27 20 5655 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6ca0cbe21d9e57e38ce59a7ea8c96742.pdf 7ec9850663b6b393bf92b992fe984923 PDF Text Text Spring 2020 �Letter from the Editors In the Decameron, seven young ladies and three young men flee the plague-filled city of Florence in search of pleasure. Their pleasure takes the form of lying in the shade and telling stories, which, as one of the young ladies argues, “may afford diversion to all the company who hearken, [as well as to the storyteller]”. We as readers are no strangers to the solace stories bring; we remember the advice our Don Quixote of La Mancha gave to the canon: “read these books, and you will see how they will banish any melancholy you may feel, and raise your spirits should they be depressed.” We hope that this collection of your stories, poems, paintings, and other works of art can provide you with a moment in the shade, and a diversion from whatever melancholy might ail you. �Samuel Barrettini 32 sodomy is dead 33 Homo Ives Williams Natalie Walker Anna Seban Amy Porter Natalie Walker Tyler Mazur Clare Collins Brendan Reicherter John Verdi Julia Cooper Anna Seban Juana Melendez Glenn Burns Lysithia Page Eric Baker MegAnn Sara Johnson Elle Laabs Sheba Delaney Sophia Heimbrock 8 RoadKill 9 My Young Reflection... 10 Free Fall 11 Icharus 12 Antigone, Line 72 14 Hinterland 15 untitled 16 Deminished Blues 17 Good Fences 18 Icharus 19 Jess 20 the trip 21 ODE OF THE HORSEMAN 22 Yesternight..., If only... 23 The Sandelwood Kid 26 Forgive me Father, for I have been Sacrilegious 27 Sóller 28 At Least He’s Laughing 30 on parallels 31 big and little words all spelling out desire Daryl Locke 34 New Years Morning 35 Twenty Liam Marshall-Butler 36 The Innumerable Steps Amalie Christensen 38 So I Yearn Scott McCrae 39 Newton 1.3 Louis Petrich 40 Falstaff Riseth Up Chris Musick 42 A Politician Amongst Philosopher... Anne Brong 43 Welcome mattress Nortaute Grintalis 44 Kajus’ Centripetal Force 45 A year’s archetype 46 Daily Heroin Maya Sofia Lake Nicholas Thorp 47 Untitled Elias Christian 48 Variations on Sweetapple... Sofe Cote 49 Self Portrait With Lump (#5) Kristina Dover 50 Clutching Her Pearls, Unavailable Rose Zhang 51 my favorite person Jean Hogan 52 Content Warning Martha Campbell 54 Sonnet for Cordelia: From France 55 A Poem for France: From Cordelia 56 Molly (for my love) Sofe Cote �If I might but sit awhile and gaze upon the heartbeat finger tap twitch of a wounded deer by the midnight gas station antlers akimbo, thorny palms raised to the sky when it saw those headlights staring back did it see the eyes of God? 8| Ives Williams RoadKill anxious to greet the indefinite creaturepetrol pulse, parly on the weedy road My Young Reflection (on two lines from Whitman) Around my eyes does not stay crinkled yet. My cheeks resist my smile. They will remain Unsure for still a while that I’ll maintain, As life’s response, laughter is valid and set. My forehead too persistently forgets Each riddle and duress my mind does deign With momentary interest, real or feigned, And smooths each crease left by the thought it had met. I think my face misunderstands itself, And what facing this sad, strange world ever meant— As if experiences stay on some shelf, As if most deeply I am indifferent. My face does not yet look like Me Myself— Aloof, amused, compassionate, complacent. one more innocent self-sabotage in the desperate flight from ignorance Natalie Walker |9 �Free Fall 10 | Anna Seban Icharus Amy Porter | 11 �12 | Natalie Walker | 13 �Hinterland untitled A guest in a warm bed. The cold outside, in the dark. A windowsill between us, Smothered with trinkets. Euphemism for junk, shit. How many windowsills From here to the Fall Line With trinkets strewn about? Frame and photo from when? Wedding china going where? Appalachia is a junk culture. A shit culture, hoarding Bottles long after the drink. Still, better with than without In the cold and dark, I guess. 14 | Tyler Mazur Clare Collins | 15 �Good Fences Diminished Blues Brendan Reicherter bœ ˙ 4° œ & b 4 ¢ ™™ F7 5 bœn œ bœ ˙ &b œ B¨7 bœnœ B¨º7 C7 Cº7 B¨7 9 bœ nœ^ & b nœ bœ Ó C7 17 2. F7 Cº7 &b ˙ 16 | Brendan Reicherter F7 Œ ‰ bœbœnœ œ œ œnœ œnœ œbœ œnœ J bœ bœ nœ ˙ &b œ 13 F7 F7 b œ B¨º7 nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ œn œ b œ bœ œ~ J Œ ‰ Œ Ó B¨7 Bº7 œ bœ bœ nœ ˙ C7 Cº7 Fº7 œ~ Œ ‰ œj œbœ B¨7 Bº7 nœ bœ bœ nœ œ œ ‰ œJ œ bœ bœ nœ ˙ 1. John Verdi ü ‰ nœJ bœbœ œbœ œ œ œbœbœnœ œj Œ nœj œbœ œnœ œbœbœnœ ™™ † B¨7 B¨º7 bœ F7 bœ nœ F©º G‹7 C7 bw 3 John Verdi | 17 �Icharus 18 | Julia Cooper Jess Anna Seban | 19 �the trip ODE OF THE HORSEMAN In the dark, I meet your skin. Your veins run like hidden rivers beneath you, Carrying the spirit of your immutable heart. It pulses, Like the light of the stars above. We run in pace with its ancient rhythm For we’ll run far away from the spying stars (where their light can not divide us)And our skin will be together, So that we are one (much like the patchwork quilt that lies in our barn). And when you breathe, Your lungs carry the stories Of forgotten beaches and snow-kissed mountains. I hear in you the wind that has passed your ears, And filled your chest. When we are together, I never worry that a merciless God should do us part, For we are already in His heaven (but dear Lord, When we’re together is not enough). We climbed up to the top to the comfort of this house made a fire now worn out after ripping all walls apart took the remains and sailed away on boats made of glass and iron. 20 | Juana Melendez Glenn Burns | 21 �Yesternight the sky was dark The Sandalwood Kid By Eric Baker I had only just arrived at Kineo Mount Yesternight the sky was dark Or so you would have thought But stolen was its inkiness, And in its place was nought. Who slurped away the jet black broth and left the stars behind, Opaque like chunks of chicken breast, with edges undefined? But really it was colorless, For contrast thus had ceased. Now everything was everything, I fell asleep apleased. I had spotted eagles, brown, as I sailed to the island “Mni Wiconi” I recite to myself I’ve never seen water so clear Nor the Milky Way so casually fixed- as if little more than some novelty “Mni Wiconi” As if my mantra would teach me something hidden About the lake When I was a boy I had asked my mother about love She tells me a story, that she had told once before How as a child she had once had a bird, and loved him so And kept him in a brass cage Her father had made Her grandmother goes up, and moves to open the cage “Will you still love, if he had somewhere else to go?” “No” she screams, but a little girl My young mother slams the cage door shut, and puts it in its lock If only we had seen the land “Leave him alone” Her grandmother turns, no anger in her soul “When we play by the stream, and pass water down the line- from me to your father to youHow do I hold my hands? Do I grip If only we had seen the land Before its skin was razed Would we see ourselves the more The wild had we gazed? But lost ourselves in skies on fire, We in bleeding wood, Alas we’ll never see ourselves, Maybe we never could 22 | Lysithia Page With a fist?” “No” “Do I hold my hand flat?” “No, you’d drop all the water!” “Ah, so cup my hands I must, never gripping, otherwise neither your father nor you will ever get to sip?” “Grandma, why are you asking me? Just leave the bird alone!” “Fix your tone, and fix your attention to my words. You cannot nourish your other, if you hold onto them tight. They are not for you to claim, but only for you to let pass along. Open the cage door, for the bird is not yours.” “But father-” Eric Baker | 23 �“We’d call him mad if he kept his hands cupped with water, and ran away from all of us with it spilling No beard in his way from outside, it was only passing through. Do you think he’s angry?” In Heaven’s Lake over his shirt and down his head. You’d be angry, because you didn’t have your fill. The sparrow came The grandmother moves towards the cage, and my mother relents her protest The sparrow, wild, darts towards a wall Her grandmother had neglected to open a window It plops to the ground and my mother screams A red round dot left on the wood board My mother’s shriek then meant nothing He just sat for a while And had flown far, far away Untethered, untouched He had owned nothing And like the tree, the finch and the stream Nothing owned him after all. Compared to her cries later I find a tree, a white pine, though not sandalwood But because her father had decided to stuff it the next morning And breathe in the world Not over the bird’s death My mother walks into their living room And avian eyes stare blank from the mantlepiece I put my forefingers together Crossing my third fingers over my forefingers I exhale, I lose the world Her grandmother knits as my mother writhes on the ground “Mni Wiconi- water is life” my mother says Until her grandmother places her half-finished shawl over the stuffed sparrow “Water can’t be called life, if it’s kept to yourself She bares her juvenile teeth and weeps And takes my mother to bed My mother pauses before me She doesn’t know how to continue “Like the water, it wasn’t mine to keep” Though the saying is not from her part of the world Nothing can be life, if it doesn’t pass you through. Life can’t ever, ever, just stop with you,” she mumbles With a cigarette between her teeth And a lighter under her thumb I stare, unsure of the lesson she’s gleamed I breathe again “Mni Wiconi” I cross my fingers I recite again As I step onto the landing And dock my boat Up Kineo I head The moon lighting my way I exhale again I cross my fingers once more I gain the world I lose the world But still, the world doesn’t lose me Or take me up with it I recall another story Again, I try, to no avail Son of the Bear I return to the world Of the Sandalwood King And first of our race Who, after his reign, Stepped under a sandalwood tree At the top of a mountain peak And found peace I depart from the mount And open up my sail Still a boy, still a kid Dreaming of the wind Dreaming of riding the gale. With no clothes on his back 24 | | 25 �Forgive me Father, for I have been Sacrilegious Sóller I used to pray every night before bed Now I sit and read Euclid instead I used to play around with play-doh Now I fuck about with Plato Whatever happened to reality? Now it’s just me and the Polity Sorry Dad, I’m becoming secular As the church no longer feels familiar Now I know the true holy trinity: Euclid, Plato, and the Polity 26 | MegAnn Sara Johnson | 27 �At Least He’s Laughing It has been raining for weeks. I pull myself around like a dog coerced outside for a piss. I unfurl my umbrella just as the rain stops and feel its extra weight in my hand. Necessity does not talk to me anymore. A telephone pole poster for anger management tells us to “find the virtuous mean” in italicized helvetica neue. “Use protection.” winks the condom wrapper kicked about on the classroom floor. Moderation is a kind of invited claustrophobia to hold in, hold together— bent umbrellas against rains already come. We talk of fragility around cornered tables and grin as though it might disappear with the hot air of speech. There is no difference between cracking and falling. We all leave all the time for smoke breaks and daydreams and trips to the restroom to slap our cheeks until our eyes decide to open again. We’re always circumscribing some shape we never take. “I am my own phantom limb!” cries a man 28 | Ellie Laabs out the third floor window. Drops keep falling. I have left my umbrella inside this time. The universe and I form dissonances whenever we touch. I never care about it until I get a glass of wine in my hands and someone asks, with over-compassion: “but how are you, really?” I think often of summer— of the early July day I discovered a wet paint sign clinging to the beach, as if to say “the creation is yet fresh.” That’s the closest I’ve come to knowing God. I think: at least He’s laughing. Ellie Laabs | 29 �on parallels big and little words all spelling out desire every morning finds something missing: the pause too long for comfort, like cold curdled coffee dregs, like letting the toast burn. all the books stand at attention (and underneath, little pieces of paper with your words written on them). i want to puncture the silence, rip the wound open over and over, wider each time. i want sugar in my tea today. i want blueberries and milk and you asleep in my bed. 30 | Sheba Delaney Sophia Heimbrock | 31 �sodomy is dead ive forgotten all the pornstars i used to know flat figures with illusions of breast thigh tenderness heartthrobs and other throbs mouldering in sub terranea passing days like the ending routine of an old age home listen the children have come to sing for you never really a song only a plastic cup of jello stained purple with lipstick— i apply it to my wrinkled mouth as if im hungry small routines create us a smear an earring leather bondage i gorge myself on myself and when i get sick i look around wearing betrayal on my sticky face— large eyes on an insufficient frame trembling for more soaking drinking sputtering in scenes of coiled mouths but they didnt gasp and pulse and lie in the dark alone they didnt taste skin and shiver and sigh yes louder or softer perhaps when they knew what was coming they only ever lay there silent with their extrusions limp and tiresome days with the halfhearted scent of sweat hanging dull and rancid over the room a flaccid mind holding hands with a stale body i watch my cut wires dangle like a magicians spoiled trick one end cant thrash without the other all the cables to my screens look so simple now i cant remember how they played strings into flesh into solid damp hot words troublesome that the words dried up and stuck around when i didnt want them anymore i emptied them all out 32 | Samuel Barrettini but the casings i couldnt let go now that ive lost most of my teeth i need something to roll around in my mouth and spit out stick words on my shell and watch them calcify build something new before the foundations give way one last peep show under spotlights flickering flickering flickering— Samuel Barrettini | 33 �New Years Morning Twenty I have never confused anything Essentially Especially two shifts Plums and oranges I have never used in the same sentence I woke up and it is a new day I walk the dogs and there is a new sky Just yesterday I was in panic Just hours ago I was counting down the numbers Today is a new day A new year, a new lifetime Everything else seems new too The urine, the bagels, the unmade bed, The honey on the counter, my black hair the silverware seems a bit funny too I grab my first breakfast in this lifetime A plum and an orange As I try and figure out what Eve met out of her New Years I sit on the balcony This cold air - new And watch the sky and wait for the next one to come With twenty rowing years and each a rowing lifetime raving with life’s pulse in the curl of its heart in the depth of its spine venturing through heaven and hell, storms and rainbows Time ages me generously It is not me that places cracks near the eyelid, but the body itself I try and betray such insults although a grey weed sprouts from the cranium With luck seemingly rooted in one Mainly on the outskirts Which makes me dote in twenty years to come I’ll be forty, ah! Time be jolly I must stay beautiful 34 | Daryl Locke Daryl Locke | 35 �The Innumerable Steps Mark Stevenson must have gone mad. After inheriting a house from his now late uncle, he had begun to organize it. His uncle, who was notoriously messy and resistant to throwing things out, had left the house a mess. Somewhat by mistake he had realized that after counting the steps to the attic multiple times, he could not find any consistent number of steps. It was his habit to count the steps as he walked up or down any staircase, however, this staircase seemed to sometimes have twenty steps, sometimes twenty one or twenty two. Once he even counted it to have twenty five steps. This discovery occupied Mark for quite a bit of time. He walked up and down the steps again and again for half an hour until he began to write the results down. Maybe there is some pattern; it must have more steps when going up then going down he thought. When Mark’s brother, who had agreed to help organize the house, came and saw that Mark had not accomplished much in his time asked Mark how he was holding up with the death of their uncle. “I think I am having a break. I swear that the staircase to the attic has a different number of steps every time you count them.” Mark answered. After Mark’s brother was incapable of comforting his distraught brother tried to count the number of steps of the staircase twice in a row in an endeavour to explain to Mark that he was simply grief stricken and exhausted. However, he was incapable of successfully counting the number of steps twice in a row. Mark and his brother found more and more people to test the seemingly magical staircase. As word got 36 | Liam Marshall-Butler around skeptics came to attempt to disprove the innumerable steps. The staircase soon became famous and quite a few scientists came to study the steps to no avail. At first Mark let them come without question, but he soon decided to charge people for the pleasure of seeing the known laws of physics and reason fell apart. Mark’s business was incredibly successful for a few months until a local with no particular religious affiliation burned the house to the ground under the belief that Mark had made a deal with the devil. While, at first, the world was distressed to find that the newest maracle had ceased to exist, a number of theories explaining why the staircase must have been a hoax were disseminated. Mark’s staircase was soon all but completely forgotten and relegated to the footnotes of history. | 37 �So I Yearn There is something about the ebbing of our thoughts The way you know me not. See me sinking deeply, feel I’m floating lightly Tears are falling freely. I crashed and crashed again, still my tide continued Blame it all on my moods. Moving forward somehow, what I seek is needed Remember what you said. One drop builds to many, many will build a pond Will you ever respond? From glaciers to the rain, mist and frost included You forgave what I did. Where there is water, our stream of life will follow. Spes mea in Deo 38 | Amalie Christensen Newton 1.3 “Every body that, by a radius drawn to the center of a second body moving in any way whatever, describes about that center areas that are proportional to the times is urged by a force compounded of the centripetal force tending toward that second body and of the whole accelerative force by which that second body it moved.” - Principia Book I. Proposition 3. Let T be a body, and L be a second body orbiting it. When body T moves towards T​1​, L moves towards L’ and also towards A. Δ​T L A​ = Δ​T1​​ L’ A’ ​ A​’ = Δ​T1​​ A’ B​ ​ (​Principia 1.1) Δ​T​1​ L’ ​ ​ ∴ ​ Δ​T1​​ A’ B​ = Δ​T L A ​ .​..and also B​’ = Δ​T2​​ B’ C Δ​T​2 A’’ ​ Δ​T​2​ B’ C​ = Δ​T​3​ B’’ C’ The actual path of body L is thus the curved line ​L A’B’C’ Scott McCrae | 39 �Falstaff Riseth Up Let’s not fit into “friends”-suit shrunk by wash. Your words out-stretched to me as mine to you have touched too much our hearts and minds; so this word “friends” too little sounds, and wraps not ‘round embodied kinds who want so much to fit inside intestined homes, no room for pride— love at high end leashing riots love at lower on death diets not to lose the fat to keep the taste-outlasting passing politic days, to likes of ours belongs the race! Yet if you would compel God’s kingdom come by disemboweling this noisome one-storming and fouling-I know an old man tried who ended howling, distilling questions from despair: love’s cause? . . . life’s cause? nothing . . . nothing there . . . dwindling air 40 | Louis Petrich broken down to barest words ever spoken, ever heard— arms holding cold his excellent never come more daughter. Enter Falstaff, old man through with storms, now lads his lusty cue to question honor thoroughly: merely air . . . tongue’s deadly fare. Him missing dear we would, if plump-veined world unchurled could be good . . . but Falstaff Riseth Up, double-backed with sup and hotly spurred by sack to sleep and snore through knocks of law that would arrest the mountain depths and make all even bored, but life that’s wet and ever spicy mines he up in hoards to share ‘mongst thieving mates racked all in laughter wielding swords, self-hacked self-bloodied, shameless glad to last reopen flaming gates of Paradise and tempt the honey Prince, never never turncoat back! Oh yes, it’s true: Paradise. All the same, put this to store: it’s not for everyone— life, I mean— fat, drunk, elevated, and loved of all the rest more. | 41 �A Politician Amongst Philosophers: A Sonnet Welcome mattress And never had there such a sadness been As he, a man who walks with head so low. How those who pass him scrutinize his sin! But if he tried to hide it still would show To bring them wealth was all that he desired, Yet they would never surely understand Just how much this man was truly tired Much like a member of a marching band Whose arms are weak as if they would fall off, But marches on despite terrific pain. So does this man march on though he’s distraught, And never will he hold his head in shame. But if you call him by this name he stirs: A Politician Amongst Philosophers 42 | Chris Musick Anne Brong | 43 �Kajus’ Centripetal Force A year’s archetype Dressed in dyed poppy, I entered the forest Led deeper by a trail of Pomegranate seeds I left Myself last year. Bare teeth, Annihilate the fruit’s bone Encouraged to go To the underground of force, Where promised years abandon seeds To bitter themselves. Thus, I leave Persephone behind My sweat, drops of pomegranate. I will see her red shawl soon, Woven of poppy and The forgetful secrets of spring, For to fall again By the sun’s drifts into New damnation Is my allotment. 44 | Nortaute Grintalis Nortaute Grintalis | 45 �Daily Heroin Untitled The harder the breath, the thicker the air The bigger the push, the heavier it gets The louder the scream, the softer the hush The clearer the sky, the foggier the mind The taller one grows, the more one shrinks inside The smarter one gets, the dumber one feels The longer one stays, the harder to leave The stronger one gets, the weaker the high The slower I live, the faster I die 46 | Maya Sofia Lake Nicholas Thorp | 47 �Variations on Sweetapple: A Fragment of Sappho Self Portrait With Lump (#5) Οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ᾽ ὔσδῳ ἄκρον ἐπ᾽ ἀκροτάτῳ λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπνεσ, οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐδύναντ᾽ ἐπίκεσθαι. Solitary sweetapple red-dabbled on the high branch, on the highest branch, which the gatherers neglected no, not truly neglected: were incapable of grasping. Exposed on the high bough, the highest bough, sweetapple ripens, uncollected by the harvest not uncollected for lack of appeal: in faith, unable to be collected. A single sweetapple blushing on the high branch, on the highest branch, remains hidden from the hands of applepickers.  No, in fact, not hidden but unattainable.  Even as sweetapple ripens on the upper bough, on the uppermost bough, she goes untouched by industry: not precisely forgotten, but untouchable. Apple flushes sweetly in autumn light on the bough’s foremost end, its very end, and retains herself, unseen by harvesters No, in truth not unseen, simply beyond reach. When sweetapple stains red on the high branch, on the highest branch, she is not stained  by farmer’s hands because those are not well-fitted to grasp. 48 | Elias Christian Sofe Cote| 49 �my favorite person Clutching Her Pearls And her eye whites were egg shells, With broken porcelain plates made Out to be the pearls on her Neck, her neck, where my nails have been. But what I have learned is that Pain is a thoughtless thing, Minding nothing at all, Only doing, doing, doing. So leave me here where the Morning screams out my name, and The stars die before they can Catch me. I've committed to nothing and everything Unavailable all at once, I'm sorry mom That I ever touched you. I woke up to something breaking In the kitchen. Mom stood there Emptying an hourglass Onto her face. She took a Stick and drew a smile, now It's night and I watch waves of Depression leave her expressionless. She whispers, "It's time." 50 | Kristina Dover Rose Zhang | 51 �Content Warning A Translation of Baudelaire’s Au Lecteur (x) Hurt/Comfort (x) Not safe for work (x) Pining (x) Yearning (x) Anatomy (x) Wish-Fulfillment (x) Introspection (x) Homelessness (x) Rodents (x) Fixit Fic (x) Doomed Ship (x) Not Beta Read (x) Confessions (x) Fluff (x) Non-Canon (x ) Tear-Jerker (x) Redemption arc (x) Satan (Catholicism) (x) Trimegustus (Hermeticism) (x) Resolved Romantic Tension (x) Smut (x) Body Modification (x) Brain Bleach (x) Occult (x) Vaping (x) Devil (Lucifer) (x) Manipulation (x) Enemies to Lovers (x) Giantess (x) Corruption (x) Fall from Grace (x) Evil Protag (x) Optimism (x) Revolt (x) Sexual Content (x) Kisses (x) Biting (x) Sex Work (x) Age Difference (x) Voyeurism (x) POV: First Person (x)Fingerfucking (x) Fruit (x) Drugs (x) Insects (x) No Longer Taking Feedback (x) Community:Demons (x) Beach Party (x) Implied/Offscreen Character Death (x) Hiccups (x) Moaning (x) Rape (x) Poison (x) Stabbing (x) Arson (x) Everyone Lives (x) Protectiveness (x) Slice of Life (x) Tragedy (x) No Self Insert this time (x) Please be nice 52 | Jean Hogan (x) Jackals, (x) Mythical Beings and Creatures (x) Scorpions (x) Vultures (x) Snakes (x) Language (x) I don’t even know (x) In Public (x) Not Safe for Work (x) Big Bad (x) Unhygenic (x) Plot what Plot (x) This author regrets everything (x) This author regrets nothing (x) Angst (x) Tearjerker (x) Dream Fic (x) Smoking (x) Modern Era (x) Reunion (x) Fashion (x)Family (x) Reader insert This work could have adult content. If you proceed you have agreed that you are willing to see such content. [Proceed] [Go Back] | 53 �Sonnet for Cordelia: From France A Poem for France: From Cordelia The crashing waves betwixt our passing ships Push thistles in my side, sea salt to cheek, But what I want is roses on my lip; A blush sail blown all out make my knees weak. Say but wind and thus carry me away, Or say just light and guide my eyes forth. You shall give me the world if you stay, But if you turn, only pain henceforth. My affections hang in your loft sail, Yet I see a storm approaching our wake, So be like the breeze, not howl or wail, And carry my ship across this calm lake. Simply call out, my love, a tender word, And heal the wounds which I have incurred. There is a silent heartbreak which is common To the world. With hair curled, And dazzling jewels and gowns all put on. The jewelry, well fascinated, And the costumes, well fabricated, Carry only an air to the eye and not One to the heart. I can only promise no such heartbreak. I am poor, Yet no more Would I need than a quiet home to make. My love, not distant, And my love, still constant. I will be your fool so long as You will be mine. 54 | Martha Campbell Martha Campbell| 55 �Molly (for my love) 56 | Sofe Cote | 57 �Editors In Chief Enkh-Od Batzorig Sofe Cote Adam Schulman Editors Grace Calk Elias Peregrine Christian Kristina Dover Jean Hogan Levan Kiladze Daryl Locke Yifei Lu Lysithia Page Cover laundry by Yunju Park Energeia Energeia is the Literary and Art Publication of St. John’s College, Annapolis... ... St. John’s College 60 College Ave. Annapolis, Maryland 21401 Thank you to all who contributed to this issue of Energeia, and a thousand thanks to our wonderful team of editors. Your dedication and effort means the world to us. � 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>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. 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 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 energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 29 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 2020 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 2020. 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 2020 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 Subject The topic of the resource Arts--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia_2020Spring Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/08cfc1785dbfa9ecae16ba97046d41fb.pdf 1f7d0b006fb758c29dcad9fff5419c0f PDF Text Text �Energeia Spring 2019 ����There once was a man from the Pitt Who wrote poems under his lover’s tit His rhymes would all buckle His lover would chuckle Saying “you never could rhyme for shit” Untitled, by Anonymous �Editor's Note ince spring is a time for new beginnings, we S encourage our readers to try something new: approach this edition of Energeia as if it were a seminar reading. Part of our job as editors is to publish the art we receive from the polity in a way that is engaging and cohesive. Look deeply at the art and how it all works together as a unified publication. We hope that in doing so you will come to understand something new about the common connection that we, here, at St. John’s share through the arts. �Audrey Bryant 1 to again hold Cole Caudle 2 Dialectic motion Samuel Berrettini 3 all things turning as one Kristina Dover 4 Bible Belt Bruises; Blue Green Yellow Dress Anna Seban 5 Room Study ft. Prada Ad Anonymous 6 Spirals Zihan Mei 7 The Swan/ 天鹅 Will van Engen 8 The long way back Reuben Morris 9 Untitled Amy Porter 10 If They Remain Silent.. Grace Phan Jones 11 Emerveille, ou l’homme au demi-sourire Jean Hogan 12 Story in which everything is read through a shitty night vision filter Falon Findley 13 Untitled Elizabeth Janthey 14 Library of Celsus Ephesus, Turkey Bowman 15 Flatlands Are Gold (Bonus Track) Anonymous 16 St. John's Gothic Luke Cartrite 17 Intertwined Gabriela Sanchez 18 springtime hustle Louis Petrich 19 Obituary For a Tutor Ayushma Thapa 20 Lines Adam Hurwitz 21 Moon Graph: Light Sofe Cote 22 Bodies diptych �Julia Cooper 24 Untitled Grace Villmow 25 Carex sedges R.M. Goad 26 Ode to Strange and Delicate Men Isabella Williams Dohyun Song 27 Cousin 28 Untitled Amalie Christensen 28 Golden Hour Nicholas Thorp 29 Self Portrait Tianqi (Simon) Gao 30 Holy Iron Tatum Liam Marshall-Butler Zac Cohen Enkh-Od Batzorig Grace Calk Ben Haas Theo Martin 31 72 32 Ancient Curse 33 Spheroids 34 dead 35 dandelion 36 Relics of an Unknown War 37 Droplets Mark Wittmer 38 Being Beheld Karlena Haase 39 Pound 5 Sera Johnson 40 Fool’s Day; March Mackenzie Daffner 41 Untitled Keaton Jahn 42 Too young for memoirs Sheba Delaney 43 Existential Pronouns Aisha Shahbaz 44 The beginning ��In the beginning, there were beings. Beings with an exceptional faculty; the ability to measure. The beings measured with their hands, and these hands measured with webbing connecting their parts. With these webbed appendages, and minds that worked in harmony with their hands, the beings measure was their nature. Their hands were measuring cups, and with these cups so integral to their identity, they measured to understand their environment and to understand themselves. Now as the beings grew and matured through the generations, they reoriented their nature. The beings soon valued a different sort of measurement, one impaired by the connection of their fingers. They sought both to leave their measured paths and the choice to sieve through what would be measured. With the being’s hands unrestricted, the beings began to build, create, and discern without their natural measurements, and instead distanced their knowledge from the source to calculate and rely on their surroundings. The beings, after generations of measurement-desire-departure, began to once again desire what had been taken away from their nature. They yearned to fulfill this great desire, to be connected where they once were. And like young saplings learning the consequences of sprouting out of the ground, their hands and limbs began to feel the air around them in the nakedness of uncloaked branches. Reaching out, sprawling in the air, grasping at necessities for growth, light and water. The Beings stretched their un-webbed hands and feet, measuring the length of their surroundings with straightened fingers, measuring the warmth of their loved with a cupped hand, measuring the knowledge grasped by inscribing thoughts and ideas communicating by the moving of independent fingers. The movement yearns for unity, for the webbing the beings once had. Moving side-to-side, almost hoping motion will be the successor to the natural stillness of flesh already there. They strive for something lost, for the knowledge held by a sieve is incomparable to the knowledge held by a cup. The straining and disunity of the former cups enable deception and discord. For the tree grows its leaves to connect sunlight and water through itself, producing the being and the fruit of the tree. One outstretched stem is no tree; neither are the twigs and branches that fall unneeded to the ground. The webbing of leaves necessitates almost constant connection, as even trees that wither their leaves away in winter recognize in their state of being that they must return, and so their webbing returns. So like the trees, the beings yearn to return to what they once knew and held knowledge in. The beings strive for the measure of the innate, to once have connection to the measurement. The beings long to hold and to have the measured once more with the measurer. The part is held without the whole, and the whole falls through the part. The beings, as they once were, measured and discerned and held the part within the whole. But the scales themselves morphed, and so, humanity formed on an unbalanced scale, broken and desirous of to once again hold. Audrey Bryant |1 �Dilectic Motion 2| Cole Caudle �all things turning as one -first the garish sunlight splatters on the wall broken and fragmented by ugly blinds the last jumbled utterances of what once ruled the heavens have traveled through infinity the cacophonic news for my unenlightened eyes -Last The Radiance gone with Solitary witness, Wistful knowing nothing– The Cosmos sings, But I hear weeping In the Eternal Joy, The Sound of All: ‘We once could stretch Our hands toward stars Which were not ours to touch.’ Samuel Berrettini |3 �Bible Belt Bruises Righteously wrong women rip Their wrists on dirty holy Handkerchiefs, Their daughters, poppy girls with Ponytails, are pulled and punished By the neck, Blinded with blurry bloody blots With black and blue piss, I cry Out Amen. Blue Green Yellow Dress Mother Blue blazed the moon then wrapped it up in fleece. Covering me in her hands, large, puddy palms, Mother Blue fed me arugula, mint. Praised life before her wrist rang out urea, rags of clouds carrying Mother Blue's piss. Yellow dripping down calm cottonmouths as Mother Blue tyes thyme in and out of time with basil leaves and my bleeding liver (blaming lovers for believing in love but leaving when blood levels out), into a crown of pomegranate shells I place on my head. I drink from her golden blessing in bliss. 4| Kristina Dover �Anna Seban |5 �6| Anonymous �天鹅 THE SWAN 薄雾里，有只天鹅时常出没 我知道，发颤的羽毛 从那些遥远的冬夜，还在向我 发出责备，就像有一双眼睛 曾经让黑暗羞愧，就像那脖子： 是流水、是大雪、是冰… 曾经让一匹小马 忽然垂下头，迟疑地 陷入沼泽，最终认出了这场预谋 Deep in the mist, the swan appears again. I know, those feathers through the distant winter nights quivering, still blame me, as the eyes once the darkness humbled, as the nape (it is a water without ending, it is snow swirling, it is ice) once made a colt drop his head, hesitantly into a bog sink, eventually realize the snare premeditated. Zihan Mei |7 �Untitled 8| Will van Engen �Untitled On the tipping orange Night he’d already well rehearsed Spit a grime on overtime (click-clack-uh-yeah man’s got eject-ed) Milwaukee hand proud lunaticked (the moon is big as shit) On that dock-angle this was right Missed lock-pop so my dance slid worst Wished his chance at empty mind (You seem Hellboy? That’s all true) If eyes not drunk then sad and tired He’d viced seen those scaly goobers Real demons not slick similes night we passed windows he smashed Enemies whose warpaint faces guaranteed he won’t be laid Round the table each man liked me so each woman saw his seeth tooth I asked if his rasp ever could pass Because his life seemed scary (Used to drink...hang...with she was 40) Now How would he not be a lifer My best new Buddy starred and ill Now he’s at Buddy’s bar and grill Tell me if you saw him Reuben Morris |9 �If They Remain Silent.. Museum: a temple of the arts packed with the warm, sticky tourists that dash in and out from the too-hot streets. Through the tall windows, the blinding light from outside reflects off of polished marble limbs and angel wings. Beauty, guarded by guns and crystal glass because of the hunger in every face. Slavering and lusting, the crowds come in and, panting, look at pictures of water, at statues of Love. Longing, longing for absolution, for the knowledge that there, on those pedestals, stand the true human race. They come to worship with vacant eyes, unseeing, afraid to see, because if they did they would know that it was all too bright. The lofty thoughts that man imagines themselves condemn him as dust. They are silent, their mouths hanging open. The only noise is the rustle of clothing and bodies as they roam in herds, gently nudging in closer to drink more deeply at the sights. Their hot stink spreads through the air as their living breath brushes silently against the masterpieces. Their tiny hearts pound with false illumination and misunderstanding. A huddle of them surrounds a bronze man caught in the act of dying. They gnaw at him with their eyes. Despairingly, his face reaches upward to the white light filling the room. An enormous shadow blocks the blinding rays, as if some great Being has stooped low to look in at the windows, eclipsing the sun. In the darkness, a sound like cannon-fire cracks. The dying man lives and begins to move. Splitting and breaking with every effort, now all of the statues are writhing and leaping from their pedestals. They wrest their sculpted lips apart and begin loudly to sing, their stony voices low and rumbling, like an oncoming avalanche. The sound fills every crevice of space, thrusting away the thick and silent stench of the crowd. The pillars of the hall tremble at it. With lurching, crumbling steps they knock paintings from the walls and tear at the tapestries. All the while, every colorful scene they destroy begins to add its voice to the cacophony. Portraits and idyllic scenes sing their colors loudly, egging on the statues that continue to desecrate their canvasses. Many harmonies mix into one strain. The crowds, with horror at seeing their fixations move, run madly in every direction. The guns from terrified security guards fire into the air and shatter the crystal cases, behind which hordes of tiny figurines are dancing wildly to the song. Chaos, chaos, and utter harmony reigns. They struggle to get out of the revolving doors, which spin like tops because so many people are pushing in at once. No one gets out. Like so many hamsters crammed into one wheel, they keep turning in crazy circles to get away, get away. Someone falls inward and vomits on the marble floor. The statues continue to break into pieces, singing as they go. The pillars are crumbling, the temple falling, the idols themselves destroying it. 10 | Amy Porter �Untitled Grace PhanJones | 11 �Story in which everything is read through a shitty night vision filter I I am trying to write a ghost story Rather: I am trying to write the ghost of a story Rather: I am scrambling through secret passages the hallways behind the hallways trying to convince you that I am a ghost close up on my eyes prying from the painting zoom on the painthing prying from behind my eyes It too knows what bookshelves will slide open for it what lamps it can knock over {cut to commercial} Note to Editing: Post ad break montage [a hollow doll, a discarded bottle, an exterior shot of the tinder-wood house, further cliches, the growing realization that the only full thing tonight is the moon, etc] II It’s 2019 anyone can be a ghostbuster or at least anyone can try and oh, how they line up to try Crossing our streams lighting each other up into new dimensions the only place you can find a tear in space time muscle tissue and then i am taking breaths so numerous and so shallow i think that one of these days there just might not be enough air in this town to fill me up Sarah thinks that being a ghostbuster is her favorite tv show job bc it is so rare to find people who put that much work into listening Being a ghost myself I can neither confirm nor deny this 12 | Jean Hogan �III & now the theories One thinks I’m just like that Five mention spirits; three even mean by this – ghosts One, and he doesn’t know how right he is, thinks something snuck out of someone else’s mouth mid-scream and got stuck in mine Notice how all these theories tend toward the corporeal, they would never admit it but everyone surveyed has a stake in my remaining something they can touch hold IV Anne Carson says if prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running through it Probably she means to express urgency, consumption, the way it licks at certain prosaic structures, etc (We should pause to acknowledge that not all poems have houses) Babe I have seen too many men walk out not knowing they’re on fire and light up so many beautiful things Remember, I only ever called this a story In this piece you and I lock the man inside the house Falon Findley | 13 �Library of Celsus Ephesus, Turkey "Then I looked on all the works that my hands had made, and on the labor that I had expended on it: and, behold, all was vanity"- Ecclesiasties 3:11 14 | Elizabeth Janthey �Flatlands Are Gold (Bonus Track) Look at your heart. Watch it unravel the image of her, in front of your chest. In it you know and Out of it you will grow to know. In your room that is under the sea now, Imagine the salt enter your skin. You sink and all around, the beating of the water Surrounds you. Spinning forward becoming total life. Becoming the only life. Grief of the living unloved is chain upon chain upon chain. Grief of the living loved is Unknown freedom. When she reaches her flatlands, answer to me why that is. Bowman | 15 �St. John's Gothic You hear footsteps in the hall approaching your room. They never change position, always right outside your door. There are old lighters on the quad - all of them white. You daren’t pick them up. You dream of ghosts and drowning in college creek. You mention this to your friends. They only stare at you. You don’t go near the docks, just in case. People disappear for half an hour during class and return glassy-eyed. You wonder where they go. You zone out during seminar. You tune back in. You’re talking about Odysseus. You are always talking about Odysseus. You complain of writer’s block. You overcome the writer’s block. You drown in words. You write a three-page paper. You double space it. You have written a three and a half page paper. The rune exists on the underside of the circular stone. You drink with friends and call it a symposium. You all have a problem with alcohol. You tell yourself you’ll do better this week. You skip class Monday morning. People keep withdrawing. What strength do they have that you don’t? What do they see on the other side? “Any couple that gets together before Thanksgiving doesn’t make it long,” they say, threateningly. You draw a line. You erase it. You draw a line. You erase it. You draw a line. Hearing the voices in the stairwell, you peek in. Three hunched figures stand in the dark. One peers at you curiously. There is no sound. You return to the warm light of the hallway. There was a person-sized bloodstain on the ground. They redid the carpet. Buckets sit on the steps in case the rain comes. The rain always comes. You don’t remember the last time you cried. You touch your cheeks. They are wet. Was it the rain? You sleep eight hours a night. You take a nap in the afternoon. You are exhausted. You unlock the door and turn on the light, calling out a polite hello to whatever shifts in the back corner of the room. You always make sure to say goodbye, too, so that it knows not to follow you home. You are alone in a building. You hear someone sniffing. You always hear someone sniffing. You look down and see blood on your paper. How does that keep happening? The bells ring on the 15, the 30, the 45, and the hour. Ther ring 10 minutes before class, when it starts, and when it ends. There are always bells ringing. You are unable to ignore the passage of time. The bell tolls. Someone takes your hand. You realize this is the first time someone has touched you in months. You begin to cry. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on 16 | Anonymous �You compliment someone. ‘Thanks, it's not mine!’ Nobody seems to own anything around here. You write only with found writing utensils. You don’t worry when you lose one because you know another will be coming your way soon. There’s hardwood flooring under this thick blue carpet and decades-old linoleum. You start to claw at the floor with your fingernails. Your RA approaches. “Are you alright, my dude?” The lights flicker in the wind. An eclipse occurs overhead. You are huddled with your classmates under borrowed blankets in ten-degree weather. You can’t feel your ankles or your nose so you tilt your head back further to see the red glow of all of the sunsets on Earth on the surface of the moon. At least it isn’t pain. This Monday night seminar has gone on for hours. You put your chin in your hand and blink. You are sitting in Lecture. You raise one eyebrow. You raise the other. Your eyebrows have escaped into your hairline. How did you do that? You google “how to gently bring up occult ritual to your friend group”. You sigh. They don’t even believe in ghosts. “Have you heard of Genji?” You smile and nod. All you do is nod and smile. You don’t know anything or anyone but Odysseus. The quietest person in seminar speaks. Everyone collectively shifts in their chairs, drowning out all other sound. Everyone moves on. ‘Be careful. He has a Title IX.’ The food is rotting. Go get it. It is April. You ask for someone’s last name. You miss home. You think of the last time you visited. You miss who you once were. “Why?” you ask; a child again. Seminar is over. One of them has still not yet returned. You know not to think about it too much or else you will be the next empty seat. They say that The Program makes you a better conversationalist. You stutter and blush. The Program has failed you. Or have you failed The Program? Luke Cartrite | 17 �18 | Gabriela Sanchez springtime hustle walnut ink on paper �Obituary For a Tutor He spent his whole life reading books, the kind containing truths ne’er done, and teaching students how to look for questions. Side-by-side they run. He showed us life goes good that way. But late he lost internal text, not even his Spinoza stayed to introduce him to what’s next of things provided reason for. He kept up outwardly himself, still copied pages, followed score of conversation, losing health, but not his affability. Too awful fitting, lacking hard the answers, soft in brain to be. So ended mind before the heart. Sure death’s not proud of his conquest-the city was abandoned first and slowly left to burn, detest of body hitched no more to nurse. I lost my way to funeral site. I heard it lasted long past noon, as rabbi talked about his light of learning . . . hope . . . th’all-keeping tune. I wonder if we get it back, not what death takes, but life can’t keep. I wonder if death sides with Jack and Jill crowned, ‘gainst the crack runs deep. I wonder if Montaigne is right: that we do what he did to move, to exercise our mental sight, that getting lost is to improve the short way, bare, and late to class. I should have writ his last address, like answers finely versed, to pass the time that’s left me with the best. Louis Petrich | 19 �Lines Coarse palms infused with lines All of them crossing each other’s paths, We were told those lines can speak And if this is true Those coarse palms tell a story Of hills climbed and long summer days In the field. My father’s palms are softer They tell different stories Of rough days in the field Holding metallic objects. Those Palms are recognizable to me. Yet he says, They are not the same palms he used to have They have morphed into something else So now the lines do not tell the stories of clutching the dirt Instead they tell stories of caressing the soil. Winter has left my palms rougher than they were, I cannot feel certain textures But they still tell their own stories Neither of clutching nor caressing the soil But of faraway lands. 