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Interpretation A JOURNAL 10F POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Winter 2001-2 Volume 29 Number 2

Harry Adams Aristotle on "the Vulgar": An Ethical and Social Examination

Nasser Behnegar The Political and Theological Psychology of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure

Zdravko Planinc ". . . this scattered kingdom": A Study of King Lear

Henry T. Edmondson III Modernity versus Mystery in Flannery O'Connor's Short Story Woods" "A View of the

Review Essay

Richard Freis A Triple Inquiry into the Human Center

Book Review

Will Morrisey The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey, by Seth Benardete Interpretation

Editor-in-Chief Hilail Gildin, Dept. of Philosophy, Queens College Executive Editor Leonard Grey General Editors Seth G. Benardete (d. 2001) Charles E. Butterworth Hilail Gildin Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Howard B. White (d. 1974) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell Joseph Cropsey Ernest L. Fortin John Hallowell (d. 1992) Harry V. Jaffa David Lowenthal Muhsin Mahdi Harvey C. Mansfield Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) Ellis Sandoz Leo Strauss (d. 1973) Kenneth W. Thompson International Editors Terence E. Marshall Heinrich Meier Editors Wayne Ambler Maurice Auerbach Fred Baumann Amy Bonnette Patrick Coby Elizabeth C de Baca Eastman Thomas S. Engeman Edward J. Erler Maureen Feder-Marcus Pamela K. Jensen Ken Masugi Will Morrisey Susan Orr Charles T. Rubin Leslie G. Rubin Susan Meld Shell Bradford P. Wilson Martin D. Yaffe Michael P. Zuckert Catherine H. Zuckert Manuscript Editor Lucia B. Prochnow

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E Mail: interpretation [email protected] Interpretation A JOURNAL 10F POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Winter 2001-2 Volume 29 Number 2

Harry Adams Aristotle on "the Vulgar": An Ethical and 133 Social Examination

Nasser Behnegar The Political and Theological Psychology 153 of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure

Zdravko Planinc ". . . this scattered kingdom": A Study of 171 King Lear

Henry T. Edmondson III Modernity versus Mystery in Flannery 187 O'Connor's Short Story "A View Woods" of the

Review Essay

Richard Freis A Triple Inquiry into the Human Center 205

Book Review

Will Morrisey The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading 233 of the Odyssey, by Seth Benardete

ISSN 0020-9635 Interpretation

Editor-in-Chief Hilail Gildin, Dept. of Philosophy, Queens College Executive Editor Leonard Grey General Editors Seth G. Benardete (d. 2001) Charles E. Butterworth Hilail Gildin Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Howard B. White (d. 1974) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell Joseph Cropsey Ernest L. Fortin John Hallowed (d. 1992) Harry V. Jaffa - David Lowenthal Muhsin Mahdi Harvey C. Mansfield Amaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) Ellis Sandoz Leo Strauss (d. 1973) Kenneth W. Thompson International Editors Terence E. Marshall Heinrich Meier Editors Wayne Ambler Maurice Auerbach Fred Baumann Amy Bonnette Patrick Coby Elizabeth C de Baca Eastman Thomas S. Engeman Edward J. Erler Maureen Feder-Marcus Pamela K. Jensen Ken Masugi Will Morrisey Susan Orr Charles T. Rubin Leslie G. Rubin Susan Meld Shell Bradford P. Wilson Martin D. Yaffe Michael P. Zuckert Catherine H. Zuckert Manuscript Editor Lucia B. Prochnow

Subscriptions Subscription rates per volume (3 issues): individuals $29 libraries and all other institutions $48 students (four-year limit) $ 1 8 Single copies available.

Postage outside U.S.: Canada $4.50 extra; elsewhere $5.40 extra by surface mail (8 weeks

or longer) or $ 1 1 .00 by air. Payments: in U.S. dollars and payable by a financial institution located within the U.S.A. (or the U.S. Postal Service).

Composition by Bytheway Publishing Services Printed by the Sheridan Press Binghamton, NY 13901 U.S.A. Hanover, PA 17331 U.S.A.

Inquiries: (Ms.) Joan Walsh, Assistant to the Editor interpretation, Queens College, Flushing, N.Y. 11367-1597, U.S.A. (718)997-5542 Fax (718) 997-5565 E Mail: interpretation [email protected] Aristotle on "the Vulgar":

An Ethical and Social Examination

Harry Adams Rice University

The utter vulgarity of the herd of men comes out in their preference for the sort of existence a cow leads. (Aristotle 1961, 10956b20)

Aristotle's practical philosophy is known, with some notoriety, to be colored by a certain aristocratic or elitist tone. An integral part of this tone derives from

vulgar," his many scattered and pejorative comments on "the "the vulgar class

men," craftsmen," of "vulgar and so on. In this paper, I trace the salient features (which center on the ways vulgarity is "inimical to virtue and happiness") of Aristotle's account of vulgarity. Although concentrating on his account of the vulgar working class, or craftsmen (banausoi), I also consider his comments on

rich." "the vulgar In addition, I critically evaluate his account as being marked by the following strengths and weaknesses. To its credit, his account contains many incisive and valuable social insights concerning the characteristics, causes, and influences of such vulgarity. As part of the value of these insights lies in

their relevance to the moral landscape of contemporary capitalism, I suggest that, to whatever degree capitalist society suffers from such vulgar influences, it can improve itself only by squarely facing the vacuum of virtue left in its midst by these influences. To its detriment, Aristotle's account suffers from

masses." a morally specious and priggish condescension towards the "vulgar Correspondingly, as I argue, Aristotle is to be faulted for implicitly endorsing

virtuous," an enjoyment of the fruits of vulgar labor by "the without an adequate

vulgars' appreciation of these necessary and substantial contribution to the good life of the polis.

THE VULGAR

'vulgar' We may commence by examining what Aristotle means by this term (banousos). In our contemporary usage of the term, we often associate vulgarity with coarseness, repulsiveness, or profaneness of a vaguely sexual nature. But these associations are as misleading as enlightening. For Aristotle, the term 'common' connoted a threefold type of "commonness': in the sense of fre

'common' quently found and commonplace, in the sense of socially crude and 'common' unrefined, and also in the sense of morally base and ignoble. In

interpretation, Winter 2001-2, Vol. 29, No. 2 134 Interpretation

Aristotle's usage of this term, each of these three senses informs and overlaps his meaning, with now one, now another, being emphasized (E.g. A/1095b20, 1107M9, P1260a40Politics, hereafter cited as P. For elucidation of Aristot

'vulgarity' le's conception of against the backdrop of its usage in ordinary Greek of the time, see Liddell & Scott). Expanding beyond a mere definition of the word, how may we say that Aristotle understands and employs the concept of vulgarity? At its core, vulgarity may be understood as a common set of ethical shortcomings, centered on pettiness and ignobility, and an inversion of base for lofty values, that arise from an improper relation to the material resources in one's life. There are six ancillary features that compose and inform his interpre tation of this concept. Aristotle associates vulgarity: (1) with physically exhaust ing and stultifying bodily labor, leading to a narrowing of one's ability to de velop and employ reason (P1258b35-8, 1277M-6); similarly, (2) with mentally exhausting and overly demanding career work, leading to a reduction of one's capacity to learn and acquire virtue (P1337b5-20); (3) with a lack or misuse of the type of leisure time that wholesomely contributes to one's civic, moral, intellectual, and spiritual enrichment (P1328b34-29a2); (4) with a lack of suffi cient financial resources to attain and support virtue, or a gaudy and greedy misuse of these resources; (5) with an expenditure of one's time and effort for others under necessary constraint, rather than for oneself and one's polis under voluntary choice (P1278a5-21) and, finally, (6) with the replacement of supe (P1341M0- rior, ultimate goods and ends with base, common goods and means 15, Ar'1095bl4-96al0). As we shall see, each of these features provides key reasons why Aristotle thinks vulgarity is inimical to virtue and true happiness. "alienating" (In light of such a description of the living and working conditions of this poor, vulgar lot, it is no wonder that Marx, who studied Aristotle closely during his doctoral program and was surely familiar with these passages, made labor" "alienated such an important tier of his [especially early] work. See Marx, esp. pp. 77-87, and also McCarthy.) It is vulgar craftsmen (banousos technites) who become, for Aristotle, the paradigmatic symbol and embodiment of these features. To be more precise, we might draw a distinction between banousos (qua trades) as standing specifically for a certain occupation or class of workmen, and banousos (qua traits) as stand ing for a certain class of vices or behavioral traits. Although Aristotle uses the single form banousos in both of these senses, in this paper I take these senses largely to overlap; that is, I take this class of workmen to be characterized, largely though not completely, by a certain class of social traits. And as we shall see, the vulgar rich may be said to share qualities 3, 4, and 6 of the class of banousos-traits, even though they are mutually exclusive with the class of banousos-irades. Because these craftsmen come equipped with "strong backs

minds" and weak (after having long employed their brawn rather than their brains); because they have so little time for leisure (or, if they do have time, use it in trivial amusement, rather than in self-enrichment); because they spend Vulgar" Aristotle on "the 135 their days executing the demands of others, rather than learning how to execute the functions of active citizenship and public office; because "they are pre

well" occupied with living, rather than with living (P\251b41. To be sure, Aris totle is, in this passage, referring not to craftsmen, but to that class of citizens who are wealthy and involved in commerce. But as will become evident, this

living," characteristic of "being preoccupied with mere may be taken as repre sentative of all the vulgar, regardless of their occupation); and because they (mis-)take leisure, money, or pleasure to be their chief ends in life, Aristotle concludes that these vulgar are practically incapable of virtue and happiness (P1264M6-23, 1337b3-20). We may guess (since Aristotle does not explicitly tell us this) that their incapacity for these things is not due to their nature, but to their nurture, i.e., to the stultifying household and working conditions they live through. For, while Aristotle says that natural slaves are incapable by nature of the reason requisite for full virtue and happiness, freedom and citizenship, he situates vulgar craftsmen ambiguously, as lying somewhere between these lowly natural slaves, and free, full citizens (P1254bl6-55a4, 1260bl, P1277a36-bl.

For a detailed examination of the socioeconomic conditions of these vulgar

craftsmen in ancient Greece, in relation to their neighboring classes of slaves, farmers, tradesmen and merchants, etc., and the wealthier class of citizens, see Meikle.).

Situating these vulgar craftsmen at this ambiguous level raises potentially

theory." serious problems for "the virtue of Aristotle's virtue Aristotle insists that, like slaves, these craftsmen are lacking in virtue, at least true and full virtue that goes beyond the proper execution of menial tasks; he claims that "their bodies and minds [have] been rendered useless for the practices and activities

virtue" of (P1337M1). In claiming here that their bodies and minds have been rendered useless for virtue, he leaves open the suggestion that, unlike true natu ral slaves, these craftsmen may not lack virtue because of being precluded in nately, by nature, from attaining it (P1260M-2). Consequently, vulgar crafts men would, after all, seem to have the nature and capacity for virtue, lacking only the adequate means, namely proper upbringing, training and education, and sufficient leisure time, to develop it. Where one's internal nature is not the impediment, Aristotle sees only the lack of these types of external means and goods as impeding people from attaining virtue. Aristotle seemed to take it for granted that this class of craftsmen (along with farmers, hired laborers, and traders) just will lack these means and goods. But, being the astute empirical thinker that he was, he might have realized that this did not necessarily have to be the case. He might have considered the possibility, realized in our day, that such craftsmen will be able to have decent family training, adequate education, sufficient leisure time, and so on, so that, in turn, they will be able to develop virtue. So if these craftsmen, who make a necessary and valuable contribution to the polis and its good, are capable of virtue but simply lack the necessary means to it, then, we must ask, Is it right for Aristotle to presuppose that they 136 Interpretation must be so vulgar and unvirtuous? In turn, we must ask the following critical questions: Must the virtue and good of Aristotle's polis necessarily be based on ^virtuous and vulgar elements? If the craftsmen of the polis are vulgar, and yet actually capable of virtue, then what is the justification for continuing to profit from their demeaning labor (which is, according to Aristotle, what keeps them in their vulgar condition), rather than enabling them to achieve virtue? Is not the only justification for allowing and wanting these (virtue-capable) crafts men to continue doing their (virtue-inhibiting) work pure expediency? If so, are not these craftsmen (or their virtue, at least) being sacrificed for the overall good of the polis, and thus (in Kantian terms), being treated only as means? If Aristotle is to remain theoretically consistent, enabling these craftsmen to become virtuous would require freeing them from their slavery, or at least their essentially vulgarizing labor; for elsewhere he insists that it is the duty of states men and legislators to try to promote virtue among the citizenry. Granted, these craftsmen are certainly not full citizens, at least not in Athens. Their status as falling anywhere between slavery and citizenship really depended upon what particular constitution they found themselves under. See Morrison, who argues that Aristotle's concept of citizenship gains greater coherence by seeing in it a range of degrees of citizenship. Presumably, only full citizens, who make signif icant contributions (holding deliberative and judicial office, donating property,

polis' etc.) to the good, deserve significant goods (honor, education, leisure, etc.) from the polis in return. But can it justifiably be said that the contributions these craftsmen make to the polis are so comparatively insignificant and unde serving of comparable goods of restitution (such as citizenship status, education and leisure and the support towards virtue that these imply)? Certainly not. Aristotle might reply that there is a difference between the baser material goods that these vulgar craftsmen contribute to the polis, compared to the nobler goods that citizens contribute; and that this difference is what justifies the full citizens receiving the privileges, honor, education, and so on that the craftsmen don't receive. But this reply doesn't seem to hold water, for these craftsmen are capable of virtue, and are thus arguably undeserving of their lowly lot (unlike true 'natu

slaves,' ral who, because they are by nature incapable of reason or virtue, are deserving of their lot, according to Aristotle [P1334al]). In addition, these craftsmen make contributions to the polis which, though perhaps not altogether

noble, are for that reason no less essential and important. "Vulgar craftsmen are

concerned with crafts without which a city-state cannot be managed (of these

living" some are necessary, whereas others contribute to luxury or fine (P1291al-

citizens" 3). The goods that "good enjoy, then, are built upon the labor, upon the blood, sweat, and tears, of vulgar craftsmen. For all these reasons, it doesn't

'virtuous' seem ultimately defensible, just, or virtuous for citizens of the polis like Aristotle (who was actually a resident alien of Athens) to denigrate these craftsmen for their vulgarity, while all the while enjoying, and in fact presuppos 'vulgar' ing, the fruits of their labor. Or again, isn't it wrong for these craftsmen Vulgar" Aristotle on "the 137 to be 'virtuous' denigrated and criticized for being so vulgar when any of the might have ended up with similar characters if they had had to endure similar harsh living and working conditions themselves? Doesn't such denigration re duce to condemning the vulgar for not developing resources that they never had available, or for not capitalizing on chances that they were never given? There seems to be something fundamentally unfair, if not exploitative, then, with pre

virtue' vulgarity,' supposing that such 'lofty might be built upon such 'lowly when these vulgar elements are not given their proper due. Notwithstanding these possibilities, we shall now take a closer look at the actual labor and leisure (or lack thereof) of these vulgar workhorses.

