautly chubby, like those archaically smiling korai. But of the theory of proportion, probably the greatest topic of Greek mathematics, we never spoke, and to the question "what must the world be like for the parts of a whole to be in a proportion, to have the same �BRANN 67 ratio to each other?"-of that we seemed never to think. Some of you probably know the remarkable answer to that very question: how is it possible that a first element of a shape is to a second as a third such element is to a fourth. Only in a Euclidean world is such proportionality possible; there are other realms in which two shapes may be the same but no two can be similar, so that one canonical proportion cannot govern differently sized items. One cold winter's week I went down to Corinth to look at the Protocorinthean pottery collection in the American excavations. I had the excavation house to myself; at night there was a fire in the common room and a hot meal. There I perpetrated a horrible deed, all unknowing-as Greek hamartiai are ever committed. I got hungry at midnight and ate up the Corinthian starter yogurt in the icebox, the one that made the far-famed, the finest, creamiest yogurt in the archaeological world. There also I found a bookcase of the olive-green Loeb series and determined in youthful hubris to master in the cozy evenings all thirty-six Platonic dialogues, both those certainly genuine and also those probably spurious. I carne back with an anathema on me for the yogurt and treasure in my heart from the Plato. I have been at my college, St. John's, for the past halfcentury, thinking back now and then on my early years as a graduate student of classics and archaeology. I think I am intended to wax wise on the basis of age, and I'll take the challenge. You must know that where I come from we have no professors, authorities, or specialists, and our students are meant to look on us as just better-prepared fellow learners. That is not hyperbole but actual practice. As a result none of us tutors, as we call ourselves, wilt readily under scepticism. So if you find the following three lessons I've drawn from my two lives doubtful or even repugnant, I can't ask for anything more familiar than to hear you say so. One. Some of you, very few I would guess, are scholars to the bone. The pursuit of a delimited problem through thickets of opinion and mountains of evidence gives you a �68 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW soberly orgiastic pleasure. You don't need advice, you'll do what you love and gain the recognition you deserve. But others among you, quite a few I would again guess, know in your heart of hearts that your enthusiasm for scholarly research is a little forced, more drawn by duty than by joy; that the minuscule adjustments to previous opinions that you tweak into an issue and the slight variations you contrive upon old contextures give you only a meager satisfaction. When you acknowledge this condition in yourself, finish your degree, by all means. But, on the supposition that you do want a life of learning, forget about the university and go teach at a good small college. By good I don't mean prestigious. Lovely things go on in fairly obscure places, where unsophisticated but willing young students often bring their teachers back to basics, to elementary questions of the sort that scholarly research races too far ahead of. As Thomas More advises a promising but very corruptible young man in one of my favorite plays, "A Man for All Seasons": "Be a teacher." Try not to think, in fact never think, of the writing you do as "my work." Those of you who are researchers at heart must believe-though there is something problematic about it-that they are part of a common progressive work, the advancement of learning. As I say, it's problematic whether there is any actual progress in the humanities, or whether as the cutting edge digs into the future, the past silts up and sinks into sedimented oblivion. Yet whoever is nonetheless committed to scholarship must surely believe that they can own no real estate on the orbis intellectualis where all is common ground tilled for the increase of knowledge. So much the sadder is it to hear teachers speak of "my work." Is teaching not their work? To put it another way: The scholarly world is more and more a virtual world, spatially expansive but often topically constricted. For my part, I think the humanly full life is concretely local and intellectually wide, to be lived in a faceto-face community whose members can talk to each other �BRANN 69 about anything, where nothing of human interest is interdicted; where you don't have to mount a colloquium to have a colloquy, where there are no taboos except indifference and incivility; where discourse does not divide into either shop talk or chat but observes the truly interesting human mean; and above all, where no one owns a specialty so that others have to venture opinions with the disclaimer, "Of course, that's not my subject." Once I knew more about Protoattic pottery than anyone then alive in the world, an Englishman or two excepted. It is an experience everyone should have sometime. And then they should stop and live in that acknowledged semi-ignorance which is both proper to human inquiry and the ideal state of teachers, who, before producing another article, should set themselves to learn what their students ought to know. Let me make sure here that I'm rightly understood: These instructions aren't meant as categorical imperatives, unconditional commandments. They are rather what Kant calls "hypothetical imperatives," of the "if-then" type. The protasis of each is: "If you want to live happily" -as Aristotle thinks of happiness: the soul activated in accordance with human excellence. The apodosis is: "then try doing it this way." Two. Socrates is said to have told the Athenians in his last public appearance that "the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being;" "ho ... anexi!tastos bios ou biotas anthropoi" (Apology 38A). I think he is being more absolute than "worth living" conveys. I would translate: "the uninspected life is not a lived life." Socrates is uttering both a claim and an injunction. The injunction is to ask yourself what you're doing, and the claim is that if you don't, you aren't all there, not quite alive. To me what Socrates says seems utterly true, and on that hypothesis I'll proceed. What are we mostly doing, we who are at home in the world of learning? That's plain: mostly we use words. To be human means to have logos-and indeed we do hardly anything but employ /ogoi-rational speech in general and special words in �70 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW particular. It is, then, part of our peculiar business to know what we are saying. So don't use words you don't understand or don't mean to come to understand at least partly. Graduate school is rightly more training than education, more preparation for a profession than learning for the sake of being all there. Hence, the possession of a professional vocabulary, often well-invented and always serviceable for expressing yourself within the guild-and, I can't help adding, for marking greenhorns and amateurs-is not only an accomplishment but also a professional deformation. So talk human whenever possible and know something, at least a little, of the explicit or implicit theory behind the language of the humanities. You might construe what I've just said as an invitation to theorize, to engage in theory. Not so, just the opposite. It is an incitement to philosophy, which is just the name for the questions Socrates thinks will make you come to, be all there, all aware. Moreover, here's a claim some of you will resist and some of you will recognize as the articulation of your own suspicions: Theory is the enemy-were I given to hyperbole I would say, the deadly enemy-of philosophy, more accurately, of Socratic philosophizing. I mean, say, legal critical theory, literary theory, every kind of social theory; I've just come off a bout of reading "desire theory," and I know whereof I speak. I could talk for hours about this displacement of thought, perhaps with some of you for a while afterwards. But for now I'll put it in capsule form; I understand philosophy to be everyone's business, certainly a classicist's. It is the desire to look as straight, deep, and directly into yourself and out into the world as you can. (It has, of course, only a tenuous, occasional connection to the academic subject by that name.) That effort I am speaking of, introspective and contemplative, looking within and gazing at the heavens, used indeed to be called theory. Theoria has had a long and fascinating passage of diminution into "theory." Theory is a rational screen, a mental jig under which things are re-formed into pre-assigned shapes. It is a form of ration- �BRANN 71 alization but not always of thinking. It is logos, however, not plus receptive love but plus willful manipulation. A theory is fun to devise but the devil to inherit, because duty demands that we grasp it and wisdom asks that we resist it. Here's another way to put it: when you spot trendiness or recognize ideology-the marks will be a jigged and unnatural terminology-become a porcupine, all quills up. Three. My third hypothetical imperative does verge on the categorical. There is a sort of human minginess that appears characteristically in academic settings-not that academics typically practice it, but that it lurks as an endemic danger of mutual infection. I have heard it said that its meanness is large in inverse proportion to the minuteness of the issues. Many of you will soon be members of departments and will be absorbed in departmental politics. The issues are not in fact so very small, since they concern the way the life of learning is lived, and it is right, or seems right to me, to be passionately involved. But passion is not pathos; beware of false moral drama. Be as little ignoble and ungenerous as you can. I could fill Twelve Tables with negative advice but I'll close with one piece particularly pertinent to this talk. In published research plagiarism is a serious offense. In reflective conversation it is a lovely compliment. If as teachers and colleagues you find ideas you thought were yours by priority turning up in your colleague's conversation, smirk with inner satisfaction and then offer a serious critique of your own thoughts, lest your borrowers fall into the original sin of the intellect: holding opinions that have been purloined but not appropriated. I've kept you too long, but that's what happens when an elder of the tribe is urged to talk. Yet, before I stop, one afterthought: If you could all band together to found a movement for the abolition of the "original contribution" requirement of the doctoral dissertation you would do the world of learning a great service. For in the humanities the drive for �72 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW originality and the search for insight are too often at crosspurposes. � 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974.  It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>.  <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2007/1 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Guekguezian, Peter Ara Hunt, Frank Sachs, Joe Kohl, Jr., John C. Sinnett, M. W. Nelson, Christopher B. Description An account of the resource Volume XL, number one of The St. John's Review. Published in 2007. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_50_No_1_2007 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/22601ba4cb34513bc7e59fb5ec7fdae8.pdf 316912f484052021e7d93fcac0b40d51 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974.  It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>.  <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 thestjohnsreview Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library 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. 110 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2008/2 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Browning, Thomas Hunt, Frank Sachs, Joe McGrath, Hugh Flaumenhaft, Mera J. Description An account of the resource Volume 50, number 2 of The St. John's Review. Published in 2008. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_50_No_2_2008 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a112ebe1027a2955fdae3b05a48a50d9.pdf 62bc4ac7920e933939974378c9be4b16 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974.  It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>.  <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 thestjohnsreview Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library 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. 128 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2009/1 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dugan, C. Nathan Brann, Eva T. H. Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott Browning, Thomas Hunt, Frank Sachs, Joe Hopkins, Burt C. Seeger, Judith Yee, Cordell D. K., 1955- Description An account of the resource Volume 51, number 1 of The St. John's Review. Published in 2009. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ISSN 0277-4720 The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_51_No_1_2009 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 owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/794a6d91b5a834e127b4f6c1fdfd7877.pdf 160da4d3f0210e4c2121b66e1d443db3 PDF Text Text The St. John’s Review Volume 51, number 2 (2009) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Barbara McClay The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Michael Dink, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P .O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 214042800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2009 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop �2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Essay The Secret Art of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Part Two...................................5 Judith Seeger “The Things of Friends Are Common”........................37 Christopher B. Nelson Review “My Subject Is Passion”...............................................45 Eva Brann’s Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People Know Ronald Mawby �4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 The Secret Art of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica Part Two Judith Seeger 4. The Second Hidden Text: The Great Work of Nature Tis true without lying, certain & most true. That wch is below is like that wch is above & that wch is above is like yt wch is below to do ye miracles of one only thing And as all things have been & arose from one by ye mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation. The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its nourse. The father of all perfection in ye whole world is here. Its force or power is entire if it be converted into earth. Separate thou ye earth from ye fire, ye subtile from the gross sweetly wth great indoustry. It ascends from ye earth to ye heaven & again it descends to ye earth & receives ye force of things superior & inferior. By this means you shall have ye glory of ye whole world & thereby all obscurity shall fly from you. Judith Seeger is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. This essay is published in two parts. Part one appeared in The St. John’s Review, volume 51, number 1. All bibliographical references appeared at the end of part 1. Endnotes are numbered continuously through both parts �6 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Its force is above all force. ffor it vanquishes every subtile thing & penetrates every solid thing. So was ye world created . . . . (“Tabula Smaragdina,” translated by Isaac Newton)37 The General Scholium with which the second and third editions of the Principia end is so powerful that it may obscure the discussion of comets that precedes it. That discussion, however, is of crucial importance. The main text of all three editions of the Principia culminates with Newton’s demonstration that the formerly fear-inspiring comets, rather than being supernatural signs of God’s wrath, are natural bodies that obey the same laws as the planets. This accomplishment is one of the triumphs of the book. But Newton did not stop there. The wide-ranging disquisition on comets at the end of Book 3—consisting primarily of celestial observations, mathematical calculations, and inferences drawn from Newton’s optical studies—includes, as well, assertions about the active role comets play in the universe, in passages that stand out in the context of mathematical calculations and demonstrations. Consider, for example, the remarks that follow Proposition 41 of Book 3 in all three editions. At this point, Newton has already established that the bodies of comets are “solid, compact, fixed, and durable, like the bodies of planets” (918), and that their tails are composed of extremely thin vapor which the head or nucleus of the comet emits under the influence of the fierce heat of the sun. Then, surprisingly (for what does this have to do with the mathematical determination of celestial motion ruled by universal gravitation?), he states that this extremely thin vapor is essential to the replenishment both of water on earth and of a more subtle spirit required for life. The passage continues: For vapor in those very free spaces becomes continually rarefied and dilated. For this reason it happens that every tail at its upper extremity is SEEGER 7 broader than near the head of the comet. Moreover, it seems reasonable that by this rarefaction the vapor—continually dilated—is finally diffused and scattered throughout the whole heavens, and then is by degrees attracted toward the planets by its gravity and mixed with their atmospheres. For just as the seas are absolutely necessary for the constitution of this earth, so that vapors may be abundantly enough aroused from them by the heat of the sun, which vapors either— being gathered into clouds—fall in rains and irrigate and nourish the whole earth for the propagation of vegetables, or—being condensed in the cold peaks of mountains (as some philosophize with good reason)—run down into springs and rivers; so for the conservation of the seas and fluids on the planets, comets seem to be required, so that from the condensation of their exhalations and vapors, there can be a continual supply and renewal of whatever liquid is consumed by vegetation and putrefaction and converted into dry earth. For all vegetables grow entirely from fluids and afterward, in great part, change into dry earth by putrefaction, and slime is continually deposited from putrefied liquids. Hence the bulk of dry earth is increased from day to day, and fluids—if they did not have an outside source of increase—would have to decrease continually and finally to fail. Further, I suspect that that spirit which is the smallest but most subtle and most excellent part of our air, and which is required for the life of all things, comes chiefly from comets. (926) This is an allegory of circulation as the alchemists understood it, in which the spirit provided by the tails of comets is analogous to the philosophers’ mercury—whose many names included dew of heaven, oriental water, celestial water, our �8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW balm, our honey, May dew, silver rain—the spiritual agent, whose properties were activated, according to Basil Valentine, by expulsion from its habitat in the form of airy vapors, and whose descent was perceived as heavenly condensation falling to nourish the earth, which would perish without it (Nicholl, 92-3).38 Newton is not here speaking of circulatory motion within a single immovable plane, which he has shown in Proposition 1 of Book 1 to be the motion of bodies driven in orbits under the influence of centripetal force. He is describing, rather, a continual churning within the universe, the manifestation of nature as a circulatory worker, to borrow his characterization of it in 1675.39 This is an image of earth as retort, inasmuch as comets supply both the fluids and the subtle spirit required for the development of life itself. The final book of the first edition of the Principia ends abruptly with Proposition 42. But the second edition continues. In addition to incorporating more observations and calculations of the paths of comets, Newton in the 1713 edition extends the image of renewal nourished by comets to the fixed stars themselves, writing, “So also fixed stars, which are exhausted bit by bit in the exhalation of light and vapors, can be renewed by comets falling into them and then, kindled by their new nourishment, can be taken for new stars. Of this sort are those fixed stars that appear all of a sudden, and that at first shine with maximum brilliance and subsequently disappear little by little” (937). This phenomenon, he comments, had been noted by such reliable observers as Cornelius Gemma, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler’s pupils. In his last recorded conversation with John Conduitt, Newton, at the age of 83, expanded upon the circulatory image implicit in this understanding of those celestial events; for, as the preceding citations from the Principia show, he regarded the appearance of what we call supernovae as evidence that the universe itself undergoes vast cycles of destruction and regeneration. Conduitt wrote of this conversation that: SEEGER 9 it was his conjecture (he would affirm nothing) that there was a <sort of> revolution in the heavenly bodies that the vapours & light