20 | Ayushma Thapa �Adam Hurwitz | 21 �22 | Sofe Cote �| 23 �24 | Julia Cooper �Grace Villmow | 25 �Ode to Strange Untitled and Delicate Men This is an ode to strange and delicate men, men sincerely deeming sights and moments lovely; with cambering brows, with relish gleaming from between their lashes. Readily bewildered, the delicate man treats truth like charity; he seeks what lurks behind predictions but puts no stock in prophecy. His charitable truth eludes, ducks behind widthy oaks and willows, clasps palm over chuckle-packed mouth; she hides because the seeker hunts, but for him, she’s no peddler of delusions. This is an ode to strange and delicate men, housing rampant hearts in unpuffed chests; men for whom reverie inevitably comes, whose time enraptured spent is time embraced. 26 | R.M. Goad Freely enthralled, the strange man in love beholds; he concludes his beauty’s intrigue quite detectable by every rod and cone; he detests the yellow tape of esoterica. His beauty sings, and all ears scramble for vicinity; his beauty laughs, and mirth swarms under every sternum. And here he has no instinct to brandish corks and trunks, his rampant heart untempted by memento. �Ives Williams | 27 �Golden Hour Here our golden hours last only minutes, and we all take the time to bathe in it. The beauty before us, our eyes shut tight, since senses are idle to see the light. At the end the gold sinks into our skin, a confusion of clarity sets in, and fiction gives birth to our convictions. 28 | Amalie Christensen Dohyun Song �Nicholas Thorp | 29 �Holy Iron 30 | Tianqi (Simon) Gao �72 Having time in dark, quiet places warm with peace, having warmth in thoughts, pliant minutes pass that gladly cease strife and trouble, troubling on I warm turn to me lonesome guest in paradise of trouble lacking me: "Me, have we lacking trouble stumbled blessedly upon our rest, here to stay us and happily?" Here in me and all about the gentle staying shade, I trouble me with answer, not to trouble but to rest, lay: "I, happy we remain the 'lotted time we feel the sameand troubles not the troubleless the times troubled we regress to thinking here, lack of strifefor here and then our moving life can move, trouble back again if peace be our trouble's end; endevor us (or stay in being) then to this the peace we're seeing by peace's rest, the struggles stop, so our thoughts fight not to know strife, but know rest, And by these know peace best." I, my heart beated these and churned mind churning pleas to keep close calming words, I listened and I gladly heard what I and trouble said, hoping now and then heart growing for such a council in quiet. Tatum | 31 �Ancient Curse The archeologist stood before the monument to Death. They had spent their entire life studying the Plastic Age Collapse, which had become as mysterious as that of the bronze age. The ancients had abandoned writing by the time the plague came. They burned many of their cities to ash, in riots. Pestilence and famine had left them deranged. They waged wars over the remaining food. Although, many of the cities had maintained civility; now, they remained, monuments to a former greatness, filled with bodily remains. The doctors of the Plastic Age were ineffective. Lacking proper medicine, they poisoned their patients in the hope the sickness would die before the patient. The Ancients abandoned their religious practices. Their churches and temples were replaced with bunkers to hide from the Angel, who they believed could shed a single tear on a city and turn it to dust. The archeologist had discovered the first temple of the Angel. On its walls was inscribed a warning to all who entered, of a great illness. However, the archeologist knew better than to lend the primitive Ancients credence. The substance they thought caused this illness must have been nothing more than a trick to scare thieves. This substance they called plutonium. 32 | Liam Marshall-Butler �the Pictured are roughly 10000 cancer cells, split evenly into two spheroids. A spheroid is a tightly compacted grouping of cells, formed in the case by spinning cells in a centrifuge. These spheroids were then injected into collagen, and allowed to invade their surroundings 3 dimensionally. This mimics a metastatic tumor spreading. The above picture was take 72 hours after the spheroids were introduced to the collagen. The image was captured with a laser scanning confocal microscope. The cells are labeled with fluorescent proteins that release light when struck by a laser. The released light is of a different wavelength, which allows the emitted light to be filtered from the original laser light. The color indicates where the cells are in the cell cycle. This specific protocol is called FUCCI. Green cells are S, G2, or M phase, while the red cells are in G1. For a brief period between G1 and S, cells will appear yellow. Lasers of differing wavelength are needed to excite each type of protein (2in this case). In addition, images are taken at any different heights, because of the incredibly short focus length of the lasers. In total, 15 different heights were imaged, each 10 m above the last. Each height, or slice, must be imaged with both lasers, as well as ambient light (omitted), for a total of 45 images over the course of 10 minutes, all to form the single image above, which is unusable for research because the spheroids were erroneously placed in the same dish, and have interacted. Zac Cohen | 33 �dead 34 | Enkh-Od Batzorig �What will I do when love has left me? Will I remain the same unchanged and bright? Will I fall and shimmer fractured and unpraying? dandelion What will I do when life has vanished? when in my stomach a fire grows And burns me whole from the inside out? Will I cease to breathe when the cold water drowns me? Will I cease to touch when my skin crumbles, ashen and grey? Will you refuse to love me when Babylon has visited my tongue? Will you arrest your stare when the moon is no longer behind my eyes? I don’t believe the earth will stay the same I have no faith in the current of the stars The red will not bleed when I cut the sky open Isolation will not submerge under the raging crest of the open ocean And I do not believe that shadows will stay hidden Or that scars will remain unopened All must run wild just as the eight year old in a dandelion field lopes through the milky bleeding sea of flowers Grace Calk | 35 �36 | Ben Haas �Droplets When imagining the mind, I see thoughts that cascade like water does, one leading to the next, to the next, to the next, until they collide and form oceans from pools. And I suppose the mind functions rather like all that water does, with its expansiveness and storms and waves. Both have cycles. Saltwater droplets rise as one, then fall as one, then combine as one, crashing deep into unspoken depths of the seafloor as naught but the gentlest of energy. We recede into our minds with a similar tentativeness, unearthing old memories again. At the surface, we remember—and it feels like the cresting of waves. But I am getting ahead of myself. I am no oceanographer nor a psychologist; the motions of our earth and moon and seas are a mystery to me. But I have studied sediments and seen how they fall, read books on time and light and the dance of the heavens and the ground. Our minds are filled with energy, yes? Zaps! and collisions of information gathered from whatever we see or touch or hear. Those connections cross space and time like wormholes do, losing the "here and now" insisting on occupying some imagined "could they be––?" Energy is the force which makes shells and bones and rocks crumble into one: a sediment made of muck, that watery ooze which animals then eat, and die in, and live in, and mate in. Everything becomes something else, eventually, and everything becomes something new. Like the sea, this cycle lives within us. It is a life-bringing brew. And as we wonder about the universe, this too we seek to understand. Theo Martin | 37 �Being Beheld 38 | Mark Wittmer �Karlena Haase | 39 �Fool's Day The flowers are the heralds of Spring, Trumpeting daffodils and trilling tulips, Push forth from the dark dirt and call out in color to be ready— to prepare— The trees are waking from their long sentential. If you stand still on the stone, the wind will whisper weightless words For you— only you— and the birds— and the foxes— and the squirrels— and the beetles— to hear. The clouds rush back forth across the sky scrubbing the rusted iron blue of winter from the stars. The pale young sun casts commands upon each and every green blade, unsheathing arms freshly sharpened. Young blossoms look out shyly as buds line branches in neat rows, anticipating the charge. The rolling green hills of Summer will soon be conquered— Hark, for the kingdom of God is among us! 40 | Sera Johnson 40 | �Mackenzie Daffner | 41 �42 | Keaton Jahn �Sheba Delaney | 43 �TheUntitled Beginning Cars stand still on a bridge rushing by them. At 5:15 footsteps were silenced by the wind and, Disoriented by a cacophony of honks, The river down below moved in the opposite direction Away from the frost of the winter air vainly Inflicting itself upon the skin of the water, And holding frozen streams of thought, which The sun meekly acknowledged. But the frost slips away from its grasp As the river slips too... As Disquietude maps onto itself, The wind changed course midway And the sun disappeared behind the horizon. A story yanked the one thinking Back to a Night When rivers, feet, cars and wind Effaced the beginning into a series of accidents. 44 | Aisha Shahbaz The sun rose around a different hemisphere, Molding gold on concave waves On days that burn brightly when the solstice Swings by, and similarly, when the equinox Follows closely behind. And it always breaches through the mist that hides it. Lingering on long, The golden sands of this desert Escape the time that attempts to confine it– An eternal beauty which the Atlantic envies and admires In its attempts to meet it, While the sand seas undulate on the surface of the Namib. A story yanked the one thinking Back to a Day When sun, oceans, seasons and deserts Rescued the beginning from a series of accidents. ��Editors-in-Chief Enkh-Od Batzorig Sofe Cote Patrick Ensslin Adam Schulman Editors Dorothy Bowerfind Jean Hogan Dahye Kim Gabriela Sanchez Anna Seban Front Cover Green Multiverse Seascape by Adam Hurwitz Energeia is the literary and art publication of St. John’s College, Annapolis. St. John’s College 60 College Ave. Annapolis, Maryland 21401 energeiasjc.com Submit to energeia@sjc.edu �� 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>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. 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 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 energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 57 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 Energeia, Spring 2019 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 2019. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 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 Subject The topic of the resource Arts--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia_2019Spring Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d114eed6c536e818fdb3886050d7d1a5.pdf 5fee3b20c161dd835e46c59937143215 PDF Text Text �Amy Porter 1 Invitation, We Are Togehter 2 Home, The Hollow Dark 3 Eye Contact, 2am Bleakness 4 Me and the Bugs Anonymous 5 Untitled Louis Petrich 6 Yanked, Over Here, Over There Natalie Walker 7 Untitled Louis Petrich 8 To Those Commencing Young Ellie Laabs 8 a slight embrace of time Lysithia Page 9 Ode to the Stroll Elizabeth Dowdy Raphael Rose 11 Heron on the Dock Daryl Locke 12 Can you see me?/ Deep in the Red Sea 13 Self Portrait 2020, The Unnameable’s Sera Johnson 14 Bedford Samuel Berrettini 15 An End 16 Sofe Cote 17 Seal Attacked by Polar Bears restless Raphael Rose 18 Red Light Sunset Eric Baker 19 The Dry Cleaner 20 Han XVII: Back Home in Isolation �Zeinep Kyzy 20 Untitled Jay Tram 21 Undersell Clare Collins 21 Untitled Avery Laur 22 trapped John Verdi 23 The End Is Nigh �Editor’s note This fall we have endured the stagnant and fought against a common enemy. The enemy is not a body, but is microscopic — almost non-physical. It is an enemy we can unite against in isolation. We have stood in a tableau, we have seen each other framed in vignettes. Temporality has descended to the forefront of general consciousness. The collective sentiment reflects variations of confusion and despair. Finally, we can openly share our anxiety, our solitude. This sharing liberates and we present our tools of liberation. As we retreat, we lose touch; we could easily forget about the world beyond the confines of our four walls. We sometimes find comfort in our undisturbed solitude. Yet, we unite in a far more profound way as we share the experience of the present time in this undefined space. Energeia hopes to be that space as we push forward to new grounds. Our long-discussed experimental issue has come to realization under the theme “Isolation”. With this issue, we hope to give voice to our collective consciousness, and find comfort and connection in our shared loneliness. We would like to thank all our members of Energeia for their hard work and the undying creative spirit that holds us together. �Invitation Welcome, welcome to my mind. Don’t be afraid, come in! They only attack if I’m alone. Come in! Come in! I’ve put my monsters in cages, And labeled them nicely for you. We Are Together We are together in being alone. We are together in loving the lonely. (I hear the blunt taps of water on leaves. I feel, in the quiet, a peace which comes in An unobserved expansion of my old catacombs, For once unfolding, stretched wide without pain.) We are together when company’s not a cage, And the silent distance brings us closer To where presence is not perspective, And nearness not a threat. Amy Porter 1 �Home I have kept your hearthfire in a jar On my cold and barren mantelpiece. It has lit and warmed the room, while I struggle With damp matches and clumsy fingers. If I stop and wrap my hands around this kind, kind gift, I hear your voice, your home, and promise still to live. The Hollow Dark At midnight, here, I find myself To wander after long-lost stars; For any small guide lights my way ‘Tween twisting thoughts of time and me, Reflection of the hollow dark. 2 Amy Porter � Eye Contact, 2am Bleakness Elizabeth Dowdy 3 �Me and the Bugs I like to sit outside in the summer and pretend that I am sitting there with someone and as the sun sets and it gets darker I watch the sky change, listening to the bugs come out of hiding. I like to imagine the feeling of an arm on my back or lips on my lips. It’s hot outside already, but I welcome the extra heat. I like to think that I wouldn’t get so many mosquito bites, because someone would be there to share them with me. I like to realize how the darkness wouldn’t scare me as much if I wasn’t alone, how the bugs wouldn’t be my only company, how comfort in the dark would be good, how a companion in the light would be too. But here I am, another summer passing and nearing its end, sitting outside. I’m wearing a dress and my hair is wavy, everything is in place for my fantasy, except I am alone. 4 Elizabeth Dowdy �Anonymous 5 �Yanked, Over Here, Over There (After William James, George Cohan, and a Cypriot Crier) Feeling conscripted? Under authority? Whose--all together now--is this?-knock the childishness out of you give you standings to weigh proud of more than college privilege gone nostalgia trip this pan of nature mostly pawns off you-so wipe that whining, get to work show your grit, do your bit and tell your sweetheart not to pine keep stead your faces shined on screen for me to see youth all the time on tap— no blacking out for beers or naps— I know your tricks and counterfeits! Maggots! take one for the old home team-whoe’er they are that would count more-you’re the cream of isolation corps who save, of country, burning poor, last beds for those breath-ridden toward, you heard them say but one’s too dear, so brave full hospitality--to fear! Until it’s over here and over there don’t think of norming back ‘till all our care has overcome the rum-tum drummed beware! But yet the pity of it, how it goes! A piteous pearl unsaved—O sweet ago! See sky, how’t caves! See how we make behave! 6 Louis Petrich �Natalie Walker 7 �To Those Commencing Young When first rehearsed, this character of evil worked so strong the actors, our venturing story lurched and heeled like dog- then dervish, tranced and keeled by curving skirting caving fears— their center spread--sky disappeared . . . Here let us not mistake the signs, You handed me your plate to stir: taste-tested dust—e’en this it dures-all questions faced all readiness as house lights invite black. Bereft, but staged for life, you feed my want of sun to break the chains and burn. Warm freckles—come! Chaste moon--return! for time would modesty confine Like this, to tan well always went. good tangling threesome—worth a try. to tongues in proof, so earn kiss meant this to, and efforts honest kind-- All bulge from teeming information. It muscles darkness—fashions creeds to falter springs of laughter free. Disaster’s peelings, caffeine stares addict to disaffection’s bit love’s horsing jawbones, chafing lips of fasting shades that long to sip past fleshed out masking asking holes, untimely ripped for doctored roles, disbanded Adams, Eves dispatched-gone!— save for face that gyps and laps in vacuumed webs. We must rematch. Remember would that friendship can. 8 Louis Petrich Like this--up late to keep bent true for great--none better knows than you. � Ode to the Stroll When I am weary of the world, I walk about my town, And try to notice hidden things, The splendor all around. Here are buried memories, Beneath the bricks and stones, The stories that have given rise To lullabies and bones. Marvel at the dignity The redwood tree commands, A beacon from the world before, Enduring Fortune’s plans. Note weeds that punch the sidewalk cracks And force their spindles through With will to live and taste the air, Charisma fair and true. A man bemasked with downcast eyes Trails back behind his hound; I wonder who is walking whom, And where the pair is bound. Presently my thoughts contortThe future gapes its maw; Malevolence below our feet From sleep has come to thaw. Lysithia Page 9 �Alone together shall we trudge, All wandering fallow land; Though cataclysm comes to call, I cannot hold your hand. Ruin has a bitter taste, How shall we wash it down? What does it take to build an arc, Or will we simply drown? I take these thoughts and smother them, I scrape my mind of fear; In several months, the ball will drop, And end this lonesome year. To break the spell of loneliness, I stroll, behold, and muse; While breathing in the sweet salt air, I pay the Bay my dues. Old-sea swells tell a secret, With words that hush and lull, That all returns unto its depths In love unshakeable. All buildings were but dreams before, So was this well-worn street. Then someone blessed them into life, As when old friends first meet. 10 �A child picks a dandelion, Blows its tufts away. I wonder what the child wished, And hope her dreams will stay. Indeed I dream of dancing On nights that fizz with joy; Though isolation stings my soul, This song no fears destroy. When I can’t remember who I am, And living seems a chore, I gather all my spirits up And step outside the door. 11 11 �Can you see me?/ Deep in the Red Sea 12 Daryl Locke �Self Portrait 2020 The Unnameable’s Objection toward color is just one’s own insecurity. Insecurity because of color is just one’s own folly. Folly due to another’s exquisiteness is an unnameable objection. 13 �Bedford 14 Sera Johnson �An End Indigo sunset. Salt smell, dull wave hum in a night that hides the jungle and reveals stars. I am awake. I think about the sweetness of the fruit that used to fall from trees– dripping, bursting, overripe. Then. Now: brown mush underfoot. Worm food. I stand up. I look down the empty beach. Just past a breeze stands a stone wall that stretches into the jungle and dismantles itself in ivy and moss. Something cries far off beneath the shadow of the wet trees. I follow. The air is clinging close under the palms; the water wants to enter my nose and mouth and clog them. Clouds cover the sky. Mud covers the ground. I peel something off in hushed darkness, becoming more naked– sweet, fresh, fat. Once. Now: bony. Rancid with spit and sweat and ugly dreams. Somewhere shrouded, the moon sets. I breathe. I sit down. Rot loves me. Blind patches of ooze stretch out moldy fingers toward my lips and eyes. I close. Brown mush underfoot. Worm food. Samuel Berrettini 15 �Seal Attacked by Polar Bears 16 Samuel Berrettini �restless Sofe Cote 17 �Red Light Sunset 18 Raphael Rose � The Dry Cleaner My mother and I walk home. It is dark out. Wind is cool and soft. Lampposts dirty and yellow. The street is empty and clear, Except for outside The Korean dry cleaners. Mr. Yi is clutching his wrist. He does not wince. Red stain down tan trousers. Pool of blood At his feet. My mother asks If he is okay. He replies he was just Trying to bring down the gate. My mother asks if there is an ambulance coming. He nods. He says yes. He smiles. We walk on. I look back. He stands there alone. I am nervous. We shut the door to the building. Muffled sirens. Late evening Blood drip Clenched wrist Gentle breeze On the corner Bleeding calmly We greet the cleaner He nods Pants soaked red As blood pools Distant sirens A steady heart Eric Baker 19 �Han XVII: Back Home in Isolation Oma paces, Then turns on the stove to light her Dunhill. She’s been up all night smoking, too. 20 Zeinep Kyzy �Undersell Lazy sun UnderSelling new religion Of self love Sets upon me, my nose Fragility Is telling the truth Of the unheard, aspired Overseen: In fragile places lies floating and captivating Sterilized molecules of beauty and being In the haze of darkening I see my light from below In the haze gettin’ lost I see my heart beautified. Jay Tram Clare Collins 21 � i feel trapped. dispel the liquid on my tongue and let it leave the slight tingle on my lips, like frostbite on the lungs. a revolving door heart, never stopping, always letting in new and letting out old, wanting to know even a glimpse of their souls. i tear at the bags underneath my eyes, set upon my fragile frame from sleepless dreaming and nightmarish evenings; they’re all spent inside my mind. maybe if i stretch the bags down far enough i can wrap them around myself and cocoon for a thousand winter solcistices. i feel trapped. dispel my tongue on the liquid like frostbite on the lips, and let my lungs feel the slight tingle it leaves. 22 Avery Laur trapped �The End Is Nigh John Verdi 23 ��Co-Editors Assistant Editors Cover Illustrations Sophia Cote Adam Schulman Grace Calk Elias Christian Lysithia Page Zeinep Kyzy Special thanks to Enkh-Od Batzorig Energeia Energeia is the Literary and Art Publication of St. John’s College, Annapolis... ... St. John’s College 60 College Ave. Annapolis, Maryland 21401 �Fall 2020 � 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>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. 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 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 energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 30 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Fall 2020 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Fall 2020. 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 2020 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 Subject The topic of the resource Arts--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia_2020Fall Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/679f4f72e39a4a21f9c3705e859c4d46.pdf a3478ab5083243c8c383652efcb44b1d PDF Text Text Energeia Spring 2018 �Letter from the editors �Sasha Grand 1 Name Stephanie Liu Mary Quinn Sofe Cote Jaeyon Jo Anonymous Ree Jones Annie Brong Rachel Goad Chance Hogan Anna Seban Sera Johnson update Logan Zimmerman 2 Untitled Ben Haas Cora Clark Isabella Williams 3 Confused-yet-Open Book 4 The Dunes 6 Stuart 7 Untitled 8 Untitled 9 Haunted 10 Plucked Petals 12 Untitled 13 lessons in hospitality 14 Blowjob Pantoum 15 No Name 16 Untitled 17 Franklin Seeks Understanding Re ader 18 To Be Determined 19 Untitled Anonymous 21 the moon is blinking Mary Turner 22 Tsornin Proposition Sophia Kiang 24 Untitled Sam Berrettini Amalie Christensen 25 13 failed drafts of an apology 26 Universal Margaret O’Hare 27 Flower Weiouqing Chen 28 Untitled Arthur Kohn 29 Elemental Genesis Kidus Kebede 30 01.01.18 2.45 Gabriela Sanchez 31 Between the Blue Yaxuan Tang Jonah Piscetelli 32 Untitled 33 For Fall �Name my name guides my body. my shins quiver at the cascade of syllables lovingly spoken. They tear up become slick, and attempt to hide from the welts of falsehoods cuffed around their trotting ankles. my name was spoken (as a lullaby) when my eyes first twitched. They whispered it and left an empty nest. The twigs were crooked, the leaves burdened with mud - river willow tried to fix the mess, but fell out of fashion. Silk was used instead, but nothing geometric could be achieved. Nests are messy in nature. I see a name whose skin has blushed waiting in the river too long it could not pan out an identity of gold nor silt. I see ankles chained to bloodhounds, dragging my name away from what I intended. They sniff out the thoughts of strangers instead of my own. Sasha Grand |1 �Untitled Confused-yet-Open Book Seeks Understanding Reader “I am not what the kids call Inscrutable If easily read people wear their hearts on their sleeves, mine is hovering ten feet from me, flashing neon red It’s not like I’m trying to hide it I just Can’t say it out loud What if it’s weird? What if it’s wrong? I’ve always had a hard time telling between romance and friendship Even intimacy doesn’t seem to shift I’ve slept with people I didn’t love and love people I haven’t slept with Not that romance has to be sexual, but that’s not really the point right now The point is that I like you but (nearly) every inch of me is (pretty) sure that everyone else but me can tell the difference Long story short, I value you as a person and as a friend But also you’re very cute Help” 2| Stephanie Liu Ben Haas |3 �The Dunes On any day like this the old curtain opens And out of my memory I come walking, As I did once, down The dune-lined deserted highways of Barnstable That all lead to the beach Or nowhere through iridescent swamps. I’d never felt so alone For the birds there knew how to bury themselves And wait out the hot sun till the evening, chilly with sea murmurs To shadow the stars with their wings. I could hear the gas pumps crooning from a station That stuck out of the sand like a silver photograph. I’d never known so well my shoes. There were paths that straight from the concrete Disappeared into the sand and purple shrubs. They made me tired with their ancientness, their slow life in grass roots and salt consumption, Ensnared with blueberries, coins of sunlight tumbling in And cool droplets of everlasting dew Of rain from weeks ago, unevaporated. I recall no sign of anyone, no footprints nor car. It was gray and worn and diminutive, banked Halfway into the slope by blown sand That reached the window box of shriveled roses. A single window with four panes and white cotton curtains. And its windowsill, reverent in its arm of sunlight, The way all windowsills are reverent. Holding a few solitary objects, silver bits, thimbles or coins, Leaves in half states of dryness. This ethereal vision Of what I felt was one person’s secretive importance, Here in huge expanse of lonely weariness, in the golden weather Became what I become when I’m in a room of vacancy. Void, emptiness, and I fill it with ruby ragged grass. I see my body like a mirage where the air wavered, Like the tracks dragonflies’ wings leave behind, too quick to see. On a shelf, something mysterious matters. Something elusive, Imaginative, becomes true. Collecting the gentle dust. This movelessness what my whole life is. I stood, a marble person when I saw the ocean, finally, like a wet tongue, and felt nothing. This was the kind of wildness Where I knew the lost things went, bottle caps and sunhats, kite string, swallow feathers. And somewhere there, where the road blurred in memory, Sat a cabin halfway up the incline to the sea, Throttled in sage and glossy leaves. 4| Cora Clark |5 �Stuart Untitled It is too early For your sleepy eyes to open. You are not mine Though I wanted you to be. Your little hands Are too small for the day ahead. You are not mine Yet, I cannot fathom being apart from you. We walk together To the end of the gravel drive. You are not mine But in moments like these you belong to nobody. I am too scared To let go of your little hand. You are not mine Nevertheless, I love you all the same. The great horned owl calls Reminding me it’s far too early, Your hands are far too little, And you are not mine. In his holler I find solace For your grace, Like the omniscient raptor’s, Cannot be claimed by simple souls like mine. 6| Mary Quinn Sofe Cote |7 �Untitled Haunted Lying still, I watch the clock dwindling down, Marking that time for rest that never comes; Coalescing αρχή and terminus into one. The moon’s soft light supplanted by the sun, And six o’clock startles me– I had dreamt of faraway rooms and lamps, Holding their memory: Itself bereft of me. That self I thought – no – imagined knew, Now becomes one form: You. Disrobing pride, Love seeks the other: Striving, searching, converging to one. For through love, does not the other’s Kiss explode one’s heart into A moment stretched past eternity? I am at Time’s slow mercy. Do I dwell in Limbo Or Paradise or Hell? I do not know. Or–do the different not differ, And difference entangles with same Now that sweet torment yokes me to life, Allowing no reprieve in a heart so aflame? As a god from Olympus looks down on Sisyphus, His fashioned pawn, You orchestrated me in your clever games. Yet, with my soul you did abscond, And left with all the Rights: wronged. 8| Jaeyon Jo Anonymous |9 �Plucked Petals i. you love her. her soft body, the way her skin smells like cocoa and mango, the way her hair curls along with the corners of her mouth, the way her lips melt upwards when she graces you with a smile. she demands eye contact and forces you to put your phone down. she bathes in your attentionstripping herself naked, before hiding behind your eyelids. she peeks out from behind velvet eyelashes, marvelling at the masterpiece she knows that she could be beautiful (if only she had another set of eyes.) ii. you love her not. she is meltdown after meltdown after meltdown, and you are forced to make space in your bed not just for her, but for every mistake she has safety pinned to her pajamas you wish she’d clean up her mess. (she wishes you’d clean up yours.) v. you love her. she is beautiful, she is sexy, and sometimes she walks like she believes it. she wears an all-black outfit like a second skin, and puts your hands on her body while stealing a kissshe’ll steal kisses often if she’s tall enough. (she’ll wear heels often so she’s tall enough) she manages those stilts like a harlequin drunk on confidence. iii. you love her. she is yours. your camera roll exists for her like a shrineeach smile she captured, saved, and sent to you, each time she loved herself enough to say, “for god’s sake. look at me.” iv. you love her not. 10 | vi. you love her not. she cannot hold her liquor. she cries sometimes, and you know all too well that once she begins to cry, she cannot bring herself to stop. she just cries and cries and cries and creates monsoons that threaten to wash everything away. You stand like a sand castle, You close your hermit eyes, and wait for the silence. vii. you love her. no one else knows how to quiet the noise in your head, or sing lullabies into the ether. she wraps herself around you from behind youyou didn’t like being the small spoon until you met her. she is warm, like sunbeams of salvation. you thaw under her touch. viii. you love her not. she never learned how to keep her hands to herself. she has a hard time grasping how much you have to hold, how your hands have calloused and frozen around her, how protecting her is a full-time job. You count the spots on her butterfly wings multiple times a day, you check her for signs of self-destruction, you are a gentle lepidopterist. Always on guard, second guessing the way you touch her, you caress her with bubble wrapped hands. you are always on-call on the other side of her glasses. all of you. x. you love her not. she sees the stars in your eyes, but she does not see how she drains you. x. you love her not. she is a supernova of sadness, but you can’t even wrap your mind around gravity. x. you love her not. but she loves you too much. ix. you love her. she sees you- Ree Jones | 11 �Untitled lessons in hospitality love does not abide decorum: should you welcome her, she will not reside in the guest room she will not look for subtones, she is not American courtesy she will not muffle her laughter, will not meeken her chews she will sprawl over the tidy couch of your reason, all spent limbs and tousled hair sweet relief, you think, in the stammer of the screen door her lithe contour being swallowed by the sunset your home is yours again, but sweet inconsideration sighed too soon— when she leaves, it is only a trip to the hardware store 12 | Annie Brong Rachel Goad | 13 �Blowjob Pantoum No Name You took me into your bed The silence remained undiminished I took you into my head Only one of us left when you finished The silence remained undiminished I went first and you came forth Only one of us left when you finished a joke about it pointing magnetic north I went first and you came forth I took you in and less in A joke about it pointing magnetic north For once I kept the mess in I took you in and less in Not that I needed someone to teach me For once I kept the mess in I elected, you impeached me Not that I needed someone to teach me You took me into your bed I elected, you impeached me I took you into my head 14 | Chance Hogan Anna Seban | 15 �Untitled Franklin Franklin dipped the pad of his forefinger into his reflection; smooth circles wrinkled the surface, pushing his nose into his eyebrows. The seamless rippling seemed to Franklin like the motion of the Pasco wave machine in his lab. When will those circles reach the end of their string, and rejoin the centre, he wondered. Eight moments of chilled silence answered his query: there is no return. Franklin considered all of the motions he’d caused that day. The bread in the toaster popped down, and then back up. The faucet on, and off. The plate was lathered in perfect circular patterns. The compost went into the garden, where it would one day grow ripe, red tomatoes blooming in cycles of rain and sunshine. On his morning walk to the lake, Franklin knew he, too, would have to return to the place from whence he’d departed (an idyllic yellow house with white trim-- this thought, with the others, also rolled around Franklin’s head). Surely, the rings in the water must also find balance? Or perhaps, he thought, they continue moving forever-- until the water dries up completely with the return of the sun. When his nose rested under his eyes once more, Franklin recalled his cottage, and its garden, again. And his walk to the front door, where he would open the screen to find more of the same. A wife with thin lips and hazelnut eyes, who, like Franklin, revolves around the yellow house. She’d be knitting, he knew, behind the screen (today, a small set of green socks). But what of a world where eyebrows are noses? Precisely on that note, Franklin made a distinctly linear decision, and walked into the lake. Sera Johnson | 16 17 | update �To Be Determined Untitled Why compare the mirrored unknown To the spoken civility, half-known pity, Of knowing oneselfTo insipid gray? You are violet, blood-red, quicksilverLicorice lips, dripping with ink Of thoughts yet unsaid You are breath before a cup Of unpoured coffeeThe breadth of undiscovered land Plaintive and presumptuous with Unfulfilled action, ripening fruition Unsatisfied, unceasing, Undeterred, unfetteredYou are midnight on an altar As the clocks scream goodnight, Goodnight, goodnight.... 18 | Isabella Williams Logan Zimmerman | 19 �the moon is blinking pure perfect i’ve never had pure perfect before. i clutch you and you moan three short syllables {into my ear} and her name is pure perfect {in my mind} i wish i could be everything or anything that you need but you sit beside me and she sits beside you and i am not worth the trouble and you see that in me and the moon blinks and you wink and i sink into the hole left behind by your pure perfect picking fingers. 20 | Anonymous | 21 �Tsornin Proposition If a hyperbola is constructed in a cone by a cutting plane which is parallel to the axis of the cone, and an axial triangle is cut parallel to the cutting plane of the hyperbola, then the axial triangle is equiangular to the triangle formed by the asyptotes of they hyperbola and the line drawn tangent to the section at the vertex. For let there be a cone with vertex A and axis AK, with the circle on BC as the base. Let it be cut by a plane through the axis creating an axial triangle ABC. Let the cone be cut by another plane parallel to the axis so that its intersection with the base is perpendicular to the diameter BC and it will make section DFE so that when the diameter of the section, FG, is extended it will meet the side of the axial triangle AC above the vertex at point H. This section, DFE, is a hyperbola (I.12). Draw a line through the vertex A, falling on the diameter BC which is parallel to the diameter FG. I say it will be the axis AK, for the cutting plane of section DFE is parallel to AK, so AK is parallel to FG. It goes through the vertex, and it falls on the center of the circle, so it will lie on the diameter BC. Let straight line FL be taken so that sq. KA : rec. BK,KC :: FH : FL, which is the contrivance from I.12. Let the cone be cut by a plane parallel to the plane of the hyperbola DFE through the axis, creating the axial triangle MAN. Draw a line tangent to the section DFE at the vertex F in the plane DFE. Cut off the tangent line on either side of the section PF and SF so that sq. PF = sq. SF = 1/4 rec. HF,FL. Take the midpoint Q of the transverse side FH and join QP and QS. They are the asymptotes of the hyperbola DFE (II.1). 4 sq. PF = rec. HF,FL (by construction) Draw the straight line R such that R = 2PF sq. R=4sq. PF sq. R = rec. HF,FL HF:R:: R:FL(EuclidVI.17) HF : FL duplicate HF : R (Euclid V.def 9) sq. KA : rec. BK,KC :: HF : FL BK = KC = MK = NK sq. KA:sq. MK:: HF:FL sq. KA : sq. MK duplicate KA : MK (Euclid VIII.11) and HF : FL duplicate HF : R and sq. KA : sq. MK :: HF : FL KA : MK :: HF : R HF = 2QF and R = 2PF HF:R:: QF:PF KA:MK:: QF:PF AK HG and DE MN ™MKA=™DGH (Euclid XI.10) DE PS and they are cut by HG ™DGH=™PFQ ™MKA=™PFQ andKA:MK:: QF:PF Q PFQ is equiangular to Q MKA (Euclid VI.6) and ™PQF=™MAK and ™AMK=™QPF Similarly Q SFQ is equiangular to Q NKA and ™SQF=™NAK and ™QSF=™ANK ™PQF=™MAK and ™SQF=™NAK ™PQS=™MAN (Euclid C.N. 2) Q PQS is equiangular to Q MAN I say that Q MAN is equiangular to Q PQS. 22 | Mary Turner | 23 �Untitled 13 failed drafts of an apology I didn’t know, and I’m sorry. I didn’t know, but I would have fixed it if I had. I didn’t know, and don’t we all make mistakes? I didn’t know, but you could have told me. I didn’t know, and I’ll be better now, I promise. I didn’t know, but now I do. I didn’t know, and I’m sorry. I didn’t know, but that’s no excuse. I didn’t know, and it’s still my fault. I didn’t know, but in the end, that doesn’t matter. And you know why. Maybe I didn’t know why the distance was growing. Maybe I didn’t know things were falling apart. Maybe I didn’t know I was the problem. But I should have. 24 | Sophia Kiang Sam Berrettini | 25 �Universal Flower Enumerating lights long elapsed, named it something of the past. Extant no more, the glamor’s gone, our endeavor to explain is lifelong. irreligious iridescenceconsternated constellationsmacrocosmic malevolence- Observing the enormous expansion, our inclusion is the mission. Disregard your omnipresencedesolate in the inhuman distance. 26 | Amalie Christensen Margaret O’Hare | 27 �Untitled Elemental Genesis As a mathematician, as a Geometer, I am a God. My word is the Word. My thoughts become Reality, And I see them as they are, as Good. I wonder what God’s Axioms were, When He made Man, when he made me. What things did He beg? And to Whom? Did He ask them of Himself ? As I do? Making them clear and distinct in His mind? He conceived of Darkness and Light, Then begged that they were Good and Evil Then defined his terms. I’ve always thought Good was something Outside God, As the sphere is something Outside Me. More perfect, Divine (er?) Can such a thing be conceived? What Proofs do you need? What Axioms? I have none. And I have no God But when I set my pen to paper, And enunciate The Truth Weiouqing Chen | 28 29 | Arthur Kohn I Am He. Elements My Genesis And My Adam and Eve More Perfect They Will never Fall, Fail. �01.01.18 2.45 Between the Blue Sprinted into the world at the speed of silence. And still they followed, the hollow figures that resided very firmly in the depths of my bedroom mirror. We lay together often. 30 | Kidus Kebede Gabriela Sanchez | 31 �Untitled For Fall I want to say which fall I mean. It’s not the maple-blushing fall, The season that flings out a wash Of bronzy on the atmosphere, A row of geese-and-hearts-soar days. It is not that, although I praise The late tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, Smeared apple pie for sunset, and A candy-apple of a sun. When I say fall is the best good In me, let others understand By which fall I have understood Myself by standing under sky, Either too cloudy or too clear: Frost fall, thanksgiving fall, a dry Wind-kicked November at the door, The fall that tells me, singing, sore, To jig, to leap, at last to crawl Across a white and yellow green. Fall-on-your-knees––Yes, that’s the one. 32 | Yaxuan Tang Jonah Piscetelli | 33 �Editors-in-Chief Editors Front Cover Dorothea Bowerfind Dahye Kim Arthur Kohn Anna Seban Adam Schulman Enkh-Od Batzorig Devin Van Gorden Mary Hommel Table of Contents & Inside Cover Energeia is the literary and art publication of St. John’s College, Annapolis. St. John’s College 60 College Ave. Annapolis, Maryland 21401 energeiasjc.com Submit to energeia@sjc.edu � 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>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. 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 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 energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 21 Pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 2018 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 2018. 