THE VULGAR, AND THEIR WORK AND LEISURE

Aristotle reasons that

Since we are investigating the best constitution, the one that would make a city- state most happy and happiness cannot exist apart from virtue, as was said ear lier it evidently follows that in a city-state governed in the finest manner, possess ing men who are unqualifiedly just (and not given certain assumptions), the citizens should not live the life of a vulgar craftsman or tradesman. For lives of these sorts are ignoble and inimical to virtue. Nor should those who are going to be citizens en gage in farming, since leisure is needed both to develop virtue and to engage in po

litical actions. ... Any task, craft, or branch of learning should be considered vulgar if it renders the body or mind of free people useless for the practices and activities of virtue. That is why the crafts that put the body into a worse condition and work done for wages are called vulgar; for they debase the mind and deprive it of leisure. (P1328b34-29a2, 1337b9-14)

So he acknowledges a correlation between certain professions and the amount and types of leisure that these professions allow. The professions of vulgar crafts men, tradesmen, and farmers, but also those of soldiers, wealthy merchants, and so on, just happen to require such long hours, such demanding physical labor, and- or such careful attention, that they leave little or no room for leisure (See also P7.15 and NE10.7). In the latter passage, Aristotle says that "the business of the

impossible" politician also makes leisure (1177M3). Now, this would seem to involve him in a contradiction, inasmuch as he also holds the politician (qua statesman politikos) to represent the official embodiment of practical virtue, and virtue to require leisure. How can such a politician (who is supposed to be so practically virtuous) be virtuous if he has no time for leisure, and leisure is necessary for virtue? The only two possible ways out of this contradiction, it seems, are either (1) for Aristotle to make a distinction between this kind of politician (portraying him as a busy, scattered, merely bureaucratic type of pub- 138 Interpretation lie servant), and the type of statesman he holds up as a paradigm of public virtue, or (2) to make a much greater distinction than he is normally held to make between the public virtue of the politician and the deeper virtue of the philosopher, and to reason that the politician is precluded from being able to have this latter kind of virtue. But leisure is requisite for the cultivation of virtue in the following ways. The intellectual virtues require a significant amount of time spent in reading, learning (perhaps in a kind of Peripatetic setting), studying philosophy, quiet meditation and contemplation, and so on. The practical virtues require a signifi cant amount of time spent in public potential involvement, in learning to execute skillfully and diligently the roles of office-holder and civic leader and, generally, of good and active citizen, contributing to the overall good of the polis. Aristotle does not presuppose that the possession of mere free time is the same as, or will issue in, such well-spent leisure time. On an individual level, he notes that many people, especially of this vulgar type, will spend whatever little free time they have in the pursuit of frivolous pleasure and amusement. Perhaps so as to unwind after an exhausting day of physical labor, this type will not think to spend their remaining free time in what leads to their intellectual and moral edification, but only in what leads to their physical relaxation, gratifi cation, and amusement (V1150bl6-18, P1337b33-41). On a communal level, Aristotle notes that people need to be trained in the proper use of leisure time. Without such training, he says, people tend to misuse their leisure time so as to become soft, intemperate, and arrogant (P1334al0-34). He claims that it is an important responsibility of legislators to train and educate their people in how to be worthy of, and properly take advantage of, these goods and the good of leisure (P1334al-10). More will be said about the significance of a broader training to virtue in the conclusion. For a lucid explanation of the way that Aristotle saw education and wise legislators relating to, and being necessary conditions for, any people's ability to relate properly to their goods of property, money, and leisure, see Irwin. Although a people may have exercised particular virtues (such as military prowess and courage) to gain their leisure time, they need other virtues (such as temperance and wisdom) to be able to maintain their leisure time. Aristotle claims that the more a people enjoys the goods of "luck, peace, wealth, and leisure," the more they need to grow in temperance and the virtues that philoso phy entails. He uses the example of Sparta as a model of this principle: Aristotle describes this people as militarily virtuous enough to have acquired political hegemony, peace, and leisure time, but as not otherwise virtuous, temperate, or mature enough (and as not having just- or wise-enough legislators), to keep these goods. "Because the[se Spartans] consider these goods and the enjoyment of them to be better than the enjoyment of the virtues, they train themselves only in the virtue that is useful for acquiring them, and ignore the virtue that is leisure" exercised in (P7.15). Aristotle argues that the Spartans make a fatal Vulgar" Aristotle on "the 139 mistake concerning their ends and means, which is the type of mistake charac teristic of all the vulgar. The vulgar always aim for some mere mean or common end as a false ultimate end rather than aiming at the only truly ultimate ends, which are virtue and happiness. In this case, Sparta made military victory, lei sure, and money, rather than virtue itself, its ultimate ends. In discussing the foibles and instabilities of the Spartan people and constitution (P2.9), he con tends that

The entire system of [Spartan] law aims at a part of virtue, military virtue, since this is useful for conquest. So, as long as they were at war, they remained safe. But once they ruled supreme, they started to decline, because they did not know how to be at leisure, and had never undertaken any kind of training with more authority than military training. Another error, no less serious, is that although they think (rightly) that the good things that people compete for are won by virtue rather than by vice, they also suppose (not rightly) that these goods are better than virtue it

self. . . . Thus, the result their legislator has produced is the opposite of beneficial:

he has made his city-state poor and the private individuals into lovers of money. (P1271M-17, italics mine)

people" Aristotle insists that all such "vulgar as these always choose some lesser, common end over virtue. He suggests that these people think they have good reason to privilege their own petty indulgences, whether they be leisure, money, pleasure, or any other mere means to an end, as a preferred and ultimate end over virtue itself. Aristotle notes, for instance, that some vulgar "people make

amusement their end. For the end perhaps involves a certain pleasure (though not just any chance one), and in their search for [pleasure as an end] they mistake amusement for it, because it has a certain similarity to the [true] end of

action. ... One might plausibly conclude, therefore, that people try to achieve

amusements" happiness by means of pleasant (P1339b31-9. It is provocative to consider how much this scenario might apply to present-day America, consid ering how much energy and resources we often spend pursuing leisurely escape and amusement). We shall now examine the way that Aristotle perceives the

resource" vulgar as relating, not to the "common material of their leisure and leisure time, but to their money.

THE VULGAR AND THEIR MONEY

In relation to work and leisure, we saw that Aristotle tends to associate vul garity with the poorer and working classes. So in relation to money, we might expect him to make the same association. But he does not. Instead, and some what surprisingly, when he is talking about money he tends to associate vulgar ity with the rich. (For a helpful analysis of Aristotle's views on property and 140 Interpretation into the relations of the wealthier and poorer classes to the property conditions Aris of his day, see Mayhew.) According to the way he understands vulgarity, bit as totle thinks that certain of (but certainly not all of) the rich may be every

"vulgar" deserving of the title as the poor. In some places, in fact, he even

rich" insists that the "vulgar may be more vulgar, and more harmful to the

poor" polis," "constitutional health of their than their corresponding "vulgar (P1267al3-5, 1297all). In his discussion of the virtue of philanthropy (NE4.2), for example, he has this to say about the rich man who spends his money in a community- gaudy and self-flattering way, rather than in a well-calculated and enhancing way:

Corresponding to the [philanthropic] man on the side of excess is the vulgarian, who spends too much. He spares no expense in order to make a splash on trifling occasions dining the members of his club as if they were wedding guests and (if he happens to be financing a comedy) insisting that the chorus be dressed in pur

ple, . . . and committing similar faux pas. And in all this he will not be fired by any noble aspiration. All he wants to do is make a display of his opulence, since he imagines that he is admired for that. He spends little where he ought to spend much

and much where but little is called for. (Thomson trans.)

These comments provide clues as to how Aristotle understands such wealthy people as being vulgar. Their vulgarity consists not only in their inability to use money in a restrained and well-directed way, but in their inversion of true, noble "common" values with false, ignoble, and ones. These kinds of vulgarians place great value in the enhancement of their own personal prestige, but little value in the enhancement of their community's good. From this inversion, Aristotle reveals the dangerous potential of money to breed a narrow and selfishly indi vidualistic spirit, rather than a selfless esprit de corps (cf. P1263M-5). Aristotle provides a litany of transgressions which these vulgar rich fall into: First and foremost, as mentioned, these vulgarians place greater value on money (and its extravagant power) than on virtue and noble, worthy causes, which only the virtuous will recognize and appropriately support. In these ways, the vulgar rich resemble the aforementioned Spartans, whose oligarchic constitution repre sents all oligarchies insofar as they do not "organize their laws and educational system to promote all the virtues, but instead are vulgarly inclined to promote

the ones held to be more useful and more conducive to acquisition. . . They consider these [material] goods and their enjoyment to be better than the enjoy

virtues" ment of the (P1333M0, 1334b3, italics mine). Secondly, but similarly, these vulgarians view money as an end and good in itself, rather than as a means to an end. "The masses take [the supreme good] to be something plain and

tangible, like pleasure or money or social standing. .. As for the money-maker "businessman," [or as Thomson translates], his life is under some kind of re straint; clearly, wealth is not the good which we are trying to find, for it is only Vulgar" Aristotle on "the -141

else" useful, i.e., it is only a means to something (yV1095a23, 1096a6, Ostwald trans.). On this point, Aristotle says that "these people also make all of these

[goods and skills] into forms of wealth acquisition in the belief that acquiring

end" wealth is the end, and that everything ought to promote the (P1258al3). Thirdly, in overemphasizing the value of money in relation to other values, these rich vulgarians exalt themselves and look down on others who don't have as much money as they. Aristotle describes oligarchies as being based on this logic of smug arrogance: "Oligarchies arise from those who are unequal [or, actually, superior] in some respect taking themselves to be wholly [superior]: for being [superior]" [superior] in property, they take themselves to be unqualifiedly (P1301a31-3, see also 3.9). Fourthly, these vulgarians do not recognize the proper limits to wealth and wealth acquisition. If they recognized wealth for what it really was, a mere means to the good life, they would see what Aristotle limit." calls its "natural But, since they view it as an end in itself, they take it as having no limits. Consequently, "there is no limit to the end of this kind of wealth acquisition, for its end is wealth in that form, that is to say, the posses sion of money. [So] wealth acquirers go on increasing their money without limit" (P1257b24-34). In their inordinate acquisitiveness (pleonexia), these vul gar rich recognize and acknowledge no clear point of excess, to the point

"unnatural" wherein their careers, pursuits, and character become (P1256b27- 57a4). (This comprises Aristotle's psychological account of the genealogy of greed.) Finally, and as a result of these previous reasons, these vulgarians be come ruled by greed. "For they consider any amount of virtue, however small, to be sufficient, but seek an unlimitedly excessive amount of wealth, posses like" sions, power, reputation, and the (P1323a36). With this vicious develop ment towards greed, the deleterious effects of vulgarity begin to exceed the bounds of harm done to the character of individuals, so that significant harm is done to the character of the whole polis. Particularly in oligarchies, a vicious two-way cycle develops, whereby both individual greed seeps out to corrupt the constitution of the polis, and, in turn, the acquisition-oriented constitution of the polis turns back, as Aristotle says, to "make the private individuals into lovers

money." of In fact, Aristotle sees this vulgar greed, including the distortions, corruptions, imbalances, and distributional injustices that come in its train, to be a central cause of constitutional instability (P2.7; 5.2). I take Aristotle's descriptions (which also serve, of course, as criticisms) of

rich" these "vulgar here to be quite incisive and valuable, for the following reasons. First, I take them to be instructive in their capacity to serve as remind ers of the ethical dangers of living under contemporary capitalism, at least in its more unbridled forms. I thus take many of his comments about oligarchic constitutions to apply to capitalistic states. (Lewis also makes the case that Aris totle's various criticisms of oligarchies are altogether applicable to capitalism, and that Aristotle offers a prescient critique of many contemporary market forces.) Obviously, there are many and significant structural differences between 142 Interpretation ancient forms of oligarchy and current forms of capitalism. For example, many Western capitalist societies, to the extent that they are liberal democracies, are infused with, and animated by, principles fairly foreign to these ancient regimes, e.g., a striving after toleration, individualistic freedom, and multicultural plural ism. On another level, whereas Aristotle plainly states that oligarchies are forms of rule by the rich, we modems would like to believe we are ruled by "the people,""law," majority," by by "the etc., or anything else that allows us to defer the question of how much we may be ruled by the rich. These differences should not obscure the one common similarity between oligarchy and capital ism, however, namely, their organization around the end (telos) of the acquisi tion and maximization of wealth.

I must further qualify my acceptance of his critique of such forms of oligar chy-capitalism (or, perhaps more accurately, "plutocracy"). I do not think the plausibility of his views comes as a result of their being a sound economic, as much as their being a sound ethical, critique. This distinction is important. Espe cially in our present post-Cold War era, there is a tendency to interpret all criticisms of capitalism as outmoded forms of economic myopia that are blind to the ways capitalism is simply a more efficient, and perhaps even more stable or just, system. But, although capitalism may be a more efficient system than other types of political economy, this does not automatically mean that it is a more ethical, i.e., virtuous, system. Consequently, I think Aristotle is right to hold that an appreciation of the economic virtues ofa system should not obscure the recognition of the ethical (or in this case "vulgar") vices of that system. Aristotle is insistent upon these points and distinctions. For example, in his discussion of what makes for a more stable tyranny, he quite straightforwardly insists that a regime that is altogether ruthless and iron fisted may, nonetheless,

"brutally" be in many ways efficient, well-organized, and self-preserving (P5.ll). And he denounces those constitutions that do not "organize their laws and edu cational system to promote all the virtues, but instead are vulgarly inclined to

acquisition" promote the ones that are most useful and more conducive to

"vulgarly" (P1333M0. Although in this passage, what Reeve takes as comes from the Greek phoptikos rather than from banausos, the point still seems perti nent [Goodin and Reeve].)

These claims are reflected through Aristotle's kindred claim about the ethical

character of constitutions. In this case, Aristotle claims that certain types of

constitutions will produce certain correspondent types of citizens and of constel

lations of virtues in these citizens (P3.4-5). "For [instance,] the sort of person

oligarchy" who is a citizen in a democracy is often not one in an (P1275a3). Whereas democracies might produce citizens tending towards, say, a greater civic involvement or political awareness, oligarchies will produce citizens tend

ing towards a more vulgar acquisitiveness. "The kind of rule is not in terms of excellence or virtue, but is based on wealth and power [in the case of] oligar

chies" (7V1161a2; 1173a25-b5). As mentioned, an oligarchy may thus be taken Vulgar" Aristotle on "the 143 as a general prototype of modern capitalism (notwithstanding certain differ ences), to the extent that both prioritize the acquisition of wealth. If there is such a similarity between oligarchies and capitalism, and if, as Aristotle claims, oligarchies tend to produce such vulgar acquisitive traits, then may we not con clude that modem forms of capitalism will also produce citizens tending towards the same constellation of "vulgar and acquisitive traits"? (If x produces z, and x is sufficiently similar to y, then will not y produce z?) What does this imply

constitutions," about us, as citizens of "capitalist and our vulnerabilities to vul

garity?

THE VULGAR AND THEIR (LACK OF?) HAPPINESS

We have seen that vulgar craftsmen are precluded from being virtuous be cause of their stultifying work and their lack of adequate resources like leisure time (MT1099a32-b7); and we have seen that the vulgar rich are prevented from being virtuous by their own greed and overly distracting work and their misuse of money and leisure time. However plausible these claims are, should we also accept Aristotle's further claim, that these vulgar are not, or cannot be, happy (P1264b22)? Must their lack of virtue entail a lack of happiness? To answer these questions, let us try to imagine this vulgar class at its happi est. Cannot we imagine certain craftsmen, such as might be represented by the so-called blue-collar workers of our own day, as being substantially happy be cause of possessing, say, a labor-intensive yet satisfying job, an endless supply of cheap beer, and a widescreen TV equipped with portable remote and satellite hookup? Of course, we have to factor in the fact that this contemporary worker enjoys a degree of leisure time undreamed of by his ancient counterpart. It seems so. It is even easier to imagine the vulgar rich as happy. Cannot we imagine them as being supremely happy, deluged in champagne and material wealth, gaily traveling the globe, and denying themselves no pleasure or posses sion? (If they are ugly, which Aristotle mentions as one impediment to happi ness, they can even hire the most skillful of plastic surgeons.) How many of us would abjure such a life because of the sheer and essential unhappiness it con tained? But, more importantly, don't these (admittedly stereotypical) caricatures force us to admit that the vulgar are in fact altogether capable of happiness?

"happiness." The answer to this last question turns on our understanding of Aristotle, of course, meant something very different and more specific by the term than what we often mean by it. Without going into an extensive analysis of the term (as many others have done), Aristotle took happiness (eudaimonia, which I hereafter refer to as 'happiness,') as the following: as a lifelong experi ence attained only by those virtuous in character, that consists in the possession ofa full array of the goods of life, each held in their proper place by a harmo nizing and well-developed reason (cf. NE\.4,5,1-\2. Akrill presents a helpful 144 Interpretation

account of this central topic, including a discussion of the much-debated ques tion of whether Aristotle sees greater happiness lying in the theoretical, as op posed to the practical, life. Also, see McDowell, who discusses the senses in which Aristotle does and does not take eudaimonia to be the proper and ordering end [telos] of the good life.) In contrast, we often take happiness (and I will hereafter refer to our common understanding of this as "happiness2") in a much more general sense, as meaning something like a state of experience character ized by a predominantly greater balance of pleasure over pain. This distinction should help clarify that the life of the vulgar may indeed be characterized by happiness2, but not by happiness]. Is this distinction so significant? If the vulgar can enjoy a life of happiness2, perhaps even one of intense pleasure, can we say, along with Aristotle, that these vulgar lives are still so deplorable, so inferior, and so much less happy (in an overall sense), than the lives of the virtuous? Indeed, is it inconceivable that vulgarians may experience a greater amount or intensity of pleasure through their lives than Aristotle's virtuous persons? What about all those vulgarians and rich sensualists like Sardanapalus (a regal Hugh Hefner-type of his day), who spend so much of their time and money pursuing, and attaining, predomi nantly hedonistic pleasures?