gathered <emitted> by the sun <which had their sediment as water & other matter had> gathered themselves by degrees into a body <& attracted more matter from the planets> & at last made a secondary planett (viz. one of those that go round another planet) & then by gathering <to them> & attracting more matter became a primary planet, & then by increasing still became a comet wch after certain revolutions & by coming nearer & nearer the sun, had all its volatile parts condensed & became a matter fit to recruit <& replenish> the sun (wch must waste by the constant heat & light it emitted), as a fagot put into <would> this fire if put into it (wee were sitting by the <a wood> fire) & and that that would probably be the effect of the comet in 1680 sooner or later . . . (Iliffe, 1: 165). Newton added that when this collision occurred, after perhaps five or six more revolutions, it would “so much increase the heat of the sun that <this earth would be burnt &> no animals in this earth could live” (Iliffe, 1: 165). Indeed, he seemed to Conduitt “to be very clearly of opinion” that such a collision, and subsequent “repeopling” by the Creator had happened at least once already, observing, first, “that the inhabitants of this earth were of a short date,” partly because “all arts as letters long ships printing – needle &c were discovered within the memory of History, wch could not have happened if the world had been eternal,” and, further, that as far as the earth itself was concerned, “there were visible marks of men [Westfall (1984: 862) has “ruin” here; the word must be difficult to make out.] upon it whch could not be effected by a flood only” (Iliffe, 1: 166). Such collisions were, Newton speculated, the cause of the suddenly �10 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW brilliant stars he had noted in the Principia—but without mentioning there, as he did in his conversation with Conduitt, that he took those stars to be “suns enlightnening other planets as our sun does ours” (Iliffe, 1: 165). When Conduitt asked him “why he would not own as freely what he thought of the sun as well as what he thought of the fixed stars—he said that concerned us more, & laughing added he had said enough for people to know his meaning” (Iliffe, 1: 166).40 Newton could laugh, even in the face of past and future death and devastation, for he trusted that a benevolent and all-powerful God—both perfect mechanic and perfect alchemist—determines everything that happens in the universe, including the generation and apocalyptic destruction of all living things (as, of course, Newton had also read in the Bible, though he seems not to have mentioned that particular bit of testimony in the conversation Conduitt recorded). The second text concealed in the Principia, by giving us an alchemical account of the generation of life, expresses Newton’s confidence in God as perfect master of the Great Work. This text is fully contained in the following sentence, added to the second edition of the Principia, in a translation based on that of Cohen and Whitman (938), but retaining the ampersands of the Latin text. The issue is not the use of the ampersand itself, which appears stranger here in English than it does in the Principia, as it is used throughout that work. What is striking is that both a comma and an ampersand separate every term from the one that follows it. This is not Newton’s common practice when listing members of a series: And the vapors that arise from the sun & the fixed stars & the tails of comets can fall by their gravity into the atmospheres of the planets & there be condensed & converted into water & humid spirits, & then—by a slow heat—be transformed gradually into salts, & sulphurs, & tinctures, & SEEGER 11 slime, & mud, & clay, & sand, & stones, & corals, & other earthy substances. In the second edition this sentence is followed by two more sentences. In the third edition those two sentences have been omitted, so that the sentence cited above is the last one in the body of the work immediately preceding the General Scholium. By the time he wrote these words, Newton had abandoned his attempts to achieve experimental evidence for the existence of the forces he had sought through his alchemical work, but his references to comets show that he had not abandoned his faith in the truth behind that quest, for the language and imagery of this sentence come from mystical alchemy. The sentence can be read as an allegory of the three fundamental processes by which, according to the alchemists, nature perfects her work: sublimation (the vapors arise from the sun, the fixed stars, and the tails of comets); distillation (by gravity they are condensed and turned into water and humid spirits); and concoction (they change form under the application of a slow heat). This process as a whole Newton knew as vegetation, which in one of his earliest texts on this subject (called “Of Nature’s obvious laws & processes in vegetation,” written between 1670 and 1675) he explicitly distinguished from what he called the “gross mechanicall transposition of parts” (3r). In the 1670s Newton had no inkling either of universal gravitation—writing, for example, that clouds could rise high enough to “loos their gravity” (5r)—or of a possible connection between comets and life on earth. Although he writes in the manuscript that, “this Earth resembles a great animall or rather inanimate vegetable, draws in aethereall breath for its dayly refreshment & vitall ferment & transpires again with gross exhalations” (3v), he does not claim to know the renewable source of the ethereal breath. After writing the Principia, however, he was able, in allegorical language, if not in the language of experimental science or mathematics, to complete the system of life-giving �12 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW circulation.41 The products of vegetation, listed in order as rising from the depths of the planet toward its surface in the presence of the fertilizing philosophical mercury falling from the heavens are emphasized in the Latin text by the repetition of the ampersand. The first three—fundamental salts, oleaginous and fiery sulphurs, and transforming tinctures— are alchemical ingredients of increasing power, associated with spirit and necessary for the origin and development of life. The next four describe the evolution of matter under the gradual drying effect of slow heating: slime (the residue of putrefaction), mire, clay, and sand. With the eighth member of the series, stones (a category that includes precious stones), we begin to see the organization associated with the mineral kingdom, considered a union of spirit and matter. The ninth member of the series is coral, which also appears in the generative series in “Of Nature’s obvious laws.” Unmodified this would be red coral, a precious natural analogue (according, for example, to Michael Maier, nine of whose works were part of Newton’s library) of the crimson philosophers’ stone (169). With coral we pass from the mineral to the vegetable kingdom, for coral was thought in Newton’s day to be a marine plant, which grew under water and hardened to stone when brought into the air. The last member of the sequence—seventh in the group comprising the evolution of matter, third in the group comprising the evolution of life in terms of the three “kingdoms,” and tenth in the entire process comprising the gradual union of spirit and matter— brings us to the animal kingdom, telling us that “all terrestrial substances,” a category that includes our own bodies, have come into being through the natural transmutation of celestial vapors by gravity and the planet’s slow heat. Newton begins this sentence speaking generically about planets. He ends it speaking specifically about that which “concerns us more”: our earth and ourselves. The final sentence of the body of the Principia, then, reaches back to the very beginnings of Newton’s concern with cosmology. He has returned at the end to the old SEEGER 13 questions on a new level of understanding made possible by his discoveries in the Principia, though not yet sufficiently developed to be expressed openly in the mathematical language of experimental philosophy. In the second and, even more pointedly, in the third edition of the Principia (both prepared with more leisure than the first edition), it seems, Newton wanted to end his book with a powerful vision encompassing all of nature; a vision which, like that of the veiled text at the beginning of Book 1, would be at once as clear as crystal to those who knew how to read it and as clear as mud to those who did not. The dissertation on comets is the last dual teaching. Through careful observations and sophisticated mathematical calculations Newton has transformed our understanding of the nature of comets and the laws behind their motion. But he has also composed hauntingly beautiful images of generation in our universe and on our earth, for in the final allegory comets link the earth and everything in it to the heavens. Newton chose not to express this grand life-giving circulation openly in the Principia. But he did include it. The processes revealed in these allegories declare the Great Work of nature under the guidance of God. In this vision perpetual circulation leads to life itself, and universal gravitation is its motor. 5. “The fountain I draw it from” Nature may truly be described as being one, true, simple, and perfect in her own essence, and as being animated by an invisible spirit. If therefore you would know her, you, too, should be true, single-hearted, patient, constant, pious, forbearing and, in short, a new and regenerate man. (The Sophic Hydrolith)42 I am not so bold as to assert that I have interpreted the concealed texts correctly in every detail and I certainly do not claim that I have discussed every appearance of symbolism in the book. Nevertheless, I hope I have shown that a coherent �14 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW vision may be seen by reading the beginning of Book 1 of the Principia in terms of numerological, esoteric geometrical, theological, and alchemical symbolism, and by reading the end of Book 3 in terms of alchemical allegory. I am not arguing that the Principia properly understood is a sort of Paradise Regained couched in mathematical metaphors, and I have not forgotten for a moment that I am dealing with the foundational text of modern terrestrial and celestial mechanics; that what I have been calling the exoteric text has existed ostensibly on its own for over 300 years; and that the esoteric texts, in the absence of the exoteric text, would be no more than mystical fancies, and perhaps not particularly interesting ones at that. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss or avoid the esoteric texts, because they open the way to a new and richer level of understanding of the work as a whole, as well as of its author. In fact, the existence of concealed texts in the Principia is a solution, rather than a problem. Newtonian scholarship has been a prolonged and uneasy exercise in rethinking his work. Isaac Newton devoted the passion of his soul and the activity of his intellect to discovering the intelligibility and the unity of the world in all its manifestations. Yet even before we knew of his vast manuscript collection of theological and alchemical writings, whose subjects and style are so very different from those usually attributed to the author of the Principia, Newton was considered a complex and contradictory character. Now, the impacts of successive revelations—among them the ardency of his alchemical pursuits, the intensity of his theological studies, and his conviction that much of his work was restoring ancient learning—seem to some to have shattered the possibility of ever seeing him as a single, cohesive individual. The Principia has been the crux of the problem. Mathematicians and physicists have, quite reasonably, focused on its mathematical and physical aspects. Meanwhile, Newton’s biographers and the students of his theological and alchemical pursuits have, for the most part, surrendered the SEEGER 15 Principia to those capable of following its formidable mathematics. I hope that, by looking closely at the Principia in a way that (to my knowledge) has not been attempted before, I have demonstrated that the mathematical, philosophical, theological, and alchemical aspects of Newton’s work are intertwined. But, even granting the existence of the concealed texts, important questions remain: Why would Newton have incorporated these teachings into the Principia? Why would he have hidden them rather than revealing them openly? And to whom are they addressed? The first hidden text is particularly perplexing. Even as mounting evidence persuaded me that it must be there, I had no ready answer to the question why someone absorbed in the relatively hasty composition of such a difficult and timeconsuming work would (or even could) have taken the time and trouble to construct it. And yet perhaps it is not so surprising. The language of symbol and allegory would have been second nature to a man so thoroughly steeped in the interpretation of alchemical and theological texts. Incorporation of allegory and symbolism into his own text would not have required inordinate effort. More importantly, while for readers of the Principia, the hidden texts might seem to be subsidiary to the open text—if they are seen at all—for its author the relationship would have been the reverse. The esoteric texts are not appendages to the exoteric text; they are, instead, its foundation. There were certain things Newton was not disposed to doubt and he held certain convictions he would not deign to explain. In 1676, for example, in a letter to John Collins, after asserting what he realized was astonishing power and generality for his method of fluxions, Newton wrote, “This may seem a bold assertion because it’s hard to say a figure may or may not be squared or compared with another, but it’s plain to me by ye fountain I draw it from, though I will not undertake to prove it to others” (Correspondence, 2: 180). The symbolic texts allow Newton to incorporate into his masterwork the certainty which was the source of his amazingly fruitful vision of the �16 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW world, without having also to prove its existence to others. They proclaim the glory of God suffusing both the universe and the souls of men: the ground of Newton’s assurance that the pursuit of knowledge through experimental and mathematical means is the proper vocation of humankind. So did Newton include the hidden texts as a prayer of thanksgiving to God, or perhaps as a personal meditation, without intending them to be visible to others? I do think that expression of his deepest beliefs at the heart of his greatest work must have been a balm to the lonely soul of its author. Newton had an attentive niece, devoted disciples, sympathetic colleagues, and even friends; but he had no peers. His manuscripts with their repeatedly suppressed declarations and speculations tell the story of an individual tormented by the conflict between the aching desire to share his convictions and the conviction that he could not do so. The “classical” scholia, parts of which I have quoted above, serve as a particularly poignant example of this struggle, which he finally settled by not including them in the Principia. The hidden texts, thus, help resolve what must have been nearly unbearable tension. Newton would have known that, whatever their fate as far as the rest of the world was concerned, they were there as his testimony of faith. Nonetheless, it seems impossible that he concealed texts in the Principia simply for his solitary satisfaction. There are abundant indications within the work that signal the existence of the first hidden text, while the remarks cited concerning comets are in plain sight of anyone who reaches the end of Book 3. Moreover, Newton himself, in the General Scholium, calls our attention to the relation between God and natural philosophy in a way that, when read only in the light of the surface text of the Principia, is more puzzling than enlightening. The extended discourse on God, located at the center of the General Scholium, is, frankly, shocking. It bursts through the surface of the text with the force of a pent-up spring, a surging torrent of words, far too powerful and far too passionate to be neatly contained within the book the SEEGER 17 Principia seems at first to be. And then this ardent outpouring vanishes without a trace, subsiding as suddenly as it began, beneath the sentence: “This concludes the discussion of God, and to treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of natural philosophy” (943).44 No one who reads this passage can doubt that its author was a man of exceptional piety, but if he was so very pious (and if he really believed that to treat of God from phenomena is part of natural philosophy), how could he have slighted God in his greatest work? It is true that the Principia is a book of experimental philosophy (though there are necessarily few actual experiments in it), and that there is no experiment that will simply prove the existence of God. But, except for a few scattered remarks, God appears to be so utterly absent from the work that—despite the testimony of Richard Bentley’s lectures, titled A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World, delivered in 1692 and published in 1693—Newton has been condemned for writing an atheistic book (or, alternatively, commended for writing a secular one).45 Of course, I have been arguing that God is not at all missing from the Principia. On the contrary, anyone willing to admit that this work (like white light, the stone of the philosophers, man, and the universe) may be simultaneously one and many, and able to follow the clues Newton has provided, can see that it is, in fact, filled with God’s presence and that we are meant to see that presence. But if we are meant to see that presence, then why hide the teachings? There are several partial answers to this question. One reason may have been Newton’s personality, which has been described by such various terms as prudent, paranoid, modest, arrogant, cautious, suspicious, domineering, fearful, and vindictive. A more important factor in his decision to hide the teachings could have been his particular situation in the context of the political and religious turmoil that was occurring in England during his lifetime. Most importantly, the nature of the teachings �18 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW themselves would have determined the form of their presentation. As for his personality, extreme reticence, whatever its source, was apparently part of Newton’s character. Public revelation of any of his work seems often to have required a struggle with himself as well as with others; most of what he wrote, by far, he did not publish. But a simple appeal to character does not really resolve the issue, for in the works he did publish Newton was not always quite so reluctant to reveal his beliefs as he was in the Principia. In the Opticks, for example, published during his lifetime in six editions (three in English, in 1704, 1717/18, and 1721; two in Latin, in 1706 and 1719; and a French translation in 1720), he wrote increasingly openly of his hopes and speculations regarding natural philosophy, though he still disguised them (however transparently) as queries. He first published the Opticks, however, after the death of his nemesis Robert Hooke in 1703 and his own ascent to a position of fame and power as author of the Principia and president of the Royal Society, and at a time when he was becoming more conscious of the need to leave his work for posterity. Openness had also characterized his early “New Theory about Light and Colours.” But the tone of ingenuous excitement in which on January 18, 1672 Newton (who was not yet 30 years old) described his discovery of the nature of light to Henry Oldenburg as “in my Judgment the oddest if not the most considerable wch hath beene made in the operations of Nature” (Correspondence, 1: 82-3) is one he never again employed publicly. Instead, burned by the hostility that work aroused, he designed his Principia to ensure that the expression of his deepest passions and convictions would be visible only to like-minded readers. Newton’s penchant for secrecy, however, was not simply (and perhaps not even primarily) a matter of character. He had compelling external reasons to conceal his theological, philosophical, and alchemical beliefs. With respect to SEEGER 19 theology, in the General Scholium to the Principia Newton finally affirms the strict monotheism and the vision of God as Παντοκρατϖρ that underlie his work, though with characteristic discretion he eschews the scorching anti-Trinitarian diatribes he allowed himself in his unpublished manuscripts. But by the time the second edition of the Principia was being prepared—and the General Scholium was Newton’s final addition to that edition—its author was Sir Isaac, secure in his renown; and the Principia was so highly regarded that it had practically become a sacred text itself. Had the unknown Cambridge professor expressed his dangerously unorthodox beliefs in 1687, he would have risked his career if not his life (for religious heterodoxy was a capital offense in England at the time). Moreover, the peril of confessing such beliefs did not abate during Newton’s lifetime. He was a member of the Convention Parliament of 1689, which declared equally illegal the Roman Catholicism he loathed and the Arianism he held.46 