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 2018 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 Subject The topic of the resource Arts--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia_2018Spring Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/89b849ef04ab118959d4c10bc7a0b8b6.pdf df1e351180fe413f4f4c503ea6df510c PDF Text Text This .naienai may De protected by Gopynght iavi- (Title 17 U.S. Cod^ 1794 DEPTH AND DESIRE EVA BRAl'IN St. John’s College Annapolis, Friday, August 31, 1990 �St. John’s College Library. .Apn.T.iolis. Marv'and- DEPTH AND DESIRE Eva Brann Annapolis, Friday, August 31, 1990 y an old tradition the first lecture of the year is dedicated to ____the new members of our college, to the freshman students and the freshman tutors. It is a chance to tell you something about the shape and the spirit of the Program that governs St. John’s Collegeand not only to tell you but perhaps even to show you. I think I am right in this spirit v/hen I begin by examining the class-name I just called you by: freshmen. A freshman, my etymological dictionaries tell me, is a person "not tainted, sullied or worn," a still-fresh human being, where "fresh" means, so the dictionary points out, both "frisky" and "impertinent." Later on in the year you will learn a weighty Greek word applicable to persons of frisky impertinence. They are said to have thvmos. spiritedness or plain spunk, a characteristic necessary for serious learning. This spirited frame of mind is perfectly compatible with being shy and secretly a little scared. In fact, to my mind, it is a sign of quality in newcomers to be anxious for their own dignity in the way that shows itself in spirited shyness. It is our business, the business of the faculty and of the more responsible upper class students, to help your spiritedness to become serious, to emerge from the shyness- whether it be of the quiet or the boisterous sort, to help you channel your energy into a steady desire for learning and to direct your boldness toward the discovery of depth and, moreover, to help you without leaving you tainted, sullied, and worn out. I keep saying "help," because although great changes are bound to take place in you in these next years- do but behold the seniors: unsullied, untainted, unworn and transfigured- we none of us know who should get the most credit besides yourself: the Program, our teaching, your friendships or just plain time passing. At any rate, the spirit of the college is invested in seriousness, a certain kind of seriousness— not dead seriousness but live seriousness, you might say. This seriousness shows itself on many occasions: in deep or heated conversations in the noon sun or at midnight, in marathons of effort and in the oblivion of sleep, in devoted daily preparation and in glorious goofing-off, in the B 1 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE willingness to try on opinions and in the need to come to conclusions. What does your school do to induce this very particular kind of seriousness? When you chose to come to St. John’s you were, perhaps, attracted by the fact that the mode of teaching normal in higher education is quite abnormal here. I mean lectures. Only one lecture a week is an integral part of the Program, on Fridays at 8:15 P.M. Now the chief thing about a lecture is that it is prepared ahead of time. For instance, I began working on this lecture in March. A lecture ought to be the temporarily final word, the best a speaker has to give you at the moment. It should not matter whether the surface of the speech is brilliant or drab, as long as it is a deliberate and well-prepared opening of the speaker’s heart and mind to the listeners. As such it carries authority. These authoritative occasions are obviously important to the life of the school. Yet our normal way is not the prepared lecture but the focused conversation which is effervescent rather than prepared, provisional rather than authoritative, and participatory rather than reactive. Your tutors will not tell you but ask you; they will not demonstrate acquired knowledge, but the activity of learning. One reason why the teaching of new tutors- and some of your classes will be taught by newcomers- is often most memorable to freshmen is that their learning is genuinely original and keeps sympathetic pace with yours. There is an irresistible but false local etymology of the word tutor as "one who toots," perhaps his own horn. What the word tutor really signifies is a person who guards and watches learning. We are deliberately not called professors because we profess no special expertise. Since you will not be told things, you will have to speak yourselves. What will you speak about? The Program will ask you to focus your conversation on certain texts- they might be books or scores or paintings. These texts have been selected over the years by us because they have the living seriousness I am trying to speak about. To my mind texts, like people, are serious when they have a surface that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to fulfill that desire. Here then, is my announced theme for tonight: the depth that calls forth desire. To delineate that depth I must once again distinguish our kind of conversation, the kind associated with such texts, from the 2 BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE kind of fellowship to be found in other places. All over this country, and wherever the conditions for some human happiness exist, there are people who know all there is to know about some field that they till with a single-minded love. This is the blessed race of buffs, aficionados and those rare professionals who have had the grace to remain amateurs at heart. They study history or race stock cars or do biology or fly hot-air balloons. My own favorite fanatic is the young son of a graduate of St. John’s. This boy is persistently in love with fish, with the hooks, flies, sinkers, leaders, reels and rods for catching them, with the books for studying them, with the aquaria, ponds, lakes and oceans for observing them. When I first met him he looked up at me shyly and asked if I knew what an ichthyologist was. Since I knew some Greek I knew the etymology of the word and could tell him that it is a person who can give an account of fish, so he was satisfied with me. This boy may have his troubles but he is also acquainted with bliss. TTiis kind of concentrated bliss we cannot deliver to you, except perhaps in limited extracurricular ways. Instead we, or rather the Program, will drive you through centuries of time and diversities of opinion, while depriving you of the freedom and the serenity to till and to master a well-defined field of your own choosing. You will study Greek and invest hours in memoiizing paradigms, but your tutorial is not a Greek class- it is a language tutorial in which Greek is studied only partly for its own virtues, and partly as a striking and, for you, a novel example of human speech and its possibilities. You will study Euclid and demonstrate many prepositions, yet your tutorial is not intended to make you geometers but to allow you to think about the activity of mathematics. In short, you will be asked to read many books carefully and to study many matters in some detail only to find them passing away, becoming mere examples in the conversation. And these fugitive texts will almost all bear their excellence, their worthiness to be studied exhaustively, on their face, for we try to pick the ideal examples. This procedure is practically guaranteed to keep you off-balance, even to drive you a little crazy, since you will not often have the satisfaction of dwelling on anything and of mastering it. How do we dare do this to you? Here is a strange but unavoidable fact: Those who plow with devotion and pleasure and increasing mastery some bounded plot on the globe of knowledge often undergo a professional 3 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE deformalion. They lose first the will and then the ability to go deep. To be sure, specialists are often said to know their subjects "in depth," but that is not the depth I mean. Let me illustrate with an example I have a special affection for. I began my academic life as an archaeologist, and the first thing archaeologists do is to dig deep past the present surface of the earth, or rather they scrape it away layer by layer. But with every stratum they scrape away they find themselves at a new surface, the surface of a former age. They poke into time- a magical enough activity-but they do not pretend to pierce the nature of things. For example, there would come up from the depths of a well-shaft an ancient pot. I would catalogue it by naming its form, say; kotvle. a kind of cup; by giving its dimensions: H. 0.108 m.; diam. 0.135 m; by describing its proportions: deep­ bodied, narrow-footed; by interpreting the picture painted on it: a rabbit- this is the pot-painter being funny- jumping a tracking hound from behind; by conjecturing about the provenance and the stylistic influences: made in Attica under Corinthian influence; and by assigning a date: third quarter of the seventh century B.C. Was I required to consider what I meant by dimensions, proportions, styles, images, funniness, influences, places? Not a bitthat would have meant time out and profitless distraction from my business, which was to know all about the looks and appearances of the pottery of Athens in early times. What this Program of ours offers you is exactly that time out, and that splendid distraction. People will say of you, when you have graduated, that you have 4 BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE acquired a broad background. But your education will have been broad only in a very incidental and sketchy way- certainly not in the fashion of a close-knit tapestry that is a continuous texture of interwoven warp and woof. Many of the books you are about to read do tie into one another. Sometimes a book written by an ancient Greek will (I am not being funny) talk back to one written by a modern American, or the opposite— the strands that connect these books seem to run back and forth and sideways through time. But some books will stand, at least as we read them, in splendid isolation, and all in all the texts we study do not add up to a texture of knowledge: There is no major called "Great Books. How could there be competence in a tradition whose moving impulse is to undercut every wisdom in favor of a yet deeper one? There is not even agreement whether this tradition of ours advances or degenerates with time, whether its authors are all talking about the same thing, though in a different way, or in apparently similar ways about quite incomparable things. Here is what the books do seem to me to have in common: They intend to go into the depths of things. All the authors, even those subtly self-contradictory ones who claim that there are no depths but only surfaces, are deep in the way I mean. This desire for depth, then, is what will hold your studies here together. There is a word for this effort, to which it is my privilege to introduce you tonight. The word is philosophy. The term is put together from two Greek words, philos. an adjective used of someone who feels friendly, even passionate love, and sophia. which means wisdom or deep knowledge. When I say that your school is devoted to philosophy, the love of deep knowledge, I mean that all our authors want to dravv you deep into their matter, whether by words, symbols, notes or visual shapes. Incidentally, in a few weeks a lecturer, a tutor from Santa Fe, will come and contradict me; he has told me that he will say that what we do needn’t bear the name of philosophy at all. Let that be a subject for future discussion, and let me come to the heart of my lecture tonight. It is .he question what depth is and how is possible. 1 think we are alj inclined to suppose that literal, actual depth belongs to bodies and space and that people or texts are deep only by analogy, metaphor cally speaking. I want to propose that here, as sj often in philosophy, it is 5 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE really the other way around: it is the body that is deep merely metaphorically, as a matter of speaking, while the soul and its expression alone are deep in the primary sense. Certainly the depth of a body or a space is elusive. If a body has a perfectly hard and impenetrable surface, its depth must be forever beyond our experience— a kind of hard, inaccessible nothingness. On the other hand, let the physical body have a hollow in it— such caves are powerful allegories of depth and you will in the next four years come across some famous holes: the grotto of Calypso, the underground chamber in Plato’s Republic. Don Quixote’s cavern of Montesinos. Now ask yourself: Where actually is the depth? The containing boundaries of the hollow are all faces of the body, and no matter how deep you seem to be inside the body, you are still on its surface, just as I argued before about archaeological excavations. Now consider matterless bodies, geometric solids. Euclid says in Book XI that a solid has length, breadth, and depth, but he gives us no way to tell which is which: it depends on your perspective- in fact all three dimensions are lengths delineating the surfaces that he says are the extremity of the solid. What is inside that solid, what its inwardness or true depth is, he does not feel obliged to say. These are questions you might want to raise in your mathematics tutorials: Can one gel inside a geometric solid? How? Bodies, I am suggesting, are either too hard or too involuted or loo featureless or loo empty to have true depth. Only divine or human beings and the texts they produce- texts made of words, notes, paint, stones, what have you- can be literally deep or profound. For I attribute depth or profundity to that which is of a truly different order from the surface that covers and hides it. And it must be the inside and foundation of just that surface, so that we can gain entrance to it through that particular outside and through no other. Every depth must be sought through its own proper surface which it both denies or negates and supplies with significance: the surface that hides its own depth is never superficial. Human beings seem to me the most obvious example of such depth. All human beings have a surface, namely the face and figure they present. I personally think that in real life almost all people also have an inside, their soul, their depth. But there are some famous novels in which characters are described who are nothing but 6 BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE empty shells. Against their impenetrable surface those whom they attract by the insidiously unflawed beauty peculiar to facades that hide nothing break themselves, or if they tear through, they fall into nothingness. However, these are fictions, and actual human beings have by the very fact of their humanity an inner sanctum. We begin by noting, casually, their face, their demeanor. As our interest awakens we proceed to read more carefully, to watch their appearance ardently for what it signifies. If we are lucky, they may open up to us, as we do to them. If we go about it right, this interpretative process need never come to an end, for the human inside, or to give it, once again, its proper name, the soul, is a true mystery. By a true mystery I mean a profundity whose bottom we can never seem to plumb though we have a persistent faith )n its actuality. I think that for us human beings only depths and mysteries induce viable desire. For love entirely without longing is not possible among human beings. Many a failure of love follovs on the- usually falseopinion that we have exhausted the other person’s inside, that there is no further promise of depth. It is not only in respect to living human beings that depth calls forth desire. This college would not be the close human community that it is if you did not get to know some human beings deeply- which is called friendship. But such love is only the essential by-product (to coin a contradictory phrase) of our philosophical Program, a program that encourages the love of certain para-human beings. These para-human beings are the expressions of the human soul, our texts, as well as the things they talk about. Let me take a moment to ask whether this particular desire for depth I keep referring to is common among human beings or even natural. I say it is absolutely natural and very common. You will see what I mean when I tell you what I think is the nature of desire. Desire seems to me to be a kind of negative form or a shaped emptiness in the soul, a place in the spirit expecting to be filled, a kind of psychic envelope wailing to be stuffed with its proper contents. Now take a long leap and ask yourself what a question is. A question is a negative form or shap^ emptiness in the mind, a place in thought waiting to be filled, a psychic envelope ready to be supplied with its proper message. Questions therefore have the same 7 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE structure as desires. In fact questions are a subspecies of desire: a question is desire directed upon wisdom or knowledge. Therefore I might go so far as to say that this school teaches the shaping of desire— because here we practice asking deep questions. Now I think that very many, probably all, human beings would like to ask such questions if they only knew how. That is why the desire for depth is both common and natural. What we most often, or at least most programmatically, ask questions about are those texts I have been mentioning. As I have intimated, such a text, particularly a text of words, is a curious kind of being, neither a living soul nor a mere rigid thing. What a book might be, such that it could have genuine depth, is a question that should arise over and over in the tutorials and the seminars. That books do have depth is shown by the fact that they induce questions, the directed desire to open them up. I want to end by giving a sample of a deep text and a demonstration of the beginning of a reading, a mere knock at its gate, so to speak. The text is a saying by Heraclitus. Heraclitus flourished about 500 B.C. He was early among those who inquired into the nature of things, and he had a contemporary antagonist, Parmenides. You will see from your sheets that Heraclitus said that it is wise to agree that "All things are one." Parmenides said things that, on the face of it, seem similar, but whether he meant the same thing as Heraclitus, or something opposite or something incomparable- that is a matter of ever-live debate. In any case, Heraclitus and Parmenides together embody the great principle of our tradition that I mentioned before; you might call it the "the principle of responsive differentiation." However, I shall not try to talk about Heraclitus’s actual wisdom tonight- that along with the previous questions; "What is philosophy?," "What is a solid?," "What is a cave?," "What is a book?," I leave to future discussion. I shall attend only to the preliminaries with which Heraclitus surrounds his wisdom. Heraclitus’s book is largely lost, though as far as we know it was not a treatise but a book of sayings. Even in ancient times it had a reputation for depth; the tragedian Euripides said of it that it required a Delian diver- the divers from the island Delos (which means the "Manifest" or "Clear") were evidently famous for diving deep and bringing things to light. DEPTH AND DESIRE BRANN The saying I have chosen goes: oOk tuou dXXdc Tou Xdyou dxouaavTas dpioXoydv 90ip6v laTiv Iv -irdvTa flvai Transliterated it reads ouk emou alia tou logou akousantas homologein sophon estin hen panta einai. On the surface this saying is in Greek and needs to be translated. Since I have argued that surfaces are, like traditional Japanese packaging, an integral part of the contents, they must be carefully and patiently undone. Now to put Heraclitus’s Greek into English is, up to a certain point, not hard. Your Greek manual will tell you about the "accusative absolute" and about various infinitives, and your Greek dictionaries will give you the meaning of "listening," of "wise" (which you are already familiar with in philosophy), and of "agree." But then you look up logos. "Logos" is one of the tremendous words of our tradition, to which it is, once again, my privilege to introduce you. Without even looking it up, I can give you the following meanings: Word and speech, saying and story, tally and tale, ratio and relation, account and explanation (that was the meaning which occurred in the word "ichthyologist"), argument and discussion, reason and reasoning, collection and gathering, the word of God and the son of God. As you learn Greek you will see what it is about the root-meaning of logos that makes this great scope of significance possible. But how are you to choose? You are caught in a vicious circle: Unless you know what Heraclitus means by logos you cannot choose the right English translation, and unless you discover the right English word you cannot know what he means by his saying. However, sensible people find ways to scramble themselves out of this bind. Try a meaning that makes good immediate sense: choose "reasoning." Listening not to me but to my reasoning, it is wise to agree that all things are one. This yields a saying that is particularly pertinent to us, since 8 ov'er dcor. For J �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE look into each other’s faces, we must not get stuck on personalities. Each seminar member has a right to say: "Never mind me, answer my argument." Heraclitus is introducing a great notion into the Western world here: Not who says it matters but what is said. But there is more signifying surface to the saying. Listen to its sound and notice that in the second line the word homologein sounds like logos. "Agree" is a good first meaning but it does not preserve the similarity of sound. Homologein literally means "to say the same." Let me try that, and for "my reasoning" I will substitute "the Saying." BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE Here I shall stop. But although I am ending, I am not finished— and neither, of course, are you. If you have in fact listened not only to me but also to my argument, and if you are possessed by the proper freshman spirit, now is your moment, the part of the Friday night lecture that is the true St. John’s: the time for questions. If you listen not to me but to the Saying, it is wise to say the same: that all things are one. Now what sense does that make? What Saying? Whose saying other than Heraclitus’s own? Suppose the translation did make sense, then Heraclitus is saying that there is a saying that can be heard beyond his own, a speech to which we must listen, a speaking that it would be the part of wisdom to echo in what we say. What impersonal speech could that be? Heraclitus in fact tells us not what the logos is, but what it says, for he bids us to say the same: "All things are one." What if this saying, of which no human being is the author, where a power whose saying and doing were one and the same? What if its speech were an act? Let me play with a third, somewhat strange, version: Once you have listened not to me but to the Gathering, it is wise similarly to gather all things into one. Here logos is translated as gathering or collection. It is the power that gathers everything in the world into a unified whole, the organizing power we are invited to imitate by giving a comprehensive account of the universe in speech. The logos speaks primally; our logos becomes deep by imitating it. I think by now the text has begun to draw us through its surface into its depth. You can see that it demands of you the playful seriousness I mentioned at the beginning, a seriousness that calls out all your capacity for careful attention to surface detail as well as your willingness to dive into the depths. 10 11 �A NOTE ABOUT THE TEXT This lecture was written and edited in WordPerfect 5.1. All headings, subheadings, and body text are set in Times Roman. 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Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Depth and Desire Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 31, 1990 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990-08-31 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource College freshmen Depth (Philosophy) Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Brann_Eva_1990-08-31 Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4aa5a0e867bf11a8e782235bc95ca5bf.pdf a87b183e5a3cafab4e1c7c88eb334ee9 PDF Text Text MITCHELL GALLERY 2019–20 PAST EXHIBITIONS AND PROGRAMS AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISM: TREASURES FROM THE DAYWOOD COLLECTION August 29–October 27, 2019 THE LIFE AND ART OF MARY PETTY November 5–December 15, 2019 RETOOLED: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE HECHINGER COLLECTION January 9–February 23, 2020 AMERICAN INDIAN ART FROM THE FENIMORE ART MUSEUM: THE THAW COLLECTION March 6–April 26, 2020 �AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISM: TREASURES FROM THE DAYWOOD COLLECTION AUGUST 29–OCTOBER 27, 2019 Robert Henri, Kathleen, 1924, oil on board. Huntington Museum of Art, Photo credit: John Spurlock. American art changed significantly between the late 19th and early 20th centuries when artists moved from European-style landscapes and monumental portraits to intimate subjects of the American countryside and portraits of those around them. This exhibition of over 40 works highlights this shift through the vision of artists Arthur Bowen Davies, Henry Ward Ranger, George Inness, Ernest Lawson, Willard Metcalf, Edward Redfield, Charles Hawthorne, Georg Luks, and John Sloan. Also included in the exhibition are “The American Ten,” a group founded by John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, and Childe Hassam, who were dissatisfied with the conservatism of the American art establishment, and “The Eight,” a group of urban realists led Robert Henri. This exhibition is generously sponsored by Rex and Katharine Pingle with additional support provided by James W. Cheevers. “American Impressionism: Treasures from the Daywood Collection” is organized by the Huntington Museum of Art and toured by International Arts & Artists, Washington DC. IN THE NEWS American Impressionists in Annapolis: WBJC’s Judith Krummeck interviews Lucinda Edinberg about the “American Impressionism” exhibition at the Mitchell Gallery. �ALSO FEATURED IN THE AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISM EXHIBITION Charles H. Davis, A Clearing in June, oil on canvas. Huntington Museum of Art, Photo credit: John Spurlock. George Inness, Early Autumn, c. 1861, oil on board. Huntington Museum of Art, Photo credit: John Spurlock. Irving Couse, The Eagle Plague, oil on board. Huntington Museum of Art, Photo credit: John Spurlock. PROGRAMS AND EVENTS September 11 Art Express Lunchtime Tour. Join Art Educator Lucinda Edinberg for a tour from 12:15 to 12:45 p.m. September 19 Book Club, 2:30 to 4 p.m. Join members of the Mitchell Gallery Book Club for a docent tour followed by a discussion of The Collector’s Apprentice by B.A. Shapiro, led by artist Janet Rogers. Registration for this book club event is required. October 1 Lecture, 5:30 p.m. Amanda C. Burdan, curator at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, will lecture on “American Impressionism: Echoes of a Revolution.” Free and open to the public. Registration for this lecture is required. Amanda C. Burdan October 8, 15, 22 Tuesday Try-It Trio Workshop, 1 to 3 p.m. What is the magic of oil paint? Explore the translucency and layering the Impressionists employed to create their works through this three-session workshop. Impressionist artist Abigail McBride will guide participants through theory and process to create two landscape paintings. Members: $100, Non-members: $150. Adults 16 years and up. No experience necessary. All materials provided. October 27 Sunday Afternoon Lecture, 3 p.m. Art Educator Lucinda Edinberg will lead a tour of the exhibition. Abigail McBride �THE LIFE AND ART OF MARY PETTY NOVEMBER 5–DECEMBER 15, 2019 Mary Petty, Thanksgiving Dinner, The New Yorker Magazine, cover illustration, November 25, 1944. Watercolor and ink on paper. Cartoonist Mary Petty (1899–1976) is known for the witty and pointed cartoons of the upper class of early 20th century America that appeared in The New Yorker for 39 years. Some of Petty’s earliest illustrations featured independent, free-thinking women, while her later works concentrated on the lifestyles and attitudes of inherited wealth and her invented Peabody family. Petty was married to fellow New Yorker cartoonist Alan Dunn, whose works are also included in the exhibition. Dunn’s works, which comment on architecture, politics, and social issues, complement Petty’s observations on modern life. The spirit of their independent compositions, unified by a shared sense of humor, is timeless. This exhibition is generously sponsored by Patrick F. Crossman in memory of Elizabeth D. Crossman, with support from Peggy Sue Atterbury and Joan Vinson. Additional support is provided by Anonymous, Tara Balfe Clifford/Cliftara Bed ‘n Breakfast, George and Madeleine Hughes, Pamela McKee, Thea B. Pinsky, and Eric and JanElaine Smith. “The Life and Art of Mary Petty” is organized by the Syracuse University Art Galleries. �MORE WORKS BY MARY PETTY Mary Petty, Fay Modeling Ermine Cape, The New Yorker Magazine, cover illustration, January 10, 1953. Watercolor and ink on paper. Mary Petty, Fay Replacing Bulb in Chandelier, The New Yorker Magazine, cover illustration, September 24, 1955. Watercolor and ink on paper. Mary Petty, Fay Trying Archery, The New Yorker Magazine, cover illustration, July 15, 1950. Watercolor and ink on paper. PROGRAMS AND EVENTS November 10 Lecture, 3 p.m. Bob Mankoff, American cartoonist, author, and former cartoon editor of The New Yorker, will lecture on “This Petty Place: Mary Petty of The New Yorker.” Free event, registration required. Immediately followed by Mitchell Gallery Members Libations and Conversations. November 20 Art Express Lunchtime Tour. Join Art Educator Lucinda Edinberg for a tour from 12:15 to 12:45 p.m. Bob Mankoff December 4 Book Club, 2:30 to 4 p.m. Join members of the Mitchell Gallery Book Club for a docent tour followed by a discussion of Bob Mankoff’s How About Never—Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons, led by cartoonist Eric Smith. Free event, registration required. December 8 Sunday Afternoon Lecture, 3 p.m. Art Educator Lucinda Edinberg will lead a tour of the exhibition. FUNDING AND SUPPORT �RETOOLED: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE HECHINGER COLLECTION JANUARY 9–FEBRUARY 23, 2020 Hans Godo Frabel, Hammers and Nails, 1980, glass. Photo courtesy of Edward Owens. This exhibition of thoughtful and whimsical interpretations of tools as objects of beauty, or instruments of satire, features more than 40 imaginative works in sculpture, painting, photography, and works on paper. Berenice Abbott, William Eggleston, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Arman, Richard Estes, Red Grooms, Fernand Léger, and Roger Shimomura are among the 28 artists represented. These creations serve as reminders that tools embody the “can-do” spirit and may be an extension of oneself. The works on view are part of a massive collection originally belonging to hardware-industry pioneer John Hechinger. This exhibition is made possible through a leadership gift from the Helena Foundation and is generously sponsored by PNC Bank and Anne S. Potter. Additional support is provided by David and Laura Watt, Richard and Carole Falk, and Katie Blyth + Gary Brown + Brogan Brown. “Retooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection” was organized by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC. Gift of John and June Hechinger. �IN THE NEWS ReTooled—Tools as Art at the Mitchell Gallery: WBJC’s Judith Krummeck interviews Lucinda Edinberg about the “ReTooled” exhibition at the Mitchell Gallery. Robert’s Picks: This article in Annapolis Home magazine highlights “ReTooled” as an exhibit definitely worth seeing. Tools of the Trade: This story in the Bay Weekly takes a look at the “ReTooled” exhibition. ALSO FEATURED IN THE RETOOLED EXHIBITION Lee A. Schuette, Cross Cut Saw, 1982, wood. Photo courtesy of Edward Owens. Richard Estes, Nass Linoleum, 1972, screen print. Photo courtesy of Edward Owens. Hugh R. Butt, The Long Road to Usefulness, 1989, painted steel and hardware. Photo courtesy of Joel Breger. PROGRAMS AND EVENTS Art Express Lunchtime Tour: January 15, 12:15–12:45 p.m. Lecture: January 26, 3 p.m. Try-It Workshop: February 4, 2:30–4:30 p.m. Book Club: February 6, 2:30–4 p.m. Lecture: February 23, 3 p.m. �AMERICAN INDIAN ART FROM THE FENIMORE ART MUSEUM: THE THAW COLLECTION MARCH 6–APRIL 26, 2020 Club, ca. 1800–1830, Coast Tsimshian, northern British Columbia mainland islands, caribou or elk antler, L: 16 ½ in x W: 5 in x D: 1 in. Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Collection, T0171. Photograph by John Bigelow Taylor, NYC. The aesthetic traditions of North America’s native peoples are represented through sculptures, paintings, drawings, basketry, textiles, ceramics, and other media. The 40 works on view provide insight into the artistry of these spiritual and utilitarian objects. Featured in this exhibition is a mid-13th century Busycon conch shell gorget elegantly carved by a Caddoan sculptor. Also on view is a late-19th century war record painted on animal hide by two Lakota artists, and a split buffalo horn Blackfeet headdress embellished with ermine fur, porcupine quills, glass beads, silk ribbon, cotton binding, and other fibers. “American Indian Art from the Fenimore Art Museum: The Thaw Collection” is made possible through the generosity of the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust. Organized by the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, in collaboration with the Mitchell Gallery. Annapolis Subaru and Keith and Katherine Dunleavy are proud sponsors of this exhibition. Additional support is provided by Melvin and Judy Bender, Joy Chambers and Peter Bungay, Deborah Bowerman Coons and Jana Bowerman Sample, and Anna E. Greenberg. �ALSO FEATURED IN THE AMERICAN INDIAN ART EXHIBITION Mask, ca. 1850, Central Yup’ik, Bristol Bay, Alaska, cedar wood & bark, duck feathers, snowy owl feathers, sandhill crane feathers, caribou fur, white clay & black pigment, H: 21.5 x W: 30 x D: 4.5 in., Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Collection, T0600. Photograph by John Bigelow Taylor, NYC. Gorget, ca. 1200–1350, probably Caddoan, Spiro area, Oklahoma, whelk shell, H: 4 x W: 4 ¼ x D: ¾ in. Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Collection, T0001. Photograph by John Bigelow Taylor, NYC. Comb, ca. 1670–1687, Seneca (Haudenosaunee), Boughton Hill site, Victor, New York, moose or elk antler, H: 4 ¼ x W: 2 7/8 in. Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Collection, T0024. Photograph by John Bigelow Taylor, NYC. PROGRAMS AND EVENTS March 8 Lecture, 3 p.m. Eva Fognell, curator of the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY, will lecture on From Old Masters to Native American Masters: The Thaw Collection American Indian Art. The Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art—consisting of more than 875 objects spanning 20 centuries from throughout North America—is the most significant Eva Fognell American Indian Art collection donated to the American public since the depression era, and was stunningly and quickly formed by Eugene and Clare Thaw over the course of a few short years. At the collection’s core is an unwavering philosophy; that in any culture a small percentage of things stand out as masterpieces by virtue of their superb craftsmanship, visual power, historical association, and cultural meanings. Gene Thaw put it this way: “I want to stress that I look at Indian material culture as art,” he states. “To me, it is co-equal to any of my own highest experiences in pursuing the arts of many nations both as dealer and collector. It stands rightfully with ancient art, with masterpieces of Asia and Europe, as their equivalent, and I wish it would be looked at this way.” Registration required. March 11 Art Express, 12:15–12:45 p.m. Lunchtime tour with Art Educator Lucinda Edinberg. March 27 Try-It Workshop, 2:30–4:30 p.m. Basket making led by Kathi Beauchesne, president of the Center for Research in Basketry, will lead a workshop to create a simple basket. For adults 16 years and up. $15 for members, $25 for non-members. Registration required. Event cancelled. April 2 Book Club, 2:30–4 p.m. Author Lucia St. Clair Robson will lead a discussion on her book, Ride the Wind. Free. Registration required. Event cancelled. April 26 Lecture, 3 p.m. Art Educator Lucinda Edinberg will lead a tour of the exhibition. Virtual tours available on Facebook and Instagram. � 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 Mitchell Art Gallery Exhibitions Description An account of the resource Schedules of past exhibitions from the Mitchell Art Gallery. To see current exhibitions please visit the <a title="Mitchell Gallery" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/mitchell-gallery/exhibits-and-programs" target="_blank">Mitchell Gallery Exhibitions</a> webpage.<br /><br /><span>Click on </span><a title="Mitchell Art Gallery Exhibitions" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=30"><strong>Items in the Mitchell Art Gallery Exhibitions Collection</strong></a><span> to </span><span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource 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 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. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mitchell Gallery Exhibition Schedule 2019-2020 Description An account of the resource Mitchell Gallery Exhibition Schedule 2019-2020. Exhibitions include American Impressionism: Treasures from the Daywood Collection, The Life and Art of Mary Petty, Retooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection, and American Indian Art from the Fenimore Art Museum: The Thaw Collection. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.). Elizabeth Myers Mitchell Art Gallery Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-2020 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 Subject The topic of the resource Art--Exhibitions Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context MitchellGalleryExhibitions_2019-2020 Mitchell Art Gallery https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f0a47582b99917f0c3cb740b392fb874.pdf 65b3b4fce32c8301c6dad084b9929c6e PDF Text Text FRIDAY NIGHT FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2019–20 St. John’s College | Annapolis, Maryland 2019 Fall Semester Date Speaker Title August 23, 2019 Joseph Macfarland, Dean St. John’s College, Annapolis The Christopher B. Nelson Lecture “Speaking Freely and the Conversational Virtues” August 30 All-College Art Seminar September 6 Stephanie Nelson Associate Professor of Classical Studies Boston University “The Eternal Present of the Iliad” September 13 Michael Zuckert Professor of Political Science University of Notre Dame “Philosophic Anthropology and the Emergence of Liberal Constitutionalism” September 20 Mark Alznauer Associate Professor of Philosophy Northwestern University “Hegel on Reason in History” September 27 David Fung, pianist Concert October 4 Long Weekend No Lecture October 11 James Lennox Professor Emeritus Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh “William Harvey and his Aristotelianism” October 18 Benjamin Storey Associate Professor Political and International Affairs Furman University “The Pursuit of Happiness: Four French Thinkers on Our Restless Quest for Contentment” 60 COLLEGE AVENUE | ANNAPOLIS | MD 21401 | 410-263-2371 SJC.EDU �October 25 All-College Seminar November 1 Arthur Melzer Professor, Department of Political Science Michigan State University “Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing” November 8 Ronna Burger Professor of Philosophy Tulane University “Jerusalem and Athens: The Family Drama in the Bible and in Greek Thought” November 15 Zena Hitz Tutor, St. John’s College Annapolis, Maryland “The Moral Fragility of Human Beings” November 22 Gail Weiss Dean’s Research Professor of Philosophy George Washington University “Beauvoir’s Critical Phenomenology of Women’s (Limited) Agency under Patriarchal Disciplinary Regimes” November 29 Thanksgiving Holiday No Lecture December 6 King William Players “The Shape of Things” by Neil LaBute December 13– January 5 Winter Vacation No Lectures 60 COLLEGE AVENUE | ANNAPOLIS | MD 21401 | 410-263-2371 SJC.EDU �2020 Spring Semester Date Speaker Title January 10, 2020 Antonio Meneses, cello and Paul Galbraith, guitar Schubert, Bach, and Brazilian composers Concert January 17 Sarah Ruden Visiting Scholar, Author and Poet University of Pennsylvania The Andrew Steiner Lecture: "Vergil's Aeneid and Augustine's Confessions: Reading, Writing, Being Human." January 24 George Russell Tutor, St. John’s College Annapolis, Maryland For Hume’s Select Readers: The Books We Keep, The Books We Burn, and Why January 31 Long Weekend No Lecture February 7 Mitzi Lee Associate Professor Department of Philosophy University of Colorado “The Virtue of Justice in Aristotle’s Ethics” February 14 All-College Seminar February 21 Karin Ekholm Tutor, St. John’s College Annapolis, Maryland "Where Thought Lingers and Love Plays: Art in Eliot's Middlemarch" February 28– March 15 Spring Break No Lectures March 20 Parker Quartet Salonen, Szymanowsky, Beethoven Op. 132 Cancelled - Concert March 27 James Hankins Professor of History Harvard University Cancelled - The Italian and Humanists and The Virtue of Humanitas 60 COLLEGE AVENUE | ANNAPOLIS | MD 21401 | 410-263-2371 SJC.EDU �April 3 Ange Mlinko Author and Poet Associate Professor, Department of English University of Florida Cancelled - “Why Do the Poets Still Speak of the Gods?” April 10 Bill Pastille Tutor and NEH Chair, St. John’s College Annapolis, Maryland Cancelled - NEH Lecture: “There to Here and Back Again: The Down-to-earth Mysticism of Plotinus” April 17 Dashon Burton, Baritone Cancelled - Concert Brick by Brick: Changing America Through Song April 24 King William Players Cancelled May 1 Reality Show Cancelled Spring 2020 semester lectures and performances cancelled due to COVID-19 and campus closure. 60 COLLEGE AVENUE | ANNAPOLIS | MD 21401 | 410-263-2371 SJC.EDU � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 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 Lecture/Concert Schedule 2019-2020 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2019-2020 Academic Year. 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 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-2020 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 Subject The topic of the resource St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.). Calendars Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LectureSchedule_Annapolis_2019-2020 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/28bacd6f3058043922aa21ad0b7115c6.mp3 81629ce2576173fdc42273dbdeb2a4e8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audio cassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:38:53 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 Friendly, Unfriendly Universe Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 10, 1982 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kutler, Samuel S. 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 1982-09-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Kutler_Samuel_1982-09-10 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c84ebb2ceea1c524b0194146adb63862.mp3 d1b366827cfa211642ef2e0f5b9f3597 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audio cassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:54:43 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 Desiring What is Beautiful Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 19, 1993 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kutler, Samuel S. 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 1993-11-19 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Kutler_Samuel_1993-11-19 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/dfc816c55f411d28883e01b7919f77f6.mp3 70ac6788f4253b6178dc75e1dfdf7907 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audio cassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:49:59 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On Complex Numbers Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on December, 09, 1983 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kutler, Samuel S. 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 1983-12-09 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Kutler_Samuel_1983-12-09 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4c95870af1e885dd44897c3daea1725e.pdf db6dd1249074f3fe3d21241b6d65c144 PDF Text Text Learning to Love Lincoln: Frederick Douglass’s Journey from Grievance to Gratitude Diana J. Schaub St. Johns College, Santa Fe 4 December 2020 I am delighted to be here to talk about my two heroes: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. I will be focusing on what one of them had to say about the other. Frederick Douglass, in his great oration in memory of Lincoln, delivered in 1876 upon the occasion of the dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument, observed that “Any man can say things that are true of Abraham Lincoln, but no man can say anything that is new of Abraham Lincoln.” That is still the case today. Not even by resorting to lies and untruths can one find anything new to say about Abraham Lincoln. The truths and untruths—and maybe most common, the half-truths—have all been around a long time. The task is thus not to be original in one’s appreciation, but to be just. Proper appreciation of Lincoln’s statesmanship, particularly during his lifetime, was rare. The contrast with George Washington is instructive. Although both experts and ordinary citizens now routinely consider Washington and Lincoln the greatest of American presidents, Washington’s rank as a statesman was clear and uncontested from the first—so uncontested that his election to the presidency was unanimous, while the election of Lincoln was so contentious as to provoke civil war. In addition to the seditious opposition of the South, Lincoln encountered plenty of loyal opposition in the North, not only from Democrats, but from those more radical than he both within the Republican Party and outside it (among the various strands of abolitionism). Radicals, then and now, have been particularly stinting in their praise of Lincoln. Some today suggest that credit for emancipation belongs more to those, like Frederick Douglass, who pressured Lincoln to take that decisive step. At the extreme, this position asserts that Lincoln was anti-black, that the Proclamation was basically a fraud, and that Lincoln does not deserve any credit for emancipation since he was “forced into glory.”1 1 �Before signing on to the contemporary radical critique, we might want to examine what the greatest of the abolitionists himself had to say about Lincoln. From his newspaper editorials before and during the war to his speeches and personal reminiscences after the war, the trajectory of Frederick Douglass’s thinking about Lincoln is one of increasing and deepening appreciation, often revising his own earlier negative assessments. Perhaps because Douglass was selfeducated, he remained a lifelong learner, capable of open-minded and rigorous reconsiderations. The way in which the exercise of his critical faculties could lead him to substantive revaluations was evident early in his career when he dramatically changed his opinion about the status of slavery under the Constitution. Repudiating the Garrisonian view of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution, Douglass embraced an anti-slavery reading of the document, thereby transforming himself from a revolutionary, intent on annulling the Constitution, to a reformer, still fiercely critical of American practice, but ever after a staunch defender of America’s founding principles.2 A parallel, but more subtle, shift occurred as a result of Douglass’s encounter with Lincoln—an encounter that taught him to appreciate the statesman (which is to say the prudent politician) as well as the John Browns of the world. Douglass learned to love Lincoln and in his 1876 “Oration in Memory of Lincoln” he recapitulated that intellectual and emotional journey for the benefit of all Americans.3 First Things Douglass’s oration was the keynote address at the unveiling of the nation’s first statue in honor of Lincoln. The statue is entitled “Emancipation” and it was erected in the name of the former slaves and was paid for by their donations. As befitted the ceremonial nature of the occasion, Douglass’s speech expressed gratitude toward Lincoln, but more intriguingly, it reflected on the political significance of gratitude. It is a speech both of gratitude and about 2 �gratitude. Douglass says that “the sentiment of gratitude” which “perpetuate[s] the memories of great public men” is “one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.” Further, he points out that with the dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument black Americans now “[f]or the first time in the history of our people, . . . join in this high worship.” Douglass wants the world to notice what “we, the colored people” are doing in honoring Abraham Lincoln. As he explains, “First things are always interesting, and this is one of our first things.” Douglass presents the black commemoration of Lincoln as an act that honors the honorers almost as much as it honors the honoree. The story of how the Freedmen’s Memorial took the shape it did, and Douglass’s role in ensuring that his people’s first “national act” came off well, is fascinating. Douglass was asked in 1865 to lend his name to the Educational Monument Association which proposed to raise money from blacks and whites alike to build a black college in honor of Lincoln’s memory. Douglass refused to participate in the project. Here is what he wrote in his letter to the organizers: For a monument, by itself, and upon its own merits, I say good. For a college by itself . . . and upon its own merits, I say good. But for a college-monument, or for a monumentcollege, I do not say good; . . . . The whole scheme is derogatory to the character of the colored people of the United States. . . . It looks to me like an attempt to wash the black man’s face in the nation’s tears for Abraham Lincoln! . . . I am for washing the black man’s face (that is, educating his mind), for that is a good thing to be done, and I appreciate the nation’s tears for Abraham Lincoln; but I am not so enterprising as to think of turning the nation’s veneration for our martyred President into a means of advantage to the colored people, and, of sending around the hat to a mourning public.4 Douglass doesn’t want gratitude—which he calls “one of the holiest sentiments of the human heart”5—to be contaminated with blatant self-interest, for gratitude isn’t even gratitude then. In the proposed college-monument, the problem of impure motives would have been even worse, since there would not just be a mixture of motives but actually a division of motives along 3 �racial lines. Whites would be doing the creditable giving and blacks the self-interested taking. Douglass did not want blacks to enter upon citizenship in that way. Instead of an ennobling display of black gratitude, which would elevate the givers and, moreover, elevate the givers in the minds of white observers, the college-monument idea would reduce blacks primarily to the role of recipients. Douglass was not, in principle, opposed to white philanthropy on behalf of blacks. Years earlier he had sketched a plan for an industrial college in answer to an inquiry from Harriet Beecher Stowe about what she could do to contribute to black advancement.6 However, Douglass was always sensitive to the dangers of ill-timed and overly intrusive assistance, which could have the perverse effect of sapping black initiative, thereby impeding the long-term prospects of the race. Douglass worried that there was always more of benevolence and pity rather than straightforward justice in white America’s dealings with blacks. His preference was for