The common run of people and the most vulgar identify [happiness] with pleasure, and for that reason are satisfied with a life of enjoyment (Ostwald trans.). Accord ingly they ask for nothing better than the sort of life which consists in having a good time. (I have in mind the three well-known types of life that just mentioned, that of the man of affairs, that of the philosophic student.) The utter vulgarity of the herd of men comes out in their preference for the sort of existence a cow leads.

Their view would hardly get a respectful hearing, were it not that those who occupy great positions sympathize with a monster of sensuality like Sardanapalus (Thomson trans.). (NE1.5)

Does this possibility (of the very happy2 vulgar person) raise problems for that part of Aristotle's ethical theory that suggests that the virtuous man just will be

the happiest,, and the one who experiences the greatest overall pleasure (/V1099a8-30)? Not at all, I think, if we remember to distinguish between these two types of happiness. (Morris documents contemporary parallels among American businessmen.)

To defend and further clarify Aristotle's answers to these questions, we need to understand why he argues that happiness, is superior to such pleasure and

common happiness2. Aristotle might admit that a vulgarian could experience more pleasure (at least of a sensual kind) than a virtuous man, in the same way have no trouble that he would admitting that some vulgar rich person could a possess more money than virtuous man. For, ultimately, he sees pleasure as being just another lesser and constitutive good (like money, leisure, good looks, Vulgar" Aristotle on "the 145 and so on), that comprises the greater good of happiness,. He views pleasure not as equivalent to happiness,, but only as a significant component of happiness,. Accordingly, he would not admit that any vulgarian (however intensely satisfied with pleasure) could experience more happiness, than any virtuous person. Keeping these distinctions in mind, we may now see why he considers the happiness, of the virtuous to be superior to the happiness2 of the vulgar. In many ways, the reasons he offers for this claim of superiority comprise the cornerstone of his whole practical philosophy. Henry B. Veatch captures these reasons in a passage that is worth quoting at length:

Not the least interesting feature of Aristotle's Ethics is the effort which the philoso pher makes to give an account of human happiness which would make it not a mat

ter of mere subjective feeling on the part of the individual, but something objec tively determinable. To put it in colloquial language, the relevant consideration seems to run something like this: a man might think he was in excellent health be cause he felt just fine, yet a medical examination would show that he was far from well; so a man might think himself to be quite happy and contented, because he would feel quite satisfied and not at all inclined to either complaining or self- 'happy' reproach, yet it would be only too obvious to an objective observer that this man was really no better than a fool, his whole way of life being not intelligent, but [vulgar:] stupid and unenlightened and perhaps even mean and petty, and so, in a

'But,' perfectly objective sense, miserable and unhappy. you may retort, 'if a man

so?' feels contented and satisfied, is he not really To which the answer is that being satisfied or contented or happy must always involve being satisfied or contented or happy in something or with something or by something. The question then be comes: in what sort of thing does a given individual find satisfaction? If it is any thing less than what as a human being he is capable of and what, as we have al ready seen, he is naturally ordered and oriented toward, then we should certainly say that such a person had settled for less than he should have, or that he didn't know what was good for him, or that his sense of achievement and satisfaction and therefore of happiness had somehow become perverted and corrupted [and vulgar ized]. (Veatch, p. 70)

Supposedly, a human being "is capable of, and is naturally ordered and ori

towards" ented the cultivation of reason, which is what particularly differenti ates him from other creatures like cows and pigs. "Reason and understanding constitute our natural end. Hence they are the ends that procreation and the

promote" training of our habits should be organized to (PI 334b). Human lives, of course, can be unnaturally oriented and organized towards the kinds of lesser, baser ends they share with cows and pigs: These include the end of merely satisfying one's bodily appetites, the ends of merely reproducing oneself or producing mere material goods, or the end of existing merely as a means for others (and, to insert Kant again, not also being an end in oneself). Each of these lesser ends, if not accompanied by and ordered towards the greater end of 146 Interpretation the cultivation of reason, will then become a vulgar end, and will end up vulgar izing the person who so takes them as his end. If a person takes leisure to be his highest end (so that he even achieves great relaxation and amusement), he is thus still vulgarly delimiting himself from experiencing the more enriching rewards of a participation in the life of reason. Or if a person takes money to be his highest end (so that he even achieves great wealth), he is still vulgarly delimiting himself from experiencing the nobler rewards of participation in the civic life of his polis. And if a person takes pleasure to be his highest end (so that he even becomes a Hugh Hefner, or achieves great happiness2), he is still vulgarly delimiting himself from experiencing the wider, fuller, and more sub lime rewards of true happiness,. Only the virtuous person knows how and why he should keep all lesser goods (leisure, money, property, pleasure, and so on) in their proper place, not as vulgar idols, but as mere parts of, and means to, happiness,. Subsequently, it is only the virtuous person who can experience the truly superior and surpassing end of happiness,. "A happy(1] life for human beings is possessed more often by those who have cultivated their characters and minds to an excessive degree, but have been moderate in their acquisition of external goods, than by those who have acquired more of the latter than they can possibly use, but are deficient in former" the (P1323a40-b5). The virtuous would never regard any of these goods as competitors to happiness,, as the vulgar might, because the virtuous recognize these goods as being lesser and more common supports to the greater and nobler good of happiness,. John Stuart Mill famously supports Aristotle on these perfectionist claims: "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be [a virtuous] Socrates dissatisfied than a [vulgar] fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison

sides" knows both (Mill, p. 10). Even if a virtuous person did not have more of a particular good (such as a certain kind of hedonistic satisfaction) than a vulgar ian, then, the virtuous person would not fret, knowing that the overall good he experienced would be greater than that of any narrowly fixated vulgarian. Sum ming up, Aristotle argues that the happiness, (eudaimonia) of the virtuous will surpass the happiness2 (pleasure) of the vulgar in two ways: (1) in many cases, the virtuous will enjoy a wider range and greater number of goods than the vulgarian, who tends to fixate upon certain particular goods to the exclusion of others; (2) and in all cases, the virtuous will enjoy more noble or sublime goods than the vulgarian, who fixates upon more base and common goods.

CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR (A VIRTUOUS) CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Let me sum up three of the main themes considered so far. We have seen, first, that vulgar laborers, not only certain craftsmen, but any others who labor Vulgar" Aristotle on "the 147 under stultifying working and living conditions, cannot attain virtue, in large part, because of these conditions. I questioned Aristotle for making specious moral judgments about such people while simultaneously enjoying the fruits of their hard labor, in other words, for smugly presupposing that virtue such as his may be built upon vulgarity (or "vulgar labor") such as theirs. In this context, we saw that the following salient questions arose: If a necessary condition of virtue among the citizenry is (benefits coming from the toil of) a class of vulgar laborers, isn't it morally problematic for any who so benefit to treat these "vul gar" with disdain or moral condescension? And isn't it plausible that any who so benefit might be obligated, perhaps from a sense of reciprocity or fair play, to see that such laborers are afforded the opportunities and resources to attain virtue themselves? (See Miller and also Goodin, who argue that such obligations do exist.) This last question demands a qualification. Aristotle has maintained that workers cannot attain virtue when they are left with inadequate leisure time to pursue it. But it must be noted that adequate leisure time is not a sufficient, but only a necessary, condition for virtue. For, although Aristotle's vulgar banausoi lacked adequate time for the pursuit of virtue and private enrichment,

"vulgar" many contemporary workers enjoy a tremendous, historically unprece dented amount of leisure and free time. So whereas a lack of leisure time might help to explain the lack of virtue among ancient workers, it cannot by itself explain whatever lack of virtue exists among contemporary working classes. For an explanation of such lack under contemporary capitalism, we need to look elsewhere. I offer one possible explanation below. Second, we have seen that the vulgar rich do not attain virtue, at least in part, due to their gaudy and greedy misuse of, and improper relations towards, mate rial resources. I took Aristotle's arguments here as providing insights not only

oligarchic" into certain "vulgarly features of his own society, but into similar features of our own capitalist society. Here again, a qualification is in order. We cannot facilely assume that either the mere temptations of wealth or a culture of pleonexia are sufficient, in themselves, to explain vulgarity and a corresponding lack of virtue among today's wealthy. That is, although today's materialistic culture may influence wealthy individuals to become more materialistic, we need to ask what has caused our culture to become like that in the first place.

rich" If many of today's wealthy class share character traits with those "vulgar of oligarchic Sparta, what really accounts for this? And, we might also ask, what features would be necessary to turn these vulgar rich towards the virtue of those who have been aristocratic not merely in class but in character? Here, too, I postpone my response to these question. Third, we saw that both these types of vulgar, the vulgar poor-working class and the vulgar rich, do not attain happiness, because of their lack of virtue. Aristotle has said that "the happy],) city-state is the one that is best and acts nobly. [And] the best life, both for individuals separately and for city-states collectively, is a life of virtue sufficiently equipped with the resources needed

actions" to take part in virtuous (P1323b31,41). But here, again, we are driven 148 Interpretation back to the same fundamental questions: What accounts for a lack of virtue among these persons (considering that it cannot be merely an improper relation towards leisure time and material resources)? Conversely, what exactly are "the

actions" resources needed to take part in virtuous and, thereby, true happiness, (considering that these resources cannot consist merely in an abundance of lei sure time and material resources)? Irving Kristol, for one, has tried to answer these questions, in relation to modem capitalist society. In his Two Cheers for Capitalism, he argues that in feudal societies, affairs were inherently structured to accommodate high culture and an aristocratic plane of living and virtue for an elite few, while leaving the Tocque- masses culturally impoverished and vulgarized. Kristol claims (quoting ville) that

"in democracies, in contrast, there is little energy of character but customs are mild and laws humane. If there are few instances of exalted heroism or of virtues of the

highest, brightest, and purest temper, men's habits are regular. . . Genius becomes rare, information more diffused. There is less perfection, but more abundance, in all

arts." the production of the ... In short, an amiable philistinism is inherent in bour geois society. (Kristol, p. 258)

"philistinism" And why is this so pervasive in capitalist society? Because, ac cording to Kristol, an ethical system (namely, the Protestant Ethic) that was once robust enough to infuse both a private code of character and also the public system of law and government has gradually been replaced by efficiency sys (Kristol' tems s so-called Darwinian and Technocratic Ethics) that are appro priate to, and inspiring for, neither private nor governmental spheres, but are efficacious for only the marketplace. Kristol retells the Weberian account of this transformation wherein the spirit of capitalism supplanted the Protestant Ethic, with virtue getting lost in the shuffle, that is, wherein a certain constellation of

may," vicious traits (individualism, greed, "profit maximization come what- and consumption-oriented acquisitiveness) gradually eclipsed certain constellations of virtuous traits (such as piety, neighborliness, and production-oriented indus try). In response to what he takes as this essentially decadent process, Kristol advocates a renewed commitment to various traditional sources of moral educa

tion. His hope is that these sources will reinvigorate virtue among the citizenry. Kristol' In this regard, s account aligns fairly well with Aristotle's, in that both regard training in virtue, rather than merely the provision of adequate material life." conditions, as essential for happiness, and "the good While there is much to agree with in Kristol's account here, this cannot be the end of the story. For, regarding what might be an explanation of "vulgarity

midst," in our we also need to take into account the different dynamics of being in a specifically liberal, as opposed to merely Protestant and capitalist, society: (1) In earlier Protestant capitalist society, culture was infused with a more Vulgar" Aristotle on "the 149 homogeneous conception of the good life. Along with this came a relatively clearer and more homogeneous training in virtue for the young. Accordingly, the tables of virtues to be sought and vices to be avoided were more uniform and more uniformly promulgated by the parents, schoolteachers, legislators, and elders of that era. As many have chronicled, this greater moral uniformity had both its positive and negative aspects (Cf. Bellah, et al., and Douglas and Tip ton). The positive side was that the moral expectations and tutelage of that culture were simpler: if one wanted to be good and happy, all that were needed, supposedly, were obedience to the laws of God and man, prayer, and study of the Scriptures. This uniformity and simplicity allowed the youth of that time to be raised without the deep moral ambiguity, or moral vacuum, that many contemporary youth suffer through. Whatever other struggles youth of that day had to endure, they did not have to endure two of our characteristically modem struggles as much, namely, anomie (the experience of being caught in a vertigo of conflicting values and norms) and nihilism (the haunting conviction that there are no real norms, truths, or values. (See Merton, p. 162. For an account that contrasts earlier versus more recent moral environments, with emphasis on their repressive and anomie effects on youth, see Goodman.) Even so, of course, Protestant capitalism was not without its equally salient and pernicious negative features, which included sometimes severe intolerance, sectarianism, and repres

sive authoritarianism. (2) By contrast, contemporary liberal capitalist society provides a quite dif ferent moral environment, in regard to the training in virtue of the young. On the positive side, the state under liberalism has chiefly learned to be tolerant. In fact, the liberal state has prided itself not only on its tolerance of diversity but, in particular, on its neutrality, its strict insistence on not favoring or supporting any one conception of virtue, or any one comprehensive view of the good, over any other. As a result, liberal regimes have shed much of the sectarianism, authoritarianism, oppressive bias and exclusivity, and so on that marked many preliberal regimes. This public neutrality, including a retreat from the moral issues of life, has had its drawbacks, however (For critical analyses of such drawbacks, see Goodin and Reeve, and also Sher.). On the negative side, many youth, as suggested above, have been left in a kind of moral vacuum, where they have had to contend, if not with some form of anomie and nihilism, at least with a lack of clear and consistent moral guidance and a thorough lack of moral inspiration. And all these children who have grown up without strong moral guidance in their families and private lives have had no more available help from the public sphere. This is in contrast to preliberal youth, all of whom did

have greater encouragement to virtue from the public space, even if some lacked it from the private. So if vulgarity is precisely what takes root and grows in a moral vacuum, in an environment lacking in training to virtue, then it seems that liberal capitalism consigns all children who grow up without strong private moral guidance to a destiny of vulgarity. If a child is not encouraged, either in 150 Interpretation the private or public sphere, to recognize virtue as attractive, how can she come to recognize vulgarity as being so unattractive? What implications do these differing dynamics have for our discussion? They imply that, if Aristotle and Kristol are right, then what is needed for the attain ment of virtue and happiness, and the avoidance of vulgarity (in addition to certain material preconditions like nonstultifying work and adequate leisure time) is training in virtue, where such virtue is generally supported in the public sphere, even if it has not been thoroughly provided in an individual's family. If this is so, we seem to be left with three possible options. Our first option, as a society, is to revert to the Protestant capitalist model, that is, to aim not only for a certain level of material goods, but concomitantly for a certain level of moral (qua spiritual) good, through an attempted reunification of the public and private spheres, wherein all youths, if they are not adequately trained at home, will at least be able to be morally inculcated through a (specifically "Christian") virtuous public culture. But this retrogressive option is obviously unacceptable, because the costs that would come, in terms of suppressed diversity, lost liber ties, totalitarianism, various new forms of witch hunts, and so on, would be just too great. Our second option is to maintain our current liberal capitalist model, that is, to let all training in virtue be consigned to the private sphere, and to

neutral" reserve the public sphere only for "morally activities. If we think that our culture doesn't harbor too much vulgarity, if we think that all or enough young members of our culture have real access to training in virtue, and if we

state," think that there is no better alternative than the "virtue-neutral then per haps maintaining this status quo model will be acceptable. But is there no better alternative, no preferable and feasible third option? Perhaps there is.