Newton could reasonably conclude that open acknowledgment of his religious convictions would have put his entire philosophical program at risk. At the very least it would have provided for a lifetime of distraction, as he would have been forced to engage in endless discussion and defense of his beliefs. He had better things to do. Newton had good reasons, as well, not to proclaim his unorthodox philosophical convictions in the Principia, closely tied as they were to his heterodox theology. He believed that the existence of gravity had been made manifest through its effects as revealed in the Principia, and that such revelation, as he wrote in the General Scholium, was— indeed, had to be—enough for now. Throughout his long life he repeatedly tried to claim the right to say that he did not know the cause of gravity, insisting (as had Galileo) that knowledge of causes was not necessary for the pursuit of natural philosophy. In fact, Newton was convinced that requiring that causes be known, or hypothesized, before effects could be studied stifled philosophical progress.47 In the �20 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW General Scholium, after his often quoted assertion that he does not feign hypotheses, Newton continues: “For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy” (943). This statement—in addition to neatly equating, in terms of their uselessness, the metaphysical with the physical and the mechanical qualities that the Cartesians held with the occult qualities which to them were anathema—stakes out Newton’s philosophical position on this issue. He publicly refuses to attempt to explain gravity, and, with the authority of the Principia behind him, he goes on to declare that a search for its cause is, at best, beside the point. But his protestations were not accepted by the mechanical philosophers. Surely the heat with which they attacked him was due in part to their understandable suspicion that he thought he knew the cause of gravity, and that it was not mechanical; for it was quite clear that impulse was unable to account for universal gravitation. Explanation of gravitation, therefore, seemed inevitably to require acceptance of a doctrine of attraction, of action at a distance, of a force that was, to use their heavily-laden word, “occult.”48 Newton would readily have admitted that the workings of gravity were occult—in the simple sense that we do not know exactly how God does it. But he could never have satisfied the strict mechanical philosophers on this point, no matter what he said, for conservation of the universe as Newton understood it required active force;49 and any admission of a nonmechanical cause into the universe was unacceptable to those who held that the physical world could only be intelligible in terms of matter and motion alone. If Newton harbored personal beliefs about God’s active role in the universe, he also realized that it would have been foolish for him to express openly in the Principia convictions for which he could not supply experimental evidence. Wisely, he designed the surface text of the book to preclude speculation about SEEGER 21 causes. The deeper teachings—composed in a language not susceptible to argument—were reserved for those who could appreciate them. As concerns Newton’s alchemical quest, as well, there were abundant reasons not to reveal it openly in the Principia. Again, one was the character of the open text as its author constructed it, for if he had no demonstrable evidence of the cause of gravity he had no demonstrable evidence even of the existence of the forces he sought so avidly through alchemy. Newton seems to have read alchemical texts with the same intent with which he read all texts: seeing their deliberately deceptive exposition and dense symbolic enigmas as expressions of a single truth uniting nature and revelation, obscured by a veil that could be penetrated by interpretation, which in this case was aided by the experimentation at which he was so adept. Whatever the philosophers’ stone may have meant for other alchemists, for Newton I believe achievement of the stone would have been the culmination of his life’s work: it would have meant the acquisition through experimental means of that truth which he sought so very intensely. As early as the first edition of the Principia, Newton struggled with the desire to reveal his alchemical pursuits, writing in the Preface, after describing the procedure he would follow in the book: If only we could derive the other phenomena of nature from mechanical principles by the same kind of reasoning! For many things lead me to have a suspicion that all phenomena may depend on certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by causes not yet known, either are impelled toward one another and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled from one another and recede. Since these forces are unknown, philosophers have hitherto made trial of nature in vain. But I hope that the principles set down here will shed some �22 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW light on either this mode of philosophizing or some truer one. (382-3) As usual, however, he resolved that the open text of the Principia was not the proper place for conjectures, no matter how fervently he may have held them. This brief statement of his strong suspicion and hopes and a few speculations in the last paragraph of the General Scholium, which he cut short for lack of experimental evidence, are as close as he comes to openly stating his chemical aspirations in that work.50 Failure to obtain experimental evidence for chemical forces might have been sufficient motive for Newton to withhold open acknowledgment of those aspirations, but there were other cogent reasons for discretion, as well. Newton surely considered himself among the philosophical alchemists, for, unlike the puffers or smoke-sellers, whose base activity the philosophical alchemists universally decried, he was surely not interested in acquiring personal power or amassing wealth through chicanery. Nevertheless, he knew that alchemists were widely considered to be rogues and conjurors and as such were both ridiculed and feared. Therefore, in personal terms, there was much to be lost and nothing to be gained by publicly espousing alchemy. In practical terms, serious alchemists considered the power they hoped to achieve too dangerous to be proclaimed openly to an imperfect world, a constraint that we know Newton respected.51 And finally, the philosophical alchemists were engaged in a spiritual quest for purification and perfection, which they also called healing, not only of metals but also of their own souls. True philosophical alchemy required a relationship between the practitioner and his God wherein the success of the work depended at least as much upon the state of the alchemist’s soul as upon his facility in deciphering texts or his dexterity in following procedures. The one thing serious alchemical writings make perfectly clear is that only the pious and pure of heart will be able to discern the proper proportions of materials, the correct degrees of heat for each part of the procedure, and the precise timing necessary to SEEGER 23 perfect the work.52 Achievement of the philosophers’ stone would have been a gift of God awarded to one who merited it. Open acknowledgment of engagement in this intense and intimate quest would have been not only foolhardy but also impious. There are, then, abundant negative reasons for Newton to have hidden his theological, philosophical, and alchemical beliefs; but there is also a powerful positive argument for including those beliefs in the form of concealed texts. Newton seems to have considered, repeatedly, the possibility that the world was ready for him to reveal, in his own name, the convictions he held. And every time he considered that possibility, he rejected it. He, therefore, took his place as a member of a distinguished secret fraternity long engaged in the task of seeking the truth and revealing it in a dual manner: each work simultaneously expounding one text for the many, and another, through symbols and figures, for the few.53 He believed that the alchemists, the ancient sages, and the inspired writers of the Holy Scriptures—recognizing the peril to themselves and quite possibly to others of openly displaying their true convictions in unsettled times like those in which he was living—had conveyed their mystical teachings in metaphors, fables, allegories, images, parables, and prophecies, as well as numerological and esoteric geometrical symbolism. All of their texts, like the book of nature itself, required interpretation. Newton understood the worth of his Book of Principles. Why should it differ in this respect from the world-changing works that preceded it? In his remarkable passage about God in the General Scholium, Newton comes close to expressing in words the vision of the concealed texts. But the full force of mystical belief cannot be conveyed in everyday language, corrupted by the Fall and confined by what Newton called its “unavoidable narrowness” (McGuire, 199). Newton had numerous reasons not to express his mystical teachings openly, but he also had a powerful reason to express them in the way he did: Symbolism is their proper language. �24 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW An unavoidable, and perhaps uncomfortable, consequence of this reading is the recognition that not all of the teachings in the Principia were meant for everyone (though the shock of this realization should be attenuated by recalling that the book is a restricted text at every level). But if the teachings were not meant for everyone, to whom were they addressed? Clearly, Newton wanted others to continue the work he had begun. He published and repeatedly revised both the Principia and the Opticks in the interest of promoting the development of natural philosophy, which, he told Conduitt toward the end of his life, he felt the comfort of having left less mischievous than he found it. But, aside from those two books, he seems to have cared so little (or perhaps, in some cases, feared so much) what his contemporaries would think of his work that he preferred not to publish it during his lifetime, particularly if publication meant that he would be hounded and pestered by critics.54 On the other hand, he cared very deeply that his work be preserved and, furthermore, that others know that it was his. Both his reluctance to publish and his wounded outrage—when his originality, at least with respect to his fellow moderns, was assailed (as by Hooke); or his work, to his mind, was hindered (as by Flamsteed); or his priority and even his probity were challenged (as by Leibniz)—may be partially understood if we realize that Newton considered the intellectual community to which he belonged to be temporal.55 In the concealed texts Newton was addressing primarily those he would consider his true intellectual heirs. Those philosophers, carrying on the task of improving natural philosophy and presumably familiar with its venerable dual tradition, would be able to see and recognize the true foundation of the work in which they were engaged. For Newton knew that the work was not complete. Although he recognized that his remarkable achievements had reached new heights of natural philosophy, he was also well aware that his deepest questions had gone unanswered. There is evidence that when he finished the first edition of the SEEGER 25 Principia, he still hoped he would find those answers. In the early 1690s he immersed himself in a monumental study of the entire alchemical tradition. He may, as well, have attempted to initiate his young disciple, Nicholas Fatio de Duillier, into his alchemical pursuits. But it came to nothing.56 In 1693 Newton suffered a breakdown, a mysterious episode which led to rumors on the Continent that he had become permanently deranged or had even died. The onset of this crisis has been attributed—not fully persuasively—to various causes; but equally remarkable (and also unexplained) is its abrupt end. This end was characterized by the full resumption of his sanity—if not of the intense intellectual power that had previously marked his life—only a few months after he wrote the rambling letters to Samuel Pepys and John Locke that were the source of their fears for his state of mind.57 His failure to unlock the chemical secrets of the universe, despite his fevered attempts to do so, must have been devastating. But Newton finally accepted that he would not be the one to answer those questions. In 1696, at the age of 53, he abandoned his experimental search into the unity of nature and took a position as master of the mint. Nevertheless, he did not repudiate his earlier failed attempts. On the contrary, he left ample evidence of his ongoing conviction that such unity did exist. This evidence includes his elaboration of the second concealed text in the second and third editions of the Principia, as well as his decision to leave both that work and the Opticks open, inviting further study and suggesting possible directions for it. Newton also scattered clues to his beliefs outside of the works published in his name. He impressed some of his unpublished views upon the young men whose careers he fostered, and they in turn disseminated them. His disciple David Gregory, for example, in “The Author’s Preface” to his Astronomiæ physicæ & geometricæ elementa (1702) included a history of astronomy, according to which the laws his great mentor Isaac Newton supposedly was the first to discover had been in fact only rediscovered, as they had been known to the �26 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW ancients. In the twentieth century the manuscript of this passage was found among Newton’s papers, written in Newton’s hand. Newton himself had composed it. In addition, though he is said to have burned numerous papers in the days before his death, Newton left millions of words concerning the interpretation of history and scripture, as well as his interpretation of alchemical texts and detailed notes on his experiments.58 As he seems to have left no written account of his reasons for wanting his unpublished manuscripts to survive him, it is impossible to be certain of his motives. One might surmise, for example, that Newton left us his alchemical notes as proof of failure, as evidence that not even he could unlock the chemical secrets of the universe by following that path, and therefore as an indication of precisely how not to proceed. But what, then, do we make of the historical and scriptural interpretations that accompany that record? Are we to regard them as repudiated, too? In the absence of a note stating his intent— whose discovery among the manuscripts would be a real coup—it seems likely that he retained hope that another, knowing of his efforts now that he was “out of the way,” could pick up his task of unifying scripture, history, and natural philosophy where he had abandoned it. Newton could not have known that the executors of his estate would label his alchemical writings not fit to print. Nor could he have known that his more radical theological manuscripts would also be deemed unprintable, despite the desire his niece expressed in her will that they be published. Newton, in short, could not have known the extent to which his published work—particularly his Principia—like the philosopher’s stone he had sought for so long, had begun to transform both the world and himself within it. One of the effects of this transformation may have been to shield the secrecy of its author’s convictions after his death more thoroughly than he intended. But he seems not to have cared. Dying intestate, he left the matter in the hands of God, who, he trusted, would allow it to be revealed at the proper time. SEEGER 27 For Newton believed the time would come when an improved world would be ready to accept his teachings. In the spirit of the ancient philosophers he most admired, his philosophical aspirations extended beyond the realm of natural philosophy; he trusted that its perfection would lead to that of moral philosophy, so sadly imperfect in the turbulent world he saw around him. The last edition of the Opticks ends with the following passage, looking toward progress in natural philosophy, which Newton believed would lead not to a new morality but to a return to pure ancient morality: In this third Book [for the Opticks, too, is divided into three books] I have only begun the Analysis of what remains to be discover’d about Light and its Effects upon the Frame of Nature, hinting several things about it, and leaving the Hints to be examin’d and improv’d by the farther Experiments and Observations of such as are inquisitive. And if natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged. For so far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and what Benefits we receive from him, so far our Duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature. And no doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had not blinded the Heathen, their moral Philosophy would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal Virtues; and instead of teaching the Transmigration of Souls, and to worship the Sun and Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have taught us to worship our true Author and Benefactor, as their Ancestors did under the Government of Noah and his Sons before they corrupted themselves. (405-6) �28 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW But the outcome of Newton’s “method” has been quite other than the unification of natural and moral philosophy he intended. We can never know how things would have been different had his concealed convictions been brought to light before the twentieth century. In the event, his Principia was driven like a wedge between reason and faith. Designed to declare the power of the deity in the world and, thereby, to revive and foster both natural and moral philosophy, Newton’s masterwork has instead been seen as a monument to the separation between science and religion, as antithetical to the unity of the very traditions of which it was in fact the culmination. 6. Conclusion: The Old Made New Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.59 So what then is this Principia? To construct his grand vision, encompassing the whole of creation, Newton, of course, drew on his exceptional mathematical ability. But the Principia is more than the mathematical and physical treatise—however great—that it appears to be. It is a little world, an artful elaboration of secular and sacred traditions of human knowledge, born both of Renaissance Hermeticism, which was so influential in the development of experimental science in the seventeenth century, and of Newton’s faith in a beneficent creator who ruled the universe and who (in the fullness of time) would allow his human creatures to discover and reveal its lawfulness. Behind everything that Newton did was a firm faith in God’s providence. All of his work conveys his conviction that we live in a world whose history is the working out of God’s great story from the creation to the apocalypse. We humans do not have the power, he thought, nor should we have the desire, to alter SEEGER 29 that already-written story; but God has hidden clues to it in both nature and scripture, which some of us may be granted the power to see and understand. The texts concealed in the Principia—in their vision of God’s glory filling, fertilizing, and illuminating the entire universe and the soul of his disciple—are Newton’s grateful acknowledgement of the source of his understanding and also his message to the future; they are the manifestation of his peculiar genius and his true secret art. I do not intend here to discuss the validity of Newton’s vision of the world. My goal in this study has been merely to urge a thoroughgoing reconsideration of his Principia, a book that resolutely resists easy classification. Seen as a whole, the work both supersedes, and incorporates, the secular and sacred traditions of learning that preceded it. It is a magnificent product of transformation and circulation, a manifestation at every level of the old made new (and, for that matter, of the new made old). Together with the unparalleled mathematical achievements of the open text, the mystical journey near the beginning of Book 1 teaches us that our minds are capable of ascending to the heavens and beyond, while the cosmic allegory at the end of Book 3 shows us that our bodies are composed of the material and spiritual stuff of the universe. The open text is grounded upon the visions expressed in the hidden texts, and the hidden texts depend for their power upon the open text while extending its domain. The Principia, in sum, speaks to both our intellect and our imagination, addressing our deep human desire to be intellectually, spiritually, and materially at one with our universe. Newton’s greatest book is far stranger and far richer than we have ever suspected. A mathematical and physical work of prodigious power, the Principia is also an expression of the highest art and a declaration of the deepest love of which this remarkable man was capable. * �30 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW I would like to thank Curtis Wilson, Tom Simpson, and Dana Densmore for reading and commenting on an early draft of this paper. I would also like to thank Rob Iliffe and Peter Pesic for doing the same for a nearly final draft, and the editors and editorial assistants of the Review for seeing it through to publication. I am especially grateful to Eva Brann for her unstinting support from beginning to end. I have attempted to address the questions and suggestions of these generous readers. None of them bears any responsibility for anything written here. Notes 37 Isaac Newton’s translation of the Tabula Smaragdina, the “Emerald Tablet” attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (quoted in Dobbs 1991, 274). The passage continues with some alchemical instructions. 