justice—sternly and blindly equal, with no special pleadings or privileges.7 This leads to what at first might seem a contradiction in Douglass’s reaction to the monument-college project. As is well-known, Douglass’s vision of America was fundamentally integrationist. Nonetheless, he wants the monument to be exclusively a black effort; however humble, it should be, he says, “our own act and deed.”8 On the other hand, when it comes to the idea of a college, Douglass speaks against not only the self-serving hybrid of a monumentcollege, but also against the idea of any college being built for the permanent and exclusive use of blacks. Given the discrimination of the day, Douglass admitted the need for temporary recourse to complexional institutions, but he did not want to see the founding of any institution that accepted the permanence of segregation. As he says, “the American people must stand each for all and all for each, without respect to color or race.”9 4 �So, he is in favor of a separately erected monument but opposed to a separate college. Why a Freedmen’s Memorial but not a Freedmen’s College? What accounts for the different judgments on these two endeavors? The explanation, I think, hinges on the nature of the two undertakings and their potential contribution to either lessening racial prejudice or prolonging it. A display of gratitude by black Americans, reflecting the special sentiments they bear towards Lincoln, would undercut white prejudice, by showing blacks capable of “the holiest sentiments of the human heart.”10 Conversely, a college explicitly and exclusively reserved to blacks (whoever foots the bill for it), by accommodating race prejudice, in effect bolsters it. Thus, Douglass accepts all-black institutions only with great reluctance and always with the proviso that, as soon as circumstances permit, blacks must make their way into the majority institutions.11 Douglass is consistent in that he judges instances of racial solidarity and group action by their effects on friendship between the races. His guiding question is always: does the doing of this deed point us toward the overcoming of race prejudice and contribute to an ethos of common citizenship? Acts of black self-reliance, both individual and group-based, can create the conditions for non-racial brotherhood. Douglass understood that before the black man could be recognized as a brother, he must be recognized as a man. Manliness precedes fraternity. Or, to give it a non-gendered formulation: independence precedes friendship. As Douglass had hoped, the monument-college plan was abandoned and, in the end, the memorial took the pure form he had recommended, with Douglass himself delivering the keynote address. Not surprisingly, his first paragraph refers to the “manly pride” with which blacks should view the occasion, while the final paragraph sets forth the black claim to “human brotherhood.” More especially, Douglass informs those whites who seek to “scourge [blacks] beyond the range of human brotherhood” that the Freedmen’s Monument stands as a refutation 5 �of their “blighting slander.” In between the opening invocation of manliness (or independence) and the closing invocation of brotherhood (or friendship), the speech itself demonstrates how a still very divided nation could develop a shared perspective on the achievements of Abraham Lincoln. Any analysis of the speech must take into account not only the uniqueness of the occasion but the rhetorical dilemma posed by the larger historical moment. The speech was given in 1876, as the Reconstruction period was coming to an end. With the federal government increasingly reluctant to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments, Douglass was rightly worried about the resurgent spirit of the Old South. Douglass worried that reconciliation between Northern whites and Southern whites could end up excluding the freedmen and erasing the real meaning of the Civil War. Thus, he attempts to use the memory of Lincoln to counteract this dangerous tendency, and to revive the “new birth of freedom.” The Oration has a careful structure, being composed of eight distinct sections, each of which begins with what grammarians call a “vocative expression”; in the first two sections he addresses “Friends and Fellow Citizens,” in the subsequent six sections, simply “Fellow Citizens.” Politicians, of course, often rely on direct address of this sort. Sometimes it even becomes a kind of verbal tic, like Lyndon Johnson (in his Texas accent, which I can’t imitate) peppering his speeches with “my fellow Americans.” Douglass’s iterations, however, are more deliberate; they signal new phases of an argument that delineates the different (but not irreconcilable) claims of whites and blacks to the memory of Lincoln. Douglass begins the Oration by addressing his immediate audience: those who assembled that day in Lincoln Park due east of the Capitol building on the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. The audience was a large and racially mixed one, composed of 25,000 ordinary 6 �citizens, along with numerous representatives of official Washington. Douglass mentions the presence of members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the presence of the Chief Justice and Supreme Court, and President Grant himself. These attendees deserved to be called not just “Fellow Citizens,” but “Friends,” whose attendance gave evidence of their sympathies. Interestingly, this first section of the speech makes no mention at all of Lincoln, but instead congratulates “you,” a pronoun that seems to refer, at least initially, only to Douglass’s fellow blacks. Thus, he speaks of “our condition as a people” and the remarkable progress in that condition. The evidence of progress, which Douglass says is a “credit to American civilization,” provides the occasion for a shift to congratulating “all.” Douglass notes that the “new dispensation of freedom”—“has come both to our white fellow-citizens and ourselves.” The second section of the speech acknowledges especially the federal government and its friendly role in this new dispensation. The erection of the memorial received congressional approval; the pedestal for the statue was paid for by congressional appropriation; and the day itself had been declared a federal holiday.12 Douglass, however, highlights the awful sacrifice that lies behind this federal friendship. This section contains Douglass’s first mention of Lincoln, whom he calls “the first martyr President of the United States.” Moreover, Lincoln’s martyrdom is presented as the climax of the larger national sacrifice to which Douglass alludes with his reference to “yonder heights of Arlington.” Arlington Cemetery was visible from Lincoln Park, and 16,000 Civil War soldiers were buried there, including 1500 black troops.13 On the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s death, what Douglass wanted to remind his audience of was “bloodbought freedom”—“our blood-bought freedom”—in which “we, the colored people” rejoice. While Douglass emphasizes the sentiment of appreciation that gives rise to monuments like the one being unveiled, curiously he says nothing about the actual statue. It is known that he 7 �was not altogether pleased with the design which shows Lincoln, Emancipation Proclamation in one hand, standing over the crouching or half-rising figure of a slave. Dissatisfaction with the sculpture was apparently not limited to Douglass, but was shared by other African-Americans. The official program for the festivities attempted to address these objections, explaining that In the original [design] the kneeling slave [was] represented as perfectly passive, receiving . . . freedom from the hand of the great liberator. But the artist justly changed this, to bring the presentation nearer to the historical fact, by making the emancipated slave an agent in his own deliverance. He is accordingly represented as exerting his own strength with strained muscles in breaking the chain which had bound him.14 The brochure also mentions that there was an alternative design by the female sculptor, Harriet Hosmer, which was rejected as too costly. It would have depicted Lincoln atop a central pillar, flanked by smaller pillars showing, among other figures, black Union soldiers. Douglass would certainly have preferred this design, since it embodied his favorite aphorism: “Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not/ Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?”15 In a sense, Douglass’s speech corrects the submissiveness or paternalism of the statue, by acknowledging both “our loyal, brave, and patriotic soldiers” and “the vast, high, and preeminent services rendered to ourselves, to our race, to our country, and to the whole world by Abraham Lincoln.” In other words, Douglass’s praise of Lincoln is balanced by his recognition of black agency, the invaluable contribution made by black Union troops (by war’s end, there were 180,000 black troops). Having spent the opening two sections proclaiming the generous deed of the moment and commending it to the notice of “men of all parties and opinions,” including “those who despise us,” Douglass in the third section begins to speak to the larger nation-wide audience—an audience of “Fellow-citizens” not all of whom are necessarily “Friends.” Douglass now treads 8 �very carefully. He does not want the black embrace of Lincoln to trigger a white flight from Lincoln. And so, he quite dramatically backs away from the Great Emancipator, insisting that Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the last years of his administration to deny, postpone and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people, to promote the welfare of the white people of his country. . . . The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a pre-eminence in this worship at once full and supreme. . . . You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. Douglass devotes the whole of section 3 to reassuring nervous whites—whites who are patriotic, but probably prejudiced. Basically, he tells them, “Look, don’t worry. Lincoln always loved you best. Take it from me, a Negro, Lincoln was not a Negro-lover.” It’s a rather startling rhetorical gambit, but it allowed Douglass to exhort white Americans to heap high their hosannas of Lincoln. He tells them: To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures on your walls, and commend his example, for to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor. By the close of this section of the speech, which we might dub the white supremacist section, one might wonder why blacks are bothering to honor Lincoln at all? Douglass’s answer is that while whites are Lincoln’s children, blacks are “his step-children, children by adoption, children by force of circumstances and necessity.” Moreover, what Lincoln did for his step-children, whether it was part of his original intention or not, was deliver them from bondage. Accordingly, Douglass entreats whites “to despise not the humble offering” of former slaves. The separate claims of whites and blacks upon the memory of Lincoln can co-exist. Whites can honor Lincoln for saving the Union; blacks can honor him for Emancipation. Shared homage, if it is ever to develop, must begin with toleration for racially-specific homage. 9 �Frederick Douglass had a gift for metaphor and this image of blacks as Lincoln’s stepchildren is one of his finest. It accords nicely with Lincoln’s own account of the relation between the cause of Union and the cause of Emancipation, as expressed in his famous letter to Horace Greeley. Here is how Lincoln himself explained his duty as president: My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.16 Douglass reminds his listeners that Lincoln was a Unionist first and foremost and that he became the Great Emancipator only “by force of circumstances and necessity.” Whites ought to revere Lincoln as the savior of the nation. And indeed, the inscription on the national Lincoln Memorial, built half a century after the Freedmen’s Memorial, reads: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”17 Of course, the Union to which Lincoln was devoted had at its foundation the principle of human equality. The Union was itself a moral project. Because the bond of genuine Union is a teaching about natural right, American patriotism ought to produce citizens who are, as Douglass says, “friendly to the freedom of all men.” In the 4th and central section of the speech, Douglass presents at greater length the step-children’s view of Lincoln, the essential feature of which was faith in Lincoln’s “living and earnest sympathy” with their fate. Again, Douglass doesn’t paper over the disagreements and disappointments that blacks experienced during the war years. “We were,” he admits, “at times stunned, grieved and greatly bewildered.” Douglass provides a litany of reasons why blacks might have doubted Lincoln’s good will: he supported colonization schemes; he refused to enlist black troops; after finally allowing black recruitment, he refused to 10 �retaliate when the Confederates violated the rules of warfare by massacring black prisoners; and he revoked early emancipation decrees by Union generals in the field. Nonetheless, Douglass asserts that “we were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln”—a view that took the measure of the man and, after factoring in the “logic” of events and even “that divinity that shapes our ends,” Douglass says, “we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.” Douglass then gives a counter-litany of the liberationist and racially transformative policies that transpired under Lincoln’s rule. He lists nine achievements, culminating in the Emancipation Proclamation. Each time, he repeats a version of the phrase “under his rule we saw . . . .” The phrase is crucial for both whites and blacks. Blacks—who longed for liberty but who might understandably be suspicious of rule and law, having suffered under generations of misrule—are reminded that their liberty came to them through law and through “wise and beneficent rule.” Conversely, whites are reminded that the actions of Lincoln, which struck not only at slavery but at “prejudice and proscription” as well, were the actions of a dedicated constitutionalist. The closing paragraph of section 4 celebrates Emancipation and, moreover, shows that the celebration can be shared by all. Douglass asks, “Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January, 1863?” Whites can appreciate black liberation and blacks can appreciate white “statesmanship”—a word that Douglass now uses for the first but not the last time in the address. On this new bi-racial basis of Union and Liberty, Douglass goes on to a reconsideration of Lincoln in sections 5, 6, and 7. He argues that Lincoln’s “great and good” character was transparent to those “who saw him and heard him.” Indeed, direct contact wasn’t even necessary. In a passage with tremendous import for us today, Douglass says “The image of the man went 11 �out with his words, and those who read him knew him.” We are indebted to biographers and historians who have scoured and scavenged for all the bits and pieces of eyewitness testimony and hearsay evidence, and who have laboriously contextualized and hypothesized and speculated, to such a degree that, with the exception of Jesus, there is now no one who ever walked the earth more written about than Abraham Lincoln. Nonetheless, it is reassuring to know that Lincoln’s words alone are enough. In light of this fundamentalist insight, Douglass now revises his earlier “white supremacist” account of Lincoln. He reconsiders Lincoln’s deference to popular prejudice in the appropriate context—the context of democratic statesmanship. Here’s what he says at the close of section 5: I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of the country, this unfriendly feeling on his part may safely to set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things; first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin, and second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success, his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people, and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined. Frederick Douglass himself always occupied “the genuine abolition ground,” and his speeches and writings, from the early years of the war especially, often manifested great frustration with Lincoln’s caution. In retrospect, however, Douglass generously acknowledges the partiality of his own abolitionist stance and credits Lincoln as the “comprehensive statesman.” I think it is important to note that the final paragraph of this section carefully distinguishes Lincoln’s views on race from his views on slavery. Douglass repeats (for the third 12 �time) that Lincoln was prejudiced, or more precisely that he “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro [italics added].” According to Douglass, racial prejudice is a social construct; there is nothing innate or inevitable about it. It seems that Douglass does not regard Lincoln as particularly progressive on the question of race; he was a follower or a sharer in the dominant opinion of the day. However, in this very same section in which Douglass refers to Lincoln’s prejudices, he explicitly says that “the humblest could approach him and feel at home in his presence.” This statement echoes what Douglass said elsewhere about the experience of being in Lincoln’s personal presence. Speaking of his second meeting with Lincoln, Douglass in his autobiography says: Mr. Lincoln was not only a great President, but a GREAT MAN—too great to be small in anything. In his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color. We might wonder whether the presentation of Lincoln’s racial prejudice is compatible with the presentation of his capacious and welcoming humanity. Of course, it might be possible for someone to regard a particular class of people as inferior in certain respects, while still treating individual members of that class with consideration. Lincoln could have been both prejudiced and polite. If so, it would still be necessary to explain why Douglass in the Oration chooses to draw attention to one quality more than the other. Perhaps he wishes to indicate to both blacks and whites that racial prejudice is not an insuperable obstacle to black advancement or bettered race relations. Alternatively, I believe it is possible to interpret Douglass’s remarks in a way consistent with the view that Lincoln deferred to popular prejudice without fully subscribing to popular prejudice. The issue might be elucidated by asking “what was the nature of Lincoln’s ‘sharing’ in white prejudice?” When he describes the relation between Lincoln and “the sentiment of his 13 �country,” Douglass credits Lincoln with being in advance of popular opinion (measured against which he was “swift, zealous, radical, and determined”). Douglass introduces the key verb “consult,” claiming that “the sentiment of his country” was something Lincoln “was bound as a statesman to consult.” To the extent that popular sentiment was unfriendly to blacks, Lincoln’s sharing in it may have been political, rather than personal—deliberately affected rather than deeply held. Douglass here conveys a crucial lesson about the limits within which democratic statesmen operate. Politicians can’t get too far ahead of public opinion if they hope to remain politically viable. More than others perhaps, black citizens must incorporate this insight into their assessment of political figures. A “comprehensive view” must “make reasonable allowance for the circumstances” and not judge on the basis of “stray utterances” or “isolated facts.” In taking the measure of Lincoln, Douglass shows how granting this latitude of maneuver is compatible with respect for the burdens of statesmanship as well as the self-respect of citizens. Douglass tries to model what it looks like to take a comprehensive view of a politician. His people are new voters and there are two dangers they must avoid. Douglass does not want blacks to look to politics for a Moses figure, but he doesn’t want them to fall into the opposite error of cynically seeing only flaws. He shows the possibility of appreciation without idolatry and criticism without rejection. Whichever way one comes down on the question of Lincoln’s views on race, Douglass is emphatic that Lincoln’s attitude toward slavery was above reproach. Douglass quotes from the atonement passage of the Second Inaugural, in which Lincoln interpreted the Civil War as the blood price exacted by a just God for the nation’s sins toward the slave. [You remember the passage: it speaks of the war possibly continuing “until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn 14 �with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”] Those were lines that Douglass quoted in nearly every postwar speech he gave that mentioned Lincoln.18 The Second Inaugural’s solemn invocation of divine reparations, Douglass says, “gives all needed proof of [Lincoln’s] feeling on the subject of slavery.” Douglass now revisits an issue he had highlighted earlier. In section 3, when he mentioned Lincoln’s policy of “opposition to the extension of slavery,” he had stressed Lincoln’s willingness to “protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed.” This tolerance of slavery in the South was there cited as evidence of Lincoln’s pro-white views. Now, however, in section 5, Douglass explains that Lincoln acted as he did not because he was indifferent to the fate of black slaves, but “because he thought that it was so nominated in the bond.” In other words, he acted out of fidelity to the Constitution. Lincoln’s pre-war willingness to leave slavery alone in the Southern states does not in any way disprove or lessen his antislavery convictions. Of course, Douglass himself disagreed with Lincoln about what precisely was “nominated in the bond.” Most notably, Douglass argued that the so-called “fugitive slave” clause of the Constitution did not, in truth, refer to slaves but rather to indentured servants (who had signed contracts and could be held to those legal terms). Nonetheless, even though he is not fully in accord with Lincoln’s reading of the document, Douglass moves his audience toward an appreciation of constitutional devotion. He is acutely aware that racial progress in the future will depend upon the fidelity of both blacks and whites to the Constitution—the Constitution as purified and completed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Fittingly, sections 6 and 7 transcend race altogether. These are the only sections that make no reference to either whites or blacks. Section 6 describes Lincoln’s early years and his preparation, through plain speaking and plain dealing, for the great crisis of civil war. Douglass 15 �emphasizes Lincoln’s humble origins: “A son of toil himself he was linked in brotherly sympathy with the sons of toil in every loyal part of the Republic.” In this section, racial division is overcome and replaced by the class division between the patrician, James Buchanan, who was willing to allow “national dismemberment,” and the plebeian, Abraham Lincoln, who had “an oath in heaven” to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. The division we ought to dwell on, Douglass implies, is that between patriotism and treason. This theme reaches an apotheosis in section 7 which describes the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Despite the “hell-black spirit of revenge” that motivated the crime, Douglass argues that good has come from it. Dying as a martyr to “union and liberty”—these twin aims now conjoined and equal—Lincoln has become “doubly dear to us.”19 In his autobiography, Douglass noted that one effect of the assassination was to bring him into “close accord” with his white neighbors, feeling, for the first time he said, more like “kin” than “countrymen.” In the final section of the speech, just one paragraph in length, Douglass comes full circle, speaking once more to his largely black audience. He tells them: “In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator we have been doing highest honor to ourselves and those who come after us [emphasis added].” Note that despite the “unfriendly feeling” ascribed to Lincoln in sections 3 and 5, Lincoln by the end has become “our friend.”20 Through his interpretation and masterful presentation of Lincoln’s statesmanship, Douglass has knit together the American polity in mutual understanding and appreciation of Lincoln. Douglass has acted as a statesman himself by demonstrating how memory and memorialization, done well, might shape a better American future. In conclusion, let me just say a word about the larger lesson to be drawn from this speech. Frederick Douglass is best known as an activist. Much of his speaking and writing 16 �involved demands for justice: justice toward blacks, justice toward women, justice toward laborers. Approached by a young man asking what he should do for the cause of racial justice, the elderly Douglass is said to have answered “agitate, agitate, agitate.” However, this fabled agitator also devoted a goodly portion of his public speaking to commemorating the past, celebrating the founding ideals of the nation, and praising those citizens and public figures who remained faithful to both the Declaration and the Constitution. In other words, he tried to foster a spirit of friendship and a unified national consciousness. Aristotle (the first political scientist) called this homonoia, or like-mindedness. Likemindedness—or thinking the same—about certain crucial matters, is the form of friendship that should characterize fellow citizens. Aristotle calls this like-mindedness “the greatest of goods for the political order” (Politics 2.4.6). It lessens civic strife among the parts or parties that are always present in any larger collective. Diversity—without this foundation of like-mindedness— is a recipe for growing discord. Like-mindedness allows cooperation and trust to replace contentiousness and suspicion. Aristotle argued that lawmakers should pursue this sort of friendship more than justice even, since civic friendship leads to justice and does so without having to involve the coercive bite of the law (Ethics 8.1). In friendship, what is right and what is pleasing come naturally together. For a model of how to encourage this civic friendship, there are very few who equal Frederick Douglass. Especially in our contemporary moment, as protests have erupted over incidents of racial injustice, as well as over statues and memorials that are thought to symbolize and contribute to ongoing injustice, I can’t think of a better resource than Frederick Douglass. He is one of our nation’s greatest fighters against injustice and he took very seriously the topic of public commemoration. It matters intensely who we memorialize and how we understand the past. 17 �Let me mention just a couple of things that distinguish Douglass from today’s protestors and progressives. While Douglass was a fierce critic of our national transgressions, he also believed deeply in the American project. He considered the principles of the Declaration of Independence to be “saving principles” and he considered the Constitution to be “a great liberty document.” He criticized the nation from the perspective of its own highest ideals, calling us to live up to our professions. Although he could be bitingly satirical, he was never cynical. He was always ready to find and praise what was good and generous and true in the American experiment. I am worried that this spirit of gratitude is being lost. There is a very deep alienation expressed in much contemporary rhetoric and action. Over the last summer, this hostility went so far as to threaten the Freedmen’s Monument itself with destruction. There are many reasons to preserve the monument, including that it was the site of one of Douglass’s most significant speeches and that it marks what Douglass called his people’s first “national act”—the act by which they translated their gratitude for emancipation into an enduring work of art. The controversy over the monument will be salutary if it leads us to revisit its history and reread Douglass’s speech. He can help us toward a more thoughtful and nuanced patriotism. Lerone Bennett, Jr. Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2007). 2 Diana J. Schaub, “Frederick Douglass’s Constitution,” in The American Experiment: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Liberty, ed. Peter Augustine Lawler and Robert Martin Schaefer (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994). 3 Lucas Morel has spoken and written insightfully on the “Oration.” See “America’s First Black President?: Lincoln’s Legacy of Political Transcendence” (2001) and “Frederick Douglass’s Emancipation of Abraham Lincoln” (2005). See also the excellent recent article by Peter C. Myers, “‘A Good Work for Our Race To-Day’: Interests, Virtues, and the Achievement of Justice in Frederick Douglass’ Freedmen’s Monument Speech,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 104, No. 2 (May 2010). 4 Frederick Douglass, “To W.J. Wilson,” in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 4:173. 5 Ibid., 4:172. 6 Frederick Douglass, “To Harriet Beecher Stowe,” March 8, 1853, in Writings, 2:229-236. 1 18 �See especially “What the Black Man Wants, speech at the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at Boston, April 1865,” in Writings, 4:157-165. 8 Ibid., 4:172. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 See especially “The Nation’s Problem: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on 16 April 1889,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 5:414-416. 12 “Inaugural Ceremonies of the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln Washington City, April 14 th, 1876,” available online through the Frederick Douglass Papers of the Library of Congress. 13 http://www.richardscenter.psu.edu/Documents/ArlingtonNationalCemeteryTour.pdf. 14 “Inaugural Ceremonies of the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln Washington City, April 14th, 1876.” http://memory.loc.gov/mss/mfd/18/18006/0009.jpg. http://memory.loc.gov/mss/mfd/18/18006/0010.jpg. 15 Douglass cited these lines from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto II, Stanza LXXVI) often, including in “What Are the Colored People Doing for Themselves?” The North Star, July 14, 1848 in Life and Writings, 1:315. 16 Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862 in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859-1865 (NY: The Library of America, 1989), 358. 17 At the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922, the keynote address was given by Dr. Robert Moton, Booker T. Washington’s successor as president of Tuskegee Institute. Douglass might have been intrigued to learn that Moton spoke not of Union, but of Liberty, fixing Lincoln’s claim to greatness in “the word that gave freedom to a race.” In the draft of his speech, Moton proceeded to transform the Negro’s debt to Lincoln into the nation’s (unpaid) debt to the Negro, a rhetorical move that displeased the organizers and forced Moton to tone down his talk of a “great unfinished work” of “equal opportunity.” Even with the edits, however, the focus of the speech was emancipation. Almost a half-century later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would sound a very similar theme in his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 18 See especially, “The Black Man’s Debt to Abraham Lincoln,” 12 February 1888, and “Abraham Lincoln, the Great Man of Our Century,” 13 February 1893, both in Blassingame, volume 5. 19 Walt Whitman’s lecture, “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” first delivered in 1879, further develops the meaning of Lincoln’s martyrdom. 20 Douglass’s eulogy of his fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips provides an interesting point of comparison. Douglass asserts that “none have a better right” to honor the memory of Phillips than “the colored people of the United States.” Although he was active for a variety of causes, Phillips “was primarily and pre-eminently the colored man’s friend, . . . The cause of the slave was his first love; and from it he never wavered, but was true and steadfast through life.” “Wendell Phillips Cast his Lot with the Slave: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on 22 February 1884,” in Blassingame, vol. 5, 151-2. 7 19 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Word Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 19 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Learning to love Lincoln : Frederick Douglass's journey from grievance to gratitude Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given on December 4, 2020 by Diana Schaub as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. The Dean's Office provided this description of the event: "Having originally been a severe critic of Abraham Lincoln, the radical abolitionist Frederick Douglass grew to appreciate Lincoln’s prudential statesmanship. In his 1876 'Oration in Memory of Lincoln' he recapitulated that intellectual and emotional journey for the benefit of all Americans. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Schaub, Diana J., 1959- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-12-04 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895 Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_SchaubD_Learning_to_Love_Lincoln_2020-12-04 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/32f24210cc711cd2e888738b35ab3974.pdf f951d31d01076ed1283967a166a0d0e6 PDF Text Text The Pursuit of Happiness: Four French Thinkers on Our Restless Quest for Contentment Lecture to be delivered at St. John’s College, Annapolis October 18, 2019 1. Thank you all for the great honor of coming to speak at St. John’s. I’ve admired St. John’s since my childhood in nearby Columbia; I have friends who were students here and friends who teach here, to say nothing of all that I have learned from the scholarship of the faculty. Moreover, for people like me who do the work of great books education on campuses where that project is less central, St. John’s is a beacon—a standard of what liberal education can be. I thus come to this campus upon which I’ve barely set foot before with an odd sense of homecoming. 2. Almost one hundred and eighty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville described Americans as “restless in the midst of their well-being.” Although Americans, as he saw them, were “the most free and enlightened men placed in the happiest condition in the world,” “a kind of cloud habitually covered their features,” and they seemed “grave and almost sad, even in their pleasures.” “A man, in the United States,” he writes, “carefully builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it while the ridgepole is being set; he plants a garden and he rents it as he is about to taste its fruit;” “he embraces a profession and he leaves it,” if he has a little leisure at the end of his year, “he takes his restless curiosity here and there” across this vast country. The Americans he saw had an incapacity for sitting still that revealed an abiding discontent. 3. Tocqueville’s observation on this point seems to become truer with every passing year. The 1830s America that looked to Tocqueville like a place of unprecedented human enlightenment and prosperity looks to us almost premodern, with people working enormously hard just to feed themselves, high maternal-fetal mortality, slavery, bad sanitation, and slow communication. Almost two hundred years of advancements have made us immeasurably more prosperous. But they have not made us measurably less restless. Depression, anxiety, and loneliness are all around us, starkly 1 �evident in the disturbing rise of so-called “deaths of despair.” Quieter forms of this unease are known to everyone who spends time with the young, including the very successful young people who graduate from colleges like this one. 4. There are surely many causes for this strange combination of prosperity and discontent. Some of these causes are political and economic, and might have political and economic solutions. But others are deeper—causes rooted in the constituent elements of our way of life. Today, I want to consider the distinctive restlessness Tocqueville observed, and that we can still observe, in the light of what I will argue is our distinctive way of pursuing happiness. That way of pursuing happiness developed centuries before Tocqueville, precisely as a strategy for palliating the natural restlessness of the human heart. I then want to argue that this modern way of understanding happiness, which I will call immanent contentment, exacerbates the very restlessness it is intended to alleviate. I want to suggest that the particular form of agitation that attends this particular way of pursuing happiness explains much about the present state of both our personal lives and our politics. 6. I’m going to make this argument by briefly outlining a conversation among four French thinkers, all of whom make an appearance in your seminars: the great essayist Michel de Montaigne, who originated the way of pursuing happiness I aim to understand and assess; the astonishing polymath Blaise Pascal, who offered the first and still most powerful critique of this way of pursuing happiness: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who transformed and radicalized the Montaignean quest for happiness understood as immanent contentment, and Tocqueville himself, who shows us what this mode of pursuing happiness does to our politics when it becomes the default way of life for an enormous modern nation. I will close by suggesting that we would be personally happier and politically better off if we reconsidered some of the basic assumptions behind this modern way of pursuing happiness. 2 �I: Michel de Montaigne and the Art of Immanent Contentment 7. This story of the modern pursuit of happiness begins in an era of profound unhappiness: the wars of religion of sixteenth century France. Michel de Montaigne lived through eight such wars, which convulsed France, turning neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, from 1562, when Montaigne was thirty, until the Edict of Nantes in 1598—six years after his death. 8. Montaigne began writing his Essays in 1572, the year the wars of religion reached their low point, with the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre on August 24. Montaigne describes that book, in which he inaugurates the use of the term essay to describe a literary form, as a self-portrait. That portrait offers a charming depiction of a self successfully engaged in the pursuit of immanent contentment, against France’s backdrop of a blood and fanaticism; it is that contrast that gives the Essays their pathos. 9. Montaigne writes the Essays in obedience to the Delphic injunction to “know thyself.” “I study myself more than any other subject,” he writes, “that is my physics, that is my metaphysics.” Highly personal though his book is, however, it is not without political import. It is by sounding the depths of his own apparently peaceable soul that Montaigne discovers the deepest causes of the troubles of his country. 10. “We are never at home,” he writes, “we are always beyond.” “Fear, desire, and hope launch us toward the future, and rob us of the sentiment of what is, to amuse us with what will be, even when we will be no longer.” Such is Montaigne’s depiction of human restlessness, which he knows firsthand. As he tells the story, when he first retired from his political career to his chateau to undertake a life of solitary contemplation, his own mind bolted like a runaway horse, giving birth to all manner of chimeras and fantastic monsters. Montaigne is, himself, a restless soul. 11. To alleviate this restlessness, Montaigne seeks to teach us, and himself, the art of being at home. The first lesson of that art is, as he puts it, “learning to die.” For Montaigne thinks that our 3 �restlessness is driven largely by our obsession with our own mortality. For his own part, Montaigne wants to die without thinking about it, and tells us that death will find him “planting his cabbages, nonchalant about death, and still more about his unfinished garden.” 12. Montaigne’s instruction in the art of dying well is a not particularly veiled critique of the Christian concern with immortality. But it is much more than that. Montaigne sees much of human ambition—the aspirations that drive philosophy, theology, politics, and even virtue itself—as a misanthropic and cruel rebellion against the human condition, which fuels, among other things, the political and religious traumas of his time. 13. Montaigne’s art of living is therefore an art of circumscription. “The course of our desires,” he writes, “must be circumscribed and restrained to the nearest and most contiguous good things. Moreover, their course should be directed not in a straight line that ends up elsewhere, but in a circle, of which the two points grasp one another and meet in ourselves by a brief contour.” Ambitious lives take the form of that straight line that ends up elsewhere; Montaigne seeks to bend those energies back around so as to return to himself. 14. Elsewhere, he specifies what this art of circumscription looks like in concrete terms: “In household management, in study, and in every other exercise, we must go up to the last limits of pleasure, but guard ourselves from engaging still further, where it begins to be mingled with pain.” Montaigne’s art of living is thus frankly hedonistic, but without the austerity thinkers like Epicurus thought true hedonism implied. 15. The motto of the Montaingean art of immanent contentment is thus moderation through variation. It is a life that seeks to achieve the ancient maxim of temperance, “nothing too much,” by adding a gentle modern corollary, “nothing too little.” 16. Although Montaigne draws extensively on the classical and Christian traditions to expound this vision of the good life, his departures from those traditions are substantial. Whether we consider 4 �the way of life of a philosopher such as Socrates, a citizen such as Cato, or a saint such as Augustine, all of them are living lives guided by some “one thing needful,” some “pearl of great price,” some virtue or activity without which life is “not worth living,” whether that one decisive thing is understood as philosophy, citizenship, or holiness. 17. Where Socrates contrasted the good life with mere life, Montaigne argues that mere life is the good life. We are “great fools,” he writes, to criticize a man for passing his life in idleness, or to look down on ourselves for “having done nothing today.” “What?” he asks. “Have you not lived? That is not only your fundamental occupation, but your most illustrious one.” This elevation of mere life, which might look slavish to a Roman or hellish to a Christian, to the status of the good life, is Montaigne’s great contribution to what we call modernity. In the wake of Calvin and Machiavelli, Montaigne’s art of seeking our contentment immanently speaks to the desires, as Pierre Manent has put it, of the millions of human beings who care neither for the salvation of their cities nor for the salvation of their souls. 18. This new understanding of the good life brings a new understanding of the virtues in its wake. First among these virtues is nonchalance, the cultivated carelessness that allows Montaigne not to take anything too seriously. The Essays themselves, which read like an undulating stream of consciousness without premeditated form, exemplify this rejection of the arts of orderliness. The intellectual side of this virtue is skepticism, the doubt which Montaigne applies to everything, thereby rebuffing the attempts of any and every good to take over his life. By so doing, Montaigne is able to exemplify the virtue of frankness in his speech: a man without pretensions has nothing to hide; he can dispense with caution and politesse and be straight with us. 19. Montaigne’s book was enormously successful—perhaps the most widely read book in Europe during the 17th century. Many of the great thinkers of that and future centuries would warm themselves at Montaigne’s cheering fire: Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, Diderot and Voltaire, 5 �Emerson and Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf and Stefan Zweig. In the generations immediately following Montaigne’s death, the Essays found an enormous audience among the rising class of bourgeois gentilhommes, a newly ascendant social group looking for a moral model to replace the chivalric ideal of the old nobility they intended to supplant. Many of them found that model in Montaigne, who became the standard bearer for the way of life of the so-called honnête homme. 20. But it was from that social class that arose, in the 17th century, the man who was at once perhaps Montaigne’s greatest reader and Montaigne’s greatest critic: Blaise Pascal, who would argue that Montaignean self-knowledge is self-alienation, and that Montaignean happiness is a human misery. 6 �II. Blaise Pascal and the Inhumanity of Immanence 21. A “frightening genius”—that is what Pascal was called by the father of French Romanticism, François René de Chateaubriand. A brief glance at his life will tell us why. Pascal was raised by a father, Étienne Pascal, who homeschooled him with a gentle attentiveness reminiscent of Montaigne’s “On the Education of Children.” Himself a serious mathematician, Étienne Pascal senses that his son will be captivated by mathematics, fears that this infatuation will cause him to neglect his Latin and Greek, and therefore withholds mathematical instruction during Pascal’s earliest years. But Pascal overhears the talk of his father and the mathematicians who frequent their home and begins to work at it on his own, inventing a private geometric vocabulary of barres and ronds. According to his sister, Étienne Pascal discovers his son’s clandestine mathematizing when he enters the twelve-year old’s room one day to find the boy deriving Euclid’s 32nd proposition for himself. Étienne has a change of heart, and begins to instruct Blaise formally. The young man will soon make significant contributions to the history of mathematics, not only with his works on conics and the cycloid, but also with his treatise on what he calls “the arithmetic triangle”—known to history as “Pascal’s Triangle”—which forms the basis of probability theory. At the age of nineteen, he invents and presides over the manufacture of the world’s first functioning calculator, capable of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers of as many as six digits. A handful of these so-called Pascaliennes survive to this day, in good working order. (Try that with your Texas Instruments in the year 2396). At twenty-five, he designs experiments on the void and atmospheric pressure that deflate the ancient scholastic commonplace that “nature abhors a vacuum.” At thirtythree, he writes his Provincial Letters: daring, uproarious satires of the most powerful churchmen in France, the Jesuits, and one of the greatest bestsellers of the ancien régime. He then sets to work on an enormously ambitious Apology for the Christian Religion. Even though illness and early death will keep him from making so much as a first draft of the book, his undigested notes, collated and 7 �published by his friends as the Thoughts of M. Pascal on Religion and Several Other Subjects, which were Found after his Death among his Papers, will become a classic of French moral philosophy and one of the most important works of Christian apologetics ever written. Finally, at the end of his life, he collaborates with his friend Arthus de Roannez to give Paris the world’s first system of public transportation, the five-cent carriages, donating all profits to charity. 