A third option would be for our public institutions to support and even pro mulgate virtue in our midst much more aggressively than they have done under traditionally neutral liberal regimes. How could his model be advanced without falling back into the first type of model? By keeping an important distinction in mind: To say that the state should be neutral with regard to comprehensive conceptions of the good (which I believe the state should be) is not to say that it should be neutral with regard to specific goods or virtues (which I believe it should not be). Take the virtues of honesty, kindness, or diligence. It would be ludicrous to infer, from the claim that the state should be neutral regarding comprehensive doctrines, that the state should in no way champion these virtues. In fact, a case could be made that virtues like these are integral to any properly functioning state, any robust comprehensive conception of the good, and any decent way of life. For what would a comprehensive doctrine look like that had "virtues" no place for these, or that championed opposite values such as the of deceit, cruelty and sloth? Would such a doctrine be worthy of equal respect? or would it not be worthy, rather, of disdain, as an essentially banal doctrine? Such publicly supportable virtues might be drawn along the following lines, then. In a Rawlsian such a table of virtues could vein, be seen as comprising an Vulgar" Aristotle on "the 151

virtue," "overlapping consensus of that is, as virtues that are shared and honored in most, if not all, cultures and comprehensive ethical systems. Or, in a more Aristotelian and naturalistic vein, they could be seen as general traits and charac teristics that lead to, and are necessary components of, a life of flourishing for any individual or society. If such suggestions hold promise, then there should be a fairly robust notion of virtues that any liberal state will be able to aggres sively support, while remaining true to its ideals of fairness, tolerance, and per haps even neutrality. And perhaps, then, Aristotle's comments about "legislators

virtue" responsibly training and educating their people in (P1334al-10) would not have to be taken as archaic or illiberal. It is not my intention to offer a full account of such a third option here. I briefly suggest this option only to point out the general direction that, I believe, our liberal society must take if it is to achieve any overall progress in virtue, if it is to escape its commonly decried

vulgarity." "stagnation in Communitarians, virtue ethicists, liberals themselves, and classical republicans of many stripes have provided critical discussions of Etzi- these supposed foibles of liberalism. For salient examples, see Maclntyre, oni, Mason, Macedo, and Dagger. Otherwise, if we do not insist on forging

masses" ahead in this third direction, it is likely that the "vulgar (both poor and in" rich) will remain "unequipped with all the resources needed to take part both virtue and happiness,, and that, as usual, such virtue and happiness, will remain the possession of only some lucky, elite portion of citizens.

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Etzioni, Amitai. The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitar ian Agenda. New York: Crown Publishing, 1993. Goodin, Robert E. Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibili ties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 152 Interpretation

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America." porate Fortune 139, no. 9 (May 10, 1999). Morrison, Donald. "Aristotle's Definition of Citizenship: A Problem and Some Solu

tions." History of Philosophy Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1999): 143-65. Sen, Amartya. Ethics and Economics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Sher, George. Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Veatch, Henry B. Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962. The Political and Theological Psychology of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure

Nasser Behnegar Boston College

The story of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is dark, perhaps too dark for a comedy. The hero of the play, the Duke, admits that his reluctance to punish lawbreakers is responsible for the licentiousness that afflicts Vienna. To correct this situation, he temporarily hands over his power not to his trusted and moderate advisor, Escalus, but to Angelo, a man who is all too ready to punish people. Almost immediately after taking the helm of power, Angelo sentences Claudio, a noble man who had impregnated a woman whom he intended to marry, to death. Claudio asks his friend Lucio to convince his sister Isabella, who is in the process of becoming a nun, to plead his case with Angelo. Her pleas, however, have an unexpected consequence. Angelo offers to pardon Clau

dio in exchange for her body. Claudio does not think this is too high a price for his life, but his sister thinks otherwise. The Duke, disguised as a friar, comes to the rescue. He suggests that Isabella should accept Angelo's offer but that she should secretly substitute for herself Mariana, whom Angelo had wronged by refusing to keep his promise to marry her once she lost her dowry in a ship wreck. This proposal also has an unexpected consequence. After having sex with Mariana, Angelo decides to renege on his promise to pardon Claudio. He is saved because the disguised Duke persuades the provost to send Angelo the head of a prisoner who had just died of fever instead of Claudio's. The ending of the play, the triumphant return of the Duke as himself, seems to banish at once the dark clouds of neglect, selfishness, deception, cruelty, and injustice. Angelo is punished by a justice that is tempered with mercy; the Duke's gentle and decent officers are praised or rewarded; Mariana is righted; Isabella is of fered a worthy marriage; and the city of Vienna seems to be rescued from the extremes of license on the one hand and a tyrannically severe morality on the

other.

Yet it is difficult to love wholeheartedly the man responsible for all these good things, who seems less like a human being than an impersonal or a control Vincentio" ling force that directs the play: "we never think of him by his name, (R. W. Chambers quoted in Eccles, p. 432). It is not just the impersonal presen tation of the Duke that distances us from him but also his apparently offensive actions. He seems to "treat his subjects as puppets for the fun of making them

twitch" (William Empson quoted in Eccles, p. 433) and "he lies to and deceives

INTERPRETATION, Winter 2001-2, Vol. 29, No. 2 154 Interpretation

again" almost everyone over and over (Bloom, p. 338). Even if at the end of the play everything turns out well, the emotional torture that the Duke inflicts on Isabella, Claudio, and Juliet, the false absolutions he grants Mariana, and even the trap that he sets for Angelo leave a bitter taste in our mouths. Our view of the Duke and of the play as a whole depends very much on how we understand its plot. On the one hand, it seems that the Duke, like a divine power, is in control of all the actions of the play:

With the exception of The Tempest, this is Shakespeare's only play in which a char acter is allowed to play God. The Duke Vincentio is in complete control, directing all events, knowing the consequences of each person's actions, meting out deserts, and aware, like divinity, of unspoken thoughts and instincts. (Donald A. Stauffer quoted in Eccles, p. 433)

On the other hand, accidents that the Duke apparently did not anticipate seem to play a crucial role in the development of the plot. For instance, he apparently did not anticipate Angelo's decision to renege on his promise to pardon Claudio. What would have happened had Angelo pardoned Claudio? The entire ending of the play would have changed. Nor did the Duke anticipate Barnardine's re fusal to be executed or the timely death of Ragozine, a notorious pirate who Rago- looked very much like Claudio. Could he have fooled Angelo without zine's death? The Duke himself characterizes Ragozine's death as "an accident

provides" that heaven (IV, iii, 75). Does God rule the play with the help of his agent, the Duke? Or does the Duke rule the play? Is the Duke god or man? The ambiguity that leads us to raise these questions is necessary for the artistic success of the play, for the more we think that the Duke is responsible for everything in the play, the more questionable he and the lesson of the play become. The formal explanation of the Duke's plan is given by him to Friar Thomas. Although he seems to treat the Friar as a confidant, we have reasons to question the candor of his speech. As we have noted, the Duke is rarely forthright. More over, in this particular case there is a practical reason for the Duke's meeting with the Friar. He needs a friar's clothing. Consequently, his explanation of his plan might have been influenced and guided by the necessity of winning the approbation of the Friar. The Duke tells the Friar that he has at least three reasons for leaving his post, but he only informs him of two of them. The first is his project for the reformation of Vienna. The reformation he speaks of is very different from that actually embodied in the outcome of the play but more pleasing to a friar. He acknowledges that he has made a mistake in letting the law slip in the last fourteen years. He describes the strict statutes and biting laws of the state as needful bits and curbs. The problem in Vienna is not that the laws are loose; in fact, they are extremely harsh. The punishment for adul tery apparently is death. The problem is that these laws have not been enforced The Psychology of Measure for Measure 155 and consequently have lost their teeth. According to the Duke's own statement, he as a prince has in effect been absent for fourteen years, for laws that are not enforced are hardly laws. Paradoxically, he prepares his return by first becoming literally absent. As Claudio says,

This new governor

Awakes me all the enrolled penalties Which have, like unscoured armor, hung by the wall So long that nineteen zodiacs have gone round

And none of them been wom ... (I, ii, 169-73)

According to Claudio, the Duke has not enforced the laws for nineteen years, and according to the Duke he has not enforced them for fourteen years. It is difficult to account for this discrepancy. Since the play leads us to think about princes, however, we might observe that fourteen and nineteen add up to thirty- three, the age of Jesus at his death. Jesus is also an absent prince. Is it possible

that the Duke somehow represents Jesus? Is it possible that his attempt to en

force his laws represents the restoration of the rule of Jesus? However strange these suggestions may seem, they become somewhat more plausible if one con siders that in returning to Vienna the Duke insists on a number of his friends with Roman names meeting him and that there is another character in the play who has a remarkable resemblance to the devil:

Lucio, like Lucifer, derives from light. He brings light, sheds light. . . he is like a comic version of the devil, light-heartedly diabolical, spitefully harming for no good "devil," reason. He loves to slander, and the word as Shakespeare undoubtedly

slander." knew, derives from the Greek verb "to (Lowenthal, pp. 255-56)

Lucio' Shakespeare describes Lucio as a fantastic, and one of s accusations against the Duke is that he is fantastical. However that may be, it is plain that Vienna is not in good shape. In particu lar, it is infested with lechery. In Act I, scene ii, Shakespeare lets us hear a

place" conversation "in a public between Lucio and two other gentlemen. In

this conversation the number of remarks and jokes about venereal diseases is staggering. From the very beginning of the play we notice another strange fea ture of Vienna: no one is married except the foolish Elbow, whose wife acciden tally walks into a whorehouse. Indeed, throughout the play all the crimes that are punished are connected with sex. The poet suggests that laws restraining and moderating sexual behavior are needful and perhaps crucial to the preserva tion of a community, and to justice as a whole. Pompey's observation in the

prison, where he meets all sorts of criminals, reveals the connections between

sexual behavior and crime. 156 Interpretation

I am as well acquainted here as I was in our house of profession: one would think it

were Mistress Overdone's own house for here be many of her old customers. (IV, iii, 1-4)

Whoremongers tend to commit other crimes, even as Pompey himself is sus pected of being a thief. Those who visit whorehouses are likely to break or actually have already broken the marriage contract, and those that break the marriage contract are likely to break the social contract. Sexual desire is the most powerful natural desire that leads us to take an interest in the good or the pleasure of another human being. But as this play demonstrates, if such demonstration were necessary, it is not a sufficient basis for a community. As soon as the laws are not enforced, sexual promiscuity asserts itself. The reassertion of sexual promiscuity is the reassertion of man's nature, albeit his animal nature. This view finds its expression in the play in the words of Pompey, the clown. When Escalus tells Pompey that the law does not allow prostitution, he replies, "Does your Worship mean to geld and splay all

city?" the youth of the (II, i, 241). And when Escalus informs him that they will hang and behead the offenders, Pompey has this to say:

If you head and hang all that offend that way but for ten year together, you'll be glad to give out a commission for more heads. If this law hold in Vienna ten year,

I'll rent the fairest house in it after threepence a bay. If you live to see this come to pass, say Pompey told you so. (II, i, 226-32)

According to Pompey, human beings cannot help following their natural desires, and any law that attempts to suppress those desires can only succeed by destroy ing human beings. He, however, proves to be not such a shrewd student of human nature. He seems to be a hedonist who thinks that men by nature seek pleasure and avoid pain, but he himself disregards Escalus's threat that he will be whipped for being a bawd on the ground that "the valiant heart's not whipped

trade" out of his (II, i, 244). Moreover, he expects Lucio to bail him out, but Angelo's proclamation has made his lecherous friend and former client into an enemy of bawds. Lucio tells him, "What say'st thou, trot? Is the world as it was, man? Which is the way? Is it sad, and few words? Or how? The trick of it?" (Ill, ii, 48-50). Pompey underestimates both the force of morality and the power of legislation to alter and mold the world. Lechery is not the whole of Vienna. Angelo and Isabella represent its other side. Although Isabella is about to enter a Catholic order, she complains that their rules are not strict enough. Angelo has such a reputation for austerity that Lucio says,

Some report, a sea-maid spawned him. Some, that he was begot between two stock fishes. But it is certain that when he makes water, his urine is congealed ice; That I know to be true. And he is a motion ungenerative; That's infallible. (Ill, ii, 104-8) The Psychology of Measure for Measure 157

Both Angelo and Isabella play a prominent part in the Duke's plan. After the Duke informs the Friar about his plan to reform Vienna, the Friar asks him why he has to abandon his position in order to fulfill this plan. If the Duke wanted to restore justice, he could have done it himself:

It rested in your Grace

pleas' To unloose this tied-up justice when you d; And in you more dreadful would have seem'd Than in Lord Angelo. (I, iii, 32-36)

The Duke's response is that since it was his fault to give the people scope, it would be his tyranny to strike and gall them. With the help of Angelo he will be able to restore order without tarnishing his reputation and the reputation of the laws. Listening to the Duke's conversation with the Friar, one is tempted to conclude the Duke has recently experienced a moral revival or at least a revival of political prudence. He confesses his errors as a ruler and wants to mend his

ways:

Sith 'twas my fault to give the people scope, 'Twould be my tyranny to strike and gall them For what I bid them do: For we bid this be done, When evil deeds have their permissive pasts, And not the punishment. (I, iii, 35-39)

Yet since the Duke does not in fact restore the enforcement of the old laws, it is difficult to believe that this was ever his intention. On the other hand, since he never repeals them, it is difficult to believe that he wanted to replace those laws with milder ones. Could it be that he wished but was unable to enforce those laws? At any rate, there seem to be two other reasons for the Duke's plan. First, the Duke wants to test Angelo:

Lord Angelo is precise; Stands at a guard with Envy; scarce confesses That his blood flows; or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone. Hence shall we see

If power change purpose, what our seemers be. (I, iii, 49-52)

The Duke tests Angelo by placing him in a situation that will tempt him to do evil deeds that he has never done before. Indeed, Angelo thinks that it is the devil that has brought Isabella to him: "O cunning enemy that, to catch a saint,/ hook" with saints dost bait thy (III, ii, 180-81). It was Lucio who brought Isabella to Angelo. Second, the Duke seems to have an interest in Isabella. 158 Interpretation

Earlier we have heard him reject the Friar's apparent suggestion that he sought to disguise himself for amorous purposes, and profess his stoic self-mastery: "No, holy father, throw away that thought,/ Believe not that the dribbling dart Bosom" of Love/Can pierce a complete (I, iii, 2-3). Yet three days later the Duke asks Isabella to marry him. Since the Duke implies that there is at least one more reason for his plan, it is hard to believe that his desire to marry Isabella was not another motive. Needless to say, the Duke has good reasons for hiding this intention from the Friar. Even if the Duke is merely a secular ruler and not a divine prince, he has reason to expose the hypocrisy of Angelo. Let us recall what we have said about the state of affairs in Vienna, namely, that it is divided between the extremes of promiscuity and piety. As was made clear in our time by the revolution in Iran, a loose society with a deep religious tradition is a virtual time bomb. The Duke would be the fatality in such an explosion. More generally, in political life there is a risk that excessive liberty will somersault into excessive restraint. However much people enjoy their loose morals, some among them are likely to get sick of immorality. One rarely sees a person who has no concern for virtue, and most people identify virtue with what is difficult for them. Even the lecherous Lucio respects and admires Isabella for becoming a nun.