38 Simpson, too, in the final section of his article, addresses what he calls the astronomical alchemy that comets undergo in their close approach to the sun, which he calls the “furnace of the heavens,” a crucible that reaches a temperature unattainable on earth, thus leading to “the emission of that ‘spirit’ which was always the ultimate objective of the alchemic search and is fundamentally needed in order to complete Newton’s account of the true System of the World” (164). 39 Newton wrote in his Hypothesis explaining the properties of light: “For nature is a perpetuall circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids, and solids out of fluids, fixed things out of volatile, & volatile out of fixed, subtile out of gross, & gross out of subtile, Some things to ascend & make the upper terrestriall juices, Rivers and the Atmosphere; & by consequence others to descend for a Requitall to the former” (Correspondence, 1: 366). These sentences were written while Newton still accepted the vortex hypothesis of planetary motion, well before he had any idea of universal gravitation. As he developed the Principia, he abandoned the hypothesis of vortices and, indeed, in the Principia he takes every opportunity to combat that hypothesis. I believe, however, that the sentiment of the passage survives as a metaphor of the circular chemical processes, moved by gravity, that make life possible. 40Actually he had acknowledged it, writing: “The comet that appeared in 1680 was distant from the sun in its perihelion by less than a sixth of the sun’s diameter; and because its velocity was greatest in that region and also because the atmosphere of the sun has some density, the comet must SEEGER 31 have encountered some resistance and must have been somewhat slowed down and must have approached closer to the sun; and by approaching closer to the sun in every revolution, it will at length fall into the body of the sun. But also, in its aphelion, when it moves most slowly, the comet can sometimes be slowed down by the attraction of other comets and as a result fall into the sun” (937). He does not, however, dwell on the implications of the predicted collision for life on earth, but moves directly on to his remarks about supernovae to which Conduitt called his attention in their conversation. 41 This image appears in the Opticks, as well. In Query 30, one of those added to the Latin and later English editions of that work, Newton muses about the convertibility of light and gross bodies into one another, writing, “The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations” (374), and, later, “All Birds, Beasts and Fishes, Insects, Trees and other Vegetables, with their several Parts, grow out of Water and watry Tinctures and Salts, and by Putrefaction return again into watry Substances. And Water standing a few Days in the open Air, yields a Tincture, which (like that of Malt), by standing longer yields a Sediment and a Spirit, but before Putrefaction is fit Nourishment for Animals and Vegetables. And among such various and strange Transmutations, why may not Nature change Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies?” (375). Like the alchemical allegory at the end of the discussion of comets in the Principia, these passages were written after their author had abandoned alchemical experimentation. 42 Quoted in Waite, 1: 75. 43 There are exceptions: notably Alexandre Koyré, I. Bernard Cohen, and Richard Westfall. But Westfall, who has produced the most comprehensive account of Newton’s life and work, admits with frustration that during two decades of study Newton became ever more of a mystery to him. In a modern version of the opinion of the Marquis de l’Hôpital— who wondered if Newton ate, drank, and slept like other men or was truly the god he seemed—Westfall concludes that there is no measure for Newton, that he is wholly other. I do not agree; but I do believe that until we acknowledge the texts hidden in the Principia we will never understand its author. 44 Et hæc de deo, de quo utique ex phænomenis disserere, ad philosophiam naturalem pertinet (764). This quote is from the third edition of the Principia. In the second edition Newton states that to discourse of God is the business of experimental philosophy, a statement which makes even more perplexing the apparent absence of God from this particular book. Newton seems to have thought better of that claim, for he changed it in the final edition. Larry Stewart contends that the General Scholium “was �32 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW written, and certainly perceived to have been written, with an eye to the difficulties and the defence of the anti-Trinitarianism of his disciple Samuel Clarke” (145-6). It is not clear to me why Isaac Newton would have used his masterwork as a tool to defend Samuel Clarke, though it is possible, as Stewart claims, that the General Scholium was (at least to some degree) a salvo fired against societal assault on experimentalism. If Stewart is right we find ourselves presented with yet another case in which Newton manages to say what he means in a veiled manner. 45 The scholium following the Definitions does mention “Scriptures,” (414) which is Cohen and Whitman’s translation of the Latin “sacris literis” (52). And the first edition of the Principia contains (in Corollary 5 to Proposition 8 of Book 3) the following sentence: “Collocavit igitur Deus Planetas in diversis distantiis a Sole, ut quilibet pro gradu densitatis calore Solis majore vel minore fruatur” (583). Corollary 5 was excised from the later editions, and some of its content was included in Corollary 4. But Newton replaced “God placed . . .” with “the planets were to be placed. . .” (Cohen 1969, 529-30). This, by the way, is further evidence that Newton’s use of the passive voice in the Principia is deliberate and significant. Cohen argues, I think rightly, that these passing references are indications that Newton was thinking of God all along, as he constructed every edition of the Principia. 46 During Newton’s lifetime, refusal to accept the doctrine of the Trinity could lead to prison; in 1696 a man was hanged for denying that article of faith. Moreover, open expression of unorthodox beliefs was costly to some of Newton’s disciples. Edmond Halley’s supposed atheism, for example, cost him the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford University, which was awarded to David Gregory, another protégé of Newton, who apparently was scarcely more religious than Halley, though he was more discreet about his heterodoxy; and William Whiston lost his position as successor to Newton in the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge University for espousing religious views similar to those Newton held. Newton, of course, considered the Trinitarians to be the real heretics, and at crucial times in his life he refused to compromise his beliefs. He was willing to sacrifice his appointment to Cambridge University rather than take the requisite holy orders; he fought hard and successfully against appointment by King James II of a Benedictine monk to the university (though in this case the grounds were Roman Catholicism rather than Trinitarianism as such); and on his deathbed he refused the sacrament of the church. Nonetheless, he attended church services occasionally; and he supported the Anglican Church. I doubt that his intent in doing so was merely to disguise his true convictions in order to protect his reputation. Newton would have regarded the Church of England as a valuable bulwark against the political and religious encroachments of the Roman Catholic Church, which he called the SEEGER 33 Whore of Babylon, and which he identified in his Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, published posthumously in 1733, as the little horn of the fourth beast prophesied in the Book of Daniel. The widespread social upheavals of the time may also have influenced Newton’s decision to be circumspect about his theological beliefs. David Kubrin, in his article “Newton’s Inside Out!” speculates that the reason he censored himself and repressed his insights, ideas, visions, and grand plan of the cosmos, “was largely social, and stemmed from the fact that Newton realized the dangerous social, political, economic, and religious implications that would be associated with him should he dare reveal his true thoughts” (97). Though Kubrin focuses on the social aspects of Newton’s ideas, his claim is reminiscent of Law’s assertion that Newton did not reveal his supposed indebtedness to Boehme because he did not want to be associated with enthusiasm. 47 Descartes, for example, criticizing Galileo’s method in his Discorsi, had written to Mersenne, “Nothing that he says here can be determined without knowing what gravity is” (October 11, 1638, quoted in de Gandt, 118). If Newton had waited to know what gravity was before writing the Principia, the book never would have been written. 48 Newton considered action at a distance, in a universe containing only matter, ridiculous, for he did not believe that brute matter could act in any way at all. In Rule 3 of Book 3 of the Principia, added in the second edition (Koyré, 268), he explicitly repudiates the notion that gravity is inherent in matter. In his third letter to Richard Bentley, he expressed this conviction even more strongly, writing: “That gravity should be innate inherent & essential to matter so yt one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by & through wch their action or force may be conveyed from one to another is to me so great an absurdity that I beleive no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it” (Correspondence, 3: 254). 49 As he wrote to Bentley, “Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to ye consideration of my readers” (Correspondence, 3: 254). 50 Further evidence for Newton’s struggle with himself over this issue, as well as his awareness of the effects revelation of his beliefs would have had on others’ perceptions of both himself and his work may be seen in a draft of a Proposition 18 (crossed out and relabeled Hypothesis 2), which he wrote after finishing the first edition of the Principia. This hypothesis, which was to have been part of a general conclusion to the Opticks, reads: “As all the great motions in the world depend upon a certain kind of force (which in this earth we call gravity) whereby great bodies attract �34 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW one another at great distances: so all the little motions in the world depend upon certain kinds of forces whereby minute bodies attract or dispell one another at little distances.” He refers to his demonstration of universal gravitation in the Principia, and continues: “And if Nature be most simple & fully consonant to her self she observes the same method in regulating the motions of smaller bodies which she doth in regulating those of the greater. This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers I forbore to describe it in that Book least I should be accounted an extravagant freak & so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe of the Book: but & yet I hinted at it both in the Preface & in the Book it self where I speak of the inflection of light & of the elastick power of the Air but the design of the book being secured by the approbation of Mathematicians, I had not scrupled to propose this Principle in plane words. The truth of this Hypothesis I assert not, because I cannot prove it, but I think it very probable because a great part of the phenomena of nature do very easily flow from it which seem otherways inexplicable: . . .” (quoted in Cohen 1982, 63) He goes on to list some of the phenomena he has in mind. Newton repressed but did not destroy this remarkable statement. 51 We know that Newton admitted the possibility that this fear was well founded because of a letter he sent on April 26, 1676 to Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society, regarding a question raised by a “B. R.” (Robert Boyle) in the Philosophical Transactions whether he should publish the recipe for a mercury that heated gold when mixed with it. Newton stated that he doubted that this particular mercury could be useful “either to medicine or vegetation.” Then he continued: But yet because the way by which mercury [Newton here places an alchemical symbol instead of the word] may be so impregnated, has been thought fit to be concealed by others that have known it, & therefore may possibly be an inlet to something more noble, not to be communicated wthout immense dammage to ye world if there should be any verity in ye Hermetick writers, therefore I question not but that ye great wisdom of ye noble Authour will sway him to high silence till he shall be resolved of what consequence ye thing may be either by his own experience, or ye judgmt of some other that throughly understands what he speakes about, that is of a true Hermetic Philosopher, whose judgmt (if there be any such) would be more to be regarded in this point then that of all ye world beside to ye contrary, there being other things beside ye transmutation of metals (if these great pretenders bragg not) wch none but they understand. Sr because ye Author seems desirous of ye sense of others in this SEEGER 35 point, I have been so free as to shoot my bolt; but pray keep this letter private to your self. (Correspondence, 2: 2) Newton and Boyle engaged for years in a correspondence about alchemical research, which itself was typically guarded in the manner of alchemical writers who rarely revealed everything even to sympathetic correspondents. Few of these letters survive, but in a letter of August 2, 1692 to his friend John Locke, who shared Newton’s interest in theological and alchemical pursuits, Newton observes, and respects, Boyle’s “reservedness” about revealing a certain recipe, a restraint he speculated might have proceeded from his own (though he does seem somewhat miffed that Boyle is being quite so reserved with respect to him). (Correspondence, 3: 218) 52 Newton himself, in his old age, implied as much in a conversation with John Conduitt, stating that, “They who search after the philosophers’ stone by their own rules [are] obliged to a strict and religious life” (quoted in Dobbs 1975, 15; also see Iliffe, 1: 178). 53 In one of the “classical” scholia, which Newton decided not to include in the Principia, after writing of the analogy the ancients made between the harmony of musical strings and the weights of the planets, he continues: “But the Philosophers loved so to mitigate their mystical discourses that in the presence of the vulgar they foolishly propounded vulgar matters for the sake of ridicule, and hid the truth beneath discourses of this kind” (McGuire and Rattansi, 117). I am not claiming that Newton considered the surface text of the Principia to be a vulgar matter foolishly propounded for the sake of ridicule. My claim is merely that in emulation of the ancient philosophers he composed the work as a layered text. 54 As early as 1676, reacting in part to the criticism that followed his 1672 publication on light, Newton wrote to John Collins, who had urged him to publish his method of fluxions: You seem to desire yt I would publish my method & I look upon your advice as an act of singular friendship, being I beleive censured by divers for my scattered letters in ye Transactions about such things as nobody els would have let come out wthout a substantial discours. I could wish I could retract what has been done, but by that, I have learnt what’s to my convenience, wch is to let what I write ly by till I am out of ye way. (Correspondence, 2: 179) 55 Special circumstances, among them Newton’s own character and that of his adversaries, influenced the particular course of each conflict, but it seems plausible that, as far as Newton was concerned, they all had the �36 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW same ground. The perception that the importance of his work was historical could also go some way toward explaining the numerous portraits of himself he commissioned. Further, it sheds light on his willingness in his later life to let others carry on the controversies his work aroused, rather than entering them himself until they touched his reputation too closely, at which point he would join the fray, but usually anonymously. This tactic was not unique to Newton, but it may have been unusually powerful in his case, as in later life he was able to speak with the voice of the Royal Society. He allowed Roger Cotes to write an explanatory introduction to the second edition of the Principia, but he refused to read it, so as not to be asked to clarify or defend it. He did not want his peace to be disturbed by the obligation of justifying his work to anyone. 56 During the same years that he was making, and failing at, his final alchemical attempts he may have contemplated excision of the first hidden text from the Principia. Whether we think he did depends upon how we read David Gregory’s notes and Newton’s own manuscripts of proposed alterations to the book. In any event, if he considered dismantling that text, he did not do it. 57 The letter to Pepys was dated September 13, 1693 (Correspondence, 3: 279), and the letter to Locke three days later (Correspondence, 3: 280). On September 28 Pepys’ nephew John Millington visited Newton in Cambridge and was able to report to his uncle that, though “under some small degree of melancholy,” he seemed quite sane as well as “very much ashamed” at the rudeness of the letter, which Newton himself characterized as “very odd” (Correspondence, 3: 281-2). In a letter of October 3, Newton apologized to Locke, explaining that “by sleeping too often by my fire I got an ill habit of sleeping & a distemper wch this summer has been epidemical put me further out of order, so that when I wrote to you I had not slept an hour a night for a fortnight & for 5 nights together not a wink” (Correspondence, 3: 284). 58 Rattansi estimates that Newton wrote 1,300,000 words on theological and biblical subjects (167), and Westfall estimates that notes and compositions on alchemy in Newton’s hand exceed 1,000,000 words (1980, 163). 59 Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2. 