22. Pascal’s mathematical and scientific genius, his literary and philosophic brilliance, his technological and philanthropic contributions to the great Baconian project for the improvement of the human condition are the unimpeachable credentials of a first-order modern mind. But Pascal is no standard-issue modern innovator, however brilliant. For he perceives the disturbing existential consequences of the modern scientific revolution as few have before him, or since. To Pascal, the universe revealed by modern physics is a world in which man finds himself at sea, prisoner of a meaningless nature that is utterly silent in the face of the human demand for the wisdom we need in order to live well. The Montaignean quest for immanent contentment, intended to vindicate “nature, complete without grace,” as one critic as put it, takes place in the context of a universe that science relentlessly demonstrates to be no home for man. Pascal’s rejoinder to Montaigne is that truly thinking through the scientific modernism Montaigne helped invent intensifies rather than blunts our need for transcendence. 25. Pascal’s reflections on this existential dislocation derived as much from his moral insights as from his scientific ones. He grew up among people who fashioned their lives after the Montaignean pattern of the honnête homme—gentle, moderate, intelligent, curious sorts who were interested in much but carefully avoided taking anything too seriously. Pascal’s examination of the lives of these adepts in the Montaignean art of pursuing our contentment immanently suggested to him that they were fooling themselves, and were far more discontent than they knew. 8 �26. We see this in Pascal’s great analysis of hunting and gambling—the latter a diversion particularly beloved by some of his friends among the honnêtes hommes. Give the gambler his winnings or the hunter his prey, he points out, asking only that he forsake his beloved activity, and you will make him unhappy. And yet, if you allow him the game without the stake, or the chase without the quarry, the charm of the thing will be equally lost. When we’re in the game, we long for the goal at the end of it; when we possess the goal, we want the game to begin again. In motion, we long for rest, at rest, we long for motion. 27. What we truly love, on this analysis, is diversion—that which gets our minds off of ourselves. But our love of diversion drives not only our amusements but our most serious activities. “What is it to be superintendent, chancellor, prime minister, but to have a position in which a great number of people come each morning and from every quarter, so as not to leave any of them an hour a day in which they can think about themselves?” Beyond making us feel important, responsibility is an extraordinarily effective distraction, and distraction, at bottom, is what we desire. 28. Why? Because, as Pascal writes, “we cannot sit still in our rooms.” Pascal thus rediscovers the restlessness that drove Montaigne to create his art of immanent contentment. And he discovers that restlessness at work in the hearts of the greatest adepts of that Montaignean art. The love of variety so characteristic of Montaigne and his followers reveals their abiding discontent. 29. What is the root cause of this inability to endure stillness, solitude, and quiet? Pascal tells us that it is “the natural unhappiness of our weak and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can console us when we think about it closely.” “We want truth,” he continues, “and find only incertitude in ourselves. We want happiness and find only misery and death. We are incapable of not wanting truth and happiness, yet we are incapable of truth and happiness.” 31. Pascal thus makes the case that human beings are naturally unhappy. That is, our unhappiness does not arise from our particular failures or vices or strokes of bad luck; our unhappiness arises 9 �from the disproportion between the limitless character of our desires and the finite character of every good we can give ourselves. We cannot cure our unhappiness, which is the natural human condition. This remark has particular salience for Americans and Englishmen, for whom unhappiness is, as Peter Kreeft remarks, the “truth we most assiduously hide.” 32. This unhappiness results from the distinctive human combination of finitude and intelligence. We are as weak as reeds, Pascal tells us, so fragile that we can be killed by a vapor or a drop of water. While this is true of every living thing, it makes man uniquely miserable, because of our unique selfconsciousness about the deadly facts of life. That self-consciousness makes our mortality and ignorance seem like a kind of exile or loss of place, like “the misery of a deposed king.” There is a massive disproportion between the thoughts our minds seem to have been born to think and the deaths our mortal frames fate us to die. As Pascal writes, “l’homme depasse l’homme,” “man transcends man.” 33. Pascal seeks to bring us to self-knowledge by making us aware of this disproportion, which he sees as the mark of both our misery and our greatness— the misery of the sole being we know of that necessarily lives with consciousness of its own death and folly; the greatness of the sole being we know of that can think the thoughts “universe” and “God.” As Pascal writes, “if [man] exalts himself, I humble him; if he humbles himself, I exalt him, until he comprehends that he is an incomprehensible monster.” I think he means the term monstrous precisely: what we are cannot be understood in natural terms. Pascal endeavors to show us this truth about ourselves so as to set us in motion, in search of some answer to the riddle of our own beings. He hopes to make us “seekers in anguish.” 34. If Pascal is right, the Montaignean quest to make ourselves immanently happy could reach a successful conclusion only at the price of the obliteration of the human heart. Our unhappiness is deeper, but our greatness is also vaster, than Montaigne imagined. Our hearts are restless not 10 �accidentally, not because of moral failures such as over-eagerness or inattention, but because we are wayfaring strangers, not made to be at home in this world. 35. Pascal seeks to set us in motion, to make us seek, because he believes there is an answer to our questions, a hidden God, whose strange story is the weird answer to the weird question that is the human heart. But his appeal has never been limited to those who come to share his faith. Nietzsche was the first in a long line of postmodern thinkers who could exclaim “Pascal’s blood flows in my veins!” For the existential unease he describes so poignantly is the quiet but insistent companion of our modern search for happiness. 36. The self-knowledge Pascal offers is a sad wisdom. In the years after Pascal’s death, Louis XIV and his age decided that it was not wisdom at all. Both the Church and the monarchy turned against Pascal and his Jansenist friends; Pascal’s works wound up on the Index of Prohibited Books, and the Jansenists’ home at the monastery of Port-Royal was demolished, its tombs desecrated. As the Promethean rationalism of the Enlightenment took flight, the eighteenth century seemed to forget that the seventeenth century ever existed, and simply picked up where the 16th left off, as the great French literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve put it. The eighteenth century philosophes, with Voltaire as their leader, tended to rally to Montaigne and dismiss Pascal as a misanthrope. That tendency, however, admitted of one great exception: perhaps the most capacious mind of the age, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 11 �III. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the Tragedy of Nature’s Redeemer 37. Rousseau set Europe on fire with everything from a hit opera to a bestselling novel to enormously influential books on education, politics, and universal history. He did so in part because he agreed with Pascal that modern man, in spite of all the delights Voltaire so memorably celebrated—the vivacious wine, the delicate food, the splendid song, painting, and sculpture, the carriages fitted out with excellent shock absorbers—is shallow, anti-social, and secretly miserable. Modern man seeks science merely so as to distinguish himself; his refined amusements merely hide his unease. True love and friendship have no place in his glittering society, which is in reality “a society of smiling enemies,” as Arthur Melzer has put it. For thinking so, Rousseau came to be seen by Voltaire, Diderot, and others, as a traitor, who uses the kinds of arguments and evidence the Enlightenment developed to critique the Enlightenment itself. 39. Though Rousseau agrees with Pascal that modern man is miserable, he does not, however, accept Pascal’s contention that such misery is natural. For Pascal, nature is fallen, but can be redeemed by God. For Rousseau, man is fallen, but can be redeemed by nature. 40. To prove this contention, Rousseau performs a vast experiment, both in his writings and on his life. He describes the huge, astonishingly various corpus this experiment produces as a “sad and great system” of thought. I take him to be in complete earnest in his use of each of these terms. His thought is systematic: in spite of its apparent contradictions, it can be understood as a consistent, even zealous attempt to redeem Montaignean immanence by combining it with Pascalian depth. Great, in that any such combination is surely a feat for the ages. And sad, insofar as his attempt to do so fails. That failure is, however, the heart of what Rousseau has to teach us. 41. Rousseau’s system begins with his famous state-of-nature story, which is a genealogy of human dividedness. We begin as natural man: solitary, mute, and almost mindless, but self-sufficient and content with life, a truly unpremeditated Montaignean. Our efforts to win a living from nature, 12 �however, lead us into ever more frequent contact with one another, the ever-accelerating development of our faculties, and ever-deepening interdependency. As we come to need others, we come to care what they think of us. Eventually, amour-propre, our concern to attract the good opinion, the admiration, and the envy of others, becomes the governing passion of human existence. Because the face we put on for others, tricked out with words like justice, love, and the common good, never matches the truth we know of ourselves, which is all passion, fear, and ambition, our concern with their opinions leaves us ever more divided. 42. Having told us this sad story in his Second Discourse, Rousseau attempts to resolve the problem of dividedness he describes through a series of experiments that consist in giving oneself, wholeheartedly, to one or another alternative on his human landscape. Modern man, the bourgeois, is, as he says, “nothing:” too self-interested to be truly social, too obsessed with the opinions of others to be truly solitary. To become something is, in the first place, to choose. There are many alternatives to choose from in Rousseau’s system; for the sake of brevity, I will focus on just two: his citizen and his solitary. 43. Rousseau’s first great philosophic statement, the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, begins on a famous walk he takes from Paris to Vincennes where his friend Diderot is imprisoned. Indulging the bookish man’s bad habit of reading while he walks, Rousseau encounters, in a newspaper, an essay contest on the question of whether the revival of the arts and sciences has contributed to the purification of morals. His answer is a tremendous no, spoken in the voice of the Roman consul Fabricius, whom he imagines denouncing the luxury of imperial Rome from the perspective of the rough huts of the ancient Republic. Himself born in the Republic of Geneva, Rousseau attacks the vain and cunning self-love of modern man from the vantage point of a human being wholeheartedly dedicated to the political community—the vantage point of the citizen. 13 �44. The citizen sees himself, as Rousseau puts it, not as Gaius or Lucius, but as a Roman. Good social institutions extend the amour-propre of the individual over the whole community, through cradle-to-grave immersion in the unceasing spectacle of public life, which produces an “intoxication” that “raise[s] men above themselves.” By so doing, those social institutions allow civic virtue to become not a pretense but an integral way of life, thereby overcoming the human dividedness at the heart of Rousseau’s diagnosis of the problem of the bourgeois. 45. This picture of wholehearted civic virtue has proven powerfully attractive. But its achievement requires, as Rousseau makes clear, “denaturing man.” And there is perhaps no modern author who has done more to make the prospect of such denaturalization revolting to us than Rousseau himself, whose history of the human race is self-consciously calculated to make us long for natural simplicity. No reader of Rousseau could be expected to accept the prospect of denaturalization without at least wondering whether we might recover a form of integrity that deserves the name natural. Rousseau offers us a more natural model of integrity at the other extreme of his system, in the figure of his solitary. 46. Rousseau’s effort to recapture the wholeness modeled by natural man stands at the heart of his autobiographical writings, particularly the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Therein, he shows us how a highly-developed, modern human being might recover the self-contentment known to natural man. 47. The greatest episode of Rousseau’s effort to recapture that contentment is his sojurn on the small island called St. Peter’s in the middle of a Swiss lake. For the two months that he lives there, Rousseau immerses himself in solitary, intentionally unproductive activities: botanizing simply for the wonder of admiring plants, floating around aimlessly in a little boat, sitting on the shore of the even smaller island next door to St. Peter’s, just listening to the waves lap. 48. Rousseau treasures these experiences because they provide him with just enough sensory stimulation to “sense [his] existence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think.” He thereby 14 �experiences what he calls “the sentiment of existence,” a psychic state in which he thinks of neither past nor future; in which he feels neither desire nor fear; in which he thinks of no one else and does not care what others think of him; in which he delights in the goodness of simply being. Though civilized human beings often forget this fact, being, simply being, is good. 49. Rousseau’s depiction of this experience is surely inspiring. But when we examine it closely, it proves to have a quixotic character. In the first place, although his description of his experience on St. Peter’s island is a paean to solitude, he is not in fact alone there: he is dependent on the tax collector and his family who are his landlords on the island. He is also dependent on Thérèse, his faithful, much-maligned companion, mother of the five children he abandoned at a foundlings hospital, whom he rarely dignifies with the name of wife. She is a living reminder that Rousseau never achieves practical self-sufficiency. 50. Nor is Rousseau’s mind truly free from the concern with the opinion of others, from the amourpropre that is the source of human dividedness. This becomes clearest in another episode of the Reveries, in which a botanizing expedition in the mountains leads him into a secluded glade where he supposes himself completely alone, and perhaps the first human being ever to have set foot there. Solitary yet joyfully immersed in the sentiment of existence, he compares himself to another Columbus, planting his flag in this undiscovered country of psychic possibility. But the amour-propre of a man who imagines himself in such terms remains very much alive—a point that is brought home to Rousseau when he hears a clanking sound, bursts through a thicket, and finds a stocking mill churning away just twenty feet from his undiscovered country. Rousseau’s quest to recover the solitary, god-like wholeness and contentment of natural man achieves no enduring consummation. 51. Were we to consider the other alternatives within the Rousseauan system, such as the couples Emile and Sophie, and Jean-Jacques and Mme de Warens, or Rousseau’s other great solitary, the Savoyard Vicar, we would find that all of them have the same character as the citizen and the solitary 15 �walker: powerfully attractive in their efforts to transcend bourgeois dividedness, yet ultimately fraught with contradictions that fatally undermine those efforts. All these thought experiments are ultimately failures, and Rousseau was being precise when he called his system “sad.” 52. But a failed experiment can still be an instructive one. Rousseau is like a chemist whose experiment blows up in his face, but leaves a telling residue in the beakers. The attempt to redeem Montaignean immanence from Pascal’s attack by investing ourselves wholeheartedly in one or another possibility on the Rousseauan landscape does not work. Redoubled dedication and renewed singleness of mind cannot save the quest for immanent contentment from its failure to meet the deepest demands of our nature. 16 �IV. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy and the Naked Soul 53. To recapitulate: we began this brief tour of the thought of France’s moralistes with Montaigne’s insistence on the possibility of immanent contentment—his attempt to demonstrate that human beings can limit their aspirations to within the confines of this mortal life, and learn to live pleasantly, peacefully, and reasonably therein. Pascal found in Montaigne a brilliant breviary of human psychology, but nonetheless held him to be wrong about who we are and how we should live, arguing that we are both greater and more miserable than Montaigne imagined—beings built for anguished God-seeking rather than pleasant self-seeking. Rousseau sought to re-imagine immanent contentment in forms capable of meeting the challenge of Pascal’s critique, from his citizen to his solitary walker. His sad and great system demonstrates, however, that such alternatives are destined to fail. 54. This great argument deeply informed the thought of our final thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville. During his famous visit to the United States, Tocqueville read the prose of American life with the poetry of these French moralistes resounding in his ears. He studied Rousseau daily, and was even more devoted to Pascal; his great friend Gustave de Beaumont wrote that the minds of Tocqueville and Pascal were “made for one another.” Tocqueville’s encounter with Montaigne was less intensive, and largely mediated by Pascal. But when Tocqueville diagnosed the restless unhappiness of democratic man, he was echoing Pascal’s diagnosis of the restless unhappiness of Montaignean man. 55. In Democracy in America, we behold the spectacle of the great drama of the soul that takes place in the pages of the moralistes scaled down to the prosaic, domestic scene of millions of ordinary households, and multiplied over the expanse of an enormous nation. In this country, Tocqueville sees immanent contentment become the standard of aspiration for millions, and it is as a reader of Pascal that he made the famous observation with which I began—that Americans are restless in the 17 �midst of their prosperity. He sees the existential conundrum of the thinking reed haunting American life from the mansions of Boston to the backwoods kitchens of the frontier. 56. Tocqueville also sees that, in a democratic country, so much psychic unease could not be without political consequences. In the minutes remaining, I want to consider our unease and its political ramifications by focusing on one particular aspect of the search for immanent contentment: our hostility to what Tocqueville calls “forms.” Suspicion of forms accompanies the search for immanent contentment from its inception in the thought of Montaigne. The unsettling political implications of this hostility to forms were on display in the Jacksonian America Tocqueville beheld in 1831, and are visible to us now. 57. Democratic human beings, Tocqueville writes, “despise forms, which they consider as useless and inconvenient veils placed between them and the truth.” He never defines the term “forms” precisely, but the meaning of it emerges from the portrait of aristocratic society he paints to put democracy into relief. In aristocratic society, the observation of formalities structured all of social life. One addressed people by their proper titles: “my lady” and “your grace,” “sir” and “madam.” One went through the prescribed motions, from bowing and curtseying in the ballroom to kneeling and crossing oneself in church. One had to dress one’s part, and know one’s place in the ranks of men, so as not to dishonor oneself by placing oneself too low or give offense to others by placing oneself too high. 58. The pursuit of immanent contentment is hostile to forms from its outset. Montaigne writes that we “must tear the masks off of things as well as people;” and reminds us that kings and great ladies go through the messy, funny, sad business of bodily life just like everyone else, from toilet to boudoir to deathbed. His frank, unpretentious irreverence is essential to his effort to scale every human pursuit down to within the circuit of immanence—we can glide lightly over the surface of life because nothing deserves to be taken with the seriousness our formalities imply. 18 �59. Rousseau, for his part, takes this hostility to forms to his wonted extremes. His rejection of bourgeois, Parisian life includes the rejection of all its finery, and he theatrically says goodbye to the formal accoutrements of Paris when he quits the city: the watch, the sword, the linen shirts, all of it. He comes to distrust even as much formalism as is required for articulate speech, trusting more in inarticulate cries and gestures as the truest revelations of the human heart. He once chooses to make his thoughts known to the staid David Hume through the highly informal act of leaping into his lap and bathing him with kisses. 60. In America, Tocqueville sees this hostility to forms democratized. To refuse to observe formalities is to take liberties, and free peoples enjoy taking liberties. There is nothing more discordant to our ears than being told to “know our place.” Formal speech, formal dress, social ranks, acts of intellectual or spiritual deference—all of them conflict with the defining belief of a democratic age, the belief in the equality of conditions. And so we strip them away, often engaging in a kind of ritualistic self-exposure that allows us to perform our liberation from social expectations and encumbrances. Wearing flip-flops to class, asking other people’s children to call us by our first names, the replacement of the organ by the praise band in church—all of it is a contemporary manifestation of the nonchalance Montaigne celebrated so long ago. 61. This hostility to forms is not merely a matter of casual taste and impatience with rigmarole. It has a philosophic side—an implied metaphysical materialism. Americans, as Tocqueville writes, are often disposed “to believe that everything is only matter.” We find formality unpleasant and unnecessary in part because we suspect that form is not real. Appearance and shape seem to us evanescent and deceptive; what is real is the tangible, the material, the stuff of things; what is real is matter, which has mass and volume. This belief has special power among us because it aligns with one of the most powerful passions of the democratic soul, what Tocqueville calls “the love of 19 �material well-being.” Our love of improving the material conditions of our lives, our concentration on those material conditions, makes us prone to the belief that matter is all that matters. 62. This moral and metaphysical materialism decisively shapes our understanding of ourselves. Human beings disposed to suspect forms and trust in matter soon come to doubt the reality of the soul, which Aristotle describes as the “living form” of an organic being. It is form or soul that endures across the constant material flux of time and metabolism; it is form that constitutes the unity and continuity of a person. Those to whom material realities often seem like the only realities therefore come to doubt the reality of their very selves. They wonder if what is called the soul is as illusory and meaningless as one of those aristocratic titles people used to get so fussy over; they wonder if the soul they experience is merely a “powerless transient being[s] in an organically generated cyberspace,” as one advocate of this view has put it. As the later Peter Augustine Lawler wrote, democratic man comes to fear that it is his fate to be a “miserable accident perceiving itself as such.” 63. To suspect that we are merely miserable accidents of course leaves us deeply doubtful of our own reality as rational agents whose capacities for thought and action about and on the world are real and potent. Doubt of the reality of our thinking, acting selves is the existential heart of our unease. Turned outward, this doubt of ourselves takes of the form of a deep-seated suspicion of the motives of others. If we have no confidence in the substantial reality of our own freedom and reason, after all, we will not have any confidence in the freedom and rationality of others. We will be prone to the view that the hidden play of material forces and interests really drive everything, behind the masks of politeness, the appearance of fairness, and the rules of procedure. 64. Our suspicion of the motives of others, ultimately rooted in our suspicion of the reality of ourselves, inclines us toward a dark, flat, and ultimately corrosive view of politics. Politics in the Aristotelian sense—reasoned if intense negotiation between conflicting, plausible, and earnestly held 20 �ideas about the good—ceases to make sense when we understand ourselves not as rational animals seeking the good, however errantly, and understand ourselves instead as pinballs passively bounced around by hidden drives and forces. Public argument, seen in such a light, comes to seem a series of performative gestures that merely divert attention from the conflicts of material interest that really motivate everyone. 65. When we cease to believe that people are motivated by the principles they invoke, we treat them differently. Conservatives see liberals not as people earnestly if misguidedly working to alleviate entrenched injustice, but as insular cultural elites signaling their virtue; liberals see conservatives not as people sincerely if mistakenly working to preserve traditional morality, but as rich white men perpetuating their privilege. Those who invoke principles that might limit political conflict sound weak or duplicitous. For to abide by such limits, we fear, is to be duped into observing arbitrary constraints on one’s latitude for action that will not trouble one’s adversaries. The human beings with whom politics deals come to seem like crude masses to be moved and manipulated by whatever means necessary. We see no particular need to handle them with delicacy or respect, or to allow them the freedom to seek a truth that cannot be seared into their brains by social pressure. 66. In such circumstances, vulgarity will come to be the political vernacular favored by all sides, and political violence will enjoy an increasing measure of legitimacy. For crude words and fisticuffs are nothing if not honest and unvarnished. The vulgar and the violent demonstrate that they are not fooled by deceptive appearances, and understand the need to fight fire with fire. 67. In such circumstances, the whole architecture of separations that is the hallmark invention of liberal politics comes to seem suspect. For the most fundamental separation upon which that whole system reposed, the separation between the church and the statehouse, between transcendent concerns and immanent ones, comes to seem an outmoded screen for corruption when immanent and even material concerns are understood to be the only genuine and powerful human motives. 21 �68. Politics in what Charles Taylor calls “the immanent frame” thus comes to reflect the existential unease of the souls that inhabit that frame. That unease drives political imprudence, abets hostility to restraint, encourages vulgarity, rawness, and violence, and explains our growing impatience with other human beings whom we find it ever more difficult to regard as separate and serious realities that we are bound to respect. The defense of immanence, an ingenious invention of prudence that once helped mark off the space that freedom and individuality require, comes to breed a new form of imprudence, bent upon collapsing all such spaces. The deepest source of that imprudence is our increasingly over-simplified understanding of ourselves. 22 �Conclusion: Liberalism and the Good Life 69. If the foregoing argument is correct, a revival of the fortunes of our shaky republican government depends upon a rethinking of what we are and what we are living for. For the restlessness that unsettles us, personally and politically, ultimately stems from our continually frustrated attempt to achieve immanent contentment, which is a kind happiness incapable of satisfying a being whose nature surpasses itself, as Pascal put it. 70. Such a rethinking might begin with a reexamination of the early modern thinker with whom I began, Montaigne, and of the skepticism to which his case for pursuing happiness under the guise of immanent contentment is conjoined. For that skepticism has become reflexive, and has unstrung our very capacity for thinking about the kind of happiness beings like us might need. 71. Montaigne’s case for moderation through variation, for a life that takes nothing as the “one thing needful,” depends upon his critique of all accounts, religious and philosophic, of a good life with such a center. He presents that critique in the longest chapter of the Essays, his “Apology for Raimond Sebond.” In reading it, one notices that he does not make his case for skepticism by refuting, in any detail, any argument for a definite conception of the good. Rather, he draws attention to the proliferation of such conceptions, piling up the most absurd arguments next to the most reasonable ones until our heads spin. “Now trust in your philosophy,” he challenges the reader, and “boast that you have found the bean in the cake, when you consider the clatter of so many philosophical brains!” 66. This rhetorical strategy, as T. S. Eliot notes, is like a gas—it is an atmosphere we breathe in, not an argument we consider. Montaigne wants to humble us by making us feel that our intellectual lives are cosmically unsupported. While his reasons for adopting this strategy amid the theologyinfused bloodbath of his time may certainly draw our sympathy, the examination we have undertaken of life lived within the immanent frame in which Montaigne encloses us should, I think, suggest to 23 �us that dealing with the problems of our time might require us to reconsider what reason can show us about how we should live our lives. 67. Re-opening the question of what we can know about how we should live would involve reexamining the indications we have of the kind of lives that are suitable to beings with our distinctive, upright, and open human form. It would also involve renewed consideration just how well the various goods to which we are attracted might hold up as the abiding object of aspiration for the life we will live with the nature we have been given. 68. I can think of no educational institution in the country that does more to raise such questions and take them seriously than St. John’s College. The work you do here is thus not only of personal and philosophic importance, but of the highest political importance. I am again grateful to you for allowing me to offer you my thoughts today in what I hope is in accord with the spirit of this place. Thank you. 24 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. 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Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 24 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Pursuit of Happiness: Four French Thinkers on Our Restless Quest for Contentment Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered by Benjamin Storey, Associate Professor, Department of Politics and International Affairs, and Co-Director of the Tocqueville Program at Furman University, on October 18, 2019 as part of the Formal Lecture Series. The introduction to Storey's lecture was not recorded. Storey describes his lecture topic as follows: "In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that Americans are 'restless in the midst of their well-being'—strangely uneasy even as they enjoy unprecedented prosperity. This talk will consider the long French tradition of thinking about restlessness that lies behind that observation. It will begin by showing how the great essayist Michel de Montaigne seeks to quiet our restlessness by teaching us a new way of pursuing happiness, a way of life distinguished by the central place it accords to the modern virtues of skepticism, authenticity, and nonchalance. Turning next to Pascal and Rousseau, the paper will consider their separate and distinctive critiques of the Montaignean pursuit of happiness, which, in their view, deepens the very restlessness it is intended to palliate. The paper will conclude with a consideration of Tocqueville’s analysis of American politics in the light of his insight into the psychological unease of the American citizen, and an argument for how we might pursue happiness better by reconsidering some of the assumptions of modern skepticism from which we began." Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Storey, Benjamin Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audio recording of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859 Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778 Pascal, Blaise, 1623-1662 Happiness Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Storey_Benjamin_2019-10-18_Typescript Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/51ca4d96e1dbb5f23c7031aaf95f1f3f.pdf f9a90c9ccfecc17bc44cd35708b2299d PDF Text Text Speaking Freely and the Conversational Virtues Joseph C. Macfarland A lecture given at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD August 23, 2019 “Except for the requirements of common courtesy, there are only two rules [in seminar]…” I am quoting from the Statement of the St. John’s Program… “First, all opinions must be heard and explored, however sharply they may clash; second, every opinion must be supported by argument—an unsupported opinion does not count.” Skipping ahead a little: “The course of the discussion cannot be fixed in advance; it is determined rather by the necessity of ‘following the argument,’ of facing the crucial issues, or of seeking foundations upon which a train of reasoning can be pursued. The argument does not necessarily lead to the answer to a question. More often than not the question remains open but with certain alternatives clearly outlined. The progress of the seminar is not particularly smooth; the discussion may sometimes branch off and entangle itself in irrelevant difficulties. Only gradually can the logical rigor of an argument emerge within the sequence of analogies and other imaginative devices by which the discussion is kept alive. A seminar may also degenerate into rather empty talk, without being able for some time to extricate itself from such a course. At its best, the seminar may reach insights far beyond the initial views held by any of its members.” About this passage, I want to draw two observations: first, it would appear that seminar is characterized by the “freedom of speech” therein: “all opinions must be heard and explored,” “the course of the discussion cannot be fixed in advance,” “more often than not the question remains open.” We are committed to this freedom even at the risk of the conversation occasionally devolving into “empty talk” or getting entangled in “irrelevant difficulties.” The second observation: the phrase, “freedom of speech,” which carries so much weight in American political culture, is not mentioned, not invoked, as if its presence were an unintended consequence of other intentions. The freedom with which the seminar conversation moves serves a deeper freedom of thought, the substance of a liberal education.1 1 From elsewhere in the Statement, about seminar: “The demands of the individual and those of the group are in continuous interplay, setting limits within which the discussion moves with the utmost possible freedom.” And: “These [the liberal] arts enable all human beings to know the world around them and to know themselves in this 1 �In the last several years, it has become common for colleges to declare their commitment to freedom of speech or freedom of expression. Several years ago the University of Chicago released a statement on ‘freedom of expression’; some version of this statement has been endorsed by sixty odd colleges and universities. This past spring, the president of the United States signed an executive order mandating that colleges uphold free speech lest they jeopardize federal research funds. The order, as framed, will have little practical impact on colleges.2 But observers of all kinds found the action alarming, as it seemed designed to ignite partisan political skirmishes within the academy, and to demean the noble principle through its patently partisan deployment. I feared that even to mention the president’s action could do the same to the discourse I’ve embarked on tonight—should I have censored myself, lest I introduce partisan strife? Can we hear the fact, without slipping into the mode of discourse initiated there? Regarding the more principled defense of freedom of speech in the academy, I will note that in some respects the Chicago statement echoes our own and there is much to admire in it. For example, “Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.” The conditions for this hard thinking and strong disagreement require valuing civility and nourishing a climate of mutual respect.3 The Chicago statement avers that “free inquiry is indispensable to the good life.” Yet in some respects, I find the Chicago statement does not suit a community of learning as I understand it, the one I believe we share. While the statement begins by emphasizing freedom of inquiry, it settles more firmly on freedom of expression. At the same time, not world, and to use that knowledge with wisdom. Under the guidance of these arts, they can free themselves from the constraint of prejudice and the narrowness of beaten paths.” 2 Chronicle of Higher Education, Andy Thomason, March 21, 2019: “But public colleges are already legally bound to do so by the First Amendment. And private colleges will be required only to ‘comply with their stated institutional policies regarding free inquiry,’ according to Politico, which cited an unnamed senior official in the Trump administration.” (“Trump's hyped free speech order asks colleges to do what they already have to,” Politico, Benjamin Wermund, March 21, 2019). 3 Although the statement pointedly adds: “concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.” 2 �coincidentally, it often emphasizes the value of “uninhibited debate and deliberation.”4 In this mode, conversation is envisioned as a place for competition. The word “debate” is derived from battere, a word in early Romance languages which meant, “to fight.” The English word debate originally meant to “fight” or “strive with” in the literal sense; it acquired its current, figurative sense—to dispute a matter of public interest—soon after.5 A debate is a “contest”; it has contestants, judges, an audience. An invisible wall is erected between the participants and the auditors—the speakers strive to persuade; they are not themselves available for persuasion; the auditors—the judges, the audience—are passively worked upon by the persuaders. The historical analogy may be to the lists, where knights in armor meet on chargers with pointed lances; the modern analogy is to the courtroom.6 The adversarial arrangement is designed to elicit arguments framed with maximum force, to clarify the choice to be made by a third party, the audience or the jury. The freedom being articulated is a freedom of expression: each may outwardly unfold his own conceits and supporting arguments without impediment. And from time to time, it offers the ephemeral sweetness of victory. The analogy to the courtroom reminds us that debate has a function essential to a free political society, but one may still question its usefulness in shared, free inquiry. Often in classes, we aim at a mode of understanding that is more secure, more certain, than mere persuasion; we aim at demonstration or knowledge. Yet even when we tread the territory in which demonstration becomes doubtful, and we must resort to judgment and imagination, we still speak less to express ourselves than to find and articulate the obscure but solid contours of our subject matter. Returning to the Statement of the Program: “The course of the discussion cannot be fixed in advance; it is determined rather by the necessity of ‘following the argument,’ of facing the crucial issues, or of seeking foundations upon which a train of reasoning can be pursued… Only gradually can the logical rigor of an argument emerge within the sequence of analogies and other imaginative devices by which the discussion is kept alive.” Our dialectical activity is not exclusively logical—it employs analogies and imaginative devices—but the 4 The brief document mentions “debate” five times, including in the introduction. Four times it appears in the phrase, “debate and deliberation.” 5 OED online gives as an example of the figurative sense: “1609 Shakespeare Sonnets xv. sig. B4 Wastfull time debateth with decay To change your day of youth to sullied night.” 6 OED: “1590 Spenser Faerie Queene ii. i. sig. M7v Well could he tourney and in lists debate.” 3 �underlying “argument” has enough of an inherent shape that we gradually conform to it as we clumsily discover it. “All opinions must be heard and explored, however sharply they may clash,” but, “every opinion must be supported by argument.” The type of inquiry we pursue requires a small enough community that we can tear down the barrier between speaker and auditor; each person in class speaks and listens; each is mover and moved. Conversely, vigorous debate as a model for learning may become more apt as the scale of the learning community grows: in a lecture hall, in a research university, in a research field, we are almost always auditors. After the courtroom, this brings me to the second analogy implicit in the defense of free speech: the marketplace. The tacit assumption seems to be that we will accumulate the greatest intellectual wealth where the movement of information is most free. In the commotion and competition of diverse arguments, true and useful notions will achieve their appropriate market share, one trusts, so long as their public expression is sustained and uninhibited.7 As John Locke said (in a work I will soon discuss): “For truth certainly would have done very well, if she were ever left to herself.”8 The auditors, the jury members in a courtroom, become consumers, and the discernment exercised by individuals is replaced by an invisible hand or the wisdom of the crowd.9 It is a serious question, of the greatest import, whether the free expression of competing ideas inevitably leads to the gradual prevalence of true ones; I am not able to judge; I am intrigued by the notion. It is of limited use, however, in thinking about our classroom— true, each participant, sharing in a common logos, will walk away with somewhat different impressions and opinions, but the classroom is not a marketplace of ideas. The importance of scale, from many to few, is noted in the Gorgias when Polus says to Socrates, “Do you not think that you have been refuted Socrates, when you say such things as no one among human beings would assert? Just ask anyone of these men [who are listening]”; to which Socrates responds, “I 7 A market is efficient when information about products, including prices, moves most freely; as a result, the market itself is thought to be the best distributor and aggregator of information. 8 Letter Concerning Toleration, in, Locke on Toleration, ed. Vernon (Cambridge University Press, 2010), page 31. Locke is concerned with the employment of government and law to persuade people about religion. On the analogy between freedom in the development of property and in the care of the soul, page 18. 9 In fairness, the Chicago Statement does not allude to the marketplace. I do think the analogy is implicit in much popular discourse about how free expression leads to the prevalence of correct notions. 4 �am not one of the political men… so do not bid me to put the vote to those present,” and, a little later, “all other men agree with you except me, whereas for me you, being one man alone, are quite enough to agree and bear witness… I put the vote to you alone and bid the others farewell.”10 Occasionally engaged in conversations on this subject, I was struck by the question of a colleague: why is it that, in reference to freedom of speech in the academy, we do not speak instead about toleration? If one wishes to create an environment that cultivates openness to different opinions, why emphasize one’s right to speak, rather than one’s obligation to listen? Within the American regime, free speech and toleration share a common source, the first amendment to the Constitution. They would seem to be complimentary parts of a coordinated intention. Within our sub-political community, a very small college, could toleration be a more fitting way to conceive of the space within which we pursue free inquiry? In order to think about this, I wanted to turn to a classic work on the subject to assist me; and I note that there is no such work on the program. And we might wonder why, when religious toleration is one of the most distinctive and, I would say, valuable, features of modern liberal democracies— answering this query is not easy. For the purposes of this talk, I will spend some time with Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, and, though it is off-the-program, it has the virtue of sharing many principles with the much more familiar Two Treatises of Government. This will constitute the second part of my talk; the third will move further back in time, to the virtues concerning “actions and speeches” in Aristotle’s Ethics. I will sketch what I take to be several principles of Locke’s account of toleration and the manner in which toleration is extended. This will bring us to a few surprising features in the doctrine, additional questions about how it is extended, and how it is relevant to our own community. 10 Gorgias 473e and 475e-476a, Nichols trans. (Cornell University Press, 1998). Of course, later, it is enough if only Callicles agrees with Callicles (482b); self-agreement under sustained examination is the necessary but not sufficient criterion for knowledge. Socrates is somewhat disingenuous here; he is, after all, conducting the argument as a demonstration for Gorgias. 