I hold you as a thing enskied and sainted By your renouncement, an immortal spirit, And to be talk'd with in sincerity, As with a saint. (I, iv, 34-37)

Isabella thinks Lucio is mocking her by speaking to her in such a manner. I think she is wrong about him, and even if he were mocking her, it could not have been entirely tongue in cheek. For why else does Lucio think that marrying a prostitute is worse than being tortured and executed? This admiration of virtue, which may be suppressed in an easygoing and loose society, is likely to be revived when licentiousness reaches an extreme. As Claudio explains his own

arrest:

From too much liberty, my Lucio. Liberty, As surfeit, is the Father of much Fast; So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint. Our Natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die. (I, ii, 118-22)

By in effect allowing sexual promiscuity, the Duke's authority rests on tot tery legs. Indeed, the shaky authority of the Duke is confirmed by the first words of the play, which he himself addresses to Escalus, his subordinate. The Psychology of Measure for Measure 159

Of government the properties to unfold

t' Would seem in me affect speech and discourse, Since I am put to know that your own science

Exceeds, in that, the list of all advice

My strength can give you . . . (I, i, 3-7)

In the same scene the Duke makes a similar comment to Angelo: "But I do

advertise" bend my speech to one that my part in him (I, i, 40-41). The Duke know" is "put to that his subordinates know more about the art of government than he does. Moreover, there seems to be a possibility of war, and from what we see of the gentlemen of Vienna they are hardly ready for a war. The Duke's sensitivity to his reputation as a soldier reveals itself in his dealings with Lucio. Although Lucio never accused the Duke of any lack of military virtue, the Duke claims at the end of the play that Lucio had called him a coward (V, i, 497-503), and while still disguised a friar he defends himself to Lucio thus: "Let he be

testimonied in his own bringings forth, and he shall appear to the envious a

soldier" scholar, a statesman, and a (III, ii, 137-38). Angelo, unlike the old, loyal, and moderate Escalus, is a real danger to the Duke. First, in times of war a political community looks to a tough leader, and from the perspective of the people it seems no one is tougher than Angelo. Second, Angelo is apt to have some contempt for the Duke for his laxity in matters that are of such importance to Angelo:

We must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape till custom make it Their perch, and not their terror. (II, i, 1-4)

Finally, Angelo is not a moderate man, and he is not easily satisfied with being in second place. Notice the readiness with which he interprets the Duke's contra dictory letters as a sign of his madness. What, above all, makes his threat real and radically distinguishes him from Escalus is his willingness to break his promises. Just as he was willing to break his promise with Mariana when it was in his interest, he might turn against the Duke when the time is right. Consequently, the Duke's interest is not merely a speculative desire to see whether Angelo is what he seems to be; rather, knowing him already, he wants to neutralize his threat. Unlike Escalus who is surprised and shocked by Ange lo's actions, the Duke anticipated his attempt to force Isabella to have sex with him. From the very beginning he expected that Angelo would abuse his author ity and reveal his nature as a man made of flesh and blood. He says of him:

Only this one Lord Angelo is precise, Stands at a guard with envy, scarce confesses 160 Interpretation

That his blood flows; or that his appetite

Is more to bread than stone. Hence shall we see

If power change purpose, what our seemers be. (I, iii, 50-54)

What better bait than the beautiful and chaste Isabella? Angelo finds her physi cal beauty attractive, but this is not what is crucial. According to him, strumpets with all their art could not ever stir his temper. It is Isabella's chastity, her ability to conquer the demands of the flesh, that makes her beauty shine all the more. He himself says,

These black masks Proclaim an enciel'd beauty ten times louder Than beauty could, display'd. (II, iv, 78-81)

It is not merely a desire for the forbidden that attracts Angelo to Isabella. We all know that it is more honorable to love a woman for the virtues of her soul

than those of her body, and Isabella possesses what Angelo considers to be the human virtue. Unless Angelo's urine is congealed ice, he could not be sexually attracted to Isabella. Angelo is a hypocrite in the original sense of the term, but he is not a hypocrite in the sense that he merely feigns respect for virtue; a hypocrite in the loose sense of the term would not be surprised to discover, while praying, that his thoughts are not on God. He genuinely loves what he considers to be virtue, but his problem is that the virtue that makes Isabella sexually attractive to him condemns his very sexual attraction as sinful. By arousing these passions, Isabella helps Angelo discover something about himself that he did not know. Few men are more dangerous than a proud man who

comes to believe he is in fact a low human being. Instead of reforming himself he becomes more tyrannical; he grows indifferent to the feelings and affections of other human beings. Angelo does not try to win Isabella's love. Instead, he

sanctuary." wants to defile her and "raze the He resents the virtue that made

him conscious of his own depravity. His pride, his sense of self-respect, wants

to debunk Isabella's virtue. Note the argumentative nature of their second en counter. Before violating her in deed, he has to violate her in speech. And he does violate her in speech:

She is forced to admit that she sets different standards for her brother and herself and that Angelo simply applies laws, the principles of which she accepts. More im portantly, she is forced to agree that her refusing to have sexual intercourse with An gelo is akin to Angelo's refusal to pardon a similar act by her brother. Angelo tells her that she will be pardoned by God for the intention of her act. The outrageous- ness of the situation, in which the enforcer of the law is now breaking it, helps to conceal the weakness of Isabella's position. (Bloom, p. 334) The Psychology of Measure for Measure -161

Angelo has to prove to himself that she is not better than he is, and she senses that in a decisive respect he is right.

Angelo's injustice to Claudio stems from his pride. Claudio is an aristocrat and a son of a virtuous man, and according to Mistress Overdone, he is worth five thousand times more than Lucio or the average Viennese. By making an example of him, Angelo will demonstrate his authority to the whole city. This sensible account, however, is not exhaustive. We are told that Claudio has been

promise-keeping," "ever precise in and we know Angelo has reneged on a prom

ise already. Perhaps uncertain of his superiority, Angelo seeks to prove his vir

Claudio' tue by harshly punishing s vice. "Pride plays a greater part than kind ness in the reprimands we address to wrongdoers; we reprove them not so much

faults" to reform them as to make them believe that we are free from their (La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, no. 37). This observation finds support in Shake Claudio' speare's text. Originally s execution was scheduled for three days after his arrest (I, ii, 68). When Escalus asks Angelo to forgive Claudio, because he also could have erred in this point, he reacts by speeding up the execution to the next day (II, i, 34). When he knows for certain that he too is guilty of Claudio's vice, i.e., after he has sex with Mariana, he speeds up the execution again and orders the Provost to execute Claudio at four in the morning and to bring his bloody head to him. The more the distance between him and Claudio is diminished, the more vehemently his proud heart wishes to affirm itself by showing greater cruelty to Claudio. The rational account he offers for his last act is not to be dismissed, but to consider it as the sole reason, or even the deepest and main reason, is to indulge along with Angelo in mere rationaliza tion. Although Isabella is a more attractive human being than Angelo, she is also, at least for some time, a hypocrite. We are amazed by her very first words in the play. She claims that she does not distinguish the privileges of nuns from

their restraints. She wishes even a more strict restraint upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare, which is all the more shocking when we are informed

of the restraints these sisters faced:

When you have vow'd, you must not speak with men But in the presence of the prioress; Then, if you speak, you must not show your face; Or if you show your face, you must not speak. (I, iv, 10-35)

Perhaps she needs more restraints to control her temptations, but one may won der whether her desire for restraints is not at least partly due to her pride. She

wants more restraints, in effect because she wants more privileges. She wants to shun the world completely, because she wants to be preferred over others by God. Isabella is highly self-absorbed: "When Isabella first hears of Mariana's 162 Interpretation plight, with her typical generosity with the lives of others, she says that Mariana dead" would be better off (Bloom, pp. 338-39). As Bloom also observes, she can hardly talk about chastity without becoming prurient (p. 338). It is a combi nation of her pride and her love of virtue that refuses to yield to Angelo's demand and save her brother. She thinks, however, it is only her concern for virtue which compels her to let Claudio die. After calling her brother a beast and praying for him to die, she meets the Duke (disguised as a friar) who asks about her decision. She gives a revealing response: "I am now going to resolve him. I had rather my brother die by the law, than my son should be unlawfully bom" (III, i, 188-90). Before she met Claudio, she had a different reason for letting Claudio die: "Then, Isabel live chaste, and brother, die:/More than our

chastity" brother is our (II, iv, 183-84). After she treats her brother brutally, it is not so much chastity but the prospect of bearing a bastard son that prevents her from helping her brother. In the battle between her duty to her brother and her legalistic understanding of Christian virtue, the latter comes out on top, but that virtue is badly injured. We are not privy to her thoughts, but how could she not feel guilty about the way she behaved to her brother? After the apparent death of her brother, Isabella abandons the legalistic understanding of virtue as well as any pretense of suppressing her desire for revenge. When the Duke offers to set up the sexual encounter between Angelo with Mariana, the chaste Isabella is not only not offended but she says, "the image of it gives me content

already" (II, i, 260). To avenge her brother's death, Isabella becomes willing both to lie and to claim that she committed adultery. After the Duke disbelieves her, she appeals to heaven but her appeals are without effect against the power of the Duke. Her education becomes complete when she accepts Mariana's plea for help in saving Angelo. She puts aside her dead brother's concerns in favor of the living Mariana's concerns. What is more she actually gives a credible argument that the Duke should show some mercy to Angelo, which is something she was unable to do in her brother's case. Mercy is justified if there are some reasons for mitigating a punishment, and in the case of Claudio there were many such reasons. Instead of referring to those reasons, Isabella argued for mercy only on the basis that Angelo himself was not free from the taint of Claudio's sin. She did this because she accepted at the time the strictly legalistic under standing of Christian virtues. Only after Isabella defended her brother's killer does the Duke reveal that her brother is still alive and in the same breath asks her to marry him. By defending her brother's killer, Isabella becomes a true Christian, and it is proper for her to become the bride of the Duke, who might be thought of as a new Christ.

We have seen that the actions of Angelo and Isabella in the extreme situation

in which they were placed are plausible psychologically. But what about the psychology of the being who places them in that situation? The Duke suggests his understanding of the relation of the ruler and the ruled in a series of images which he uses in describing his problem and plan to the Friar: The Psychology of Measure for Measure 163

We have strict statutes and most biting laws, The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds, Which for this fourteen years we have let slip; Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave, That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers, Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sights For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mocked than feared, so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead, And liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart goes all decorum. (I, iii, 19-31)

In the first parable the Duke is represented as a horseman, and the laws and statutes as bits and curbs that control the people. This image is similar to the one used by Claudio of Angelo:

Whether it be the fault and glimpse of newness, Or whether that the body public be A horse whereon the governor doth ride, Who, newly in the seat, that it may know He can command, lets is straight feel the spur; (I, ii, 157-61)

Although a rider lets the horse feel the spur in order to demonstrate his com mand, he is not oblivious to the animal's welfare, for he needs a healthy horse that can serve him well. Not only does he provide for the preservation of the horse, but he also gives it an occasional pat on the neck when it distinguishes itself; and if this horse is like most noblemen, he delights at this pat on the neck. Whereas Claudio's image characterizes the public as a noble horse that carries and obeys its legitimate ruler, the Duke's image is less flattering to the people. The people are not noble horses but headstrong weeds. The mixed meta phor has received considerable criticism from the editors. (Against suggested

"steeds" emendations [for example, to or "wills"] M. R. Ridley argues: "If we are going to regard as impossible any word which involves Shakespeare in a violence of mixed metaphor we shall certainly need bits and curbs for head

emendation" strong [quoted in Eccles, p. 44].) W. G. Stone argues:

Shakespeare was careless in linking metaphors. I think it possible that he combined the idea of a well-bitted horse (literally equivalent to enforcement of law), and the picture of a rank, noisome growth of weeds, suffered to spring up in a fair garden (literally equivalent to relaxation of law). (Quoted in Eccles, p. 43) 164 Interpretation

Yet if the two parts of the metaphor make sense separately, the image of men riding on weeds remains bizarre. Its strangeness makes us linger over it, and think about what Shakespeare intended by characterizing the people here as weeds. The image brings to mind another image, the parable of the weeds in Matthew 13, in which God allows weeds to grow until the harvest, that is, the day of judgement, and then He will burn them. Instead of burning them, the Duke rides and curbs the headstrong weeds, Angelo and Lucio, and uses them to his advantage. Had it not been for Lucio, Isabella's encounter with Angelo might have ended with Angelo's initial rejection of her suit (II, ii, 42), and his meeting with Isabella and his injustice toward her play a crucial role in her education and contribute to the setting up of her marriage to the Duke. Where God promises to destroy the weeds, the Duke only controls them. I think this is one of the reasons that some find the outcome of the play, especially Angelo's punishment, unsatisfying: "Angelo's crimes were such, as must sufficiently jus tify punishment, whether its end be to secure the innocent from suffering, or to deter guilt by example; and I believe every reader feels some indignation when

spared" he finds him (Samuel Johnson quoted in Eccles, p. 420). The second of the three images is the shortest and hence most easily by passed. It also happens to be the harshest one. The Duke compares himself to an overgrown lion that goes not out to prey. This image depicts the ruler as a predator and those who break the law as his prey. It is a curious and disturbing image because of the suggestion that the ruler's concern in enforcing the laws is not the good of the ruled but his own good. Moreover, in contrast to the first image, it suggests that enforcing the laws requires killing. This is harsher than Lucio' s similar image:

He, to give fear to use and liberty, Which have for long run by the hideous law

As mice by lions, .. . (I, iv, 62-64)

According to Lucio, those who break laws, at least laws regarding sexual mat ters, are too insignificant to be of much concern to the rulers. Although Lucio

calls the law hideous, he has a rather sanguine view of the relation of rulers and the ruled: lions usually do not prey on mice. In the course of the play, the Duke attempts to speed up the execution of Barnardine but to no avail. The only person who dies in this play is Ragozine, the notorious pirate. Ragozine's head plays an indispensable role in his plan, for the wretched head of Barnardine is a poor substitute for Claudio's noble head. Ragozine, unlike Barnardine, is "a

color." man of Claudio's years; his beard and head just of his The Provost's that fear Angelo, who had seen them both, will discover the deception is quite Barnardine' reasonable, even when s head is shaved and his beard dyed. Since

Ragozine's death is presented as an accident in the play, the Duke cannot be accused of actually killing someone for his own interest. But this exculpation The Psychology of Measure for Measure 1 65 of the Duke is bought at the price of the realization that the relatively happy ending of the play depends in a decisive manner on chance. In the third and the most visible image the Duke is portrayed as a gentle father, who is reluctant at first to punish his children but learns that he must use his rod. The Duke speaks of justice only in regard to this image, since between a father and a son, unlike between a rider and a horse or a predator and his prey, there is some sort of common good. A child is not merely an instrument of his father, and he is punished not only for the sake of his father but also for his own good. When children are given excessive liberty, they pluck justice by the nose and beat their own nurses. The nurse in this image is the law that is used by the king to nourish his subjects. When a subject undermines the law, he cuts off his own source of nourishment. The authority of the father is good for both the father and his children. The character that represents a spoiled child in the play is Pompey, who simply does not fear the rod of law and prefers to follow his own desires. Moreover, he is punished by the Duke not for the sake of punishing his evil but for the sake of improving him.

Take him to prison, officer:

Correction and instruction must both work Ere this rude beast will profit. (Ill, ii, 30-32)

Despite the harsh words he uses, the Duke does no say that Pompey deserves to be punished; rather he should be punished in order to become a better human being. By reflecting on these three images, one realizes the Duke's view that different people need to be punished differently. Having discussed the Duke's understanding of his relation to his subjects, we now consider the cause of his new interest in politics. He is essentially a

private man, as we learn from his conversation with the Friar.

My holy sir, none better knows than you How I have ever lov'd the life remov'd,

And held in idle price to haunt assemblies, Where youth, and cost, witless bravery keeps. (I, iii, 7-10)

This view of the Duke is confirmed both by Escalus who views him as a scholar agree that and a philosopher, and Lucio who views him as a lecher. They both he is fundamentally a private person. Perhaps one ought to disregard Lucio's truth of Luc testimony, since he is a slanderer. Although Lowenthal denies the knowledge io's accusation, he observes that Lucio seems to have supernatural (p. 254). Like the original slanderer he often reveals the truth even as he slan "Cucul- ders. Consider when he slanders Friar Lodowick (the disguised Duke): monachum"the second lus non facit (V, i, 261). Is this not the truth? After

scene of the play, Shakespeare's discretion transports us not to the beginning 166 Interpretation but to the midst of the conversation between Friar Thomas and the Duke. In response to Thomas's question, which is concealed from the readers, the Duke answers:

No. Holy Father, throw away that thought; Believe not that the dribbling dart of love Can pierce a complete bosom. Why I desire thee To give me a secret harbour hath a purpose

More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends Of burning youth. (I, iii, 1-6)

Judging from the Duke's response we may surmise the nature of the Friar's question. It was something along this line: Are you planning on meeting a woman in the monastery? According to the Duke himself, this Friar knows much about him: "My holy sir, none better knows than you/ How I have ever

removed" loved the life (I, iii, 7-8). It is perplexing that both Lucio and this friar assume that the Duke has a sexual interest in women while he adamantly rejects this suggestion. According to Lucio, the Duke likes to kiss old beggars who smell of garlic. This accusation reminds us of another; "It was a mad fantastical trick of him to steal from the state and usurp the beggary he was

to" never bom (III, ii, 88-89). As Lowenthal has observed, the reference to

"beggary" is a hint at the Duke's having assumed the role of a friar (p. 254). The truth underlying Lucio's slander that the Duke kisses old beggars is that that Duke as a representation of Jesus has many brides in the form of nuns. The play is set in motion by the Duke's haste to leave Vienna. Isabella's entry into the convent is the only reason the play offers for this haste. She wants to be a bride of Christ, but the only way that she can truly be the bride of Christ is to marry the Duke instead of going to the nunnery. The second reason for the Duke's more active political interest is his concern for his authority. We have

already spoken of Vienna as a time bomb, ripe for a kind of religious rebellion, and that Angelo is likely to be the leader of such a rebellion. The Duke, because of his position and actions, would be the prime target of his movement. He can no longer ignore politics and is compelled to become actively political. Consequently, the Duke must deliver a blow to the claims of the church and

Christian virtue. The exposure of Angelo is a blow against the hypocritical and legalistic understanding of Christian virtue. Moreover, he asserts his supremacy over the church in a revealing passage in Act V. After declaring the Duke unjust, Friar Lodowick (the disguised Duke) warns Escalus not to touch him.