37 “The Things of Friends are Common” Christopher B. Nelson I came to a startling realization over the summer as I was preparing to greet our newest class: that I had returned to this college to take the position I now hold in the year in which most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have passed quickly, it seems to me now, and my appreciation for the community of learning I joined back then has grown as my friendships within the community have deepened. I think I became a wee bit sentimental as I ruminated upon my first year as a student at St. John’s more than forty years ago. My Greek has gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the things learned first are remembered best, and I have kept with me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my first days at the college: χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά and κοινὰ τὰ τῶν φίλων. The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are difficult” or “Noble things are difficult.” The second can be translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What friends have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my youth the College used a different Greek grammar book, so this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson Introduction to Ancient Greek, with which our students now begin to learn Greek. And there they were, the same two sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and predicate position of the definite article, and I rediscovered something I once must have known about the two sentences, something I had carried with me all these years: they are both nominal sentences with the article τά in the predicate position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. �38 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW sentences without the use of a verb. I was pretty sure I had not committed these sentences to memory because of the substantive-making power of the article τά. It’s more likely that I remembered them because they were both quite short, and perhaps because they appeared to carry a mystery and a whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if only I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new text that “nominal sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless character of maxims or folk-sayings” (31). I wanted to understand better the little maxim κοινὰ τὰ τῶν ϕίλων, “The things of friends are common.” The sentence seemed to capture a beautiful thought, and I had the notion that if I made the effort to understand this maxim better, I also might come to see why “beautiful things are difficult.” Two birds, one arrow—so to speak. So, I begin my reflection by asking whether this little maxim means that friends share what they have, or that they ought to share what they have. Today, I give you half of the lunch I packed for us both, and tomorrow you will share yours with me. But the sandwiches we eat are hardly common to us both; quite the opposite, they are rationed out separately to each of us, albeit equally. We may each have an equal share in a good thing, but not a common good. We each consume what the other does not and cannot consume. So it is with all sorts of goods, earthly goods, goods that are external to us; what I give to you in the spirit of sharing with a friend is something I will no longer have after giving it. I will have less of it after sharing it than I did before I shared it, however good and generous my act of friendship has been, and however much I imagine I may have gained in the improvement of my character by sharing. But what, then, are the things that could be common to friends? What kinds of things can truly be held in common without having to be meted out among friends? I suppose things of the soul are of this nature, things that belong to the heart, the spirit, the mind, things that belong to our inner NELSON 39 lives. We both may love a single object or person without our having to share that love as we might share the expense of a gift to the beloved one. My love doesn’t grow less because you love too. And, of course, if we should actually love one another, that love is surely greater and stronger for it being reciprocated and reinforced over and over. So it is with things of the intellect. When I learn something you have shared with me, it does not pass from you to me like milk from a pitcher; you have lost nothing, and yet I have gained something that is now common to us both. The sum of what is common to us has just grown; it has not been redistributed. And should we together go about learning something new, we will each be richer for what we come to have in common. In pursuing such learning together we enter a whole new community. For example, when we learn Euclid 1.47—the Pythagorean theorem—each of us has it wholly but neither of us possesses it. We now have something that belongs to us, but not merely privately; we have gained something that is common to us both, and in learning it we enter the community of all who have learned it. This perhaps is why we say “things in common” belong to “friends”: the soul is not a wholly private place, but is able to enter this sort of community with others. But there is an added dimension that I think has something to do with the reason we seek these common things. We are moved to love something because it is beautiful, or to love some person because he or she is beautiful to us. We seek to know something because we believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that this knowledge will be good for us, perhaps even that it can be turned to good in the world about us. These things we have in common are beautiful and good things, and we wish beautiful and good things for our friends. If the common goods are those that increase our community by pursuing them together, then the greatest acts of friendship must be the searching together for such a common good. �40 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW St. John’s College exists for this purpose: to provide a place and countless opportunities for our students to pursue together the common goods of the intellect. We call ourselves a community of learning, aware that the word “community” in English, as in Greek, has the same root as the word “common.” We make many an effort to put into practice the conviction that we learn best when we learn with others, who like us, wish to increase the common good. Such a community offers some pretty fine opportunities for friendship. We also have a common curriculum that has us all reading books that are worthy of our attention, even of our love— books written by men and women who were themselves model fellow learners. The books and authors may even become our friends, as can the characters in some of these books. If incoming students have not already met the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, they soon do, and they spend a lot of time with him in the freshman year. For some of them it is the beginning of a lifelong friendship with a character with whom—if open to the possibility—one can converse over and over again. The words on the page may remain the same, but the reader brings a new conversationalist to the text every time he or she returns to the dialogue. At least, so it is with me. I call Socrates a friend of mine because I know that he seeks only my own good. He has taught me humility, inasmuch as I possess it all. I have many such friends in the Program. Some of them are books. Homer’s Iliad has been my companion since the seventh grade, and I never tire of returning to it. The Aeneid has become a more recent friend who has helped me to understand and better bear the responsibilities of fatherhood and the trials of leadership. The Books of Genesis and Job have helped me understand what it means to be human and how great is the distance between the human and the divine; I read them to remind me how little I really understand about the relation between the two, which in turn serves as a spur to seeking to understand better. Euclid’s Elements may be the NELSON 41 finest example on the St. John’s Program of the practice of the liberal arts, and it is beautiful for its logical, progressive movement from the elemental to the truly grand. Plato’s Republic is the finest book about education ever written; it inspires much of what I do as I practice my vocation at the College, reminding me that a community of learning is reshaping and refounding itself any time a few of its members come together to engage in learning for its own sake—and that this is what we ought always to be encouraging at this college, even by device when necessary. Other friends of mine are authors: Sophocles, who can evoke a human sympathy to inspire pity in each of his dramas; George Washington, whose restraint in the use of power is evident in his finest writings and in the mark he left on the founding of this country; Abraham Lincoln, whom I consider this country’s finest poet, whose very words reshaped what it meant to be an American; Jane Austen, whose every sentence can be called perfect (and so she is a beautiful author to me); and Martin Luther King, who taught me that non-violent protest is more than a successful tactical measure to achieve a political end, but a proper and loving response to the hateful misconduct of fellow human souls. Then there remain the characters whom I embrace as friends: besides Socrates, there is Hector, Breaker of Horses, “O My Warrior”; and Penelope, who weaves the path that allows Odysseus to return home, and is far worthier of his love than he of hers. There is Don Quixote, the indomitable spirit, and Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, whose simple acts of goodness change the whole world about her. I rather like Milton’s Eve, mother of us all, who still shines pretty brightly in the face of his spectacular Satan. I was a teenager when I met Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, and I grew to adulthood with him, probably following a little too closely his path to responsibility. There’s the innocent Billy Budd, unprepared to face the force of evil in man, and his Captain Vere, the good man who suffers to do his duty. �42 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW The Program also offers some reflections on friendship: every winter, Aristotle provides freshmen with a framework for considering different kinds of friendships and the goods they afford. Perhaps they will find his list incomplete, or perhaps their own experiences will be embraced by his explication. And then there are examples of friendships, pairs of friends in many of the books, who will also provide lessons in friendship, for better or worse: Patroclus and Achilles, David and Jonathan, Hal and Falstaff, Huck and Jim, Emma and Knightley, to name a few. We journey through the Program with the assistance of many friends, some of whom live among us here and now, while some others live on in the books we read during this four-year odyssey. They help us as we struggle with the big questions that in turn can help to free each of us to live a life that truly belongs to us. It is these friends, standing close by, who help us to find our answers to the questions: Who am I? What is my place in the world? How ought I to live my life? One of my more beautiful living friends, a colleague here at the College, has put it this way: “Our friends are doubly our benefactors: They take us out of ourselves and they help us to return, to face together with them our common human condition” (Eva Brann, Open Secrets/Inward Projects, 55). Another of my friends, a St. John’s classmate and medical doctor, gave last year’s graduating class in Santa Fe this reminder, that we can learn from our friendships with the books how we might be better friends to one another: “So often we make shallow and inaccurate presumptions about people, like the cliché of telling a book by its cover, which robs you of the deeper experience that defines us as humans in our relationship to each other. For me every patient is a great book with a story to tell and much to teach me, and I am sometimes ashamed when my presumptions are exposed and I then see the remarkable person within, between the covers of the book of their own story.” This doctor has devoted himself to saving the lives of patients suffering from cancer, and he has this to say about how he is guided by the NELSON 43 spirit of community and friendship within the soul of every human being: “In my own work, it is sometimes said, we are guided…by the idea that to save a person’s life, it is considered as if one has saved the world. To me that has always meant the life saved is much more than a single life restored, as that person is someone’s spouse, someone’s brother or sister, someone’s parent, or child, a member of the community, of a church, synagogue or mosque, or a friend, and as all are affected by loss, all are restored by their return.” (Stephen J. Forman, 2009 Commencement Address, Santa Fe). This statement is a powerful testament to the wonder of friendship at work in the world. In this last story, I have moved us away from the inner world of reflection and learning to the outer world of putting what one has learned to work in a life devoted to helping others. The second must always follow the first. By this, I mean that we owe it to ourselves and to others to take advantage of the opportunities this community offers to learn with our fellow classmates and tutors how we might acquire a little self-understanding through the common endeavor we practice here, before going out and putting it to work in the world. And in the process, perhaps we will make a few friends who will stay with us for the rest of our lives, enriching them because “what friends have they have in common.” This little nominal sentence, κοινὰ τὰ τῶν ϕίλων, happens to be the penultimate sentence in one of Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus, which is the only book read twice for seminar, at the end of both freshman and senior years. Phaedrus and Socrates have engaged in the highest form of friendship as they have conversed together to try to understand how a man or woman might achieve harmony and balance in the soul by directing that soul to a love for the beautiful. Socrates concludes the inquiry with a prayer to the gods: Friend Pan and however many other gods are here, grant me to become beautiful in respect to the things within. And as to whatever things I have �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 44 outside, grant that they be friendly to the things inside me. May I believe the wise man to be rich. May I have as big a mass of gold as no one other than the moderate man of sound mind could bear or bring along. Do we still need something else, Phaedrus? For I think I’ve prayed in a measured fashion? To which Phaedrus responds: And pray also for these things for me. For friends’ things are in common. (279B – C, trans. Nichols). 45 “My Subject is Passion”: A Review of Eva Brann’s Feeling our Feelings Ronald Mawby Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People Know is Eva Brann’s latest large and wonderful reflective inquiry into what it means to be human. Previously she has written on imagination (The World of the Imagination, 1991), time (What, Then, Is Time? 1999), and negation (The Ways of Naysaying, 2001) as “three closely entwined capabilities of our inwardness” (2001, xi). Now she takes up our affective life: “that subtly reactive receptivity we call feeling, the psychic stir seeking expression we call emotion, and the not always unwelcome suffering we call passion” (2001, xi) as well as those pervasive unfocused feelings-without-objects called moods, each “as seen through the writings of those who seem to me to have thought most deeply and largely about it” (2008, 441). Her inquiry aims at thinking about our feelings. The second part of her subtitle—what people know—insists that we have in our own experience the data that thinking about feelings must address. Anyone who has been angry, for instance, in one sense knows what the feeling of anger is. Yet merely having felt the feeling does not enable one to grasp its nature, sources, psychic situation, and human significance. To grasp the full meaning of the feelings we need thinking, and Ms. Brann believes that those who have thought best about them are the philosophers. Hence she proposes “by way of picked philosophers” to hit the “high points that will best help me to make sense of myself—and of the world, natural Eva T. H. Brann. Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People Know. Paul Dry Books, 2008. Ronald Mawby teaches in the Honors Program at Kentucky State University. �46 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW and human-made, then and now, passing and perennial, the world that impinges on me by instilling or eliciting feelings in me” (xxi). This book is singular. I would say it is sui generis were it not of a kind with her previous trilogy of the human center (1991, 1999, 2001). The reader naturally wants to classify the book under the identifiable rubric of some collective scholarly enterprise, but it resists. Ms. Brann explicitly warns us of ten scholarly categories into which her book fails to fit. In fact, although the book is full of learning, it is intended not “as a work of scholarship for scholars but rather as an effort at inquiry for amateurs” (xxv). Her inquiry into our affective being aims at “getting a clear view of the contrasting possibilities and developing a warm—though correctable— adherence to one of them for carrying on my life” (122), and she hopes that reading philosophy “might be useful at the least for gaining some sense of the way particular human experiences are entailed by larger frameworks and, perhaps, for finding a coherent set of livable opinions for ourselves” (401). Her standards are dual: “verisimilitude by the criteria of knowing and verifiability by the test of life” (442). Ms. Brann, I would say, seeks significant truth, that is, a view that can stand the scrutiny and serve the purposes of both thought and life. She believes that large philosophical accounts offer her the best chance of advance toward significant truth. She knows her approach is not obviously sound: My approach is, I think, not very hard to defend as a working method for marshaling views but not so easy to justify as a way to establish truth. For these grand wholes of philosophy are obviously even less easy to reconcile than the narrow partialities of scholarship, while to cannibalize such frameworks for handy parts to cobble together would break up the very integrity that gives their passion theories stature. Therefore the justification MAWBY 47 for my—somewhat unfashionable—interest in grounds can hardly be, it seems to me, in culling a theory from this tradition, but rather in showing how and why the inquiry into human affect might be thought to involve all the world there is. (398) An option that Ms. Brann has declined would look toward “psychological theories—those points of view that base their observations concerning the passions on natural theories of the soul (or the converse) and often only implicitly on metaphysics (or its denial)” (xx). She justifies her neglect of psychological science by saying that discredited psychological theories disappear at once or fade away after becoming either literary tropes or folk-psychological terms, whereas philosophical systems show a sort of eternal recurrence. Her unpersuaded scientific opposition would interpret Ms. Brann’s observation as showing that in science false coin is eventually withdrawn from circulation, whereas in philosophy bad pennies continually turn up. The scientist would add that even for discerning the phenomena scientific experiment has an advantage over philosophical reflection because experimental manipulation can separate factors that are ordinarily confounded, so the experiment may reveal things that ordinary observation may not. On the other hand the scientific literature tends to be dry: vital issues can be desiccated through operational definition, and the reader must travel many a dusty mile through descriptions of experimental setups and statistical analysis of results to find the small god of factual truth who lives in those details. The issue finally is whether such factual truths lead to a livable oasis of significant truth, or whether philosophical reflection can lead there, or whether “significant truth” names a mirage. I am a lapsed psychologist whose life witnesses my sympathy with Ms. Brann’s approach, but I add that psychological studies too can be thought-provoking. Having sketched Ms. Brann’s aim I turn to the book itself, a handsome, well-produced volume of over 500 pages. I urge �48 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW potential readers not to be put off by the perhaps daunting prospect of so much philosophical exposition. As she says, “my subject is passion” throughout, but one topic does not imply one continuous argument. Ms. Brann presents the philosophers independently, on their own terms, and saves her own conclusions for the end, so one need not read from beginning to end to profit from the book. The ten chapters between preface and conclusion could be read separately as free-standing expository essays, serving as orientation for those who go on to the original texts, as recapitulation for those who have previously read them, or as cribs for those wishing to be spared the trouble. And the work is a delight to read. Her expositions are clear, her comments insightful and judicious. Basing my judgment on the texts I know, her accounts, even when brief, are nuanced and correct. She knows the conceptual geography so well that she is never lost. As a guide Ms. Brann is attentive to the needs of the reader and her lively lucid graciousness makes her a fun companion. The prose moves quickly without hurry, combines delicacy with penetration, shows a keen wit and generous spirit, and exemplifies Eliot’s dictum on diction: ”the common word exact without vulgarity, the formal word precise but not pedantic.” The honesty of her thinking and the accuracy of her writing produce a dominant impression of sun-lit clarity. * In the remainder of this review I wish to imitate Ms. Brann’s model by separating my exposition of the book’s contents from my personal response. I do not think Ms. Brann expects everyone who reads her book to adopt her conclusions; neither do I expect everyone to adopt mine. When, after considering various factors and divergent viewpoints, we tentatively conclude on a way to put it all together, our conclusion is neither independent of nor strictly entailed by the dialectical considerations that inform it. Truthful reporting should be disinterested, all the more so where the topic has personal significance. Therefore I first MAWBY 49 present the contents with minimal commentary, and then discuss my response. Ms. Brann begins considering “passion itself ” through the depiction of erotic love in Greek lyric poetry. The passionate lover receives the uneasy privilege of being subjugated by an external power: “Eros whacked me.” Here the source of the passion is outside, and the soul contributes only the power to be so affected. One persistent issue in thinking about feelings is the ratio between exogenous and endogenous factors: how much is the feeling shaped by its object, and how much is the object merely a trigger that evokes a soul-formed feeling? Plato begins the philosophy of feeling with his inquiries into eros (brought inside the soul), spirit, desire, and pleasure. We get the Platonic images of the soul from the Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic, and the account of pleasure in the Philebus. Ms. Brann follows the latter thread to Aristotle on pleasure as a bloom on activity, to Freud on pleasure as the reduction of psychic excitation, and to modern research on desire. Aristotle gets a chapter of his own as the founder of methodological emotion studies. Aristotle writes about the passions in his ethical and rhetorical works because of the centrality in the soul of appetite. Passions, like virtues, are seen as means between extremes. A focus of Ms. Brann here is the analysis of shame, which in the “cycles of popularity” among passions has recently been on the rise. The Stoics come next, with special attention to Cicero. As “moderns among the ancients” they have a representational theory of mind and insist on the primacy of the theory of knowledge. Yet unlike many moderns who view a drench of the passions as a welcome relief from arid rationality, the Stoics view passions as mistakes, irrational