5 �Locke’s account of toleration has two starting points, one, his reading of the Gospel, the other, his philosophy of politics. The Letter begins from the teaching of the New Testament. Very simply, being a Christian requires charity, gentleness, and goodwill (3); Locke flatly denies that persecution of others on the basis of their beliefs is compatible with charity and goodwill (3-4). Christ sent out his disciples, “to subdue nations and compel them to come into the church[,] not with swords or spears… but with the Gospel, with the message of peace[,] and with the exemplary force of holiness” (5).”11 The word toleration, in its earliest sense, means to “endure” or “sustain hardship” (OED), and, as Locke says, “the Gospel everywhere testifies that the true disciples of Christ must expect persecution and bear it” (11). That is, even if one were to set aside charity as a reason for toleration, toleration on its own appears to follow from Christ’s teaching. The second starting point for the account of toleration is Locke’s political philosophy: “the commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for preserving and advancing their civil goods… life, liberty, bodily health and freedom from pain, and the possession of outward things” (JWG, 67). For the sake of this end, preserving civil goods, governments institutes law, and rulers have the force with which to punish anyone who breaks the law and “violates the rights of others” (7).12 The salient feature of Locke’s teaching, of course, is that the power of government is limited: he aims to show, “that the whole jurisdiction of the magistrate is concerned only with these civil goods,… that all the right and dominion of civil power is bounded and confined solely to the care of these [civil] goods; and that it neither can nor ought to be extended to the salvation of souls.” With the exception of this last phrase about “souls,” all of this is familiar from the Two Treatises on Government, and still more familiar as a principle of American government from its first establishment. What is curious is that, although the Two Treatises on Government and the 11 For “compel,” Vernon refers us to Luke 14:23, “And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” This was evidently frequently referenced in the polemical literature of the age. (Locke’s Latin in this passage, cogendas, differs from the Vulgate in Luke 14:23, compellere; perhaps the polemical literature warrants the connection?) Quotations are from the Vernon translation, except for those noted as being from the J.W. Gough edition (JWG): Epistola de Tolerantia: A Letter on Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 12 6 �Letter Concerning Toleration were published in the same year, both anonymously, and although both works rest on the same political principles, the Second Treatise on Government is silent on the question of religious toleration.13 One might wonder, is the doctrine of toleration essential to Locke’s philosophy of politics, or is it an optional, dispensable supplement? Locke’s analysis of the question has as its primary object, the “church”: the “church” is the entity whose toleration is being examined. Locke’s definition of “church” is laid out as if it belonged to his political philosophy: a church is a sub-political association that is framed in partial analogy to the commonwealth. A church is a “free [and voluntary] society of men, joining together of their own accord for the public worship of God in such manner as they believe will be acceptable to the Deity for the salvation of their souls” (JWG, 71).14 No one is born into a church or bound to one by nature; each has the same liberty to leave it as they had to enter (9). Every free association has its rules, and the right of making these rules belongs to the association, or to whomever the association has approved by its consent (10).15 In terms of this rule-making autonomy, Locke says the church is similar to an association of businessmen or an association of “learned persons pursuing philosophy.”16 Especially in the case of the church, membership is a free choice because the path to salvation is for “every individual to investigate by his own efforts, thinking, searching, judging, and reflecting for himself, in sincerity of heart” (sincera mente, 19).17 13 Both were published in 1689, the Two Treatises in English, the Letter in Latin. Incidentally, Locke’s authorship of the Letter was revealed much before his authorship of the treatises. Also, Laslett notes passages in the Two Treatises that correspond to passages in the four letters on toleration, e.g., II.3, II.108, II.134, etc. (Two Treatise of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge University Press, 1960, 1996). Although the Second Treatise does not explain toleration, in the list of causes that might lead the people to resist their government, we find, in one instance, “when their Estates, Liberties, and Lives are in danger, and perhaps their Religion too” (II.209, emphasis added). In the following section, among the actions of the ruler that could prompt the dissolution of the government, Locke includes, “that Religion underhand favoured (though publicly proclaimed against) which is readiest to introduce [arbitrary power]” (II.210). 14 Elsewhere Locke does say that “true religion” comes into the world “to ground a life of goodness and piety… holiness of life, purity of morals, goodness of heart, and gentleness” (Vernon, 3). 15 It is strange that, in discussing rule-making within the church, Locke mentions the importance of consent (assensus, JWG, 73), but when discussing the commonwealth, he omits it—strange, since consent is such a central feature in his political teaching (Second Treatise, ch. 8). Perhaps the Letter Concerning Toleration, written in Latin, was intended equally for readers on the continent. 16 Societas literatorum ad philosopham; not quite following Gough (73) or Vernon (10). 17 “The only real way to spread the truth [is] to combine the weight of reason and argument with humanity and good will” (15). 7 �The argument for toleration seems to be advanced as much as possible on the grounds of political philosophy. According to Locke, the articulation of the civil power, including its limits, is religion-independent: “Civil power is the same everywhere, and it can bestow no more authority on a church if it is in the hands of a Christian prince than it can in the hands of a pagan prince” (14). Political philosophy appears sufficient “to mark the true bounds between the church and the commonwealth” (JWG, 65). In order to do this, one more principle is requisite: “The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists wholly in compulsion. But true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing has any value with God; and such is the nature of human understanding, that it cannot be compelled by any outward force [JWG, 69].” To Locke’s political philosophy is added a principle from another part of philosophy: that the mind cannot be compelled by force. If true religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, and if the civil power exercises a compulsion which has no effect on the mind, then the civil power is simply incapable of favoring one religion over another. “It is light that is needed to change a belief in the mind; punishment of the body does not lend light” (8). In judging whether a church should be tolerated, Locke identifies three salient features to be considered: its modes of worship, its speculative doctrines, and its practical or moral doctrines. Toleration appears to be unconditional when it comes to two of the three features, modes of worship and speculative doctrines. Regarding matters of worship, most are “indifferent in their own nature”: “the sprinkling of water, and the use of bread and wine, are things in their own nature and in ordinary life altogether indifferent” (JWG, 107). They are not indifferent to the members of the church who practice them, who regard them as instituted by God. But since they are indifferent in their own nature, the civil magistrate has no cause to prefer one over the other; and as they belong to the inmost beliefs of the worshippers, the civil power is obliged to respect these choices. As far as the civil power is concerned, if a Christian “should want to sacrifice a calf, that (I say) should not be forbidden by law… That does no harm to anyone, takes nothing from any man’s possessions” (25). Toleration is equally broad in relation to speculative doctrines: the ruler ought not prohibit the speculative opinions of any church, “because they have no bearing on the civil 8 �rights of the subjects.”18 “Laws are not concerned with the truth of opinions, but with the security and safety of the commonwealth and with each man’s goods” (JWG, 123). Locke resorts to the principle I mentioned before: truth “does not need force to find entrance into men’s minds, nor is she taught by the [voice] of the laws.” The limits and perplexities concerning toleration enter with the third feature of a church, its practical doctrines. Both the civil power and the church are concerned with instilling good morals; while the commonwealth requires that its citizens have good morals, the church appears more able to instill them.19 Locke admits that this may lead the church to infringe on the commonwealth, or vice versa, but he asserts that such infringements will be rare; few sects are likely to teach doctrines that undermine the foundations of society, as the given sect would endanger the peace and respect it enjoys.20 As the force of the argument for toleration arises from demonstrating the limits of the civil power, the argument of the Letter focuses on explaining why the civil power, the ruler, must tolerate all qualifying churches. Yet, in Locke’s view, it is very often a church having influence with the civil power that seeks to use that power to persecute a competing church. The rhetorical objective of the Letter therefore is to persuade each church why it must tolerate others. Locke emphasizes that toleration is, of its very nature, mutual or reciprocal: the condition for receiving it, is granting it (36). If a church is intolerant towards others at home, it cannot expect to be tolerated abroad; if it is intolerant now under advantageous political circumstances, it cannot expect to be tolerated in the future under disadvantageous ones (15). The aim appears to be to persuade churches not to avail themselves of the civil power in order to suppress competing faiths. Or to put it more strongly, while the central argument for toleration is mounted from the philosophical analysis of the powers of the commonwealth, the 18 JWG, 121. “To believe this or that to be true is not within the scope of our will” (JWG, 121). Good morals “are a major part of religion” and “play a role in civil life” (31). For example, Christianity is opposed to vices such as adultery, fornication, and lasciviousness (5), as well as bigotry and fanaticism (6). 20 “No doctrines, incompatible with human society, and contrary to the good morals which are necessary for the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate. But examples of these are rare in any church” (JWG, 131). Locke does imply that if the civil power seizes civil goods on the basis of disfavored religious belief, the result could be civil war (“Who shall be judge between them? I answer: God alone” [JWG, 129]; cf. Second Treatise 2.168, 2.241). Locke also considers cases where a sect deceptively teaches a doctrine that would give its members civil power over member of another sect. 19 9 �rhetorical thrust of the work suggests that toleration ought to be practiced, most of all, in society generally, below the level of politics. Having laid out several fundamental aspects of Locke’s argument, let me ask a few questions. First, how far does toleration extend? Locke is categorical in extending toleration to Jews, Muslims, idolaters, and even pagans (41). “No one… should be deprived of his earthly goods on account of religion, including [those natives of America] who have been subjected to a Christian prince… if they believe they please God and attain salvation by their ancestral rites, they should be left to God and themselves” (27). Locke impresses us with his humanity on this point. Famously, however, and a little shockingly to modern sensibilities, the Letter implies that Catholicism should not be tolerated if, by its practical doctrines, it claims to limit the civil power of the commonwealth, or to assert its own civil power (35).21 Locke does maintain that there is nothing in the speculative doctrines of Catholicism to merit intolerance (31). This may be a fitting moment to mention, as you may have recently heard, that our own Greenfield Library holds a brief, very early document in Locke’s own handwriting, which considers the advantages and disadvantages of tolerating Catholicism.22 Equally provocative to modern sensibilities is the total intolerance of atheism. “Lastly, those who deny the existence of the Deity are not to be tolerated at all. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon or sanctity for an atheist; for the taking away of God, even only in thought, dissolves all. Furthermore, a man who by his atheism undermines and destroys all religion cannot in the name of religion claim the privilege of toleration for himself” (JWG, 135). Here, too, the argument for intolerance appears to be based on practical, moral doctrine: atheists do not keep promises or contracts, 21 Locke does not mention Catholicism explicitly when implicating these doctrines. When discussing another doctrine that was attributed to Catholicism and would preclude its toleration, Locke hypothetically attributes it to a Turkish Muslim instead (36). The letter seems crafted to leave open the possibility of tolerating Catholics, if those doctrines were not held. Also: “Is worshipping in the Roman manner permitted? Then permit the Genevan also. Is speaking Latin allowed in the marketplace? Then allow those who so desire to speak it also in church” (40). 22 Walmsley and Waldmann, “John Locke and the Toleration of Catholics: A New Manuscript,” The Historical Journal, 2019; http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/6528?_ga=2.23967930.1816383851.15666713691602710236.1564332443. 10 �presumably because they do not expect rewards or punishments in the afterlife. Yet the doctrine for which they are criticized—that God does not exist—is speculative, not practical. This brings into question Locke’s separation of speculative and practical doctrines: it turns out not to be true that all speculative doctrines should be tolerated. Locke had said that the commonwealth has no care of the soul; the intolerance towards atheism appears to contradict this.23 As we are instinctively inclined to extend toleration further than Locke’s Letter, some readers have endeavored to rescue Locke from the opprobrium of having been intolerant in these two cases, and to discover in his various writings a more tolerant attitude to these groups. I am unable to judge these interpretations. The intolerance of the Letter, however, suggests that the attempt to articulate with precision the grounds of toleration inevitably leads to articulating the grounds for intolerance as well. As the indictment of atheism implies, at the very least, intolerance of whatever kind must itself not be tolerated. Insofar as we, inhabitants of a liberal democracy, are strongly predisposed in favor of toleration, it is vaguely troubling to think that, if toleration is not extended without limit, we must finally be resolved, at some point, contrary to our disposition, to be intolerant. A second question: is toleration extended exclusively on the basis of political philosophy? Just as Locke said, “civil power is the same everywhere,” so he also says, “ecclesiastical authority is the same everywhere”; everywhere it is true that the church “has no competence in civil matters and no power to compel” (40). The Letter freely extends toleration to Jews, yet it also notes that, in the Biblical commonwealth of the Israelites, there was no distinction between church and commonwealth; in that commonwealth, the civil laws dictated religious ritual and punished idolaters (28). The Biblical commonwealth appears not to meet the criteria for a “church.” Locke himself argues in favor of tolerating idolaters, and he argues that idolaters were in fact tolerated in the Biblical commonwealth (30). Toleration evidently depends on the 23 Locke originally said that the civil power is not concerned with “the salvation of the soul” (JWG, 67); later, it is not the responsibility of the civil power if a citizen “neglects the care of his soul” (17). If “care of the soul” means exclusively care for salvation, then perhaps it is true that the commonwealth has no care for the “soul”; but if “care of the soul” includes speculative belief that supports moral rectitude, then it seems the commonwealth does in fact have care of the soul, in contradiction to the earlier statement. The first interpretation may be correct. 11 �non-enforcement of some laws of the Biblical commonwealth.24 To frame the matter in general terms: admission to toleration requires that each religion conceive of itself in a way conformable to Locke’s definition of a church; that is, Locke’s definition of church is in some measure normative rather than descriptive. The same might be said of Locke’s claim that “the true… religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind.” Readers will approach this question differently: some will say that all churches are conceived to conform to the contours of Locke’s own church (whatever it may have been), that is, that the ultimate grounds of toleration are theological rather than philosophical. I would be inclined to say that the specific conception of a church is designed to attain a pragmatic end, civil peace and prosperity. Either way, an objectively philosophical derivation of the nature of a church seems wanting. A third question: what import would this conception of toleration have for our own subpolitical community, “our association of learned persons pursuing philosophy”?25 I turned to Locke’s account of toleration with the hope of discovering a principle that could explain how freedom of speech is enjoyed in a small community, without focusing directly on the right to that speech. And in some measure toleration meets that end: as I said, the practice of toleration is inherently mutual; it puts the emphasis on what you are willing to hear and endure, rather than what you are free to say. Toleration requires something hard of us, to endure heresy with equanimity, to hear speech that contradicts our most dear convictions about the highest matters. The doctrine of toleration appears most stable, most defensible, when it focuses on how the civil power is—by its own nature—limited; that is, it seems that toleration is established most securely at the level of political society. The activity of religion simply lies beyond the scope of the state’s coercive power. Yet because we cannot be confident that every religion would, from its own doctrine, conform to Locke’s specific definition of a “church,” the argument for toleration below the level of politics, in society more generally, appears to rest on 24 Perhaps Locke thinks that this was the only such regime, and so, an exception easily excluded? “For the commonwealth of the Jews was very different from others, being based on theocracy” (28). Locke is then at pains to establish that, once the commonwealth was established, men were not punished for idolatry, that is, idolaters were tolerated rather than punished by the civil power (30). 25 In addition to the philosophical society, at a lower level, Locke adds, the society “of men-of-leisure seeking conversation and entertainment” (10). 12 �a moral injunction: toleration is charitable. Yet it likewise cannot be assumed that every religion eligible for toleration will place the emphasis on charity needed to inspire toleration. In the absence of charity, perhaps toleration can rest on vaguer notions of “humanity and goodwill,”26 but we would still be lacking a demonstration of “humanity” as a virtue. Personally, I am willing to accept “humanity” as a reason to be tolerant, and I would recommend toleration to a peer as a salutary condition for serious conversation, this despite the fact that, so far, I cannot adequately delineate the scope or the grounds of that toleration. I turned to Locke’s account of toleration in order to think about free inquiry and free speech without depending on the right of the individual, but attending more to the conversational culture where free inquiry occurs. The turn to toleration served those ends insofar as Locke’s defense of it emphasizes mutual respect and forbearance more than individual rights. But in the case of Locke, one might be little more than the obverse of the other: if one person is obligated to tolerate the religion of another, in Locke’s framework of limited government, doesn’t this imply that the other has a right to the free practice of his religion as well as a right to public speech about it? So for the last part of this lecture I wanted to push back further from the range of modern thought, again, in order to think about the cultivation of free speech within a community of learning. In antiquity, of course, there was no doctrine of rights—no right of free speech or freedom of the press—and yet “free speech” is nevertheless a theme for our Greek authors. I am thinking of the word parrhesia and its cognates. It is a compound word, coming from pan, meaning “all” or “everything,” and rhesis, a “speech” or “saying.”27 Literally, it could mean, “to say everything,” or, “to speak completely”; more colloquially, it means “frankness” or “outspokenness.” An example from the Gorgias might be useful: Socrates credits Callicles with his, “knowledge, goodwill, and outspokenness,” parrhesia, because he was willing to say openly 26 Humanity and Christianity appear separable: “The magistrate is not obliged to put off either humanity or Christianity” (JWG, 69). 27 For the general conception of parrhesia, I have drawn on Michel Foucault’s “Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia,” a transcription of six lectures from 1983 (foucault.info/downloads/discourseandtruth.doc). I have not much attended to the trajectory of Foucault’s own thinking on the subject which leads to developments of parrhesia in Hellenistic thinking. 13 �what appeared shameful to others.28 And even without a doctrine of civil or natural rights, this free speech was understood to be the inheritance of equal, free-born citizens in a democracy, especially in Athens. The one who lacks it is a slave.29 So let me pose a question: where does “free” or “frank speech” fit in among Aristotle’s account of the virtues of “actions and speeches”? These virtues are found at the end of Book 4 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Let me say a few words about the structure of that book. It describes eight virtues; and, as many of you have observed, the first four—liberality, magnificence, greatness of soul, and ambition—form a set. The first two deal with wealth, the second two with honor; the first and fourth, that is, liberality and ambition, deal with wealth or honors in moderate measures; the second and third, magnificence and greatness of soul, deal with wealth and honor in extraordinary measures.30 The third virtue, greatness of soul, forms a sort of peak among the virtues, both locally and within the Ethics as whole: worthy of great honors, the great-souled man is the best of men, having complete virtue.31 Aristotle identifies the last three virtues in Book 4—friendliness, truthfulness, and wit— as the virtues concerning “associations of actions and speeches.” Of these three, the first and third, friendliness and wit, are sibling virtues: both have to do with pleasure, the first has to do with pleasure “in the affairs of life”; the third, with pleasure in amusements.32 In between these two, Aristotle inserts truthfulness—we will have to think about why these three form a set, and why truth-telling is situated in between the two sibling virtues. 28 Gorgias 487a, also 487d. Foucault, page 9-10, interpreting The Phoenician Women; on the need to inherit parrhesia, page 19. Gorgias 461a, Socrates to Polus: “you would certainly suffer terrible things, best of men, if you came to Athens, where there is the most freedom (exousia) to speak in Greece, and then you alone had the misfortune not to get any there.” Also see the Republic 557b. 30 Aristotle says, magnificence has to liberality the same relation as greatness-of-soul has to the virtue having to do with moderate honors (4.4.1125b1). This virtue is without a name; it seems to be found in the way one might find a “fourth proportional” in geometry. I have mostly followed the Rackham translation (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1926, 1982), although I have also sometimes followed the Sachs translation (Focus Philosophical Library, 2002) and the Bartlett and Collins translation (University of Chicago Press, 2011). 31 Ethics 1124a24. Thirty years ago I took an extended class on the Nicomachean Ethics with Leon Kass at the University of Chicago. It is not possible to accurately trace or to properly acknowledge what I owe to him and to others in the class for my understanding of this book. 32 Ethics 2.7.1108a11; also 4.8.1128b5. 29 14 �The last thing I will say about structure of Book 4 is that the fifth virtue, gentleness, seems to serve as a transition between the first four—the virtues of wealth and honor—and the last three, the virtues of “associations in actions and speeches.” Having sketched the structure of Book 4, I ask: where do we find “free” or “frank speech” among these virtues? Surprisingly, not among the virtues of “actions and speeches,” but in the great-souled man. And it is also surprising how much Aristotle has to say about the great man’s way of talking. Recall that he has wealth and virtue, he seeks great honor and is worthy of it, and so he is “haughty towards men of position and fortune,” but measured towards the middling sort. He cares more about truth than opinion; he speaks frankly and truthfully (parresiastes and aletheutikos). If he did not openly say what he thinks, he would suggest he was fearful; his outspokenness affirms his greatness and his disdain for others (4.3.1124b27). With the humble sort of people he refrains from frank speech and, instead, he is self-deprecating or ironic. In addition to this: he does not talk about other people, he is not a gossip, for he does not wish to be praised in conversation, nor does he want to speak ill of others. He has a deep voice and a firm way of speaking (stasimos lexis, 1125a13). He seems to be not an eager conversationalist, and not likely to tell a joke. Let’s turn to the so-called virtues of actions and speeches: why does “speaking frankly” not appear there? After all, the great-souled man is said to be frank and truthful, and one of three virtues under consideration is truthfulness: How does being truthful get separated off from speaking frankly? Of the first two of these virtues, friendliness and truthfulness, Aristotle says they are nearly about the same things (4.7.1127a13). It is important to digress briefly and note, about both virtues, that they do not have a name—like all ethical virtues, they are means between two extremes, two vices, an excess and defect, and the virtues are known only negatively, only by the absence of the vices. Now, Aristotle does fall into using provisional names for these virtues, the ones I have been using—friendliness and truthfulness—but it will be important to remember that they are nameless. 15 �Friendliness is the settled disposition of hitting the mean with respect to giving pleasure to associates, and not giving them pain. For the reasons I noted, friendliness is seen more clearly in contrast with its correlative vices: those who object to everything, who don’t care whether they cause pain, are peevish and contentious (or eristic, duserides, 4.6.1126b15). At the other extreme, those who never raise an objection, who studiously avoid ever being a cause of pain to others, are obsequious or flattering.33 Now this virtue, the mean between contentious and flattering, doesn’t have a name, but Aristotle says this is the sort of person whom we often call, “a good friend” (epieikes philos, 1126b21); hence, the virtue could be referred to as “friendliness.”34 The good friend is not someone who is always pleasant; he takes into consideration what is honorable and what is advantageous; he does not join in what is shameful or harmful; he will be somewhat unpleasant, or cause pain, when there is cause (1126b31). In deciding whether to be pleasant or, if needed, unpleasant, he considers whether the person he is with is a friend, a mere acquaintance, or a stranger, someone high in society or low. I propose that we think of this “good friend,” the opposite of the flatterer, someone occasionally willing to give pain in speech, as the replacement for the man of free speech. The flatterer conceals his thought, or lies, in order to please; in the same circumstances, the good friend, like a frank speaker, says what he thinks, but gauged to his audience.35 As I said, the virtues of friendliness and truthfulness are closely related, so let us turn to truthfulness to fill out the picture. Once again, properly speaking, this virtue has no name; Aristotle introduces only it as “the mean in relation to boastfulness,” a vice; it concerns those who tell the truth and those who lie, in deeds and in words (4.7.1127a13). Aristotle has in mind especially speech about oneself: at one extreme, the boaster exaggerates and gives to himself qualities he does not have; at the other extreme, the ironic person makes himself out to be less 33 When Aristotle first names the vice, he names only obsequiousness (4.6.1126b12); only at the end of the chapter, does he add the flatterer (kolax), when someone gives pleasure for the sake of gain (1127a10). In English I believe flattery is often motivated by gain, but need not be, that is, its sense seems broader. 34 In Book 2, when sketching the virtues, Aristotle calls it “friendship,” philia (2.7.1108a28), not “friendliness,” but in 4.6., he says this virtue is not friendship per se; hence, I am using the word “friendliness” in order to distinguish the virtue from the relationship. It would be truer to Aristotle’s diction to use “friendship” in both cases, although also more confusing. 35 Of course, the great-souled man also gages his speech to his interlocutor, either those comparable to him in greatness, or those below him. The good friend appears to mix with those beneath and above him. 16 �than he is. Boastfulness is most common when one stands to gain something from deceit, and deceit about one’s ability is hard to detect: Aristotle gives as examples divination, medicine, and philosophy: boastfulness looks like an occupational hazard.36 He does not fail to remind us, on the other side, that Socrates was charmingly ironic or self-deprecating.37 This truthfulness, however, is not simply about oneself: Aristotle explicitly excludes from this virtue telling the truth or lying about business matters and contracts; these cases would fall under the virtue of justice instead (4.7.1127a33). Here he is discussing someone who tells the truth, not only about himself, but when nothing particular is at stake. His speech is direct; he calls each thing by its name (authekastos, 1127a24). He seems to be “a good” or “equitable person” (toioutos epieikes) because he is a “truth-lover” (4.7.1127b3, following Bartlett and Collins). The equitable truth-lover and the “good friend” form a reciprocal pair: one tells the truth about all things, but especially about himself, and the other is generally pleasant, but tells the truth to a friend even when it may sting. Or more likely, in a sound pairing, each person plays each role, as needed. The condescending frankness of the great-souled man is replaced by something equally truthful, but more equitable. They are lovers of truth, wary of false appearances, but their truthfulness is not intended to communicate anything august about their status. Let us quickly consider the two virtues surrounding friendliness and truthfulness: gentleness before and wit after. As I said before, gentleness marks the transition from the high virtues of greatness of soul and magnificence to the virtues of action and speech. Gentleness (praotês) is the disposition of feeling anger in the right measure and in right way. 38 The gentle person is not quick to anger, nor does he dwell on his anger; he is not inclined to revenge, and he is more likely to forgive (4.5.1125b31-1126a3). He is thoughtful or considerate about those 36 Ethics 4.7.1127b18. To be accurate, Aristotle says a “wise man” (sophos) not “philosopher.” Aristotle notes that the Spartans are self-deprecating in a way that, paradoxically, turns out to be boastful; perhaps this too is a danger for students of philosophy (e.g., Diogenes). 38 Here, too, Aristotle says that the virtue does not have a name, although, unlike in the earlier cases, he refers to the virtue by the name he has given it (“gentleness”) from the beginning of his discussion of it (4.5.1125b26). 37 17 �around him,39 but in a way that is dispassionate rather than sentimental. He becomes angry when there is cause, for someone who never becomes angry, who is not ready to defend himself, is base or vile (4.5.1126a6).40 Gentleness is thus a virtue fitting for a free and equal citizen; the ruler, by contrast, is likely to err a little on the side of too much anger; such rulers, Aristotle says, are called “manly” (andrôdeis; 4.5.1126b2). The insertion of gentleness lowers the pitch of the analysis from the great-souled man back to the liberal one, a free person, which is where Book 4 began. Gentleness also seems to establish the dispassionate environment where the good friend and the truthteller engage in commerce and conversation.41 The virtues of action and speech are concluded with wit. Wit discovers a “harmonious way of associating with people—[the] sorts of things one ought to say, and a way of saying them,” as well as the way of hearing them.42 Often jokers—buffoons—are called “witty,” but true wit is distinguished by the addition of tact. The buffoon, over eager for a laugh, is oblivious to the shame or pain caused by his jest; he resembles the contentious person, who, insensible to the offense he gives, indulges in raillery and vilification. By contrast, the genuinely witty person will say and give ear to those things fitting for a “free and good person” (eleutherios and epieikes).43 Wit accompanied by tact distinguishes the free person from the base, the educated from the ignorant. Others readers have pointed out that, Aristotle, making a pun, derives the word “witty” from a word meaning “full of ‘good turns’ or ‘versatile’.”44 Wit puts on display the graceful movements of character, just as athletics or dance displays the movements of the body. The playful, well-turned phrase lands on what is base but does not dwell there; it drives 39 Apt to forgive is suggnomonikos; forgiveness is later associated with the minor intellectual virtue of “consideration” (gnôme, 6.11, see 1143a20). The one who is forgiving is equitable or decent, epieikes. Note the frequency of epieiekes in these chapters. I refer the reader to an earlier lecture, “Two Good Men in Aristotle’s Ethics, or Does a Liberal Education Improve One’s Character?” which discusses the differences between two good men, the virtuous or spoudaios and the decent or epieikes. 40 Aristotle notes that flattery is slavish (4.3.1125a2); it would seem that friendliness, too, befits the free person. 41 The arc of this part of Book 4 is shown by Ronna Burger, Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the "Nicomachean Ethics" (University of Chicago Press, 2008), pages 87-89. Burger emphasizes the turn away from the noble in the last several virtues of Book 4 and the appearance of grace in two of those virtues, self-deprecation and wit (1128a31-32, 1127b22-24). 42 Ethics 4.8.1128a1, Sachs trans. 43 Ethics 4.8.1128a19. Sachs translates eleutherios, “generous,” pointing back to the first virtue in Book 4, liberality; Rackham translates it a “gentleman,” as a free and liberal man is still a person of some stature. 44 Ethics, 4.8.1128a10. See R. Burger, page 89: witty, eutrapeloi; full of “good turns,” eutropoi. Bartlett and Collins suggest “versatile.” 18 �one’s thinking beneath the surface. Wit is frank and open in its own way; it gives voice to things we would normally be ashamed to say, but it does so with a grace and playfulness distinct from the frank speech of the great man. In sum, the last four virtues of Book IV collectively transform the free and frank speech of the great-souled man into something more gentle, nimble, occasionally vulgar, but nevertheless truthful and revealing. I would not want to exaggerate the effects of these virtues—we are loitering among the last of the ethical virtues. We have probably observed or read novels of refined society that is gentle, witty, and friendly in its conversation, without being illuminating or penetrating. These virtues seem to establish the conversational milieu in which several intellectual virtues could be developed, but naturally without guaranteeing their attainment. I have approached this question from the point of view our attitude or stance entering a conversation, but in retrospect it may have been wiser to ask what sort of demands participation in an illuminating, penetrating conversation makes on us. What is required of us if our end is a shared logos that is open and rigorous? Through my title I meant to consider truthfulness and friendliness (and toleration as well) as “conversational virtues,” a term we loosely use now and again, but the phrase “conversational virtues” refers equally or more often to strictly dialectical capacities that are also required for penetrating discussions. Finally, I would not want to assume the attainment of even these virtues: for all ethical virtues, it is all-too-easy to get it wrong, to miss the mark going too far, or falling short. It is easy to miss the mark, without knowing it: making a joke, I could be much pleased with my wit, only, without knowing it, to have played the buffoon, and everyone in earshot too polite to say so. And even when we hit the mean, we may not recognize it—one could respond to an affront with just the right measure of anger, and nevertheless feel convinced that one has been too irascible, or too gentle. Still worse, it does not help that several of these virtues do not even have names—they may be too obscure to give us a clear target to aim at.45 It is quite hard to be courageous in fact, but the nobility of courage is somehow vivid in our imagination, calling us to it. The unnamed virtues lack this nobility, and they lack the same clarity in our imagination. The tenor of Aristotle’s description is analytical rather than exhortative. The account reveals the 45 Again, R. Burger, page 89. 19 �parameters within which we inevitably act and speak, the structure inherent in the various ways we go wrong. In speaking quite frankly, am I being unpleasant or offending my listener, or growing too contentious, or making a fool of myself? Or being truthful? If I hold back, if I am more guarded or self-deprecating, am I being too pliable, or flattering, or morose? Sometimes we get it wrong, but if our conversation partner is gentle, we may at least expect to be forgiven. Parrhesia is mentioned at least one more time in the Ethics, much later, in the discussion of friendship. I have been discussing virtues, of course, and Aristotle clearly distinguishes the virtue of “being friendly” from the reality of friendship. Someone can be ‘friendly’ to anyone; the friendly person gives pleasure and pain in due measure to all comers, correctly gaging whether the other is familiar or a stranger, high or low in station. He acts “friendly” not from the warmth of passion, but simply on the basis of his character. By contrast, friendship is shared between two or more persons; each must hold the other in some regard and must feel something for the other (4.6.1126b23). Those who are friendly with one another might well become friends, even if just friends of utility or pleasure. Much later, in the discussion of friendship proper, Aristotle considers unequal friendships and equal ones, for example, what one owes a parent or an elder, as opposed to a brother: “we should pay to all our [elders] the honor due to their age, by rising when they enter, offering them a seat, and so on. Towards comrades and brothers on the other hand, we should use frankness of speech and share all our possessions with them” (1165a30, emphasis added). The frank speech of the greatsouled man, who looks down on others, is eventually displaced by the frank speech of comrades in friendship. This last kind of free speech, among friends, is what we wish for most of all, although it will suffice, I hope, to avoid the vices of contentiousness and flattery, and to practice toleration, however indeterminate its limits and grounds. 20 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. 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Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 20 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speaking Freely and the Conversational Virtue Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 23, 2019 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture". Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Macfarland, Joseph C. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-08-23 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Toleration Locke, John, 1632-1704. Epistola de tolerantia. Aristotle. Nicomachean ethics Academic freedom Freedom of speech Parrhēsia (The Greek word) Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Macfarland_Joseph_2019-08-23_Typescript Christopher B. Nelson Lecture Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d3e649fbc177b19aaa94793406e1e49e.pdf cf7de7d292dac70411d40c444bb92f76 PDF Text Text Our Polity A lecture given at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD Joseph C. Macfarland August 28, 2020 It customary for the dean’s lecture to do two things: to reflect on our common education, but, more than this, to do so in a way that aims to exemplify the kind of learning that we undertake in common, to deepen our understanding of some book or question. The longer I serve as dean, the less time I find for such learning. So tonight’s lecture will not explore any particular book or speculative question; instead, I mean to reflect on the nature of our small community, drawing a little too easily from books we read in common, from many of my colleagues writings (past and present), and from the ways we sometimes talk about our community, especially in imaginative terms. My talk has three parts: 1. Our polity 2. Liberal arts, and 3. The citiless The first part: Our Polity In speaking about our community we refer to the “polity.” There is a written document which defines the parts of our community, its officers and directors, and their powers and responsibilities; the document is called the “Polity.” But more casually we use the word to refer to the community as presently embodied, the human beings who collectively make it up. Parallel to this, a part of our community, the largest part, the student body, has their own governing document; this is called “the Student Polity,” often “the Polity” for short, and in this context, the body of all students is sometimes called “the polity.”1 There is a similar ambiguity at the origin of the word, “university.” When the first universities came into being, the Latin word, universitas, referred to a number of persons joined in any kind of association, for example, a “university” of barbers or a “university” of carpenters (Haskins, 9). In the middle ages, the students of Bologna, Italy, formed a student union, and in doing so they coined the word, more or less as we now use it. They formed a union in order to gain leverage in negotiating the terms of their residence in the city, and the responsibilities of the 1 The student polity is provided for in an article of the Polity per se. 1 �faculty in teaching them. The first “university,” as a student union, excluded faculty; conversely, the first so-called “university” in Paris was a union of teachers, and excluded students.2 Our union of faculty, students, and staff, is not a “university,” [not a union], but a “polity.” St. John’s has a charter that goes back to 1784, but it was in the early 1940’s, in the first decade of the New Program, that a committee of tutors, consulting with the entire faculty, drafted the first “Polity” as a supplement to the charter (JW Smith 48). The inaugural president, Stringfellow Barr, asked the faculty, “to investigate thoroughly the type of polity that… would be appropriately adapted to and coordinated with the aims of the program” (emphasis added). I wonder if there is any other college in America—or the world—that sought to discover the correct type of polity to serve its educational ends, or that continues to refer to itself in this way? As most of you know, the word “polity” is a transliteration—via Latin—of the Greek word politeia. And politeia is derived from the word polis, or city, a complete, self-sufficient political community. For Aristotle, at least, the polis exists by nature and, like everything that exists by nature, it has material and a form. The material of the city is the population, especially the citizens. Citizens come to be and pass away, immigrate and emigrate, so that the whole population, the material, is continually flowing. Yet through all this, the city, the polis, somehow remains the same as itself (Politics 1276b12): it must therefore have a form separate from the material. The word for the form of the polis is politeia: this is its enduring structure or arrangement (taxis), a kind of fundamental law (1274b39; 1326a30). Cities come in many forms, and there are different types of polity: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, and so on, and mixed forms as well. Thus, Barr’s question to the faculty: which type of polity is adapted to the aims of our education?3 Of course, there is an element of foolish affectation in our common use of anglicized Greek words like this—entirely fitting for a college located in “Annapolis.” 4 If we speak with precision, the college is not a city; it is not a complete and independent community; it relies in infinite ways on the political communities within which it is situated; so we cannot have a “polity.” It’s a metaphor. Someone wishing to speak with precision might say that the college is a not-forprofit business in the service sector. The central function is an exchange of goods: the student tenders payment for instruction, and instruction concludes with a recognized, valuable credential. The relationship lasts as long as the terms of the exchange are met: faculty and staff 2 Haskins, 18. The “college” (collegium) was originally a hospice or residence hall. Of course, one of the six forms of polity is called, simply, a “polity,” and it is a mixed form, a blend of democracy and oligarchy. 4 Coincidentally, Francis Nicholson, the colonial official who seems to have given the name “Annapolis” to “Anne Arundel’s Town,” also founded the King William School, predecessor to St. John’s (Murphy, 3, McWilliams, 18-21). 