Be not so hot: the Duke

Dare no more stretch this finger of mine than he

Dare rack his own. His subject am I not, Nor here provincial. (V, i, 311-14) The Psychology of Measure for Measure 167

Just as Napoleon at his coronation took the crown from the Pope and placed it on his head with his own hands in order to let the world know that his authority did not come from the Church, the Duke lets Isabella and the people of Vienna see the tottery legs of the Church's authority when it is not supported by the Duke, as Escalus sends this friar to the rack for slandering against the state. Friar Lodowick is saved only because he is also the Duke. But what about his interest in the welfare of his community or for justice? The Duke clearly has an interest in these matters. Let us go over the punish ments that he metes out at the end of the play. In the case of Angelo, the Duke first sentences him to marry Mariana and then to death. He then commutes the latter sentence once it is revealed that Claudio is still alive. Since Angelo actu ally intended to rape Isabella, to break his promise to her, and to murder Clau dio, marrying Mariana is hardly an adequate punishment. Indeed, the Duke does

well" not even present it as a punishment: "Well, Angelo, your evil quits you (V, i, 493). This is indeed a disturbing statement, for justice demands that "like like" doth quit (V, i, 408). The Duke does not implement his own principle of justice. In the case of Lucio, the Duke first sentences him to be whipped and hanged for slandering him and to be married to the mother of his child, whom he apparently had promised to marry. The Duke forgives the first punishment after Lucio reminds him that if his slander undermined the Duke's authority he is also responsible for restoring his authority: "Your highness said even now, I Duke" made you a (V, i, 512-13). But Lucio seems to be less troubled by death than by the prospect of marrying the woman in question because she is a prosti hanging" tute: "Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and (V, i, 519-20). This circumstance would seem to be a cause for mercy. Perhaps instead of marrying Kate Keepdown Lucio should pay child support. Both Lucio' Bloom and Jaffa obscure the justice of s protest: "Since marriage is the same sentence imposed by the Duke on Angelo (not to mention Claudio, and

severe" finally, himself), it would not seem to be disproportionately (Jaffa, p. 217). Yet Kate Keepdown is no Isabella. "Lucio is compelled to marry a woman

Lucio' who has, according to s own admission, bome him a child that he has

whore" denied and whom he now calls a (Bloom, p. 344). Although it may not have been honorable for Lucio to call the mother of his child a whore, we have

no reason to doubt the truth of his claim, given her name and the fact that Mistress Overdone has been raising the child (III, ii, 189-94). In response to

Lucio' s plea, the Duke says that slandering a prince deserves it. This is surpris ing, because he had just forgiven him for the slander. It seems that the Duke is in fact incapable of forgiving a slander against himself. Finally, there is the mysterious pardon of Barnardine. According to Bloom, "Barnardine is pardoned by the Duke probably because there is some doubt

accused" whether he actually committed the murder of which he was (p. 341). This doubt, however, was the reason he was not executed during the previous 168 Interpretation

nine years, and the provost, who is neither cruel nor rash, has informed the Duke that new evidence proves his guilt beyond any doubt. In describing Bar nardine, the provost gives an important clue as to the character of the Duke's

rule:

He hath evermore had the liberty of prison. Give him leave to escape hence, he would not. Drunk many times a day, if not many days entirely drunk. We have very oft awaked him, as if to carry him to execution, and showed him a seeming warrant for it. It hath not moved him at all. (IV, ii, 144-49)

This prison combines amazing laxity and cruelty. On the one hand, Barnardine was allowed to drink and to escape from the prison. On the other hand, he was often subject to mock threats of execution. It would seem that the mock execu tions were meant to correct Barnardine by putting some fear into him. For nine years they had failed, but on the day of his execution, Barnardine seems to take death somewhat more seriously: "I have been drinking hard all night and I will have more time to prepare me, or they shall beat out my brains with billets. I

certain" will not consent to die this day, that's (IV, iii, 51-54). Since this is the only new action on Barnardine's part, it must be the basis of his pardon. It would seem that the most the Duke can do is put a little fear into this murderer and place him in the custody of Friar Peter to help him mend his ways. According to Tovey, "despite the fact that many readers find his means dis tasteful in the extreme, it is an undeniable fact of the play that duke not only aims at the good, but that he actually achieves it. Certainly the final act of the

subjects" play reveals him to be benefactor to all his (p. 65). What gives the impression that the Duke is the benefactor of all his subjects is his apparent establishment of a new political order that escapes the twin evils of license and moral tyranny. Men are not executed for illegal sexual intercourse, but they have to marry the mothers of their children or the women whom they promised to marry. But this is nothing new. Lucio tells us that he was accused before the Duke by Mistress Keepdown and that he had denied the charges because "they

medlar" would else have married me to the rotten (IV.3. 170). To be sure, Vienna after the return of the Duke is different from before his departure. The Duke

has discredited Angelo, obtained Isabella, and put much fear into his subjects so that they are likely to take his laws more seriously. But he does all this without any reformation in the execution of the laws. In this respect, Vienna after the Duke's return is fundamentally the same as Vienna before his depar ture.

If we are correct about the Duke, some of his otherwise questionable actions, for instance, his giving of absolution to Mariana and persuading her to think that she is already married, are perfectly legitimate. The other questionable ac tions are justified by his limited power. According to Shakespeare, the Duke is wise and but he is not omniscient and he just, has no power other than making The Psychology of Measure for Measure 169 marriage possible and deceiving people with empty threats. Indeed, it seems that Shakespeare can defend the wisdom and the justice of the Duke only by questioning his power.

REFERENCES

Bloom, Allan. Love and Friendship. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Eccles, Mark, ed. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Measure for Measure. New York: Modem Language Association, 1980. Jaffa, Harry V "Chastity as a Political Principle: An Interpretation of Shakespeare's Measure." Measure for In Shakespeare as Political Thinker, edited by John E. Alvis and Thomas G. West. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000. Pp. 20-40. Lowenthal, David. Shakespeare and the Good life. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. New York: Penguin Books, 1969. Tovey, Barbara. "Wisdom and the Law: Thoughts on the Political Philosophy of Measure Measure." for In Shakespeare's Political Pageant, edited by Joseph Alulis and Vickie Sullivan. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996. Pp. 61-75.

". .. this scattered kingdom": A Study of King Lear

Zdravko Planinc McMaster University

While nursing his blinded and despairing father, Edmund leams "The worst

worst'" is not/ So long as we can say, 'This is the (Act 4, scene 1, lines 27-28. All citations and quotations are from David Bevington's edition of the play [New York: Bantam, 1988]). King Lear, Shakespeare's most profound tragedy, is a saying of the worst. It is not the thing itself. It brings us as close to it as any saying can, however. We need not concern ourselves with the famous warn ings against tragedy made in Augustine's Confessions (1.13; III.2), not simply because they are disingenuous they are written, after all but rather because they are not relevant to King Lear. Shakespeare has written the play in such a way that it deliberately subverts any attempt by its audience to find comfort in the theatrical fallacy: spectators are denied any distance or sense of escape from the worst, and sympathetic souls are denied any illusion that cathartic release is action. As much as any saying can, King Lear compels us to face the worst, to learn about our imperfect and broken nature, and to consider the consequences of these things for others.

In confronting the limitations of human existence, in coming to an under standing of the nature of suffering and death, one leams the deepest truths; and in considering their consequences, not only for oneself, but more, for others, one leams how these existential truths should affect ethics and politics. There are a good many straightforward political lessons that can be learned from King Lear. For example: a kingdom should not be divided against itself; succession controversies should be avoided; different types of authority should not be con fused; a foreign power should never be given control of the capital; and wars of national defense must be fought even when one's domestic allies are worse than one's foreign enemies. As well, King Lear can be read as having direct relevance for the political and religious circumstances in which it was written: Albany stands for James I, and the great Anglican compromise political auton omy for the kingdom, while recognizing the moral superiority of foreign author ities to homegrown Machiavels is once again affirmed. There is a great deal

Many thanks to Pamela Jensen and Paul Cantor for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, presented at the 2000 meetings of the American Political Science Association, Wash ington, DC; and to Barry Cooper for his indispensable assistance on that occasion. I am also very grateful to the journal's anonymous referee for an exceptionally sensitive reading of my work.

INTERPRETATION, Winter 2001-2, Vol. 29, No. 2 172 Interpretation more about ethics, politics and religion that the play can lead us to see, however. Its deepest insights emerge in considering the manner in which Shakespeare death" depicts Lear's "crawl[ing] toward (1.1.41). Shakespeare has crafted King Lear in such a way that its aesthetic form guides one toward, and eventually reveals, the play's full significance. The rudi mentary materials for its form are source-texts. Shakespeare uses several sorts for the play: some have long been obvious to scholars, some have not; and some are used for outlining the play's dramatic action, some for disclosing its mean ing. It is well known, for example, that the main features of King Lear are taken from the Leir story in Geoffrey's History of the Kings of Britain (11.11-15); that Shakespeare uses an episode from Philip Sidney's Arcadia (11.10) as the basis for the subplot involving Gloucester and his sons; and that Shakespeare's combination of the unrelated stories points up their affinities. These two source- texts are the foundation of the plot of King Lear. Shakespeare also uses classical and biblical texts in remarkable ways throughout the play, however. Although his use of them is less immediately evident (they are often little more than allusions, not direct references) their hermeneutical significance is central. It is through studying the place and function of these occulted source-texts in the unique aesthetic form of King Lear that the most difficult aspects of the play's unsettling, and even shocking, depiction of the worst may be brought to light. For instance, there is no direct reference in the play to Plato's Republic. King Lear is not fully understood, however, unless one recognizes the extent to which Shakespeare was familiar with the dialogue's mirroring of macrocosm and mi crocosm, not necessarily from his own reading of the work, but certainly from an intimate awareness of how its argument and imagery had been adopted by Christian authors. In the Republic, Plato parallels the order of the soul and the order of the city in a complex poetic image; in King Lear, Shakespeare does something similar. He uses traditional Christian symbols, primarily the doctrine bodies," of the king's "two in a Platonic manner to parallel Lear, as man and England" king, and his realm, "this little world,/ . . . this (Richard II, 2.1.45, 50; cf. King Lear, 3.1.10). The aesthetic device is quite deliberate and not a complex form of the pathetic fallacy. The experiences and sufferings of Lear are "writ

large" in the realm through the play's geographic movement and dramatic ac tion. Therefore, by studying Shakespeare's poetic depiction of events in the polity, it is possible to learn of his understanding of the soul, its order and disorders, its justice and injustices, and the nature of its suffering and death. To be clear: this is not yet another argument for an allegorical decoding of the play. There has been quite enough scholarship of that sort already. The characters in King Lear are not ciphers in a morality play; they are all fully realized and unique human beings. And the events of the play are not signifiers of an encoded message; they are completely understandable on their own terms. Nonetheless, Shakespeare has crafted the play's aesthetic form to be a macro- kingdom"- .. this scattered A Study of King Lear 173

death." cosmic depiction of Lear's "crawl[ing] toward Everything that occurs around Lear and throughout the realm is also something that occurs within Lear. The main characters can be read as aspects of Lear's nature. Their changing relations are reflections of Lear's changing condition. And their movements through the geographic space of England and the dramatic time of the play's unfolding are movements within Lear's soul as he confronts death. Consider the dramatis personae. Lear and Gloucester are very similar. Indeed,

"Gloucester' in Sidney's Arcadia, the character is himself a king. They have no wives; they each have children of starkly different quality; they mistake their children's qualities in the same way and at the same time; they suffer greatly for their mistake; and, together, they learn difficult truths before they die. If King Lear is the tale of one man's journey toward death, then the roughly parallel plots centering on Lear and Gloucester depict the related experiences of the soul and the body during the journey. As a symbol, Gloucester represents the body; as a man, Gloucester has two sons, Edmund the bastard and Edgar the legitimate. Edmund is Ed-mund, the Ed of the world; and Edgar is Ed, by Gar, by God, the godson of the King. Lear's three daughters similarly divide themselves into two camps: Goneril and Regan are the worldly sisters, the lovers of Edmund; in contrast, Cordelia is transcendently graceful. The two camps that form in the play, and eventually confront one another as opposed armies, are in part representations of two polar orientations or motions of the soul: toward

worldly matters even to the exclusion of the transcendent, and toward the tran scendent even to the exclusion of the world. Let them be called the camp of the

"flesh" "spirit." and the camp of the Shakespeare has a classical understanding of the various aspects of human nature the body, the psyche, their parts, their relation but he tends to use biblical symbolism in depicting human nature in action.

The geography of England is the space in which the action occurs. The events of the play are arranged on two spatial axes; and the character or quality of any event can be determined, in part, by the place in which it occurs and the direc tion in which it moves. Draw a line from Albany (Scotland) to Cornwall: that "worldly" is the axis. Gloucestershire is symbolically midway. Draw the perpen dicular from Gloucester in the west to Dover on the channel: that is the "spiri

tual" axis. It may be that no man is an island, but this island is a man, or rather, the life of a man, and the borders of the island are the extent of his life. The channel is death; and France is the beyond-land, the "undiscovered country from

returns" whose bourn/ No traveler (Hamlet, 3.1.80-81). Gloucester does not go

over, although he tries to do so when he arrives at Dover. And Lear does not go over (this is quite significant, especially since Shakespeare deliberately varies from Geoffrey's History on this point) although Lear does attempt to cut a deal with the lords of the beyond-land at the beginning of the play. Only Cordelia goes over and returns: Cordelia, the embodiment of the soul's proper loving 174 Interpretation

orientation as she leaves with the King of France (not with Burgundy, Lear's preferred suitor) and the embodiment of redemptive grace as she returns (4.6.205-7).

Shakespeare uses such Christian symbolism extensively in the composition of the play, but the result is far from the orthodoxy of any Christian denomina tion. Indeed, the play suggests that a good deal of such orthodoxy is superstition. It is Edmund who gives the most concise critique of superstition in the play: "the

world," excellent foppery of the evidence of our desire to excuse our failures, weaknesses, vices and bad fortunes, and to evade the things for which we bear the responsibility even if we cannot master them, by appealing to external

"necessity," compulsion," on" causes: to to "heavenly "a divine thrusting (1.2.121- 35). Edmund's Machiavellian critique of superstition is not only a distaste for ignorance and weak will; it is also his insight into how such opinions might be manipulated to acquire power; it announces his political theology, the ascension of bastards (1.2.21-22). Shakespeare's critique of superstition, however, goes much further than Edmund might suspect. No appeal to natural or supernatural

forces, to necessities or miracles, and no reliance on providential guidance or

"foppery." intervention is ever anything but No matter whether it is pagan or Christian, whether it is made by Machiavels or divines, or whether or not it happens to work out.

Shakespeare teaches us such lessons in King Lear by allowing us to build our hopes and expectations and then subverting them. We are always entirely per suaded by Edgar when he sets out to join the battle and says to his father, "Pray

thrive." that the right may We are always shocked when he returns with the news that the forces of the right have lost, that Lear and Cordelia are taken (5.2.1-5). And we never learn, it seems. We are again entirely persuaded by the chivalry of Edgar's return and the bravery of his challenge of Edmund, distracted by trumpets and dreams of providential victories for the right (5.3.110 ff). And as we relish defeat just," Edmund's 'The gods are we think (5.3.173) we do not even see that the test of arms was worse than a chancy illusion that worked out. The great evil that it causes is almost invisible. Cordelia is killed as everyone on stage watches the spectacle. Had they not been distracted, as we are, Albany might easily have discovered Edmund's intent and acted in time to save Lear and Cordelia. When Kent interrupts Albany's idle speculations on "The judg heavens," ment of the he comes to his senses: "Great thing of us forgot!/ Speak, Cordelia?" Edmund, where's the King? And where's (5.3.235-42). Too late.