excessive impulses that upset the soul, and philosophy as the cure. We then make a long jump to Thomas Aquinas, who places us as rational animals in the midst of creation and situates passions between the intellectual and vegetative �50 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW powers in the center of the soul. Thomas presents a “comprehensive and differentiated synthesis” (186) of the tradition. Ms. Brann in a high tribute says that Thomas offers “the most extensive and acute phenomenology of the passions known to me” (446). Descartes, the cunning innovator, next gives us “an initiating and deck-clearing simplification” (186). Descartes considers a human being not as a rational animal but as a minded machine, and says the passions arise in the body and are felt in the mind. Ms. Brann traces Descartes’s taxonomy of the feelings and ends her discussion of his Passions of the Soul with this summary judgment: “a seminal treatise that combines confident assertion with ready retraction, brisk definitiveness with unabashed equivocation, proud innovation with tacit recourse to the tradition, hopeful emphasis on experimental science with a speculative physiology, and a determined reliance on the metaphysics of distinct substances with an insistence on a human union that the theory itself forestalls. But if the theoretical exposition is surely obscure just by reason of its attempted lucidity, the practical advice might be sage just because it is wisely ambivalent” (227). Spinoza refashions Cartesian notions into a system that aims to overcome traditional oppositions such as body/mind, impulse/freedom, desire/virtue, passion/action, emotion/ reason, and feeling/thinking. Spinoza’s onto-theology implies that the impetus at the base of our being is emotional and that affect is our body’s vitality. Intellectual understanding transmutes experience from passive to active and entails an increase of joy. This chapter I found fascinating, as I have not studied Spinoza, and his metaphysics is often taken as a grounding precursor to contemporary mind-brain identity theories. I don’t know whether his “God-intoxicated” metaphysics finally works—Ms. Brann thinks not—but thinking about it is invigorating. The Spinoza chapter contains an interlude on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, with its “wonderfully MAWBY 51 wise worldliness” that “operates with three moral-psychological terms, “sympathy,” “propriety,” and “the impartial spectator” (236). Whereas Smith assumes common sense, David Hume, the topic of Ms. Brann’s next chapter, is reductively skeptical in the Treatise of Human Nature. As she observes, “in matters philosophical, when you deliberately deny depth you seem to have to embrace compensatory complexity” (292). Thus Hume’s view of the passions as reflective impressions becomes “baroquely elaborate” (292), yet “the analysis of pride in particular seems, complications aside, true to life” (309). In the chapter entitled “Mood as News from Nothing: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the Age of Anxiety,” Ms. Brann begins with Romanticism. She comments on Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Pascal before proceeding to two thinkers who take up an “uncircumventable sense of nothingness borne by a persistent mood about nothing in particular” (342). Kierkegaard views anxiety as “the intimation of the possibility of being free—to sin” (342) and thus invests this mood with a deep theological-existential import. Heidegger says anxiety reveals “The Nothing” that is beyond beings and thus attunes us to the aboriginal. Ms. Brann, who dislikes Heidegger’s character for its lack of probity, nonetheless avers “Heidegger has told us an unforgettable truth in “What is Metaphysics?”: Moods are human affects that tell not only how we are but what our world is” (356). Unlike these existential-ontological theories, Freud’s account of anxiety uses “developmental, mechanistic, quantitative, that is, basically naturalistic terms” (368). Ms. Brann contrasts ancient passion with modern moodiness, and notes that moderns tend to see good moods as superficial and bad moods as revealing, so anxiety, depression, ressentiment, disgust, boredom, and their kin prevail in 20th century thinkers and writers. �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 52 We come at last to the dispersal of theorizing in our times. Ms. Brann presents the very different philosophical accounts of Sartre and Ryle, the empirically-based conceptualization of Silvan Tomkins, and the currently dominate English-language school of cognitivism. Cognitivism includes a cluster of theories that generally view emotions as judgment-like evaluations that can motivate behavior. Modern theoreticians emphasize the utility of emotions for the organism, a role I think is made the more urgent since, unlike older theories in which responsive and responsible reason can discern and judge ends, many current theories admit only a shrunken, neutered, calculative rationality. In the final chapter Ms. Brann begins with a disquisition on philosophical accounts as responses to the open receptivity of questions and as frameworks that set definite problems by pre-determining constraints on solutions. She then articulates the leading questions of the philosophical accounts she has examined in the preceding chapters. She concludes with her tentative answers to the questions that motivated her project: Is feeling a legitimate object of thinking? What is human affect? How are thought and feeling related? Are emotions judgments? Are we fundamentally affective or rational beings? Are the passions revelatory? What distinguishes aesthetic feeling? Are the emotions good? This fragmentary statement of content fails to convey the book’s richness. It is full of insights, with many sagacious and thought-provoking incidental remarks. It is striking how often Ms. Brann can summarily depict philosophical accounts of the soul with diagrams—images of the topography of our inwardness. * Now then, what response did the book elicit from me? Ms. Brann says that to make sense of ourselves we should read the philosophers, and that made me wonder, for in my experience the benefit of reading philosophy for finding livable opinions depends on which philosophers I read, our MAWBY 53 shared basis in what I call common sense, and the dependence of their insights on their systems. Let me explain with examples. Plato and Aristotle—the former through images and arguments, the latter through analytic articulations— organize, refine, and supplement common sense, so when I read them I feel that we share a common world. They see what I see, and a lot more, so I benefit. As a ‘seventh-letter’ Platonist I don’t look to the dialogues for a systematic philosophy that can settle every question it raises, and I don’t find one. Aristotle used to annoy me when I felt he truncated a discussion saying “enough about that”; I would rebel, wanting—I now see—a systematic completion that is askew to his enterprise; he is usually not imposing a theory but trying to articulate what is there, and when he has said all he has seen, he stops. I profit enormously from reading these authors, though, of course, for both, if we push every question to the end we come upon mysteries. In contrast, philosophers such as Descartes and Hume seem to be constructing systems intended as alternatives to common sense. They say, in effect, that what is really there is less or other than common sense imagines, so when reading them I feel I am in their systems rather than in the world, and if their systems are incoherent, as I believe they are, then I am nowhere, and the insights I do gain from them are in spite of, rather than because of, their systemic notions. Take Descartes. Ms. Brann agrees that we can see clearly and distinctly that Cartesian matter and Cartesian mind cannot interact, yet according to Descartes, they do. And Hume’s systemic notions don’t illuminate my experience but render it inconceivable; his conclusions seem to me an unacknowledged reductio on his premises. These authors, rather than ending in mystery, begin there. So I wonder, What is the value of an incoherent system for illuminating the passions? How can we make sense of ourselves using notions that don’t make sense? Ms. Brann writes, referring to Spinoza’s Ethics, �54 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW What is the good of attending to a text so beset with perplexities? Well, to begin with, I cannot think of a work that is not so beset when pressed. At any rate, don’t we study philosophical writings largely to learn what price is to be paid for certain valuable acquisitions, and don’t we think out things on our own largely to find out what problems follow from what solutions and what questionable antecedents we can tolerate for the sake of their livable consequences? (278) Our choice, then, is not between some perplexity and no perplexity, but between various configurations of perplexity. To avoid perplexity is to abandon thinking, or at least to give up that serious amateur personal thoughtfulness that since Socrates has been called philosophy. Philosophy as amateur (i.e., loving, hence feeling) thoughtfulness is related to Ms. Brann’s distinction between problem-solving and question-answering, which I would describe as follows. Problem-solving aims at reduction of uncertainty; when a problem is solved, our sense of the world becomes more determinate. A solved problem moves out of our center of attention; as the solution becomes a determinate thread woven into the fabric of belief or projected as a settled line of action, attention is freed for new tasks. The question-answering thought of reflective inquiry aims at heightened awareness. A question is the soul’s attentive receptivity focused and formulated. When an answer is glimpsed, our experience brightens. The question does not go away when an answer is disclosed; rather the answering world is formed and focused in our soul more intensely. Philosophies in Ms. Brann’s scheme sit between questions and problems, and face both ways. Philosophies can set the terms for formulating problems. In this employment philosophy is often antecedent to science, a communal enterprise devoted to the piecemeal discovery of truth. Philosophies can also assemble and organize questions. In this MAWBY 55 employment philosophy contributes to living well, and is not a collective scholarly enterprise. It is an individual way of being more consciously alive. Friends can help each other here—in the end Ms. Brann’s book is just such a friend—but we are finally alone in our sense of what is true about what is significant. I have a final response that concerns one of Ms. Brann’s conclusions. Among the “unformed urgencies” that she brought, or brought her, to this study is this question, the question of her project: “Are we fundamentally affective or rational beings?” (461). Spinoza affirms the former, Aristotle the latter, and Ms. Brann sides with Spinoza but quite properly plays on an ambiguity in “fundamental” to have it both ways: “while we are at bottom affective, we are at our height thought-ful” (362). She concludes that our inwardness is affectivity variously aroused (453). Thus my being, not the impersonal intellectual “I” that Kant says accompanies every representation, but me, my very own inner ultimate self, my subject, is passion. But the question, Are we thinking or feeling beings? is inadequately posed, since it excludes other alternatives. Maybe what is primary for us is neither feeling nor thinking, but doing and making. Maybe as human animals we act and produce to remain in being and thinking and feeling arise out of our living agency. Deeds worth doing and artifacts worth making surely have been praised in our tradition. That Ms. Brann writes books is at least consistent with the primacy of works and deeds. For she agrees with Thomas that baths are restorative, and she has tenure. Why not soak in a luxurious bath, feelings one’s feelings, thinking thoughts, and when one has a “eureka” insight rest content with a self-satisfied smile? Why leap out and write a book? Might it not be because the “production of a perfect artifact” (443) is another fundamental way of being human? Now she could reply, rightly, that clarity of thought requires verbal expression, so writing is a means to thinking. And certain feelings, such as pride, require genuine achievements about which to be proud. Thus �THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 56 good works and deeds may be instrumental to the best thought and feeling. Granted. But the best works and deeds also require, as instruments, good thought and feeling. Which is primary, which derivative, is not clear to me, so I cannot approve of excluding a possible answer through the posing of the question. While this is a weighty issue when considering what it means to be human, in terms of this book it is a minor quibble. Ms. Brann undertook this project to better understand herself as a feeling being, and offers the book as an aid for any reader also “hoping to come near to an answer to the question: What does it mean to feel?” (234) The final test for each reader, then, is whether after having read it one better understands one’s affective being. For myself the answer is, Yes, I do. My vision is larger and my discernment is keener. I am still not sure in what sense the inquiry into human affect reaches all the world there is, but it surely reaches the depths of the soul and, as Aristotle observed, the soul is in a way all things. This book energized my thinking mind and enlivened my feeling soul, and engaging with it has been a pleasure. Ms. Brann is again to be congratulated for a marvelous achievement. * Brann, Eva T. H. (1991). The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Brann, Eva. (1999). What, Then, Is Time? Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Brann, Eva. (2001). The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Brann, Eva. (2008). Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People Know. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books. � 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 <em>The St. John's Review</em> Description An account of the resource <em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College.  All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource The St. John's Review, 2009/2 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kraus, Pamela Brann, Eva T. H. Van Doren, John Williamson, Robert B. Zuckerman, Elliott McClay, Barbara Hunt, Frank Sachs, Joe Seeger, Judith Nelson, Christopher B. Mawby, Ronald Description An account of the resource Volume 51, number 2 of The St. John's Review. Published in 2009. 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Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf St. John's Review https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3cf085d04efc352d9ee42f654608c11e.pdf f6e1dd21081ef8a2cebace8df2df311b PDF Text Text ST • .JOHN'S CO LL EGE E T H G R E L I F E N I E L D B RARY • • .JUNE t, t 996 FRONT L AWN 8c LIBRARY PLAZA ANNAPOLIS MARYLAND �yr i flamed in recognition of the generosity of Stewart Greenfield, alumnus of the class of 195 3 and member of the Board of Visitors and Governors, and his wife, Constance Greenfield. St. John's College is deeply indebted to Mr. and Mrs. Greenfield for their gift which will benefit generations of students, faculty and citizens of Annapolis. �0 GR AM I :30- 2:00p.m. Prelude Carrollton Brass Quintet 2:00p.m. Presentation of Colors by the U.S. Naval Academy Color Guard National Anthem written by Francis Scott Key, Class of 1796 sung by Aaron Silverman, Class of 1996 COMMENTS Christopher B. Nelson President, St. John's College Stewart Greenfield Board of Visitors and Governors Kathryn Kinzer Head Librarian, St. John's College Robert 0. Biern President, the Friends of St. John's The Honorable Alfred A. Hopkins Mayor of Annapolis Louis L. Goldstein Maryland Comptroller of the Treasury Elliott Zuckerman Tutor Emeritus, St. John's College Dedication of the St. John's College Tercentenary Commemorative Postal Card Issued by the U.S. Postal Service Ribbon Cutting 2:45 - 4:00p.m. Self-guided Tour of the Greenfield Library Reception on the Library Plaza �HIS TORY OF TH E S T. JO THE FIRST FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY IN THE UNITED STATES he King William School was established in 1696 by an act of the era! Assembly of Maryland for "Propagation of the Gospel and the Bucation of the Youth of this Province in Good Letters and Manners." Thomas Bray, named Commissary of Maryland in 1696, felt that the clergy in Maryland could not hope to visit and instruct all members of rural colonial parishes, and he hoped that the provision of parochial libraries might ease this deficiency. The "Bray Libraries" were to be given into the care of the members of the clergy for the use of the parishes. A £400 gift of Princess Ann of Denmark, for whom Annapolis was named, enabled the purchase of 1,095 volumes for the Annapolitan Bray Library, the first of the provincial libraries. Both the establishment of the King William School by the civil authorities and the Bray Library by the Anglican Church indicate the need felt in the colonies for education in philosophical and spiritual matters. * The first volumes arrived in Annapolis in 1697, the last in 1700. After fires in the buildings that housed the collection, the libra1y was moved to the King William School in 1704. In 1720, the Bray Books were transferred to the new state house, and sometime in the second half of the century they were returned to the King William School. * When St. John's College commenced in 1784, the masters and students of the old King William School joined the inaugural procession, and the property and endowment of the early school- including the Bray Books- were conveyed to the new college. * Since this early beginning, the college collection has grown- sometimes vigorously, sometimes hardly at all- reflecting the fortunes of education in the country at large. Since its arrival on the St. John's College campus, the library has moved to McDowell Hall, Humphreys, Woodward Hall, Mellon, Woodward Hall, and now, some 90,000 volumes strong, to the new library. The new Greenfield Library assures us that 300 years of liberal education through books will continue long into the 20th century. �H N' S COL L E G E L IBRARY THE HALL 0 F RECORDS New Life for an Historic Building n 1934 St. John's College deeded a section on the southwest corner of campus to the State of Maryland for $10. The State constructed the first state archive depository in the nation, the Maryland Hall of Records, on this site. The Hall of Records commemorates the 300th anniversary of the state's founding in 1634 and has a finely detailed interior with symbols of Maryland carved in raised wood panels. Laurence Hall Fowler, a noted Baltimore architect, designed the building in a Georgian Revival style to complement the 18th and 19th century architecture of the St. John's College campus. * In 1986 Matyland's state archives moved to a new building on Rowe Boulevard. The Maryland Board of Public Works approved the sale of the Hall of Records in 1993 and St. John's College formally acquired the building in 1994. Renovations were completed in 1996, the 300th anniversary of the founding of St. John's College as King William's School and of Dr. Bray's library, the oldest free public library in the United States and the origin of the St. John's College library. LIBRARY PLAZA n the post at the entrance to the brary is a plaque honoring the memory of Richard Weigle, who served as president of St. John's College from 1949 to 1980. It is not inaccurate to state that the College might not be here today were it not for the leadership and efforts of Dr. Weigle. �A R c H I T T H E s a student I remember sitting ouse one spring day, and for a ming about the future instead of t woul past. I remember wondering if I er return to St. John's to once again reflect on the good, beauty, excellence and E questions became a driving metaphor. * In all I wanted the design of the new library to evoke a sense of history and change. The timelessly ordered classicism of the historic building was to be intentionally contrasted with the sweeping modernism of the new construction. other forms. Maybe I would even repeat, 'o If you would, an old order expanded by a new anthropos agathos with more vigor. Little did I one. Using many finely crafted materials and imagine that I would be back again, spending shapes the design creates a dialogue between four years actually constmcting instead of an architecture of the past with an architecture contemplating a form for the great books. It is of today. This contrast happens not only with always a sca1y proposition to satisfy a the addition, but equally where new deserving client, but to also satisfy my construction occurs within the building. It extended academic family was an exhilarating must be remembered that the massive interior challenge to say the least. How to shape a core of the Hall of Records was a six story form that not only followed its function, but warehouse completely unsuitable for modern also a form that many Platonists wouldn't open book stacks. Computers were to replace frown upon, seemed at best, an impossible task card catalogs while open access to books and on a campus that never ever took anything at relaxed reading were to prevail over an face value. Needless to say, in designing the enclosed vault. library, I had plenty of what we architects call building of contrasts, attempting