3 2 �are obliged to perform services faithfully, to deliver the product; students are obliged to meet the conditions necessary to be awarded the degree. As a friendship based on utility, it is only as durable as the exchange. In referring to the college as a polity, we signal that our community is not defined by or limited to the activity of exchange. Aristotle says the city is distinguished from a business in that it nourishes a stronger kind of friendship, one that aims at living well, that might aim at human excellence (1280b5-1281a8). So there is some truth in our metaphorical claim to be a polity. In other ways, too, from the beginning St. John’s has imitated the well-arranged polis. Forgive me if I take time to say things apparent to many, but it is, I think, an opportune time to repeat them. The polis is small by nature (1325b33ff.): the good administration of a city requires that the citizens be acquainted with one another, that they know one’s another’s character (1326b15); this cannot happen when there are too many. In fact, too large a city cannot be well-ordered, cannot have good laws, cannot be a polis at all (1326a25). Moreover, there is greater beauty in what is measured. If the population grows too great, the appropriate remedy is to send out a colony, to send out citizens who will form their own their own polis, a new independent entity, with its own form and material, sometimes even destined to eclipse its parent in beauty or greatness, as Syracuse eclipsed Corinth. And so also the college, smaller than it is now and wishing to be no larger, established a second campus with the expectation that more would follow. Another sign of the best-formed polity is that it attends to the education of everyone on a common plan (1337a30). In Sparta, famously, all citizens enjoyed the same education; they shared hardships and trials of all kinds, and meals and conversations as well, aimed at developing self-control and excellence in war. The end sought was not high, but the fact that the education was elaborately contrived and common in character distinguished the city from all others. St. John’s is perhaps most distinctive for its education being in common. Its original raison d’être was the rejection of the elective system: no electives, no departments, no majors. In the university, by contrast students differentiate themselves by their major, and within their majors, by their subfields, and by their electives as well—they project and confirm their individuality by these choices. Their education is á la carte: everyone sees, discusses, and has a taste of what others at the table are having. In our small polity, the education is common to students and tutors alike—despite our widely ranging interests and abilities, we share the same trials and rewards. There is no one among us with whom you cannot talk about what you are studying and what you are thinking. The commonness of the enterprise compresses or erases hierarchical distinctions—there are no ranks in the faculty; and each tutor and student addresses all others as equals, for in the classroom, “reason is the only recognized authority” (Statement of the St. John’s Program), and each one of us needs others for our own learning. 3 �The commonness of the education enables the members of the polity to become friends, albeit in varying degrees. Each achieves some understanding of himself by being reflected in a friend; this mutual recognition is realized through shared activities of all kinds, high and low: athletics, dance, singing, or philosophizing (cf. Ethics 1172a3). The city is by nature, and human beings are political animals by nature, because they possess speech, logos: our sounds express not merely pleasure and pain, but the beneficial and harmful, just and unjust, good and bad (Politics 1253a10ff). More than any concrete, true polity, ours is constituted by this shared logos; it is our principal work. We discuss the pleasurable and the painful, just and unjust, good and the bad, but for the most part not in the way that citizens talk about these things. For our principal work is not the rectification of injustice, or the acquisition of goods, but investigation and understanding of these things. Certainly, as friends of a kind, we do not tolerate injustice among ourselves, but when we are focused on the execution of justice rather than its form or idea, we have descended from the higher purpose of our logos in order to attend to its low but necessary conditions. For our polity, like the city, is grounded on exercising the human capacity for logos, but about the pleasurable and painful, or the just and unjust, mostly as they are related to the true and the false [the pair not present in Aristotle’s list of four, given above]. Finally, the college may resemble a finely-formed ancient polity in being largely indifferent to the arts and technology, focusing rather on the development of character and abilities. The arts and technology are always pushing forward, the new cleverly superseding the old, whereas the laws of a polity, especially the unwritten laws and practices, gain strength with time and are weakened by change (1269a20). The advance of the arts can bring wealth, but the best city aims at wealth only as condition for the development of character and mind (1323a39). Aristotle notes that the pursuit of wealth is often achieved through trade by sea, but with wealth thus subordinated, the best city stands only close enough to the sea to allow some trade, but far enough from the sea to deter the citizens from becoming mariners.5 Part Two: Liberal Arts We sometimes say we study the “liberal arts” or practice “liberal education.” I will not concern myself with whether “arts” or “education” is the appropriate noun—although it is a good 5 Politics 1327b8. In the best practicable government, the “polity” in the narrow sense, the citizens are largely farmers (compare 1292b25 with 1298b34). The city in isolation can be happy if it is well-governed (1325a1). 4 �question—I will muse instead on connotations of the adjective, “liberal.”6 One of the first notable appearances of the phrase, “liberal arts,” is in the works of Cicero, and the root of the Latin word for “liberal,” liber, is familiar even to us Johnnies from our punning Latin motto, Facio liberos, et cetera.7 Something is liberal when it is free, or befitting a free-born person. In a classical polity, free-birth is the lowest and broadest criterion for citizenship; it is the criterion for citizenship used in a democracy, the rule of the multitude, the rule of the poor. To be “free” means to be a citizen, to have a share in the polity, not to be ruled tyrannically or monarchically.8 A liberal art or discipline prepares the citizen for participation in the polity; in the best polities, education aims at a good life or some human excellence (Pol. 1337a34ff.). A good education includes arts that are necessary and useful, such as grammar, arithmetic, or gymnastic, but only if they are not pursued so far that the mind or body becomes impaired or less disposed to virtue. No art should be pursued to the point that it makes the student less free, more servile. In this context, opposite of “liberal” or “free” is “base” or “vulgar” (banausos). Cicero distinguishes the “liberal” arts or trades from “base” ones (sordidus): the base trades include manual labor, retail, and services providing pleasure [e.g., dance]; those trades requiring serious thought (prudentia) are liberal, such as medicine, architecture, teaching, and farming. 9 These quasi-aristocratic connotations linger in the English word “liberality,” the virtue characteristic of a free person. The liberal person may not be wealthy, but he is at least free from material necessity; he has the capacity to make gifts in a fitting and beautiful way.10 In a classical polity, to be free, to be a citizen, while broadly shared, is still a mark of distinction, it separates the free citizens from non-citizens, from slaves or resident aliens. Freedom does not imply universal equality, but often entails some degree of elevation. It is not uncommon, of course, for free citizens to elevate themselves precisely by denying this freedom to others: as the notable freedom of the Spartans was contingent upon on the slavery of the Helots.11 6 See the fine 2015 lecture by Dan Harrel, “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art.” My own quick sketch: liberal arts are part of a classical and medieval heritage; liberal education is a modern formulation, and can imply an aversion to the traditional list of arts. Even Dante, to the seven arts, added physics, metaphysics, and ethics (cf. Convivio). Furthermore, arts implies that we acquire skills and competencies, and that there are disciplines that we come to know or master. Education appears to be a way to renounce this focus on skills and competencies in favor of metastrophic recognition, coming to know that we don’t know. 7 Prior to Cicero, Aristotle refers to the liberal sciences (eluetherai epistemai; Politics 1337b15). It is hard to say that the phrase or notion has a chronological origin. 8 Cite the Politics on the criterion of citizenship in a democracy; check Cicero, De republica 1.32.48 (cited by Lewis and Short). 9 De Officiis 1.41.150ff. Compare Politics 1337b4ff. 10 Politics 1338a32: there is a sort of education pursued not as “necessary or useful,” but “liberal and noble”; at 1338b3, “great-souled and free.” 11 Compare Machiavelli’s characterization of stance of the Roman people to those whom they conquered (Discourses, Book 2), or Montesquieu’s Considerations of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans. 5 �If it is base for liberal education to be too deeply engaged in the useful or necessary occupations, it seems to follow that whatever serious disciplines are not in the least necessary nor useful, and do not serve external ends, but are pursued only for their own sakes, would be the most free or liberal. Here, of course, the freedom of the liberal art depends less on the status of the human being who pursues it, and more on the inner character of the art itself. According to Aristotle, nature seeks not only that we labor (askolein) as we should, but, when not working, that we use leisure well (1337b30; cf. Klein 165). Insofar as a virtuous action is done for its own sake, insofar as it attains beauty, liberal education may aim at it. But the courageous act, even if beautiful in itself, is generally also useful to the city, sometimes indispensable. The education of the free develops not only one’s character but one’s mind (1337a38-42), and the activities of the mind, inasmuch as they are for the sake of themselves, are more free. Geometry and astronomy are liberal arts because they culminate in free contemplation. In late antiquity, when the liberal arts came to be defined as exactly seven in number, architecture and medicine were excluded from the list for dealing with mundane rather than celestial matters.12 The liberal arts under this second understanding pull away from the city and the citizen, away from the community of the free. Political freedom may be a condition for liberal learning—in order to study well one needs some leisure—but the liberal arts in this mode do not reciprocally serve or augment that political freedom. One can certainly imagine a city where the entire education is designed to foster the very highest activities of the mind—I mean Kallipolis, of Plato’s Republic—but this effort results in a highly stratified society, a city with very few free persons in it.13 The “liberal” in “liberal arts” skews in one way to the city—to the community of free persons— and in another way outside or beyond the city, to the celestial, to speak metaphorically. The opposing movements are still evident in the way we speak about liberal education today, although transformed in important ways. 12 Martianus Capella, 346. Cicero’s De oratore is cited as one of the first appearances of the phrase, “liberal arts,” has artes quibus liberales doctrinae atque ingenuae continerentur (3.32.127). In this dialogue, an interlocutor points out the incompatibility between having the leisure to pursue these arts, and the employment of rhetoric amid political responsibilities (3.32.131). 13 And in this city, those who engage in the highest or freest activity, are the least free, being compelled to rule. Klein: “It is important to see that there is a definite tension between the exigencies of political life and the selfsustained goal of liberal education. This tension is very great” (169). The death of Archimedes makes us see, “the ultimate incommensurability between this kind of searching and questioning, the basis of all liberal learning, and the implacable conditions of our existence” (170). 6 �The founders of the New Program were not shy about affirming the importance of liberal education for citizenship in a democratic republic. On the eve of U.S. intervention in World War II, Stringfellow Barr wrote that, “colleges like St. John’s,” were established to teach students, “to practice the liberal arts, to use their intellects, to reflect, to make choices, in order that a free society might be able to govern itself wisely, freely, and justly, and not fall prey to a government by force” (Report of the President, May 1941). Self-governance as a nation stands on the self-governance of the individual, and education in the liberal arts strengthens and disciplines the powers by which young people come govern themselves.14 This connection between liberal education and free government comes without the ancient, quasi-aristocratic distinction between the free and the unfree, between the liberal and the base. According to Scott Buchanan, writing in 1945, in a democratic republic, there is no division of labor between “higher functions” and lower: “it is an integral part of the American dream that each man in our society may and must perform the highest functions. These functions consist in the intelligent free choice of the ends and means of both our common and individual life. This is a most glorious and most difficult proposition to which we are dedicated. Among other things it means that each man must have his measure of liberal education…” (Catalogue 1945).15 I am not the first to note that Barr and Buchanan connect liberal education to free citizenship more closely than is now common for us.16 They echo the ancients, that education prepares adults to act virtuously as free citizens—as our motto asserts—but education here does this not by directly shaping the character of citizens, but by cultivating intellectual freedom. Education challenges and sharpens the mind, and insofar as the mind is strengthened and disciplined, it supplies the means by which the individual citizen may choose to act well.17 A liberal arts 14 “We live and enjoy liberty that we may pursue happiness, and the man who penned this triune phrase was perfectly aware of where that happiness law: in the fullest possible development, and use, of man’s most human powers, the powers of the intellect.” Cf. Buchanan, “Liberal Education and Politics” (1944): “For various reasons the European citizen of the republic of learning would not have said that liberal education is for everybody. That is the great revolutionary American contribution to our knowledge of what the liberal arts are….” 15 Buchanan: “Inner freedom or human liberty is indicated, not primarily civil liberties and economic freedom about which modern liberalism is concerned. But as all the founding fathers of our institutions have insisted, inner liberal education is a vital necessity if free men are to maintain and protect their external liberties in a democratic state” (“In Search of a Liberal College,” 1937, 4.1). 16 Recent versions of the Statement of the Program have tended to be more modest about the connection between liberal education and democratic citizenship, emphasizing the intervening steps between developing powers and exercising them in citizenship. The direct work of the college is the “pursuit of fundamental knowledge,” which entails “awareness” of “social and moral obligations,” and incidentally confers “the means and will” to become a “free citizen.” 17 “The aim of the liberal arts is the inner freedom that comes from knowledge of the truth, a freedom to match and justify the freedom that we liberals seek in the outer world” (“In Search of a Liberal College,” 1937, 3.19). 7 �college supports free government only through the medium of its students, and through their sustained intellectual development. This emphasis on freedom through intellectual development marks, I believe, a notion of what it means for an education to be “liberal” that is more at home in a modern democratic republic than a classical polis. Civil government is now instituted for the purpose of preserving freedoms enjoyed by its citizens: freedom of speech, of assembly, and of worship. The responsibilities and powers of civil government are circumscribed: government seeks the safety of the state, and the security of its citizens and their property; the force of government has no effect on the minds of citizens; its laws do not touch upon the truth or falsity of opinion; limited government carves out a free domain for religion and, in doing so, for speculative thinking as well.18 Education at St. John’s may be called “liberal” most of all on account of this intellectual freedom, one fostered within a modern democratic republic. As is said in the Statement of the Program, there are only two rules in class: “all opinions must be heard and explored, however sharply they may clash; [and], every opinion must be supported by argument.” As participants in the discussion, we are constrained to give reasons for our opinions, and we are constrained as well by the necessities we encounter within the logos itself, but as the questions we ask nevertheless often remain open—better defined in the wake of our analysis—we are each free to pour over the contours of the arguments again privately, to draw our own conclusions, and to live accordingly. Our democratic republic provides the conditions for this exercise of intellectual freedom, but, if Barr and Buchanan are right, our exercise of this intellectual freedom, in turn, serves the preservation of the republic. Yet despite this reciprocal relationship, the fact that this freedom is internal, that it has its roots in our hearts and minds, means that the cooperative exercise of such freedom requires a large measure of detachment from the wider, fortuitous political circumstances which foster it. A liberal education eschews utility and specialization; it assumes a detachment from the constructed world and contemporary polemics. Our direct task is studying and discussing books that raise persistent questions about the greatest themes in human experience, books that have stood the test of time and have elicited various alternative, coherent interpretations.19 It 18 Locke in the Letter Concerning Toleration: “It is light that is needed to change a belief in the mind; punishment of the body does not lend light” (8). Note Buchanan: “The individual citizen of this secular republic, as pupil, teacher, or official, as well as the universities and schools, enjoyed this same liberties and immunities from the political state that the church enjoyed. Freedom of thought and freedom of religion have this common history” (“Liberal Education and Politics,” 397, in 1944). 19 Cf. J. Winfree Smith, 24; Buchanan, 1945 Catalogue. 8 �takes a sustained effort to read such books well, and through this effort to grasp the arguments, to be transported in thought, to pose these questions for ourselves, and to pursue them wherever they lead. Such questions shake our assumptions and cause us to see what is familiar and gaze upon it now, as if, for the first time; we become detached, disoriented, turned around (Klein 162). The experience of detachment is the cost of thinking deeply and well. Penetrating inquiry requires the greatest freedom from contemporary common opinions; they require that one not just “entertain,” but hear and methodically think through seeming nonsense and heresies. To comprehend what a number is, one has to take seriously the thought that the square-root-of-two is not a number, or that one is not a number; or to think clearly about the cosmos, one has to take seriously the thought, confirmed, after all, by all the appearances, that the ground beneath my feet is motionless. And it is no different in the religion, ethics, or politics: to think thorough what justice is, one has to take seriously the argument that the best regime is the kingship of the wise and the subjection of the unwise. It is natural to feel a rush of derision, as you read how the heavens revolve about the earth, or to feel a shudder at the argument that inequality is natural. If, despite your prior opinions, you felt nothing as you contemplated these jarring thoughts, you would not be taking them seriously; following the argument would be reduced to a verbal game of maneuver. But we also suspend these felt responses, lest they prematurely tether our thinking. Is freedom simply the end? Perhaps not. We are also lovers of wisdom—let it be very briefly supposed that, if wisdom were achieved, and opinion were replaced by knowledge, then everything one thinks would be constrained by necessity, and freedom might be reduced to actively thinking what is true. But as lovers of wisdom, and so lacking it, the range and nature of freedom itself remains one of our persisting questions, and provisionally, at least, a more ample notion of freedom is sufficient to animate our community. As a tiny community of learning, we embrace the ethos of a Greek polity: small, intimate, sharing a way of life with long established, unwritten laws, nourishing a kind of friendship, and ambitiously aimed at human excellence. But this tiny community is not a city in fact. We embrace the shared ethos of a Greek polity for the sake of an intellectual freedom that was unknown to those polities, one native to our present democratic republic. We speak with one another frankly, freely, for the sake of following the argument wherever it leads—as modern free thinkers—but, as citizens of our tiny polity, we do so as friends, tactfully, generously, gently, neither expressing nor provoking anger.20 We suspend—or at least mute—our private religious and political commitments, in order to take our place in a community whose activity 20 Drawing on my lecture from 2019, “Speaking Freely and the Conversational Virtues.” 9 �and end is conversation that questions, challenges, and deepens those individual thoughts and commitments. Part Three: Citiless A “campus” is a field. For centuries, colleges were not campuses, not fields, but walled cloisters. Students were kept in; the public was kept out (Delbanco, 38). Students were sequestered for the quiet, long work of study. Extra-curricular activities were intra-mural, literally, “within the walls.” The oldest continually existing college, the College of Spain (1364), at the oldest university in Bologna, Italy, was designed as a refuge for international students, the ultramontani. At St. John’s, of course, we have no walls—unlike our neighbors across the street. Students do, however, often speak of another barrier surrounding us: the “Johnnie Bubble.” It is transparent, difficult to discern, and so difficult to penetrate; higher than any wall. When I hear it referred to, it’s with a measure of satire, and a pinch of unease. There’s no gate, no porter keeping us in, but one may bristle a little at the thought of not being able to get out. The bubble is an indirect consequence of deliberate choices: we choose to inhabit a small polity that enables our common way of life, although it can get claustrophobic; and we deliberately cultivate a degree of detachment from the world of human action. To read long and well is already to become a little “lost in thought” (cf. Zena Hitz); we lose ourselves in books whose original era and worldly stance is generally foreign to our own. One in every five St. John’s students hails from another nation; the nation in which the college is located is not their own; insofar as we lose ourselves in the books and in the arguments that we spin out of them, we are all resident aliens, for a time more present to one another and more present to the voices of our authors than to the active world. For the sake of conversing with one another and with our distant authors, we are temporary exiles from the public world of political activity; for a time, we are citiless. It is this quality of being citiless, detached and immersed in the arguments, that keeps us one “college” in two disparate locations. Campus cultures and extracurricular activities differ; the books on the reading lists vary; but in our central work, as liberal artists, we are much the same, as if the location is not essential. In some degree, the same might be said of all the alumni who, in their busy lives, continue to put a high value on the reading and thinking they did here and continue to do. Detached from the world, searching in thought for what endures, the cloistered 10 �becomes somewhat other-worldly, so that while the cloister contracts one’s community materially, it surprisingly also expands it.21 At the college we have actively cultivated this detachment. Decades ago, according to lore, the faculty discussed whether it was wise for the coffee shop to have a newspaper box. It sounds comical now that each of us carries in our pockets more news than we can read. The intention was serious: could heightened concern for the news of the day, the active world, distract us from our shared work, the study of venerable books and persisting questions? The skirmish was reignited about a decade ago, as inevitably happens, when considering whether wifi should be installed around campus: by limiting wireless connectivity, many tutors sought to make it easier for us put away our devices and converse, face-to-face, in person, over a book. The skirmish was won, but the war was not, as the Johnnie Bubble does not repel electromagnetic waves. A bubble, of course, is fragile; it can vanish in a moment. But we would not, on the other hand, wish the barrier to be too sturdy: a bubble may serve us better than a wall. As the Statement of the Program says, the books, “illuminate the persisting questions of human existence and… bear directly on the problems we face today.”22 We would not devote the time and effort to reading the books if they did not provoke and deepen our thinking about our present lives.23 If our shared conversations were perfectly separated from our private, lived concerns, it would imply an analogous complete separation of theoretical and practical wisdom. It would imply that the question, what can I know?, is entirely separate from, what must I do? It is difficult to reach clarity about exactly how much detachment is salutary for our inquiries because the relationship between theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom is itself one of the persisting questions that occupy us. It would be destructive of our inquiries to assume that “every frame of thought is an ideology,” that every speculative question is nothing but a practical question in disguise.24 But neither would we want to erase the practical import of our speculative inquiries—we hold it in abeyance, rather, to preserve the freedom and the rigor of our thinking—and then let it back in, when we are better informed. As conversation partners, we live as if citiless, as if aliens, for so long as necessary to think well and follow the argument freely. 21 I have in mind Arendt, The Human Condition 2.7.53. The Statement continues: “They express most originally, and often most perfectly, the ideas by which contemporary life is knowingly or unknowingly governed. Their authors can speak to us almost as freshly as when they spoke for the first time, for what they have to tell us is not of merely academic concern, nor is it remote from our true interests.” 23 The books “change our minds, move our hearts, and touch our spirits.” 24 Eva Brann: “It is the fashion now to claim that all is politics, and that every frame of thought is an ideology. From this claim it follows that theory and practice are nearly indistinguishable, since every theoretical proposition is also a political ploy.” 22 11 �This is all less dramatic than I make it sound. True, if humans were political by nature, then someone without a city would not be human at all, he would be beneath politics or above it, a beast or god (1253a25). But I have argued that the college has its fitting home in a democratic republic, in which the scope of government is fundamentally limited. And as it carves out a domain of freedom for its inhabitants, we are assured a limited domain within which we can be citiless.25 There is a second way in which we are now citiless, by which I mean, of course, that I am here, alone, in the King William Room, and you are watching me from your home. Just as formerly St. John’s-Annapolis and St. John’s-Santa Fe formed a single college, now all of us Annapolitans, still much more dispersed are trying similarly to remain one college. When the lecture ends (soon), we will not mingle, shoulder-to-shoulder in the FSK Lobby, a cup of coffee in hand, and gossip about last night’s seminar, or the lecture, or incidental pastimes, as the buzz of mingled voices in the background reminds us that we are citizens of an incessantly talking polity. Instead, you will close the browser window, the same way you exit Facebook or Netflix. While we have always detached ourselves from the world in order to engage in serious study and conversation, this detachment did not mean removing ourselves to ours homes, the private place where we provide for and satisfy bodily necessities. As members of the college, our detachment used to mean retiring to our metaphorical polity, where our lives remain public, where we venture our thoughts and questions in one another’s presence, to be heard and responded to. Instead, most of us are now “working from home,” trying to carry on our public lives from a private place, which does not serve either very well. You appreciated the irony of the story of the faculty discussion about whether to install wifi on campus: not a decade after worrying about whether it would too easy to lose oneself in a screen, we have been furiously upgrading the wifi and making infinite other technological preparations—never quite adequate—so that we can converse only through screens. Early in the summer, a colleague drew an analogy between the predicament of the college in the face of the pandemic, and Athens before the onslaught of the Persians. The analogy was hyperbole, of course, but instructive, and a hyperbole I will embrace for this reason. The course he recommended was the course we only belatedly followed: that we abandon the city and take to the ships; that we rebuild our city when the perilous threat has 25 If the modern democratic republic is originally designed to tolerate multiple religions, then each person is permitted to be both a citizen of the republic and a citizen of the city of God, in whatever form of it he believes in. Religious toleration creates the conditions for multiple, coexisting, extra-political societies; those societies may be essential to the well-being of the republic. 12 �receded; that “we are Athens, wherever we are, in the Agora, on our ships, or on Zoom.” The decision was a vexed one; in retrospect, the counsel seems wise. When the Athenians had fled Athens and yielded the sacred ground to the Persians—the Acropolis in flames—the Athenian general Themistocles sought to persuade the other Greeks—Spartans and Corinthians—to keep their ships nearby, so that they could fight the Persians at sea. A Corinthian responded that Themistocles was a “citiless man,” aner apolis, and so he had no right to speak: losing one’s city means losing one’s voice in counsel.26 Themistocles’ famous reply: “True, wretch, we have left behind our houses and our city walls, for it is not worth being enslaved for the sake of lifeless things, but we still have a city, the greatest in Hellas, our two hundred triremes.”27 At first Themistocles appears to say that the Athenians in their ships, without fixed harbor or home, alone constitute the city—he does subsequently relax the claim to say that, by means of such a navy, they can conquer or establish a new fixed home. So, at St. John’s we, too, have taken to the ships— to Zoom and YouTube—and even here, if we read long and well, ask questions freely, and publicly venture our thoughts before the faces of our friends, we can continue to do our distinctive work, continue to be the finest college of liberal learning. There is another side to the story, however: as Plato and Plutarch observed later, taking to the ships transformed Athenian political culture. Themistocles turned the Athenians from typical “steadfast hoplites” into “sea-tossed mariners,” from honorable warriors and farmers into lowly rowers.28 A change in the dominant technology accelerated changes in the character of the people. The qualities required for success shifted from steadiness and courage to quickness, cleverness, and duplicitous maneuver. Recall Artemisia at the battle, an Ionian fighting with the Persians: when pursued by the Athenians, she had her ship ram an allied Persian ship, in order to deceive the pursuing Athenians into thinking she was on their side. And prior to the battle, the very mobility of the fleet, floating on the water, gave each of the Greek admirals a strong incentive to stealthily withdraw rather than engage, to seek safety rather than risk an outcome here and now. Themistocles’ wisdom liberated Athens, indeed, liberated all Greece. But by means of this newly-recognized power, he contrived not merely to free Athens from the Persians, but to erect 26 Herodotus 8.61, cf. 7.104 (about Demaratus, a Spartan exile). Citiless is clearly an insult here. Compare Politics 1253a3. 27 Plutarch, trans. Perrin, 35; trans. slightly modified. 28 Plutarch, 13, explicitly citing Plato’s Laws. To be fair, Athens as a city of merchants and mariners is evident already in the social strife described in Plutarch’s life of Solon: perhaps Themistocles (and the Persians) only accelerated Athens’ development. 13 �a new empire over others, Persians and Greeks (Plutarch 55-57). Taking to the ships opened up new avenues for Athenian ambition, and ultimately stimulated an unsustainable longing for far off places. Themistocles himself was pulled back from his ambitious design by more measured comrades, yet nevertheless his design forecast the future of the city, for better and for worse. At the critical moment, it is true that the Athenians took to their ships and abandoned their city-walls and their temples, but they did not go far, a few miles only to Salamis and then, in the straights of Salamis, even upon the yielding water, they “stood their ground” behind a wall of wood, in order to reclaim their polis—citiless no more.29 29 Themistocles urges Eurybiades to stand his ground (Herodotus 8.62); Themistocles tells Aristides that the Greeks (in their ships) were unwilling to stand and fight (8.80), so they had to be compelled to do so, by inducing the Persians to enclose their position. Of course, Aristides, exemplary for his moderation, and no mariner, joined the clash of fleets by standing his ground on a small island in the middle of the battle (8.95). 14 �Sources referenced Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958. Aristotle. The Politics. Tran. H. Rackam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932, 1990. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Tran. H. Rackam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926, 1982. Brann, Eva. “A Manifesto for Liberal Education.” The Imaginative Conservative (online). March 27, 2015. Buchanan, Scott M. “In search of a liberal college : A program for the recovery of the classics and the liberal arts” [manuscript]. 1937. Buchanan, Scott M. “Liberal Education and Politics.” American Scholar (1944): 396-398. Cicero. De Officiis. Trans. Walter Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913, 1997. Cicero. De Oratore. Trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942. Delbanco, Andrew. College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Princeton University Press, 2012. Harrell, Daniel. “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art.” SJC Digital Archives, given July 8, 2015. Haskins, Charles Homer. The Rise of the Universities. New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1923; Cornell University Press, 1957. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. David Grene. University of Chicago Press, 1987. Klein, Jacob. Lectures and Essays. Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College Press, 1985. Locke, John. Locke on Toleration. Ed. Richard Vernon. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Martianus Capella. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. Trans. William Harris Stahl and Richard Johnson. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. McWilliams, Jane Wilson. Annapolis, city on the Severn: a history. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Murphy, Emily. “A Complete and Generous Education”: 300 Years of Liberal Arts. Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College Press, 1996. 15 �Plutarch. Lives: Themistocles and Camillus, etc. Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. 1928, 2001. Smith, J. Winfree. A Search for the Liberal College: The Beginning of the St. John’s Program. Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1983. 16 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. 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Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 16 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Our Polity Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 28, 2020 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture". Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Macfarland, Joseph C. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-08-28 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Student-administrator relationships Polis (The Greek word) Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Macfarland_Joseph_2020-08-28_Typescript Christopher B. Nelson Lecture Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d223127cb551bf3e1594e0583875dc95.pdf 6d06f9a3247b6075bbaa895916151e79 PDF Text Text The Gate of Speculation, is it Open or Closed? On the Possibility of Permanent Questions Joseph C. Macfarland A lecture given at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD August 24, 2018 I offer a sort of opening question in order to spur conversation: is our shared activity of liberally educating ourselves one of asking and trying to answer permanent questions? What kind of question is a permanent question, if there is such a thing at all? Every seminar begins with a question; each night, a different question. Even when a tutor begins the seminar on reading she has studied and discussed before, perhaps often, she asks a new question. Sometimes I notice students writing down each opening question in a small book, keeping a log of the opening questions for every seminar, generally only the question, 256 unique questions in a row, a Johnnie menagerie. Our questions have variety without limit. Often we find ourselves asking a question, knowing that we have asked this question before, perhaps among different friends, prompted by a different book, framed differently. In fact, we read and converse on the tacit assumption that this is going to happen. We would not endeavor to educate ourselves by reading a stack of old books if the questions aroused by them did not intermittently recur. I return to the Meno because Meno’s question—can virtue be taught, or does it come by practice, or by nature?—and Socrates’s prior question—what is virtue anyways?—remain questions for me. I have opinions about the answers, but without certainty. Or, to take another example: if you observe every facet and phase of Achilles’s anger, you note its occasion and probe its roots, and you wonder at its dissolution, you learn something not only about Achilles, but about ourselves; his anger is never duplicated, yet what we are learning about persists. In these two examples I effaced the difference between what is explicitly a question— "can virtue be taught?”—and something that is enigmatic, but not formally a question. Is it from the books themselves from which we take our activity to be asking questions, or from another source? We spend six months poring over the details of a book that does not pose a single question: I mean Euclid’s Elements. The Elements does not even do what many mathematical works do: frame and solve problems. A problem is literally an obstacle; one seeks 1 �a solution, a way to eliminate the obstacle. A question seeks an answer; the question is not something that is getting the way, to be dissolved. A question is the way one takes aim at an indistinct goal, a way of finding a path. We find many satisfying answers in these books, yet very often an answer is, for us, the occasion for further questions. We most of all dwell on those questions where the answer is not easy to find; in which case, what we are occupied with seems to be the question most of all. At the founding of the program, Scott Buchanan wrote a list of five criteria for a great book. The third is that the book, “raises the persistent unanswerable questions.”1 What is this “persistent unanswerable question,” present for the author and present for me? We try to understand the authors where they are: moment-by-moment our conversations are immersed in the details of the text, transposing us for a time into the world the author has opened up for us. When a question is prompted by something we read, we try as much as possible to answer that question by looking to other passages in the book, to discover how the book responds to it, to answer it in the expressions given by the book. Thus displaced from the present, we gain a measure of freedom from contemporary, generallyaccepted opinions. Yet this displacement occurs in both directions—the reason I not only read the question, but ask it, is because I have something at stake in it. I have opinions about plausible answers, opinions that may affect how I act in the moment and how I mean to live. Our interest in the books is not antiquarian—our aim is not to know what Plato thought, as opposed to Aristotle, or as opposed to what “we” think now. If we let ourselves be transposed from our familiar environment into the world of the book, we also transpose the questions we find there back into our own surroundings inasmuch as we expect what we gather there to improve our thinking, to make us a little wiser here and now. Aristotle says that human beings are political animals by nature; let us assume that this statement is questionable, as other program authors question it. On the one hand, I delve into Aristotle’s books in order to think through whatever he could mean by political, aware that the meaning could be somewhat specific to the social phenomena he is observing; on the other 1 Winfree Smith, A Search for the Liberal College, St. John’s College Press, 1983, page 24. Smith adds, “He cited such questions as those about ‘number and measurement, matter and form, ultimate substance, tragedy, and God’.” 2 �hand, I take an interest in this question on the assumption that there is sufficient congruence in the political for any answer to have import and value for me no less than for him. We neither force our authors to inhabit our world, nor do we concern ourselves much with the historical conditions of theirs. We attend to the books in a way that is open to the questions that we share, open to what spans the times. We read as if the questions that loom largest are enduring, perhaps permanent. We labor with these books as if there is an absolute of some kind toward which (or around which) we navigate in thought, whether it be what-is-bynature, an irrefutable proposition (e.g., Gorgias 473b, Metaphysics 4), an acute insight, or a persisting question, possibly with equally persisting alternatives [alternative answers].2 In order to think about the form of a permanent question, I thought I would pick a single question that has been raised by different program authors, and examine their respective treatments of that question. I will observe the way the question is framed and addressed, in order to think about what persists across multiple queries. The question I have chosen is—is the world eternal, or does it have a beginning in time? Taken naively, it seems like a fair choice: as a question about the world, it seems likely to be less contingent on social or historical circumstances. As a question about what is eternal, it seems a fitting choice for thinking about the eternality of the question itself. Of course, beginning from this particular example might well skew my view of the class, if there is a class. To pursue this, I am going to talk about two authors who are both wildly inappropriate for the first lecture of the year: Immanuel Kant, who at this point is known only to seniors, and Moses Maimonides, known to a still narrower and more select group: Santa Fe transfers. Still worse, since Maimonides’ treatment of this question does not have the clarity of Kant’s, I will spend more time with what is less familiar. I hope to sketch their arguments in a way that does 2 My thinking about this question was prompted a long time ago, first, by Strauss’s comments on an “absolute horizon” for inquiry, a horizon of “fundamental problems” with “fundamental alternatives coeval with human thought” (Natural Right and History, University of Chicago Press, 1953, page 35), and, later, by Gadamer’s critique of this idea: “Critiquing the concept of the problem by appealing to a logic of question and answer must destroy the illusion that problems exist like starts in the sky” (Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall, Cotinuum, 1998, page 377). I benefitted much from Stewart Umphrey’s analysis of the permanent problem in, “Natural Right and Philosophy,” in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, eds. K. Deutsch and W. Nicgorski, Rowman and Littlefield, 1994, pages 275-295, although this lecture does not intersect with the direction of that inquiry. 3 �not presuppose familiarity. What I have to say about each will seem insufficient to anyone familiar with either. I trust that, suspended somewhere between the two, I can gain some access to the question itself. The persisting question framed as an insoluble problem This dip into Kant’s thinking will be “quick and dirty,” which is to say, knowingly unKantian. I will leap straight to the middle of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, straight to what he calls the “antinomies,” without having worked through Kant’s prior explanation of the grounds of scientific knowledge—we will be having our desert before dinner. I will try to minimize the jargon, even at the expense of precision.3 In what Kant calls an “antinomy of pure reason,” we find two evidently contradictory statements juxtaposed: first, the world has a beginning in time and is spatially enclosed within bounds; second, the world has no beginning and is infinite as regards space and time. Kant provides a proof for each statement (B454). Each proof is negative; it proceeds by assuming the opposite statement and then showing the absurdity of that opposite. For example, in order to prove that the world has a beginning in time, let us assume that it has no beginning. On this assumption, at each point in time there would have already elapsed an infinite series of successive states of the world; but an “infinity” is precisely that which cannot be completed through a synthesis of successive states; an “infinite series of successive states” is a contradiction. Our assumption, that the world has no beginning in time, is proven false and, therefore, the opposite is true, the world must have a beginning in time. There is an analogous proof for the antithesis—the eternity of the world—it, too, is negative in form and it is equally valid. The fact that the proofs are negative is important: as Kant says, in “a dialectical combat arena… any party permitted to make the attack keeps the upper hand” (B450). In this combat, there is no victor. 