Shakespeare allows us no false hopes of salvation or redemption. There is

right; there is grace. But fulfillment and peace are momentary, and even the best are resolutions imperfect and fall to bits. Every moment of calm or joy in King Lear, every restoration of order or justice, is shattered, and we are forced to wonder what remains when the husk of the illusion of permanence, or the illusion of escape from the worst, is blown away. ". .. this scattered kingdom": A Study of King Lear 175

From the first: In the opening scene of the play, Lear attempts to unburden business" himself of his worldly authority and its attendant "cares and (1.1.39). The strictly political consequences of his decision aside, his plan to divide the

purpose" realm into three parts has a "darker (1.1.36). It represents the manner

death." in which he is resolved to "crawl toward At the end of the Tempest,

grave," Prospero retires to Milan, "where/ Every third thought shall be my he says (5.1.315). Lear's every third thought is also his grave, and his "darker

purpose" concerns his third daughter. Lear's two worldly daughters, married to Albany and Cornwall, inherit a peripheral two-thirds of the realm. Their commanded eloquence is irrelevant:

opulent" "A third more is already set aside for Cordelia and her French suitor (1.1.86). The significance of the plan's symbolism is clear. Lear attempts to put

all matters of the world and the flesh beneath him and give over the highest parts of his soul Cordelia, his heart and joy, and his capital, the seat of the realm itself to the lord of the beyond-land. In exchange, he expects to master the things of the spirit. There will be no suffering; he will "rest/ [in Cordelia's]

nursery" kind (1.1.123-24). And ultimately, nothing of significance in this life will be lost. He will retain the authority of the crown, passing from England to France and back, as it pleases him. Death will be robbed of its victory. But Lear's vision of personal immortality and perpetual peace is mad. The suffering of dying and the circumstances of death cannot be mastered, even if they may be anticipated, and the afterlife is not an open book, nor are its lords bound by contract to the living. Cordelia's love cannot be mastered, coerced or bargained away. And Lear, it turns out, has bargained with the lesser lord, the red Duke of Burgundy, not the king of France. Burgundy will not have her in the purity of her love, without the consequences, for Lear, in the dowry she would bring. find" France takes her up immediately: she loses her home, "a better where to (1.1.265).

Lear has debased his soul's proper relation to a transcendent ground with a

desire for mastery. His plan, for all its cleverness, must fail, and in his extreme

reaction, disowning Cordelia, he is left in despair, "Without . . grace, . . love, benison" .. [or] (1.1.269). The center cannot hold. The order of the realm collapses. In prideful anger, Lear divides the power of the crown and all the lands of England between Albany and Cornwall, though he insists he will some

th' how still be master of the realm, retaining 'The name and all addition to a king" (1.1.136). The court, however, disperses. Lear will no longer sit in council in his capital, somewhere between Gloucester and Dover. Instead, he will wan der between Albany and Cornwall with his retinue of one hundred knights, following the cycles of the moon. This too is lunacy, but of a different sort. The geographic shift from Lear's initial marginalization of Albany and Cornwall,

"worldly" the two poles of the axis, in his bargaining with the French, to his "spiritual" sudden rejection of all things oriented along the axis in favor of the 176 Interpretation

"worldly" extremes of the axis indicates that Lear has turned from a willful attempt to master the things of the spirit to an equally impossible or mad attempt to master the things of the world and the flesh.

Madness is a disorder of the soul, and Shakespeare symbolizes the nature of Lear's disorder in part by the happenings in court. When Cordelia is disowned, "mad" Kent, Lear's most loyal counselor, is banished for calling Lear and insist "evil" ing that his actions are (1.1.146, 169). As Cordelia is love in the soul, or "grace," to use the Christian symbol, Kent is discretion or proper judgment. Without the enlightenment of love, the soul loses its counsel, right reason is silenced, and the seat of the soul's highest powers is given over to the desires of the flesh.

The two spatial axes on which the dramatic action of the play takes place intersect in Gloucester's household. In the symbolic economy of the play, Gloucester is the body, and his fate parallels the fate of Lear, the soul. The body "flesh" "spirit" is not the flesh, nor is the soul the spirit. The terms and designate orientations, not entities. All the characters in the play are, of course, complete: souls and bodies, perpetually caught in the struggle between spirit and flesh.

sport" Gloucester himself had "good in the of his bastard son (1.1 breeding .23) and lives to learn the consequences of succumbing to the flesh. All the charac ters, however, in their symbolic function also dramatize the striking changes in Lear's dispensation. In this sense, Gloucester's role is the bodily parallel to Lear's psychic struggles. Indeed, Gloucester's household may even be under stood as the body in a neutral sense, the site of the conflict between the camps of the spirit and the flesh. Part of the charm of the scene (2.2) in which Oswald and Kent, acting as messengers or embodiments of another's will, have at each other when they meet at Gloucester's house is its dramatization of the all-too- familiar manner in which the conflicting wills of the flesh and spirit contest for control of the body. The body is lesser than the soul, but it is not inherently base. The desire to procreate is one of the lesser erotic desires, but it too is not inherently base. To symbolize the flesh, however, Shakespeare uses explicitly sexual imagery. He associates the improper psychic orientation toward the things of the world and

the flesh with the male genitals, and then, to be more precise, with a disease of

"clap" the male genitals: the (1.4.293), the potent brew of syphilis and gonor rhea that had become quite common in London. Taking a cue from Geoffrey's naming of Leir's eldest daughter, Shakespeare associates the three characters who lead the camp of the flesh, Goneril, Regan and Edmund, first with the three parts of the male genitals, and then with the disease that infects them and through them destroys the whole man. Cordelia's striking manner of addressing father" her sisters on taking her leave, "The jewels of our (1.1.272), is not a sophomoric double entendre. Or not only a double entendre. Neither are Goner- il's words on first kissing Edmund: "Decline your head. This kiss, if it durst . . this scattered kingdom": A Study of King Lear 177

Conceive." speak,/ Would stretch thy spirits up into the air. Nor is Edmund's death" telling reply: "Yours in the ranks of (4.2.22-25). Even in a leisurely reading one discovers many such lines in the play, espe cially in recurring analogy of the eyes and nose for the genitals. One must keep fool" in mind, however, that "This is not altogether (1.4.149). The imagery is used to depict death crawling through Lear. Consider the obvious parallels: As one sister moves the other and the bastard rises with their backing, the disease works through the body, ravaging everything blindness in the eyes, delirium in the brain becoming a poison capable of infecting the soul with despair. In the end, Goneril poisons Regan and then dies, stabbing herself, together with instant" Edmund, "All three/ ... marr[ied] in an (5.3.232-33); but the disease of the flesh lives on in Edmund's final order, killing Cordelia and then Lear. To return to an earlier time of Lear's dying: When he is driven from Goner

il' s house, refused by Regan, and then turned out of Gloucester's house, Lear begins to learn that his attempt to master the worldly realm has failed as desper ately as his attempt to master the spiritual realm. He recognizes Goneril and her mine"(2.4.223- sister as "a disease that's in my flesh/ Which I must needs call 24) but does not know what to do. He is at home nowhere, but now the condition of his homelessness is ruthless. No longer just misdirected, Lear lacks direction altogether; no longer capable (the hundred knights of his train are not only whittled away, they are gone) Lear is powerless against the elements and even the crudest needs. He cannot turn back, but he does not know how to go on. He

must learn to be at home in this nowhere and this nothing. He must endure and

forebear the worst of the storm, both its physical and psychic ravages, if he is to discover the way from Gloucester to Dover and, hope against hope, be recon ciled with Cordelia.

In the times when hellish pain, suffering and despair make it seem that there will never by any rest or resolution, it is sometimes best to cower down under them like a poor wretch and a coward overcome in battle. Pride then melts as

this," though to water, and the recognition of oneself as "no more than a "poor,

animal," bare, forked so far worse than nothing that it might be "better in a

grave" (3.4.100-108), leads to humility. If any comfort can be found, even though fleeting, then with humility comes the possibility of spiritual healing. On the moor that is nowhere, exposed to the tempest of elements that rages as

o' mind" Tom Bedlam wildly as the "tempest in [his] (3.4.12), Lear leams from

man" what it is to be the "unaccommodated (3.4.105). From the violence of the

night," "tyrannous he finds a scant but welcome comfort in Tom's hovel; and from the hovel, through Gloucester's kindness, he is brought to where "both fire

ready" and food is (3.4.144-46). A moment's peace. Gloucester, still divided in his loyalties, returns home to a grisly welcome. He learns, as Lear did, but more viscerally, the consequences of mistaking his

"thrust .. out at children. With his eyes gouged out by Cornwall, Gloucester is 178 Interpretation

gates," Dover" onto the moor, to "smell/ His way to (3.7.96-97). In his great pain and anguish, somehow following Lear's path, he is discovered by Edgar, who nurses him and guides him along the way, repeatedly counseling him not

thoughts." to succumb to despair and "ill Gloucester's bitter sufferings move him to say that we are to the gods "As flies to wanton boys ./ They kill us

sport." "endure," for their Yet we must Edgar reminds him, and "Bear free and

thoughts" patient (4.1.36-37; 4.6.80; 5.2.9-11). It is wise counsel. It lacks something, however. Edgar's sufferings in his disguise as poor Tom were imposture. He does not speak from sufficient experi ence. After defeating Edmund in combat (a lucky thing) Edgar's triumphal claim just" that "The gods are is spoken too quickly, too easily. And his account of Gloucester's recent death is already nothing but a sentimental story (5.3.173, 198-203). It is from Lear's suffering and death that we better learn to "Speak

say" what we feel, and not what we ought to (5.3.330). When Lear dies lament ing Cordelia's death, we are left without any illusion of escape from the worst. We know that peace and joy are momentary, and that every conviction of order or justice, however true, will be shattered. And that there is nothing more. In Lear's journey to Dover, Shakespeare shows us stunning moments of com fort and healing, of reconciliation and justification, of equanimity and grace. Not one endures. Every glimpse of the eternal in time is eclipsed. There is no movement in time toward perfection. Nor does an end redeem a single moment

of suffering.

In what refuge can be found on the moor, Shakespeare has Lear struggle to

kingdom" collect the parts of his "scattered (3.1.31). The scene recalls Plato's Republic, as its argument and imagery had been represented in various ancient and medieval works. Lear seeks justice as well as mercy. And in the spirit of

Athenian" the "good philosopher Lear sees in poor Tom (3.4.171, 176, 180), he tries to grasp justice as a quality of the kingdom of his soul in order that it may be possible to bring justice to the realm. Goneril and Regan are put on trial in "justicer[s]" a courtroom in speech (3.6). The are called, and Lear considers how to arrange them on the bench in a fitting order. First, poor Tom; then, the Fool; oh, yes, Caius too but where is he to sit? Considering their proper "wits" arrangement is itself a gathering of the his madness has scattered, for each of them represents an aspect or function of Lear's nature. Tom is "the

itself," man" thing the bare nature of "unaccommodated (3.4.105-6). Caius is fellow," several things: an "honest-hearted direct and clear in judgment, plain speaking and frank, and diligent in carrying out a true master's will (1.4.18, 27- "sapient" 35; 2.2.93, 99-101). The Fool? He is (3.6.22). And so, the body and its "yoke[d]" needs, the heart and the will, judgment and wisdom, all together by Lear for justice (3.6.37). Finally in order. And yet their order is not right. All three are not quite who they seem to be. Lear does not recognize them, nor do they all recognize each other. Tom is Edgar, unrecognizable even to his father; Caius is Kent; and the Fool, someone hidden in plain sight, taken by all this scattered kingdom": A Study of King Lear 179

be to his disguise. Their veiled quality is a symbol of the relation between Lear's continuing madness and the part of the soul still lacking for true justice. From the moment he abused Cordelia, Lear's soul was divorced from love and grace. His wits were scattered for lack of what binds them together and com pelled to go their ways separately, unrecognized. Of course, love cannot be

entirely absent from the soul: in the play, there is word of Cordelia's return well before it occurs, and Kent carries a letter from her (2.2.168-69). Similarly, the madness that results from a disordering of love in the soul is not the complete absence of right reason, judgment and will: Lear attempted to banish Kent from

the realm when he disowned Cordelia, and the Fool himself refused to attend

away' Lear, "pin[ing] for Cordelia from the moment she left for France (1.4.72- 73). But Kent returned to court in disguise, her letter in his pocket. And the

"bitter" Fool? His sweet fooling became (1.4.134-35), but he counseled Lear well on the errors of his judgment, even teaching him the many meanings and "nothing." uses of The Fool is an absent Cordelia. His pining is Lear's longing, the wound in his soul. And when Cordelia returns, the bitter Fool no longer

"fool" appears. Cordelia is Lear's sweet (5.3.311).

Lear's effort to restore his soul's order does not entirely dispel his madness, but it is a sign of calming and a rediscovery of the soul's proper orientation. Along with the provision of the barest physical comforts, it is enough for him to be at peace for a moment. He sleeps, resting his body; and in his sleep, his soul begins to heal. Before Gloucester leaves them, he urges Kent and the Fool

master" Dover," to "Take up [their] and "drive toward where greater "welcome

protection" and await (3.6.91-92). When he wakes, he is in the French camp. In other words, a long period of spiritual sleep and recovery begins when Gloucester and Lear, the body and the soul, part company. They travel the same route independently, suffering similar experiences, and Lear's revels in the nowhere of Arcadia are a beautiful dream that gradually dissipates in waking as Lear recognizes Gloucester again. The initial shudder of sensing his "mortal ity" (4.6.133) is eased at Dover by the tenderness of his nursing: undisturbed rest, the care of a doctor, gentle music to rouse him. Thinking himself wrongly

o' grave" taken "out the at first, Lear wakes to see Cordelia, and though he is

mind," not immediately "in [his] perfect his madness is finally cured by her love and forgiveness (4.7.46, 64). Her kiss, his recognition of her: grace moves the soul and the order of love is restored.

"Restoration" The fails (4.7.27). The French forces are defeated. In other words, the camp of the flesh defeats the camp of the spirit at the very moment latter' we most wish for the s victory. Our hopes are raised by Shakespeare only to be shattered. And then they are raised again. When Cordelia and Lear are paraded in triumph as Edmund's prisoners, all seems lost until Lear, no longer

foolish" "old and (4.7.90), lucidly describes for Cordelia the joys that prison will make possible for them. If the world will not allow them, they will be free

i' cage." souls in prison, singing "like birds the 180 Interpretation

... So we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too- Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out And take upon 's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies. (5.3.8-19)

"sacrifice," There need be no tears for such a Lear says. "The gods themselves

incense" throw on it (5.3.20-21). Alas, the world extends into the prison too. Any freedom for the soul found in a cell is permitted by the same worldly indifference that overlooks it outside the cell. Once they are known, however, God's spies are tolerated nowhere. Lear and Cordelia have not a moment to themselves to savor "the mystery of things." Edmund orders their immediate death. And yet, there is still hope. Alba ny's inquiries after Cordelia and Lear, a lucky circumstance, kindle a spark in us that becomes a wildfire when our attention is captured by Edgar's dramatic, staged return as the providential champion of divine justice. Edgar defeats Ed mund, the camp of the spirit triumphs over the camp of the flesh; and the triumph provides just enough smoke to allow a dagger to be driven into Lear's heart. Shakespeare's trope of Lear and Cordelia, reconciled but imprisoned, is Jesus' drawn largely from the Johannine depiction of disciples as hated and persecuted by "the world": in it, but not of it (John 17: 14-16), and refusing to love the world, because the love of God is not in "the lust of the flesh, the lust life" of the eyes, and the pride of (1 John 2: 15-17). In lesser part, the imagery is also drawn from the classical understanding of the body (soma) as the prison or tomb (sema) of the soul. When such an understanding is mentioned in Plato's dialogues (e.g., Gorgias 493a), the discussion often turns from the nature of the soul to the likelihood of its immortality. In the New Testament, personal immor tality and the possibility of salvation in the afterlife are articles of faith. Shake speare's depiction of the deaths of Cordelia and Lear, however, challenges all accounts of an afterlife. In contrast to its silencing honesty, even classical under standings of the soul's immortality seem as much a superstitious expression of our desire for a permanent escape from suffering and evil as the Christian story of bodily resurrection and final judgment. It might be supposed from the dramatic development of King Lear that Shakespeare's manner of blending classical and Christian symbols implies a critique of paganism's limitations, perhaps even making it a confessional work in the style of the morality plays. Shakespeare's qualified use of the originally Platonic mirroring of macrocosm and microcosm in showing Lear's struggle to kingdom" order the parts of his "scattered might suggest that the highest spiri tual aspirations of the ancients were not illuminated by grace. It requires Corde- ". .. this scattered kingdom": A Study of King Lear -181 lia's return from the beyond-land for Lear to recover, and the scene in which he awakens in her presence, cured of his madness, is quite obviously a metaphor for spiritual rebirth, perhaps even resurrection. As well, Lear's movement along "spiritual" the play's axis, from Gloucester to Dover, begins just as he falls Dover" asleep. Shakespeare has Gloucester initiate the hasty "drive toward with

up" the insistent command, "Take up, take (3.6.95), a reference to the famous conversion scene in Augustine's Confessions (VIII. 12) in which a voice saying,

read," "Take up and read, take up and provides the final impetus for Augustine to pick up the book of Paul's epistles and awaken from his pagan and dogmatic slumbers.