to evoke friendly user input. * The shaping of the library was a test of nerves far more demanding * As it stands today, it is a paradox while following three simple themes: stillness, movement and nature. Stillness is than rubbing the Archimedean stones together. reflected in the enduring serenity of preserved Not unlike the gods on their best of days, classical architecture, movement is evoked by mysterious forces were always at work making the paths of the heavenly spheres, and earthly the impossible possible, and not surprisingly nalllre is as clear as the sunlight, gardens and * Approaching the building the some days, making the possible impossible. rustic stone. The building was shaped by many caretakers, classical orders of the early Fowler design for and students of Plotinus will be happy to know the Maryland Hall of Records remain that sometimes many efforts can become one. deferential to the quad and its guardians, * Through all this four year saga you might McDowell, Woodward, Pinckney, and ask what it is the architect did besides bounce Humphries. The new library's timeless between all these gods like a cue ball on symmetry and handsome entry remain as a billiard table. As the Socratic midwife I set delicate and inviting as a classic Loeb volume about pursuing the toughest question a in the hand. Maintaining a sense of timeless Quixotic architect can face. What shape is temples in their sacred landscape was essential. going to shape the library that will shape the Gazing across the preserved green sea I'm future Johnnies? Further, would Eva Brann ever constantly reminded of Melville's simple poem, approve of my imagination? I contemplated, I "Creek Architecture." meditated, I cogitated, and I agitated. Fax me a muse faster than a New York minute, I prayed. Metaphors were rolling, tongues were wagging and ink stained napkins were endlessly trailing behind me. * In all my questioning, and Not magnitude, nor lavishness But form, the site; Note innovating willfulness But reverence for the archetype. more meetings than there arc bricks, the * Entering the library, the past and the concept for the library began to take shape. It present are married in a light filled core. seemed to me the library should celebrate the Sunlight in all its Platonic and spiritual spirit of one of St. John's greatest gifts, the art metaphors as the great illuminator pervades of the question. Questioning the timeless every room in the libra1y. Reconstructing the c T �' s p E R s p E c T I v E building from a closed stack vessel to an open strove to keep our reverence for the classical living room for the campus was accomplished archetype alive. Thank you Annapolis Historic by filling every room with natural light and District Commission, Historic Annapolis, the outdoor views. The atrium is the center and Ma1yland Historic Tmst, and the American the focus of the library. From the central lit Institute of Architects. Thank you core all directions in the library are clear. commissioners and then you Donna, Jeff and The search for knowledge is as endless as the Donna. stair that takes you there. * Climbing up the * Unquestionably, the utilitarian needs were of utmost importance. They were stairway one views a series of elliptical unrelentingly guarded right down to the last segments. These patterns echo throughout the iota of the last page in the last volume on the library celebrating the celestial patterns and last shelf that could fit on a single fiber of reminding us of the astronomical transitions carpet. There are people who can actually between Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler. The count the number of angels on the head of a classical interiors preserve the known rational pin and know the answer. Thank you campus geometry of the past and are intentionally committees. Thank you Kitty, Vicki, Wally, $ As sure as contrasted with the expansive paths above us. Eva, Howard, Anita, and Wendy. These curvilinear shapes are a constant the sun rose and set, the budget was and reminder of the unknown, the irrational. always will be limited. Provisioning the voyage Knowing and not knowing are always present and steering the ship through numerous in the differing geometries of the libra1y. As financial shoals took one cool-headed set of well we shouldn't forget the guardian columns captains. Without the gclt there would be no holding their torcheres of light as the quiet gilded libra1y. You've taken us to the new bearers of the building. $ To the side of the world and back. T hank you donors and thank * With pencils and historic building, a garden wall politely you Bud, Jeff, and Chris. envelopes volumes and concepts to come. The trowels, computers and concrete, an undaunted addition is, on the one hand, a garden and, on and uneclipsed team of designers and guilders the other hand, an abstract modern building sculpted reality through snow and committees crafted in stone and steel. Its shape echoes the and more snow and more committees. Oh, and endless pathways of the skylight in the main I don't want to forget to mention committee�. stmcture as well as the never ending paths of Thank you Doris, Cathy, Tony and John. nature. While the skin of the addition Thank you Maureen and thank Cod for Atlas intentionally contrasts with its neighbor, himself, Junior Hood. respect and dialogue remain. Adopting the read, think, dream, and occasionally doze in * As h1ture Johnnies stone walls of Humphries and saluting Neutra's the Greenfield Library, I hope that somehow modern vision with a phalanx of steel fins once these shapes and metaphors will give them again remind us of past and present. The new pause to reflect and question. For architects stone work invites touch while abstractly and for all of us, the relationship between framing the indigenous plantings. Both inside architecture and thought is a never ending and out one is always in a light filled garden. pursuit. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, The site is preserved and the submerged new "first we shape our buildings and then, they form is intended to be as grand and polite as its predecessor. * So there you have an shape us." I hope that we have shaped a form well, and that it will continue to shape us all introduction to the shaping themes. As we all equally as well. Having continued to be a part know, however, a shape is shapeless without its of St. John's has been a heart filled blessing for shapers. "Who were these shapers and makers?", me. Thank you all for yet another odyssey I you might ask. Let me introduce them * First, won't long forget. the existing building had its unspoken demands and if you didn't hear them, there was a chorus of historic preservationists eagerly chanting detailed directives. These champions tirelessly Travis L. Price TTl, ATA Class of 197 ·I, SF �TH E GR E ENFI ELD LIBRARY THE MAIN LEVEL The Hall of Records Plaque.When St. John's College acquired the Hall of Records from the State of Maryland, the College agreed to retain the original dedication tablet in the entryway in recognition of the State of Maryland's longstanding support of St. John's College and the other independent colleges of Maryland. 2 The Friends of St. John's College Room is named in honor of the citizens and businesses in and around Annapolis who contributed to the library project. In honor of the College's tercentenary the Friends of St. John's College set a goal to raise $1 million to restore and preserve the splendid Georgian Reception Room in the Hall of Records as an area for reading and research. They raised almost $2 million. The College was deeply honored by this expression of support. In the next year the names of all donors to the Friends Room will be lettered above the chair rail, honoring in perpetuity a community's ongoing commitment to one of its oldest institutions. To THE MAIN LEVEL insure accuracy of the lettering, the names are first presented in booklet form in the Friends Room. 3 The Lillian Vanous Nutt Room recognizes the contributions of an artist whose talents, kindness, and generosity are known to many in the Annapolis community. 4 The Gallagher, Evelius & Jones Conference Room honors the prestigious Baltimore law firm, and one of its senior partners Rick Berndt, whose guidance and financial support helped to make possible this project. 5 Alumni Donors to the Library. On a calligraphied and fTamed scroll on the landing at the mid-point of the main staircase will IJ be the names of the alumni who contributed to the renovation I I I I I EI and construction of the Greenfield library. To insure accuracy III I £±±""' prior to preparation of the scroll, the names are first on display in booklet form. THE SECOND LEVEL 6 The Stephen and Julia Ford Reading Room stands as a symbol of the good will and concern shown by neighbors of St. John's College and the residents of Annapolis. THE SECOND LEVEL 7 The William E. Brock Rare Books Room is a tribute to the former Senator, U.S. Trade Representative, and U.S. Secretary of Labor and his wife Sandra, a member of the Board of Visitors and Governors, for their extraordinary generosity and hard work on behalf of St. John's College. �S T. J 0 N S C 0 LL E G E H ' 8 The Stephen L. Feinberg Periodical Room honors the Chairman of the Board of Visitors and Governors and Honorary Fellow '?f the College whose leadership, generosity and commitment have helped to secure St. John's College's future. 9 The Joy and Bennett Shaver Reading Room friends of the College, whose volunteer is named for two efforts through Caritas and the Friends of St. John's and whose many other contributions have set an exam ple for the community. THE THIRD LEVEL I0 The Ray Cave Floor celebrates the from the class of 1948 to his devotion of this alumnus alma mater and expresses the sincere appreciation of the St. John's College community for his tireless leadership as Chairman of the Campaign for Our THE THIRD LEVEL Fourth Century. I 1 The Dr. and Mrs. George Schoedinger Ill Reading Area named to recognize the contributions and interest of the parents of alumna Sarah Schoedinger, Class of MECHANICAL ROOM THE UNDERGROUND LEVEL 1992. is �E CIAL THANKS The College also expresses its appreciation to the following: Governor William Donald Schaefer for his generosity in permitting the College to acquire the old Hall of Records Building. The City of Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, and the Historic District Commission of Annapolis whose cooperation and support were vital to the project. Travis Price, Doris Sung, and Cathy Cherry, from the firm Travis Price Architects, Inc. for design, management and oversight of the project. Henry L. Lewis Construction Company, Junior Hood and Maureen Bands-Beckenholdt for their professionalism and precision. John Gutting for his meticulous and sensitive landscape design. Charles Wallace for coordinating the College buildings and grounds operations with the construction schedules. The St. John's College Campus Planning Committee for their careful and valuable consultation on all design issues. The Library staff, including head Librarian Kitty Kinzer, Assistant Librarian Vicki Cone, and Walter Plourde for their expertise during the planning phases and their thoughtful coordination of the move into the Greenfield Library. The students, faculty, staff and friends who, following tradition, moved the books by hand from the old library to the Greenfield library on May 6, 1996. Desig11 by Zoe Pa11tclides Graphics �-----·��-----� /- 1996USPS o- 7' ynded p 1 1696 as King William's School), the U.S. Postal Service is issuing · eci.ll postal card. The card's twenty cent stamp bears the image of McDowell Hall. McDowell Hall began as the grandiose dream house of Maryland's colonial governor, Thomas Bladen, in 1742. Originally conceived to have a central section with a wing on either side, the building soon proved to be too expensive for the colony to complete. Roofless, its unfinished walls exposed to the elements, the hulk which became known as Bladen's Folly sat for more than 40 years before the site was given to a new college- St. John's College- chartered in the new state of Maryland in 1784. Reconstruction of the building was completed in 1789, and the first students from King William's School and the College moved in. The building served as dormitory, library, dining hall, and classroom space until 1837 when a second College building was constructed. McDowell Hall is named after John McDowell, the first President of St. John's College. It is the third oldest academic building in continuous use in the United States. � 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 Playbills & Programs Description An account of the resource Playbills and programs from various St. John's College events. Many of these items are from productions by The King William Players, the St. John's student theater troupe.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Playbills &amp; Programs" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=20">Items in the Playbills &amp; Programs Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 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 playbillsprograms 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. 11 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 Greenfield Library Dedication Ceremony Program Description An account of the resource Program from the dedication of the Greenfield Library, held on June 01, 1996 at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource St. John's College 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 1996-06-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Nelson, Christopher B. Greenfield, Stewart H. Kinzer, Kathryn Biern, Robert O. Hopkins, Alred A. Goldstein, Louis L. Zuckerman, Elliott Relation A related resource <a title="Photograph of the Pre-ceremony" href="http://www.digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/104">Photograph of the pre-ceremony set up</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LibraryDedicationCeremonyProgram1996June01 Greenfield Library https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3128e828285ec2b631cc85ee303cbae1.pdf 57d3cd90d84701e7653c71164e417553 PDF Text Text THE GA FLY IIIUUIIDIIIIIUIUMMgUIIIIIUU'RIIIIIIIIIIII THE S1 JOHN'S COLLEGE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER The Ins and Outs of Off and On by Hi c.lt Camp be 11 Ib you squi rreJ yourself away in ooscure corners of the library? Do you find yourself walking by your friends without taking notice of them? Do you want to eat alone every now and then? Are you ready to bash in your next door neighbors stereo with a baseball bat? (It's been done). Is your roommate deve l oping weird habits? Perhaps it's time to think about moving off campus. Before trying to find a place to live its a good idea to f igure out your finances. If you're dependent on your parents they' re probably not going to like the idea. And if you can convince them of the vital necessity of m oving off campus (for your mental health of course), they may only allow you the same amount of money it costs to live on campus. This year that's i1800 . That's $200 per month for room and board. A tidy sum. Let's see, $100 per month for rent, don't forget the security deposit . Gas and electric will be between $10 & $25 , depending on whether your heat is g.as or oil. Oi l heat is expensive and don't look for the price to drop. It ranges from $20 to $40. Then there's the telephone. An awfully tempting little device, especially if your friends are scattered around the country. It can be very expensive. I ran up $500 one month. That was a special friend and she was in Tokyo. Figure a minimum of $10 per month. The total cost for a month is,: excepting food: Rent $1 00 Oil 20-40 G&E .. 10-25 Phone Total $140-175 10 - The number of people you live with can make a aifference in your bills, but it can get crowded. Maggie Argent lives wi ~h four other students. H rent is $80 , o1 l er $30, G&E $7, telephone $5, and food $60. Total: $1 82 . Maggie doesn't eat meat, that can add up to 50% to your food bill. The people in Maggie's house cook separately. Randy Linder, on the other hand, lives with two students and they share meals. He spends $40 on f ood a month. Randy doesn:t eat meat either. Food is a big variable 1n a budget. How much you spends depends on your shoppi~, cooking and eating habits. Your food bill can be kept low with the help of coupons, comparison shopping and by using fresh foods rather than prepared. There is a food co-op on campus for basi c foods. For more informati on contact Steph Chmiel. Also, don't forget the 'hidden' costs of moving off campus: cleaning stuff, bathroom supplies and kitchen utensils. They add up. (Light-bulbs). Okay, so you can swing it financially. ·What is i t like living off campus? There is no one te lling you to make your bed , take out the trash, etc. You're independent, sort of- don't forget where the money comes from. Along with your increased independence comes more responsibilities . One is keeping the common areas of the apartment clean. There are various methods for doing this . You can have an agreement where each of you take one common room to clean for a set period . Or, you can agree to pick up after yourselves. Or, you can say the hell wi th it until it gets so disgusting that everyone pitches in and cleans up, about once a month. You may be lucky and have a r oommate who has a fetish about cl eanliness and doesn't mind picking up after everyone . I have ye t to find one vho ( COJr.l'. P. 4 ) ..Bl1 �Editorials and Commentaries 1 ••------------------~-------------­ . • lion d' Etre "Why do you want to put out another paper?" I've been asked that question many times in the past week. I believe there is a need for a newspaper at St. John's. A newspaper whose concern is serYing the entire community, not only a part of it. Serving th& community means providing it with the infor.ation it needs on a timely basis. It means addressing the problems of the community in a responsible and critical manner. There are problems within our community. Sometimes they are brought out, often they are hidden. In the spirit of the free and critical mind our program is to develop, this newspaper will practice those skills we are taught on the best subject possible ourselves. Mr. DeMartini, the polity president, has spoken of the problems within the student body, but that is only one problem. There is also a problem with communication between students and faculty. Some students get along fine with some tutors, but for the majority of us there is something lacking in the relationship. 'Nhat t~t is and how it can be remedied, I don't know. I hope that this newspaper will contribute something towards identifying the problem. The community is primarily the students and faculty. It is also our alumni. THE GADFLY is being sent to local area alumni in hopes of bringing them into a more active participation in the community. They have experience in the 'real world' which THE GADFLY hopes to tap to help our undergraduates with the period after graduation. I also have personal reasons for starting~ GADFLY. It is where I can practice writing, editing and organizing. I am an active person, not metaphysical. THE GADFLY is where I can act and see immediate results. This newspaper is also_ for anyone who is interested in journalism, satire, parody etc. If you have an idea for an article but don't want to write it, or if you want to write but have no ideas, let's get together. For those vho aaked ''why,~· this is it. Narkotic Haze A column in the tradition of the narke by H H Hammel Since editorial changes in the Collegian made possible the existence of this column, I would like to review the two new streams of literature that have also appeared for the first time at this college; namely, the "George Willard" short-story canon, and the unending saga of the Children of the Seventies . By spawning both a newspaper and a literary-quasi-news journal this year, Annapolis has oneupped Santa Fe , which has only a biannual literary magazine (Au Verso)and no newspaper. My only regret is that St. John's East's former claim to fame, the print anything spirit,is no longer with us, since, - along with the new coat of paint covering the graffiti in the McDowell men's room, it signals the end to the days of blithe spontaneity. Enigmatic Willard's most recent, most ambitous, and most flawed attempt to date is the Tale of Gold. My critieisms are (OOift'. P. 8) POLITY MEETING The most important purpose of the Polity Meeting of last month was to hold a convocation of concerned students in order to discuss and make known the present and possible future course of our student polity. Simply put the Polity is in danger of collapse. The original Constitution of over 24 years ago did provide for a polis, or community designed to promote awareness in the student body of its responsibilities to the College, to uphold the College 's reputation t o the scholastic world at large and to help the students realize their new function of "organ of self-government". It also provided for the power of the purse and the student-run organizations which have since become part of life here at St . John's. We have the K.W.P., the film slub, the Waltz Committee and the Society of Bacchus only because we have the Student Polity. (OOJrl'. P. 5, COL. 1) �Reviews and Previews Apocalypse BQ:!: "The Vision and the Riddle 11 As more than one person has said, Vietnaa for most of us was a T.V. show. Well, .let me tell you about t~o episodes in the series that are stuck in my memory. The first was the famous execution of a handcuffed Viet Cong prisoner, blithely performed by a South Vietmamese general using a hand-gun at a distance of six inches. The seer · was the stunning chapter of the AmeL.can journalist who stepped on a landmine, in view of the camera. These two scenes are the Vietnam War for mea a vicious civil conflict, where Americans, even with all their high powered technology, could-not avoid primitive traps. They say that wars used to be fought in a civilized manner. I doubt it. As Shaw said, "The golden rule is that there are no golden rules." Corollarya especially today. Apocalypse Now is very much like the wara expensive, long, gory, fascinating, repellent, crazy, puzzling. I am told that it is a good representation of events; you think a helicopter attack to the tune "?light of the Volkyries" is unreal? I am told of a corporal who who had to patrol the perimeter of his outpost at night in a jeep. He and a buddy purchased a $)00 tape-deck, bolted it to the jeep, and did their patrol while Jimi Hendrix sang "All Along the Watchtower" full blast. And they were tripping too! At first the film seems to be askinga how savage does one have to be to win a war? r1arlon Brande says we are not savage enough; we must be at least as savage as our enemies. Eut in the end, Coppola says that savagery and viciousness are only phenomena. \·!hat matters is not savagery, but a will strong enougn for atrocious acts. The Americans ride high in the sky pushing buttons; the Viet Cong cut children's arms off. One sees his victimes and faces his actions, the other does not. It is not hardware that wins, say Coppola, but men united a~ determined. 