3 As members of the audience will not have read Kant, and I want the language to be as familiar as possible, I will speak of “appearances” when the Pluhar translation of Kant says “intuitions,” “knowledge” where the translation gives “cognition,” and I might say “experience” when I ought to say “possible experience,” etc. (The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar, Hackett, 1996). In addition, as this is a lecture meant to be read aloud, I often italicize words for emphasis; the emphasis is always mine. 4 �In this metaphysical duel, the thesis and antithesis each has its partisans (B493). That the world has a beginning in time is a foundation of morality and religion (B494); the thought that the world suddenly begins is allied with the thought that not everything comes about according to the laws of nature (B473). Some appearances can be attributed to a freedom beyond nature, whether human or divine. In other words, that the world should have a beginning in time is associated with the view that the world itself is a product of the divine will, in an act beyond the laws of nature. The mere possibility that God freely created the world underwrites the freedom with which we act and make moral decisions.4 Trusting in our freedom, we have a reason to take this side of the contest. On the other side, the eternity and infinitude of the world is championed by scientists, especially empiricists (B494). The antithesis is framed to ensure that scientific knowledge can expand without limit; that everything is by nature (B496-8). We have an interest on this side as knowledge-seekers. The fact that the opposed partisans each have an interest in the outcome helps to perpetuate the contest, but it is not the cause of its persistence. The arguments on both sides are valid, yet neither is true. The truth is an alternative that escapes the contrary, but not contradictory, formulations (B531). The contest is perpetual because it cannot be decided in favor of either statement. The conflict arises due to an illusion (B534). In both cases we reason about the world as if the world were an object of experience, but the world is not something available to experience in this way. The world is an idea, a concept created by reason in order to structure and organize all the things that we do know through the understanding’s grasp of possible experience (B538).5 The world-as-idea is the “absolute totality of all existing things,” the totality 4 "Now, to be sure, we have in fact established this necessity of a first beginning, issuing in freedom, only insofar as this is required for making comprehensible an origin of the world… Yet having once proved thereby… the power of beginning entirely spontaneously a series in time, we are now also permitted to let different series begin spontaneously, even in the midst of the course of the world…” (B477-78). 5 “We can in no way intend to mean that the series of conditions for a given conditioned is in itself finite or infinite. For then we would by a mere idea of absolute totality—a totality provided only in the idea itself—think an object that cannot be given in any experience; for we would confer on a series of appearances an objective reality independent of the empirical synthesis” (B538). 5 �of all possible experience, a synthesis that therefore “surpasses all possible experience” (B4467, my emphasis; cf. B532-3, B384). I should back up a moment and note that everything Kant says about this question depends on distinguishing two faculties, the understanding and reason (B396). This is the absolutely crucial part I have skipped over, and which I will shamelessly sketch. The first faculty, the understanding, brings the wide variety of appearances under concepts, it unifies the appearances by means of rules (B359); understanding is how we come to know objects and make correct statements about them. The second faculty, reason, operates at a higher level; it does not deal directly with appearances; it manages what is supplied by the understanding, it brings coherence to these statements; in bringing order, it seeks the universal underlying conditions of those statements (B363). At first glance, the world looks like an object of experience, something grasped by the understanding, but in fact it is a concept of reason, a notion that reason freely creates as part of its work in bringing coherence to the statements of the understanding about the objects of experience. This concept of reason, the world, is barely robust enough for us to raise a question about its origin, and not sufficiently robust for that question to have an answer (B505). Thus, contrary statements can be made about it without consequence. This idea of pure reason that we constructively think, but do not experience, is inherently a problem (B510). Note that while I began talking about questions, under Kant’s guidance I have slipped into talking about problems instead. The idea of pure reason is a problem in a double sense: on the one hand, it is a “problem which admits no solution” since neither the thesis nor the antithesis can be true; on the other hand, because we can say “with certainty” that no solution is possible, we obtain a “critical solution”; the illusion is dispelled (B508-510). The problem is perfectly insoluble and therefore perfectly solved.6 One of the striking things here is that Kant appears to turn the word idea inside out. Suppose we were to ask with Socrates, “what is virtue”? We wish to know not just what qualities may be called “virtues,” but what the form of virtue is—its idea—what is it that makes 6 “No question whatever concerning an object given to pure reason is insoluble for this same human reason… for the same concept that enables us to ask the question must also assuredly make us competent to answer it, since… the object is not to be met with outside the concept at all” (B505). 6 �each so-called virtue a virtue? To answer the “what is?” question means to grasp in thought the fullness of the idea. But for Kant, the idea is not the consummation of knowledge, not a fullness of thought, but the opposite; it’s a problem for the understanding, a rift in the fabric of human knowledge. When reason connects an idea, like the world, to a thread of inquiries in natural science, it does not expand knowledge; it simply indicates that this is where knowledge-as-such ends (B498). Kant calls this method “skeptical” in that it aims to refute the dogmatism of pure reason. It is Socratic, in that he means to delineate with maximum clarity what it is that we do not know. He brings the contrarian dialectic of pure reason to a conclusion in “the Socratic manner, viz., by the clearest proof of the opponents’ ignorance” (Bxxxi).7 I seem to have contradicted myself, saying both that Kant is Socratic in his treatment of the ideas, and that he turns the Socratic idea inside out, from the consummation of knowledge to its absence. Is Kant being ironic when he says his mode is Socratic? I think not. In many Platonic dialogues, when we observe the responses to “what is…?” questions, even though several possible answers are shown wanting, suggesting progress, one often comes away thinking that the question has not been definitively answered. Even the question, “what is knowledge?” is not answered. Perhaps even in the Platonic dialogues the idea signifies not a fullness of thought, but a problem. According to Kant, the ideas even for Plato were framed more as a ground for right action than for the sake of theoretical knowledge (B371).8 By depriving reason of transcendent speculative pretentions, Kant has made room for a rational faith that grounds moral action (Bxxx). 7 “Above all, however, [we see the value of] such a metaphysics if we take into account the inestimable advantage of putting an end, for all future time, to all objections against morality and religion, and of doing so in a Socratic manner, viz., by the clearest proof of opponents’ ignorance… Hence the primary and most important concern of philosophy is to deprive metaphysics, once and for all, of its detrimental influence, by obstructing the very source of its errors” (Bxxxi). Another passage that may allude to Socrates: “And what we allow as holding in regard to our practical interest, reason may want to pass off as furthering our speculative interest; reason may want to do this in order to break… the thread of physical inquiries and fasten it—with a pretense of expanding our cognition—to transcendental ideas, through which we cognize only that we know nothing” (B498). 8 Incidentally, this is the context in which Kant suggests that he understood Plato better than Plato understood himself (B370). The worth of the ideas lies not only in practice, i.e., moral guidance, but also in regulating and guiding speculative inquiry. A cosmological idea (i.e., the world) is a rule for the continuation and expansion of experience; even though the unconditioned (finite or non-finite) is never reached in experience (B537; cf. B672, on the regulative use of transcendental ideas). “We interrogate nature in accordance with these ideas” (B673). 7 �So how might Kant’s account of the idea, understood as a problem, help us to think about our own common experience with persisting questions? It helps us to see how a question could be permanent; how arguments may be valid on both sides of the question; how the question necessarily goes unanswered. The idea understood as a problem appears to give us an object of thought that invites our inquiry, that has a determinate form, but remains elusive. The enduring questions that we maneuver around in our conversations appear to have the insideout structure of Kant’s ideas, a sort of photographic negative for the mind’s eye. Yet Kant’s account of the idea as a problem seems poorer than our naïve experience of a permanent question. Having shown that the question of the eternity of the world is permanently incapable of being answered, Kant does away with any interest we may have had in raising the question. This is exactly his intention: by showing that neither side can grasp the truth, he shows that empiricist scientists cannot do away with freedom, and defenders of religion and morality cannot put limits on scientific inquiry. There is no reason for them to quarrel, and little reason even to talk about it. He means to steer eager young minds away from these fruitless debates: too often young people “with their desire for knowledge” waste their time on this and similar quarrels, exercising their ingenuity by devising clever new arguments and “neglect[ing] the study of well-founded sciences” (Bxxxi). I don’t think Kant would have sent his children to St. John’s, although I could be wrong.9 The Stability of Nature and the Wall about the Law Kant enabled us to picture the structure of a permanent question, but only by transforming the question into a problem, one that is perfectly solved by being shown perfectly insoluble. When the question is framed in way to exhibit its permanence, it seems to lose its character as a question. With Maimonides, we see the question take on an analogous structure, of parallel, undemonstrated propositions, but perhaps retaining its question-hood. About the eternity of the world Maimonides says there are three opinions: first, the opinion of the Law of Moses, that God, through his will, brought into existence out of nothing 9 Of course, Kant neither married nor had children. 8 �all beings as they are, including time.10 Second is the opinion is of all the philosophers, including Plato, that it is not possible to bring a thing into existence out of nothing, and, hence, there exists matter that is as eternal as the deity; the deity works on this matter as a potter works on clay; out of this the earth and the heavens are generated. Third is the opinion of Aristotle and his followers, which is the same as the preceding opinion, except Aristotle thinks the heavens do not come into being, but are perpetual and everlasting (2.13.281-284). Without warning, Maimonides adds a fourth opinion, the opinion of Epicurus and his following, who do not say that a deity exists, and who think that all things come into being and pass away by chance (2.13.285). The four opinions are quickly reduced to two: the opinion of Epicurus is said to be irrelevant since the existence of the deity has already been demonstrated; and the difference between the opinions of Plato and Aristotle is quickly set aside, on the ground that the essential question is whether matter is created or coexists eternally with God. I will briefly consider arguments for the creation of the world and for its eternity in order to get a synoptic view of the question. As Maimonides’ treatment has many more facets—there are, for example, four proofs of creation based on ten premises—I will take longer, getting deeper into the weeds, while abbreviating even more. Maimonides finds the proofs for the creation of the world wanting because the premises are faulty (1.73-74). I will mention two premises. First, the authors of these proofs, the theologians, do not admit the distinction between substance and accident, between a nature that endures and a changeable attribute (1.73.200-201). The proofs, in effect, assume that nothing occurs by nature; everything is only an attribute brought about directly by God in an unceasing act of creation. They assert, “everything you consider a form is an accident… there is no difference between the substance of iron and the substance of cream” (1.73.208).11 Second, the most important premise adopted by the theologians is not acknowledging the difference between intellect and imagination; they assume that whatever can be imagined is an acceptable notion for the intellect (1.73.206), and that what is possible or impossible according 10 The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, University of Chicago Press, 1963, 2.13, page 282. This statement actually follows from the second premise mentioned here; it’s relevance to the first premise signals their connection. 11 9 �to the imagination is possible or impossible simply. As a result, they do not recognize the stable nature of what exists. By contrast, for Maimonides, the difference between imagination and intellect is made evident in mathematics. In mathematics there are things that cannot be imagined, but nevertheless can be established by demonstrative proof. One example is the relationship of the hyperbola to its asymptote: one cannot imagine that the two lines will come closer than any given distance, and still never meet, and yet this feature of the hyperbola is proven (1.73.210).12 Here, the impossible and the necessary are correctly identified only by means of the intellect.13 This distinction between the intellect and the imagination is useful to the believer as well, since by means of the imagination one may easily think that God is a body or a force acting in a body (1.73.211, cf. 1.49.109), whereas it is the intellect that establishes that God is not a body. But the intellect also puts limits on what may be believed: “the impossible has a firmly established nature” that cannot be changed by any agent, including God (2.13.283). Creation out of nothing is impossible according to the intellect, and it cannot therefore be attributed to God (cf. 2.14.286). Maimonides also raises doubts about Aristotle’s arguments for the eternity of the world. The most important argument for the eternity of the world is that that motion as a whole does not come into being or pass away; each motion is caused by a preceding motion; either this series goes on to infinity, or there is an unceasing motion prior to all others (2.14.286).14 This eternal motion is the motion of the heavens, which, being circular, has no contraries, no reason to stop. Aristotle sought to refute Epicurus, who thought that the world, even the heavens, came about only by chance (2.20.312). Thus, he sought to show that the heavenly spheres move unceasingly through natural necessity (2.19.306). This is all familiar to readers of Aristotle’s Physics. Against this Maimonides points out that the various heavenly bodies have 12 The imagination in each particular use seems wedded to a particular scale, but the infinitely increasing closeness of the hyperbola and asymptote forever changes scale. What unfolds in thought cannot be coherently pictured, but only thought. 13 In another mathematical example, the mutakallimun apparently do not acknowledge that the side and the diagonal of the square are incommensurable (1.73.198). The dependence of this assertion on the relationship of intellect and imagination is indirect. 14 Maimonides says the method is correct but not sufficient as a proof (2.17.297); his argument is rehearsed below. 10 �quite different motions—they travel in different directions and at different speeds; Aristotle’s account of the permanent causes of motion do nothing to explain this variety. What Aristotle has to say about the heavens is therefore only conjecture.15 Maimonides is at pains to point out that while Aristotle’s argument is not demonstrative, Aristotle knew it was not demonstrative; he knew what it was that he did not know.16 This awareness that he had opinion rather than knowledge distinguishes him from his philosophical followers (2.15.290-2). According to Maimonides, “no cogent demonstration” can be brought to establish either the eternity of the world or its creation in time, “this is a point before which the intellect stops” (1.71.180). When there is no demonstration of either of two contradictory viewpoints, he says that it is preferable to let this matter remain a “problem,” or, if one accepts one of the two viewpoints, to do so without pretending it is proven (2.16.293-4). When Maimonides says, “this is a point at which the intellect stops,” one is naturally reminded of Kant’s account of the ideas of pure reason.17 As there are two fundamental opinions, one religious and one philosophical, the question mirrors the simplicity of Kant’s antinomy. Here, as well, neither opinion gains an undisputed, dialectical supremacy over the other. The Guide of the Perplexed is peppered with analogous notices on the boundaries of the intellect. “Man should not press forward to engage in speculative study of corrupt imaginings… when the thing he seeks does not seem to him to have been demonstrated… he should refrain and hold back.”18 In the face of such doubtful matters, “human perfection” is not-deceiving yourself into thinking that you have demonstrative knowledge when you do not, and notaspiring to know that which you cannot know (1.32.68). He says that the intention “is not, 15 Guide 2.19.306-8; 2.22.320; cf. 2.3.254. The cause of the motions of the heavens are intellects. Thoughtthinking-itself does not “will” in the proper sense of the word because it is impossible that it will anything contrary to what it does (2.21.314, 2.22.319). [This paragraph ends abruptly; probably more needs to be said.] 16 Guide 2.15.289-290; Pines cites De Caelo 1.10.279b4 ff. This awareness that he had opinion rather than knowledge on this point distinguishes him from his philosophical followers, who dogmatically mistake the argument for a proof (2.15.290-92). 17 Of course, only by substituting “intellect” for “understanding.” Much more could be said here. 18 Guide 1.32.70, cf. 1.32.66, 1.72.193, 3.436-7, etc. The most salient case is the true reality of God (1.52, 54, 56). Each passage needs to be studied within its context; I list them only to draw attention to the trope. The affinities between Maimonides and Kant have been explored by Shlomo Pines, “The Limitations of Human Knowledge According to Al-Farabi, ibn Bajja, and Maimonides” (Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. I. Twersky, Cambridge: London, 1979), although Pines focuses on knowledge of separated substances. Josh Parens provides a critique of this view, together with a review of the literature, in Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy, University of Rochester, 2016, pages 137-147. 11 �however, wholly to close the gate of speculation and to deprive the intellect of the apprehension of things that it is possible to apprehend” (1.32.70). Maimonides’ coordinated treatment of the two opinions, in which neither is demonstrated, has the double effect of preserving scientific knowledge of the things that are, while also preserving observance of the divine law. “For I reach the goal that every [theologian] desires, without abolishing the nature of existence and without disagreeing with Aristotle with regard to any point that he has demonstrated.”19 As neither the eternity of the world nor its beginning in time have been demonstrated, the advantages of holding one opinion or the other take on greater significance. The eternity of the world, especially the eternal motion of the heavens, has the advantage of making fully manifest the stability of nature. In addition, the eternity of the heavens is the premise on which is demonstrated the existence, unity, and incorporeality of God as pure intellect. There is a very significant disadvantage to the eternity of the world: it “destroys the Law [of Moses] in its principle,” for it denies miracles, and it renders meaningless the rewards and penalties given by the Law (2.25.328). If the motion of the heavens is eternal and necessary, then the basis of this motion, the deity as intellect, is unchanging; such a deity cannot will one thing and then another (2.14.284). This kind of God cannot be the author of the Law because laws do not exist by necessity; they require choice and particularization (3.26.509). There is no necessity, for example, that one sacrifice a lamb in one circumstance and a ram in another, even if sacrifices are useful (3.26.509).20 Maimonides means to protect the stability of the impossible and the stability of nature, while also building a “great wall” about the Mosaic Law (2.19.303; 2.17.297-8). Both premises— eternity and creation—are consistent with the existence, unity, and incorporeality of God (2.1.252). In addition, creation is consistent with a God who lays down particular laws, whereas 19 Guide 1.71.182. For the sake of simplicity, I have said, “theologians,” where Pines gives, “Mutakallimun,” a transliteration of the Arabic. The word is sometimes translated “dialectical theologians.” 20 Aristotle’s deity of pure thought, that moves the eternal heaven, acts only by necessity; it cannot account for why one heaven moves east and another west, one faster, another slower; it cannot account for why the stars are dense here and sparse there; these variations appear to require “particularization.” With belief in the creation of the world, God is conceived as one who can will one thing and then another; miracles and the Law are both rendered possible (not necessary or demonstrated, of course [2.25.329]). Note, Maimonides does not claim to have a demonstration that the deity is one who particularizes. 12 �eternity can be the basis of demonstrable knowledge of God’s existence. One premise is preferable, but both are possible, and human perfection is recognizing that you do not have demonstrative knowledge of either. From world to soul While Maimonides shows that both the eternity of the world and its creation, have not been demonstrated, he nevertheless affirms that he is among the followers of Moses, who believe in the creation of the world, and he provides an argument in favor of this belief. The argument runs thus: for each thing produced in time, the nature of the thing that has attained its final state is different from the nature of the thing when it is being generated. Someone who observes a thing only in its final state, cannot infer from its final state what its nature was before, while it was being generated. For example, an orphaned male on an isolated island, who has never seen a female of a mammalian species, could not answer the question, how did he come to be generated? (2.17.295) Without viewing an embryo, one cannot know what is generated first, the heart or the gonads, the veins or the bones (2.17.298). Aristotle, looking only upon the nature of what exists, and seeing it in its stability and perfection, cannot conceive an earlier state through which this whole was generated. But the inability to conceive this earlier state does not entail that such a state is impossible, it does not render impossible a prior process of natural generation (2.17.296). Maimonides’ critique clearly does not prove that the world was generated: it is not intended to be demonstrative. It only establishes that, on the basis of the nature before us, one cannot deny the possibility of the generation of the world.21 The argument is surprising if you think about it. For Maimonides, it is the theologians who characteristically err in not correctly identifying what is possible, impossible, and necessary. They judge what is possible on the basis of the imagination, when the intellect is a more definite guide. The philosophers, by contrast, know about and are guided by the intellect, and therefore understand better the nature of the possible, impossible, and the necessary 21 Furthermore, it establishes the possibility of the creation of the world in a way as that permits what exists to have a stable nature. If the Mutakallimun established the possibility of the creation of the world in time, they did so only in such a way as to render impossible the stability of nature. 13 �(1.68.166). But here, it is the philosophers who distinguish the possible and the impossible incorrectly, thinking the generation of the natural whole is impossible. The particular error in judging the possible and the impossible points to a deeper difficulty. Every school of thought has some opinion about what is impossible, and in every case, power over the impossible is not ascribed to God (3.15.461). For example, all men of speculation think that it is impossible that God should create a second like Himself, or impossible that he should annihilate himself. Some men of speculation, the theologians, think that it is possible for an attribute to exist without being in a substance, and others, the philosophers, think this is impossible. Faced with sorting out the various opinions about the impossible, Maimonides makes a surprising concession: Would that I knew whether this gate is open and licit, so that everyone can… assert with regard to any notion whatever he conceives; This is possible; whereas someone else says: No, this is impossible because of the nature of the matter. Or is there something that shuts and blocks this gate so that so that a man can assert decisively that such and such a thing is impossible because of its nature? Should this be verified… with the help of the imaginative faculty or with the intellect? And by what can one differentiate between that which is imagined and that which is cognized by the intellect?... Is there accordingly something that permits differentiation between the imaginative faculty and the intellect? And is that something altogether outside both the intellect and the imagination, or is it by the intellect itself that one distinguishes between that which is cognized by the intellect and that which is imagined? (3.16.460-1)22 In the case of the asymptotes of a hyperbola, or in the case of the incommensurability of the side and diagonal of a square, the proofs are valid in spite of distrusting imagination; such proofs help to establish that the intellect yields a conception of the impossible and the necessary that is different from the imagination’s. But to establish that the two faculties are distinct in several cases is not the same as distinguishing them in every case. It seems the 22 Elsewhere it appears to be the intellect which is responsible for distinguishing the two: “the intellect divides the composite things and differentiates their parts and makes abstractions of them, represents them to itself in their true reality and with their causes… the imagination apprehends only that which is individual and composite as a whole, as it is apprehended by the senses; or [it] compounds things that in their existence are separate” (1.73.209). It is not clear to me whether Maimonides thinks the intellect in itself cannot be known with precision (cf. 3.9.436-7), or whether its “quiddity” can be known (1.68.163), but it is unclear in the actual exercise of the two faculties where one begins and the other ends. This question is connected with other vexed questions in the Guide: the nature of prophecy (as the prophet is one perfect in imagination and intellect) and the prophecy of Moses in particular (whose prophecy is said to make no use of the imagination). 14 �philosophers who thought the eternity of the world was proven, somehow judged the matter with the imagination even when they thought they were judging on the basis of the intellect. As Maimonides says, “passions get the better of all sects, even of the philosophers.”23 The distinction between the imagination and the intellect remains somehow indeterminate, leaving ambiguities about the possible, impossible, and necessary. I should give some context for the image of the gate: Maimonides gives an extended parable about a ruler in his palace (3.51). People are scattered about inside and outside the city. Some wander around searching for the gate, others have entered the gate and the antechambers; I will not pause to lay out the several concentric rings. The highest rank, the rank of the prophets, who are strongest in intellect, have entered the innermost court. Maimonides says they ask questions and receive answers, speaking and being spoken to, in that holy place (3.51.620). Set in this context, the passage I read a short while ago, about whether the gate is “open and licit” or closed, presents a puzzle. In other passages, if the gate is open, this means there is something that can be grasped by the intellect; if the gate is closed, then the matter lies beyond the intellect. Here, closing the gate signifies that the intellect’s determination of the impossible is correct. Conversely, opening the gate signifies that we do not know if the intellect is correct in its determination of the impossible, and, yet, in this state of ambiguity, the gate is there to be passed through, perhaps to enter the innermost chamber, where the intellect attains its highest exercise, asking questions and receiving answers. The question about the eternity of the world is a question about what’s out there, about nature, rather than the self. One may have supposed this would make the question more tractable, yet the objectivity proves illusory. The question about the world cannot be explored in depth without opening a correlate question about the nature and the powers of one’s own soul. Kant and Maimonides both show this in different ways. For Kant, the question concerning the eternity of the world is a permanent problem because its insolubility is demonstrated on the basis of the distinction between the faculties of understanding and reason. For 23 Guide 2.15.292. Here, Maimonides says Aristotle knew that the “gates” were “closed” regarding the possibility of proving the eternity of the world. 15 �Maimonides, the question concerning the eternity of the world continues to perplex and invite inquiry precisely because the faculties of intellect and imagination, however separate, lack a final, satisfactory typology. In a better form of this lecture I would put these two accounts of the soul to the test. Is the power of imagination somehow active in Kant’s account of knowledge? Does this have anything to do with reason’s “fictive” power in creating deceptive ideas? This is a gate I am not prepared to pass through; I will make some observations while loitering in front of it. First, I believe Maimonides is wiser for his caution. In solving the problem of the antinomy, Kant employs a “skeptical method” which aims “to discover the point of misunderstanding” (B4512). The method is Socratic insofar as it seeks to know what it is that one does not know. Yet “the skeptical method” has a dogmatic edge; Kant says it “aims at certainty”; it reveals not what one person knows or does not know, but the limits of knowledge for human beings as such. To accomplish this requires an unambiguous and satisfactory account of the nature of knowledge; I am not confident Kant has it. Maimonides seems to reflect more accurately my experience reading great books, that even those who rightly place a premium on distinguishing knowledge from opinion, nevertheless may prove to have confused the two.24 Second, I would observe some differences in the way the question is framed by each author. Kant’s frames each antinomy in terms of a single thesis and antithesis, the view of natural science and the view of religion and morality, or, better, our view as knowledge-seekers and our view as rational-moral actors. This framing is intended to subsume every possible philosophy and every religion. It must be able to subsume under itself all previous speculation on these subjects, if it is to put an end to the unfruitful exercise of ingenuity. Maimonides’ framing of the question is immersed in detail, disordered and enigmatic. He lists four opinions about eternity or creation; he quickly reduces them to two, but the third spontaneously reemerges as a serious option. He argues that you cannot on the basis of the present, perfect state of existence, deny the possibility of a prior state in which that which now 24 To be more explicit: Kant has answered definitively the question, “what is knowledge?” while Maimonides, like Socrates, seems to lack a definitive answer to this question. It is the definitive account of what constitutes knowledge that permits closing the question about the eternity of the world, or the lack of that account that keeps the question open. 16 �exists, was naturally generated. In proving that Aristotelians lack the grounds to deny creation, he (accidentally?) shows the viability of Plato’s view, that even the heavens were generated. Several chapters after hastily setting Plato aside, we are told, “[Plato’s] opinion,” unlike Aristotle’s, “would not destroy the foundations of the Law” or give the lie to miracles (2.25.328).25 Similarly, although Maimonides speaks of “the opinion of Aristotle” on the eternity of the world, the theory assumes the uniform circular motion of the heavens, and Maimonides is acutely aware that mathematical astronomy had made great progress since Aristotle, even up into his own times; he is also aware that astronomy contains important, unanswered questions.26 He is doubtful of understanding the nature, causes, and motions of the heavens, but serious consideration of the question concerning eternity or creation for him requires serious study of the intricacies of contemporary astronomy and physics.27 Just as Maimonides does not frame the opinions of the philosophers or mathematicians in generalized terms, so on the other side, he does not treat the question concerning eternity in reference to religion and morality in general, but in reference to one religion, his own. The creation of the world in time is a belief shared with Christians and Muslims (1.71.178). He is clearly familiar with their beliefs, and the opinions he reports from the “theologians” generally come from Muslim and, to a lesser degree, Christian writers. Despite the shared interest of the 25 In truth, this passage is perplexing. First, if Plato’s opinion were entirely congruent with the law, and just as plausible as Aristotle’s opinion in accounting for the appearances, why not adopt the opinion of Plato about the natural whole? Possible answers: Maimonides has confidence in Aristotle’s opinions about the sublunar domain (2.22.319-320), and the existence, unity, and incorporeality of God can be demonstrated on the basis of Aristotle’s opinion about nature. Second, elsewhere it is said that Plato’s opinion differs from the Mosaic law in the crucial respect: it does not admit that matter was created. So why state here that it is compatible with the law? Plato’s opinion, unlike Aristotle’s, does supply a deity who “particularizes” the natural world, and such a particularizing deity could also be a possible source of law. These congruencies do not alter the fundamental difference, however. 26 Guide 2.24.322ff. Perplexities include the choice between the epicyclic and eccentric hypotheses, as well as the uncertainty about the placement of Mercury and Venus relative to the sun. 27 Guide 2.24.327: “the deity alone fully knows the true reality, the nature, the substance, the form, the motions, and the causes of the heavens. But he has enabled man to have knowledge of what is beneath the heavens… Let us stop at a point that is within our capacity.” Maimonides refers to his admonishment here as an instance of “poetic precociousness,” and he refers to his perplexity as evidence of his “extreme predilection” for investigation. I do not by the comparison mean to imply that Kant did not study contemporary astronomy and physics, which he did: he is known for his part in the development of the nebular hypothesis. 17 �three religions, he addresses the question within the context of the specific requirements of his own, even the requirements of his own religion in his own times.28 Maimonides troubles over the details of mathematical astronomy and the variety of philosophical and theological arguments because, even if nothing has been demonstrated and the question remains a “problem,” it is not closed either, and so all the details still have import for the question. Surveying the particular state of mathematics, philosophy, and his religion, enmeshed in its details and the motivating context, Maimonides’ formulation of the question loses something of its permanence and universality. Given the present state of physics, for example, I could not learn from the Guide the truth of the eternity or generation of the world, but I might see better how to reframe the question in the present.29 The Structure of a Persisting Question? What is it that we are doing, when we ask questions that seem to be permanent? Sometimes we come across a convenient, often three-word, formulation—oh, that’s the problem of reason and revelation, or justice versus expediency, or fate and free will—and my heart sinks a little, because the phrase, so formulaic, drains all import out of the conversation. The crispness of the formula implies that it is futile to say more, that it has all been said already. Without the attendant complexity, we lack the traction to think effectively or to care. That kind of reductionism is rare around here, but the way we converse does introduce a small measure of abstraction. The fact that we pursue our questions together entails that we frame them in a way that we can share in them. Each one of us reads and raises questions in reference to one’s own experience and circumstances, beliefs and hopes, but we articulate our 28 Some precepts in the law were framed in order to liberate the people from paganism; as paganism no longer poses the same threat, the precepts should be interpreted accordingly. For example, despite the emphasis on sacrifice within the law, prayer and fasting are preferable means of worship; contemplation of the deity better still (3.29; “Silence is praise to thee,” 1.59.139; cf. 3.51.621). 29 What are the several views that physicists or philosophers hold about the natural whole? In the face of the rapid progress of science, much in the Bible may be interpreted allegorically (2.30), but what must be accepted literally so that the law may guide the community? Where are the conflicts? What has been demonstrated, and what remains conjecture? This thinking about the importance of Maimonides situation for posing his question has been influenced by Gadamer’s critique of permanent problems: “The concept of the problem is clearly an abstraction, the detachment of the content of the question from the question that in fact first reveals it [the content?]… Such a ‘problem’ has fallen out of the motivated context of questioning, from which it receives the clarity of its sense” (TM 376). 18 �questions in way that is meant to be meaningful for everyone around the table. We abstract enough from our particular circumstances to pose our questions from the point of view of a shared humanity. Or perhaps, every question is tacitly double, a question for me and for us, close but not quite the same. The abstractness of Kant’s presentation of the antinomy may be relatively far from the way we pose persisting questions, but through its abstractness I think it reveals something about the source of persistence of these questions. The dialectical contest of the antinomies is played out at the boundaries between the secure knowledge of natural science and the fictive power of pure reason, between the speculative enterprise of the understanding and reason’s practical employment.30 Sometimes the boundary seems clear: in one vivid passage, Kant says that, as far as morality is concerned, “experience is the mother of illusion” (B375): you cannot derive what you ought to do from what is done; the boundary between reason and understanding must be recognized and respected. Other times the boundary is less clear: recall that, while the world is an idea, a concept of pure reason and not an object of experience, the idea nevertheless subsumes the totality of our experiences, and so proves useful for organizing our experiences and extending our knowledge. Metaphorically speaking, one has to cross over the boundary from experience to ideas, precisely in order to broaden and deepen one’s grasp of objects of experience. Kant appears to have marked out, somewhat schematically, the territory of persistent questions. Maimonides similarly passes from mathematically demonstrative arguments, to hypothetical arguments, to probable ones, to poetical precociousness and allegorical interpretations, and back again across the spectrum. Sometimes the aim is simply to know the true reality of what is, sometimes he considers what must be thought for the individual to act well or for the community to thrive. There seem to be two axes: one a passing from knowledge, through opinion, to ignorance; the second passing from theory to practice. Unless I am mistaken, for Kant, the two axes coincide: you cannot derive what one ought to do from what is; the domain of pure reason, though prone to illusion, is also the ground of morality; wehre 30 For reason as a “fictive” power, B608 (“invention” in Pluhar; dichten in German). I believe there are other similar passages. 19 �productive speculation [i.e., learning] occurs only on the side of the understanding. For Maimonides, the axes are askew: what ought to be done is based on knowledge whenever possible, on conjecture when not. Either way, in the kinds of questions I am talking about, it is difficult to know where you stand on either axis: is the account before us demonstrative, hypothetical, analogical? Is my interest purely speculative, or is it tacitly informed by how I mean to act and live? Moreover, in raising questions, we might put more emphasis on one axis than the other. It probably struck you a long time ago that the question concerning the eternity of the world may be a poor example of a persisting question, given that the prevalent view in physics today is that the world, the universe, has a beginning in time. As I think is obvious, my own interest in the question has been connected to another question, the question concerning how religious belief may be weighed against philosophical or scientific inquiry. The cosmological question was most explosive when religion and science appeared on different sides of it. The question concerning eternity or creation led us back, on the one hand, to the question, “what is the nature of the soul and its powers?” On the other, the question is motivated for many by the question about philosophic inquiry and religious belief: “what are those principles on basis of which I should act? How are they given or discovered?” The question concerning eternity leads in two different directions, towards the study of the soul and the nature of knowledge, on the one hand, and towards morality, religion, and politics, on the other.31 In this narrative, Kant appears to prioritize the first, Maimonides the second. If several fundamental questions intersect, how you answer one must be affected by the order in which you decide to treat them, by how you prioritize them. Kant means to put an end to metaphysical speculation, to complete metaphysics as a critical enterprise, but by marking out the multiple dimensions of the space where these problems are analyzed, he is more successful in showing why we cannot stop thinking metaphysically. The gate, of course, remains open. 31 I add “politics” because Maimonides aims to draw a “great wall about the Law,” that is, to preserve that which binds and protects his community. There is a (less prominent) political dimension to Kant’s treatment of these questions as well a community, perhaps a universal community, in which freedom is maximized (B373). 20 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 20 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gate of Speculation, Is It Open or Closed? On the Possibility of Permanent Questions Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 24, 2018 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture". Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Macfarland, Joseph C. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-08-24 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Permission has been given to make this available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Questioning Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Macfarland_Joseph_2018-08-24_Typescript https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3d4a67f1830d28336d570b7db681578f.mp3 844051e33d4cd77d620e40f16acde015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audio cassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:46:43 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 Poetry and Mathematics Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on October 2, 2009 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kutler, Samuel S. 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 2009-10-02 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Kutler_Samuel_2009-10-02 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7d2b32dbb0bd78a7e0db9027e6a4c52d.mp3 15f38a4dabe9a06174e82a04c0068478 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. 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Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audio cassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:56:24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Republic of Letters and the Republic of Numbers Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 29, 2006 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kutler, Samuel S. 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 2006-09-29 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Kutler_Samuel_2006-09-29 Subject The topic of the resource Comprehension Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a01ab61d333e6ca848160c3be8e4bccf.mp3 467cae9f49777b5db231d907c5eb1b0e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audio cassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:51:59 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource What Does Mathematics Have to Do with the Way We Lead Our Lives Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 7, 1997, by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kutler, Samuel S. 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 1997-11-07 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Kutler_Samuel_1997-11-07 Subject The topic of the resource Mathematics Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f9219b72c780337ed9d6338c639ee6cc.mp3 b482491829b66340f9595f92f88a709f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audio cassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:53:00 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 Memories and Memory Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 22, 2000, by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Recording is not complete. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kutler, Samuel S. 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 2000-09-22 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Kutler_Samuel_2000-09-22 Subject The topic of the resource St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.) Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fc43bfa6d48e57a010be6b8efde20d36.mp3 5a92cbd383782712a0224dea4560496d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audio cassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:43:01 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 Generalization Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 1, 1974 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Recording is not complete. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kutler, Samuel S. 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 1974-11-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Kutler_Samuel_1974-11-01 Friday night lecture Tutors