3 The Wednesday Night Film Series Eight of the films of Akira Kurosawa will be shown this winter. All the films are FREE and start at 8a15 pm. · I chose to show .these films for several reasons. The first is my admiration for the director. Kurosawa has a unique style of film-making. He is capable not only of superb action sequences, suchaa the final battle in The Seven Samurai, but also he has made many of the most quiet, yet powerfully moving films I have ever seen, such as Ikiru. His work on the. period of events portrayed in his films is flawless, yet the characters are not enigmas from another time. Kurosawa has a , vision of humanity that spans centuries, which leads me to my next reason for showing "a bunch of Japanese films." All ·these films take place in a land and an era that is completely unfamiliar to most of us. Kurosawa's vision however crosses these borders. His ideas are enhanced, rather than enshrouded, by the alien settings he employs (to this . product of Hestern Civilization, anyway!). Above all, his filrr.s are enjoyable, exciting, and touching. He is as much a master of the film medium as he is an intelligent, imaginative, and thoughtful man. Come see a master at work! Jim Sorrentino f . S. Please send any comments you have on the Winter ?11m Series to Ingrid Miller in College Relations . (CONT. P. 5, COL. 2) Unity and determination are precisely what America lacKed in Vietnam. America beat ·Germany, not by sinking to genocide, 'but, because in the ned Gennany was run by a madman who preferred his generals to give him good reports. In the end, .says the film, without~ there is only hallucinatory chaos: Apocalypse Now. Ji.m Sorrentino �didn't eTentually develop a little bit of resentment. Other responsibilities include paying the bills on time, getting the oil tank filled when needed, keeping up with the roaches and taking out the trash, of course. Outside the added responsibilities, there is a difference living off campus. Lisa Cobb, who lives on Charles Street with a graduate and a townie, feels out of touch with the college community. Alf Newlin, who lives as close as the Little Campus, says he doesn't see other students as much. No, Alf doesn't live in the L.C. This is a common complaint. Will Warner doesn't mind that though. He says it's nice being out of the "fish bowl." Lisa Cobb recommends staying on campus freshman year because, "it's good to be part of the school and to meet people before moving off." Randy Linder likes the feeling of independence and not being waited on like a "helpless intellectual." If you want to talk to students living off campus they usually hang out in the coffee shop from lunch until 4 :00 p.m. You've decided to move off campus, and you have the money. It's time to find a place to live. The assistant Dean's office receives calls from people with rooms or apartments to let. Jan Easterday says there is nothing available now. Another source is the Evening Capital. A map is handy for eliminating places too far away. The best source is probably word of mouth. This time of year most students moving off campus take the places of those who move back on or drop out. There is also the bulletin board in the coffee shop. Found a place? Congratulations! But, will you get along with your new house mates? Unless you're filthy rich or work forty hours a week you'll probably be living with at least one other person. If you get along with your present roommate you should be all right. Of course, i f you're getting along with your roommate you probably won't be aoving off campus in the middle of the year. Apartments are not the only places available off campus. Jim Melcher and Shuba.el Bartlett live on the top floor of I'1r . Mark • a home on Prince George Street. They both eat on campus which saves them the fuss. Nick Kennedy rents a room· from a family in the historic district. His only complaint is about the woman who rents the room above his with her child. Nick also eats on campus. Anne Schanche has a novel apartment. She lives in the reconverted church on the corner of East Street and Prince George. The church is now owned by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Anne and her roommates take care of the place for a nominal rent. There are interesting living situations in Annapolis . They are very rarely advertised, word of mouth is the rule for finding them. Good luck and happy hunting. P.S. If you haven't seen much of Adrian Carsiotis lately it's because he'• ott campus. Rumor has it that he lives with three women who take good care of him. There~ alternatives and it sounds like Adrian has found one. ANNOUNCEMENTS REALITY Reality is not just a weekend in May. It is a time when the whole community gets together to celebrate the end of the school year. In recent years Reality has been mainly a studentaffair, with some notable exceptions, such as last year's reversal of roles by Fred Cox and Bryce Jacobsen in a class room situation. This year the Reality Committee is starting early. If you have an idea for a skit spoofing ourselves please contact them. They are Lisa Cobb and Eugene Wise. There will be a Reality Benefit movie Friday at 10:00 PM. It's Rebel Without A Cause with Ja.es Dean. �POLI'l'Y M.D'l'I NG Our Polity is in danger, I feel, because of our a~athy to change and our refusal to take it seriously. Since the original Constitution the student body has more than doubled in size, and one third of the students live off-campus. The Constitution has not been amended to meet the radically new situation, with the present chaotic results. This was the first Polity Meeting in at least seven years. Students are not brcught together as common students except in the separate funded activities. We are now so fragmented that the S. C.I., a very important avenue of communication between the students and the faculty, actually yearns for student input. Many enroll here seeking only a niche in which to read their Great Books, isolated from the polis, the community. I hope, therefore, to reestablish the polis as originally conceived, for it is more than just a sideshow. I have appointed Mr. Van Doren to chair a committee whose purpose shall be to report on the polity and to draft a new constitution. The work of this committee cannot be overemphasized, for without an effective, up-to-date constitution we cannot have an effective Polity. Mr. Van Doren's committee shall be holding public meetings, and student suggestions would be both vital and welcome. I further propose to hold more polity meetings. These meetings should be used as were the Greek Assemblies for common discussion and debate of issues concerning this polis. Most of the Delegate Council minutes are so limited by space as to be uninformative to all except the members. The Polity Meetings are still the most effective means of making us all aware that we are indeed one community. We must realize this by ourselves, and each make up our minds individually; for without our self-initiative, the polis folds. James DeMartini Polity President This Wee;'s Japanese Film The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail is one of Kurosawa's shorter works. It was made during the American occupation of post-WW II Japan. This was a time of severe restrictionsa not only did the Americans specify the subject matter of the films being made, they also placed limits on the running time! The film is based on a folk-tale concerning a retainer who must beat his disguised master in order to get him safely past his enemies. Of course, the retainer feels greatly ashamed. This is a good exploration of the limits 0f yeople's values and is a fine exercise in suspense. (Whether this film "ridicules feudal standards of loyalty while appearing to celebrate them," OR, as this humble one believes, celebrates those values while appearing to ridicule them, is something I leave up tb you). THE SUBSCRIPTION RATE of THE GADFLY for the second semester will be $5. We will print weekly, excepting vacations, until the end of the school year. Due to space, time and printing restrictions we are unable to accept advertisements. We are supported solely by our subscriptions. If you wish to subscribe, please make your checks payable to THE GADFLY, c/o Rick Campbell, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland 21404 THE GADFLY is free for the students and faculty of the Annapolis caapua. �Sports W<!\EN'S ·SPOilTS MEN'S SPORTS VOLLEYBALL Dec. 11th Dec. 5th Guardians 4 - Druids 0 Furies The Guardians looked to be pretty sharp in this, their opening game. They seem to have a solid group, all down the line. Many of Mr. Yamamura ' s serves were not returned successfully. The Druids are still looking for a winning combination. After one week into basketball and volleyball, only the Spartans and Guardians remain unbeaten .•. and this will change very soon, since they play each other in both sports before Christmas. Dec. 6th Hustlers 4 - Greenwaves 0 A week ago, the Hustlers were not looking so good in their loss to the Spartans ••. and the Waves were hopeful, and even euphoric, after edging the Druids. But things have changed for both teams. The Hustlers showed definite improvement ... must be those secret early morning "basketball" practices. Obviously that was a cover ... they've really been working on their volleyball skills! The only consolation for the Waves is that they will play the Druids again this winter. Apparently their first game was not "pivotal". Dec. 12th Guardians by Beth Gordon by Bryce Jacobsen 4 - Spartans 2 Now only the Guardians are left unbeaten this winter. The Spartan B's won a game, and so did their A's. But the Guardians, as mentioned earlier, are pretty solid all down the line. However, the match was closer than the acore indicates. For instance, the Guardian A's scored 42 points, an.d the Spartan A's 37. And that, Dear Readers, i8 pretty close. 42 - Amazons 39 It took them two overtime peri~ds, but the Furies have won their first basketball game, in fact, their first game of the season. 1-lith their strongest turnout so far, they ran the Amazons into the ground, en fin, and took the game away from the blue. Actually, the score remained very close throughout, when, with seconds remaining and the score tied, the Furies Sue Coffee went to the line, but missed. That set up the two overtime periods with the Furies pulling i t out. Amazon coach Eric Roberge was understandably upset, but blamed the loss on the dead soots in the floor. He did promise to play Miss Simonson more in their next game. Fury coach Steph Chmiel (who is also the team's highest scorer) attributed the first win to fine skill, newly blessed on them from various Greek gods. "And," she says, "this is just the beginning." Jan. 3rd Furies 31 - Amazons 28 Those who thought that the first Furies win was a fluke -- surprise, surprise. This win lifts the Furies out of the cellar in basketball and puts the Amazons there. The Amazons could only muster 5 players for the game. That ~o1as their downfall, because Miss HcVadon fouled out at the end of the third quarter. Miss Cobb, the Amazon captain, did her best trying to make up for the loss · of a player by scoring 14 points, the high in the game, but it was not enough. ( COftiiiJB Dl'r P.lGB) �Jan. 5th Hustlers 4 - Druids 3 Druids 7 112 - Waves 64 The Druids won the first three games, and were within three points of takin~ . the match •.• but then things started to fall apart for them. Their game scores, in order, were: 15-15-15-12-7-7-3. Questions for our calculus-type Juniors: What is the next term of this sequence? Does this sequence have zero as a limit? The Hustler's probably should get our special Award for THE COMEBACK GAME OF THE YEAR. The \-laves kept the game close in the first period. In the 2nd, the Druid B's rocked the Waves B's 37-4. David Carnes was the lethal weapon, scoring 18 points. The Waves discussed the matter, figured they had nothing to lose and played Chris Berns, f ormer Wave who is now at Indiana. Of course, they forfeited the game. BASKETBALL It looked like Mr. Spector was going to power the Spartans over the Hustlers in the first period, but the Hustlers came out of it with a 3 pt. lead. The Hustler B's took their period by 8 and the A team took it from there. Dec. 8th Spartans 75 - Guardians 67 Now no teams are unbeaten this winter, and we can all relax. Two things hurt the Guardians badly. They were 16/36 at the foul line, and their B-team was outscored 24-12. Their A's did well enough, with a 55-51 edge over the A's of the Spartans ••. but not well enough to overcome those two handicaps. Mr. Putnam was again high scorer with 27 points. Hr. Gio rdano was "held" to 20 points, but meanwhile, Mr. Spector was confounding the Guardians, and everybody's game plan, by scoring 21! The Guardians didn't quite expect that! Hustlers 91 - Druids 85 This was the opening game for the Druids, and they scored lots of points, many more than any team had scored so far this winter. But, alas, they allowed even more! It was "bombs away", and the Devil take the Hindmost. After two periods, it was deadlocked at 60-60 .•• but in the last period the Hustlers were a little more accurate with their salvo s. The Hustler B's outscored the Druid B's by seven points, which was exactly the margin of victory. Messrs. Kates, Jennings and Dwyer scored a whole mess of points. Things for the teams to worry about in the future: a) Hustlers ••• at the foul line they shot 30%! b) Druids ••• they committed 39 fouls, to leave early! caus 5 Hustlers 75 - Spartans 61 SPORTS STANDINGS MEN VOLLEYBALL WON TIED LOST Guardians Hustlers Greenwaves Spartans Druids 2 2 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 BASKETBALL WON TIED LOST Hustlers Spartans \,uardians Druids Greenwaves 2 2 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 3 l 2 POINTS 6 7 4 4 3 POINTS 7 7 4 4 2 Jan . 4th Maenads 43 - Nymphs 29 The ~aenads have done it again, and thev really look unstoppable. Unless someone can find a way to prevent Miss Athey from getting under the basket, I'm afraid the chances of beating them are slim. WOMEN BASKETBALL Maenads Nymphs Furies Amazons WON TIED LOST POINTS 6 4 2 0 0 0 0 2 5 18 14 1 11 0 6 9 �• stylistic, leaving the question of content to more interpretive critics. To begin with, only someone with an ear for dialect, for instance, Samuel Clemens:-should attempt to write it. Clemens had firEthand experience with the many variations i n regional speech in his America. To Willard I point out that folks back in Wyoming don't talk with a shit-load of "reckons", neither do they drop t heir auxiliaries("I' ve got" becomes "Aw've got" not "I got"). Ranchers tend to be laconic fellows in my experience, and when you can get them to tell a story it will be short , colorful, and pointed • • • not taa .rambling red~ncy that characterizes Willard's narrator. Repetitiveness is a flaw in writing technique, e.g.a "He stood up and walked over and sat on the ground. He took off his gloves and laid them down. They stayed in the shape of his hands , as if there was still live flesh in them. Funny how old gloves are like that." At this point I am very tired of typing the word "and." Despite this plethora of description, the 'effect stays abstract , general words appearing as mere words, with no variation of verb form or distinctive attributes concerning the action. By choosing less, one says more. Particulars stick in the mind: recall in 0ickens' Christmas Carol Scrooge contemplating his door-knocker. The door-knocker becomes al most a character. In the Tale . of Gold George tries to animate the gloves but the redundancy of "live fl esh" kills them. The above quoted l ines made me wince and sharpened my perceptions to the po intlessmess of countless phrases . I n The Children of the Seventies, Mr . "Auerbach", who I happen to know is from Wyoming, is cer tainly a laconic writer short, colorful , and pointed, "reanwhile, Sally's head was gently tilting from side to s ide, as she polished off the second basket of potato chips,"God, Mr . Callimachos," she said, daintily fill ing the innermost crevices of her mouth, "I love these things, you know? "" Possible bad points include the ihside jokes (incomprehensible borrowings from the back alleys of pop include murder theme from the "Brood", daytime TV, even documentar ies on PCP ) plot and persons in panta re, near portrayals of unwitting student and tutor victims, and the cruel parody of Willard ' s grating tendency to create his mythoi from his personal experience, w ch unfortunat ely for hi us , coincides_factually with our own. That there are peopl e who are willi. + t c axpose their creations to the orr,rnunity is admirable. May it set an example. ~naging TilE GADFLY St. John'• Colle@e Non-Profit Or8. BUL K RATE U.S. POSTAGE PA ID l'llMIT NO. 120 AN>IAPOLIS, MD. Editor Rick Campbell Art Editor Hazen Hammel Lay-out & Design Terry Polk Subscription Steve Edwards Richard Miller Staff Aoi Yamamura Patti Pratt Sara Marcy THE GADFLY is printed by the St. John 's College Press . Chris Colby Printer Chris Mark Assistant � 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly 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. 8 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Campbell, Rick (Managing Editor) Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. I, Issue 1 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1980-01-01 Description An account of the resource Volume 1, Issue 1 of The Gadfly. Published on January 01, 1980. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly 01.01 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 Press Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Gadfly Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6240af4b6ca02df16456c37275c2e5e1.pdf 7424a72b63bd0a8e5ca7b2f0395b727d PDF Text Text !"# $%&'() !"#$%&'($'"#)$*+,$!--.-/$$$01 $2-)"(3$#)-$45/#6"($$$07 8/-+)9-($2&3"-+:$!&5;+$$$0< 4/&=5-#>$?$@6#)$#&$A;&/B$$$0C$ !"#$%&'()!$*&++,-,$.$/0$*&++,-,$12,3$1((14&+5!3$67$89:09$.$1;-;!"$<03$8099$.$2&+#$===555$.$5!!;,$5 !"#$"!%&'( )*& !"#$%&"'$(")*$+&)$,)--$+"--. /&)$0-1**$"2$3456 �!"#$%&'()* +, 7$8#3$9#.(,,(,. =)()/%4"#L*(NI>2O:*,#*.1#P><*5,&#Q*4+%# <.%/.#*+#R*..$#S(*"2#*.1#T(*5)#D$+%.U# ?()?*()#"%(#H%&(.*4>+2>5#04%($7#+",-,$.)$/,00)$ 1#25$0% The student newspaper of St. John’s College. 60 College Avenue Annapolis, Maryland 21401 gadfly@sjca.edu editors in chief Danny Kraft Grace Tyson Assistant Editor Nathan Goldman Layout Editor Hayden Pendergrass business manager HONORE HODGSON Photographer HENLEY MOORE Contributors BRYCE JACOBSEN JERRY JANUSZEWSKI DREW MENZER DANIELA LOBO DIAS JUDITH SEEGER JAIME DUNN Founded in 1980, The Gadfly is the student newspaper distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus. Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gadfly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way necessary to publish the most professional, informative, and thought-provoking newspaper which circumstances at St. John’s College permit. Articles submitted will be edited for grammar, punctuation, and spelling in most cases. The Gadfly is not obligated to publish all submissions except under special circumstances. The Gadfly meets every Sunday at 7 PM in the lower level of the Barr-Buchanan Center. Articles should be submitted by Friday at 11:59 PM to Gadfly@sjca.edu. 4)22)(#"(%- 2,)#)1>2%(+ ! 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For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly 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. 8 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kraft, Danny (Editor in Chief) Tyson, Grace (Editor in Chief) Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XXXIII, Issue 1 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-08-30 Description An account of the resource Volume XXXIII, Issue 1 of The Gadfly. Published on August 30, 2011. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly 33.01 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 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Gadfly Student publication