Equally compelling evidence for an apologetic interpretation of the play can "pagan" be found in its most explicitly scene. Shakespeare's portrayal of Lear, crowned with wildflowers, briefly at peace with himself and all beasts, "every king" inch a of Arcadia, is a celebration of the many respects in which "Nature's

art," above and in particular, above the conventions of all human society (4.6.86, 107). When Gloucester joins him, recently cured of his despair by Edgar and now better able to bear his sufferings, the image seems complete: Gloucester, the chastened body, and Lear, the purified soul, are brought together and de fended by Edgar, the godson. Something is lacking, however. The beatitudes of "mortality" nature cannot be sustained. The flesh smells of (4.6.133); the carnal

thrive[s]" ity of "copulation (4.6.114); and everything sinks to "hell, ... dark

pit" piece" ness, . . [and] the sulfurous (4.6.128). A human being is a "ruined fortune" of work, and a "natural fool of (4.6.134, 191). Without grace, he is nothing. As Lear slips into delirium again, this time, a dream of bloody ven geance, Cordelia's men find him. One of the men tellingly describes Cordelia as the daughter "who redeems nature from the general curse/ Which twain have

to" "Sweet" brought her (4.6.206-7). redemption (4.6.93) is the cure for our fallen nature, enabling us to bear the worst. When Lear is reunited with Cordelia, reborn in her love, all things seem bearable. But the worst is not yet. And an apologetic interpretation of King Lear cannot overstep the stumbling block of Shakespeare's shocking use of the Gos pels in depicting the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. When Lear returns from prison, carrying the murdered Cordelia in his arms, howling and claiming that all who witness it must howl too, the scene is both

end" horror" "the promised and an "image of that (5.3.268-69). It is the final

episode of Shakespeare's macrocosmic depiction of Lear's dying, and it is also the thing itself, the murder of a gentle, beloved child and the wrenching grief Jesus' of her father. The symbolism for the scene is taken from crucifixion, but Shakespeare's theology of the cross allows no edifying sentiments. Nothing redeems it: nothing that came before, no matter how gracious; nothing to come, for there is no more; and nothing in the moment, most certainly not the incom prehension, petty worldly concerns and fearful hopes of those who stand by, a great for a merely moved by the tragedy. The birth of a child is joy parent, 1 82 Interpretation but the giving of life is also the giving of suffering and death. It is so by nature, even in Arcadia. Lear reminds Gloucester: "Thou know'st the first time that we smell the air/ We wawl and cry. . . / When we are bom, we cry that we are fools." come/ To this great stage of Nor is there an end to it as we crawl toward

Mark" death. For Lear, this is all of theology: "I will preach to thee. (4.6.179- 83). For Shakespeare, as well: his theology of the cross is based on the Gospel of Mark.

Jews" In Mark's account, the "King of the is condemned by Pilate and sent to be crucified at Golgotha so weakened by his scourging that he cannot bear his cross on the way (15:12-22 [King James Version]). As he is dying, he is

save" reviled and mocked: "He saved others; himself he cannot (15:31). In the

dark hour of his death, he "cried with a loud voice, saying, . . . 'My God, my God,

me?'" why hast thou forsaken (15:34). Some misunderstand his words (15:35). When he gives up the ghost with a loud cry, "the veil of the temple [is] rent in bottom" twain from the top to the (15:37-38). A centurion, pitying his death God" and moved by such omens, says, "Truly this man was the Son of (15:39). The Gospel then ends with the story of his resurrection. Of the four Gospel accounts of the crucifixion, this is the bleakest. The de

Jesus' spair of dying words almost overshadows the promise, for others, in his death and resurrection. In subsequent Gospels (Mark is considered the earliest) the promise eclipses the despair. Matthew repeats Mark, for the most part, but Jesus' with embellishments. Luke changes last words to have him joyously an ticipate his own resurrection and alters the sequence of events the better to suit

the mood (23:43-46). John mentions nothing that might detract from the prom ise of the resurrection, not even a darkened sky, and has the dying Jesus reflect on the manner in which events have fulfilled scripture (19:28). The intent of such rewriting emerges most clearly in the dialectical formulations of Paul's explanation of the consequences of the crucifixion: "the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power God." of Jews and Greeks who seek wisdom are called, but they will perish: "Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God

men" is stronger than (1 Corinthians 1:18-25). For Shakespeare, however, even the Gospel of Mark is not pagan enough. As Goneril, Regan and Edmund die, consuming themselves in their passions and poisons, the scourging desires and pangs of the flesh die, too. The body seems a benign prison for the soul: Lear, imprisoned with Cordelia, is at peace. Perhaps death is a parting of body and soul: Gloucester and Lear have gone their ways separately. Perhaps it is, at worst, like the report of Gloucester's own

grief," death, a moment of "conflict . . ./ Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and "smilingly" still allowing one to die (5.3.201-3). Lear had hoped to "die bridegroom" bravely, like a smug (4.6.198). In the lightness of his imprisonment

ones" (5.3.17- with Cordelia, he hopes to "wear out/ . . . packs and sects of great 19). An endless singing in a cage, the easy immortality of the soul. But Ed- kingdom"- ". . . this scattered A Study of King Lear 183 mund's death spits" sentence, like Pilate's, is not rescinded. The "burning of mortality strike deep into the heart, splitting it in killing Cordelia, killing the soul's sense of the order of love (3.6.15; 5.3.22). Lear kills the soldier who hanged Cordelia, but he cannot save her, and he is sorely distracted by the misplaced praise he receives for saving himself, but not another (5.3.279-82).

The murdered Cordelia in Lear's arms is a symbol of the greatest anguish a soul can experience. Lear's soul is forsaken by God in the hour of its death. He howls

vault" his despair so loudly that his cry almost cracks "heaven's (5.3.262-64). And

ghost," "faint," when he gives up "his those watching imagine his death to be a "pass[ing]" world" a gentle from "this rough (5.3.317-20). Kent acts the part

say," of the centurion. He and Edgar speak "what [they] ought to mistaking feel" "what [they] (5.3.330). Neither the body nor the soul goes over to the beyond-land, however: neither Gloucester nor Lear crosses to France at Dover. There is no resurrection. The image of horror is far less difficult to behold than the thing itself. The symbol of Lear's death, understood as the narrative resolution of Shakespeare's tragedy, allows us to retreat too easily as spectators concerned primarily with our own aesthetic sensibilities. Shattering the narrative, however, the murder of Cordelia, the woman, not the symbol, and the death of Lear, the man, the griev ing father, leave us no escape. Shakespeare compels us to face death directly. What is more, he shames those who avert their eyes by showing the jarring indignity of their behavior. Lear's keening of Cordelia is interrupted by Kent, Edgar and Albany, who, because they cannot see what is before their eyes, speak to Lear and draw him into the petty affairs of the world to which he is now blind. The news of Ed mund's death is nothing in this moment, but neither is news of Edgar's victory, nor are Albany's trumpeted proclamations, apportioning rewards and punish ments to friends and enemies in the image of a final judgment that cloaks the nature of death in an illusion of transcendent justice (5.3.300-310). With his eyes set on Cordelia, friends and enemies are alike for Lear: "murderers, traitors

all!" (5.3.274). But Kent insists on being recognized. The indecency of his de

master," sire to be known by his "good not only for who he is but also for his services to him in his guise as Caius (5.3.272, 288-95), is disgraceful. Though the goodness of Kent's actions is unquestionable, they are mixed with an intent

acknowledged" "To be by his lord at the right time (4.7.1-11). Kent's virtues "Authority" cannot be shaken by baser worldly concerns, but his loyalty to the

master" that he would "fain call (1.4.27-30) is inseparable from an aspiration

virtue" to "taste/ The wages of . . in a higher accounting (5.3.308-9). Visions of reward and punishment in a life to come arise from unseemly longings for recognition and cloud over the hard truths of justice and injustice, suffering and mercy, in life as it is. Lear turns away and looks again at Cordelia: 'Thou'lt come no more,/ Never,

never!" never, never, never, (5.3.313-14) 184 Interpretation

"slave" All things have their birth and their death. We, too, are to nature's

pleasure," hither." "horrible enduring our "going hence, even as [our] coming "unkindness" There is no in this (3.2.16-19; 5.2.9-10). In the words of a man who served another well, suffering much for his love and friendship: "In nature there's no blemish but the mind;/ None can be call'd

unkind" deform'd but the (Twelfth Night, 3.4.363-64). Taking nature's harshest "law," powers as as does Edmund (1.2.1), is a brutish deformity of the soul and mind, but it is not thereby the most vicious of the ways in which men attempt to master what is beyond them. Brash and unqualified vice is not more unsightly than the eclipse of virtue by vice. Kent's demand for recognition reveals a slav ish nature attempting to master authority through good and loyal service. A free soul, in contrast, loves without calculation of benefit, cares for others graciously, not from fears for itself, and nurses and comforts the suffering and despair of others in anonymity if need be. If Cordelia is the personification of love and grace, their essence is expressed in her first words, spoken to herself in trying

silent" circumstances: "Love and be (1.1.62). Silence is the only possible answer to Lear's hideous question of his daughters, "Which of you shall we say doth

most?" love us (1.1.51). His desire to master his own death deforms his soul so far that love is almost killed in it, and he becomes a pitiful old fool, bitterly

"faint" unkindness[es]" reckoning up the and the "Sharp-toothed done to him (1.4.67; 2.4.134) until he is mad. His penance is to crawl to Dover and have Cordelia hanged before his eyes. As much as any saying can, King Lear forces us to confront the worst, to learn about our imperfect and blemished natures, and to consider the conse quences of these things for others. Lear leams the final things at Dover, as much as any man can. Along the way to Dover, there are strong intimations and premonitions; and with each foresight of the end, with each hint that he must

"lie" "ague-proof" give up the that he is (4.6.104-5), there comes a simple lesson about his dealings with others as man and king. How go the things of

eyes," the world? "A man may see how . with no Lear tells Gloucester in Arcadia (4.6.150-51). What is worldly justice? Is it not rank injustice, masked

politician[s],""justice[s]" "beadle[s]" by the hypocrisy and lies of "scurvy and

gowns" in "Robes and furred (4.6.160-72)? A "farmer's dog barkfing] at a beggar

office" .. ./ [is] the great image of authority: a dog's/ obeyed in (4.6.155-59). Poor Tom taught Lear what it is to be a Bedlam beggar, writhing in the pains of body, soul and mind, alone in the bleakness of the moor. The sight of him was

"unbutton" enough to compel Lear to and offer him his clothing. But even

body" skies" before seeing Tom's "uncovered exposed to the "extremity of the (3.4.100-108), a taste of the storm's unceasing violence was enough to show Lear how he had abused the proper authority of his office. Shunning his mad "pray[s]:" ness and urging others to take shelter before him, he

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, ". . this scattered kingdom': A Study of King Lear 185

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. (3.4.27-36)

Lear takes the lesson of kindness to his grave. As he dies, as he becomes the

itself," sir" wretched "thing he asks: "Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, (5.3.315).

Modernity versus Mystery in Flannery O'Connor's Woods" Short Story "A View of the

Henry T. Edmondson III

Georgia College and State University'

mystery," "Fiction is the concrete expression of Flannery O'Connor wrote (1979, p. 144). In arriving at this opinion, she was inspired by Aquinas, who believed that humanity is entangled in this mystery because human beings reside at the boundary of the spiritual and the material. So situated, humans are com plex, in contrast to the simplicity of lower embodied creatures and of the higher disembodied angels. At this juncture of the material and the immaterial, human

creatures," beings are "middle that is, they "must be understood in relationship

them." not only to what is beneath them but also to what is above Humanity, then, embodies a kind of mystery, because of its precarious and barely tenable position, standing at the apex of animal life, but also occupying the lowest rung of the theological ladder that ascends to God (O'Connor, 1979, p. 144; Aquinas, I, qus. 75-89. Also see Aristotle, De Anima). O'Connor's faith, and especially her Catholic upbringing, imbued her with a deep appreciation for mystery. This sense of mystery was reinforced by several of her favorite writers. In The Grammar ofAssent, which appears in her library collection, John Henry Newman suggests that the overlap of human life and divine life is impossible for the human mind to comprehend fully and so it must be accepted as a mystery; what cannot be understood must be met with faith and devotion. "The pure and indivisible Light is seen only by the blessed inhabi heaven," tants of Newman argues, but "here we have . .. such faint reflections

supplies." of it as its diffraction Although these reflections may not satisfy the devotion" demands of human reason, "they are sufficient for faith and and though the human mind may try to wrench a more rational explanation from them, "you

mystery" gain nothing but a (Newman, pp. 116-17). O'Connor owned a copy of Pascal's Pensees, and there the French mathema tician and philosopher offers a different but complementary perspective on the mystery of human existence and its attendant uncertainty. He observes that hu man beings "are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, fro." blown to and Just when we identify a "fixed point to which we can cling

I am grateful to Professor John Desmond for helping me to understand this short story at a Condition," Liberty Fund Colloquium entitled, "Liberty, Responsibility, and the Human November 9-12, 2000, Mulberry Inn, Savannah, GA, although he may not agree with the conclusions 1 have drawn.

interpretation, Winter 2001-2, Vol. 29, No. 2 188 Interpretation

behind." and make fast, it shifts and leaves us Should we pursue it, "it eludes

us" our grasp, slips away, and flees eternally before (Pascal, No. 72). According to O'Connor, not even Thomas Aquinas can explain away mys tery. Perhaps it is better said especially St. Thomas, because he recognizes the boundary beyond which neither reason nor even revelation can penetrate O'Connor warned her friend Cecil Dawkins, "I don't want to discourage you from reading St. Thomas, but don't read him with the notion that he is going to "prayer" you." clear anything up for Her best solution, she offered, was (1979, p. 308). She counseled a young student who wrote her after her appearance at Emory University, "Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It knowledge" grows along with (1979, p. 489). The more one knows, the more he realizes what he does not and cannot know. Thus, a mature view of the world is one in which the mysterious becomes, in a sense, more mysterious, not less, and those elements of life shrouded in mystery become darker still. Think ing of O'Connor, the novelist Walker Percy observed, "If the scientist's voca tion is to clarify and simplify, it would seem that the novelist's aim is to muddy

complicate" and (1954, p. 108). In his Confessions, St. Augustine admitted that only by faith could he find intellectual satisfaction in the face of the inscrutabil ity of human suffering. At first the theological explanations for such human

strangely" conundrums were "sounding to the point that they "were wont to

me." mysteries" offend But, once he acknowledged "the depth of the he was

credence" able to submit to their authority and see them as "worthy of religious (Augustine, 1952, p. 90). For O'Connor, the purpose of fiction is to help the reader cultivate respect for this mystery of human life. She once explained the difference between writ "regional" ers who are merely writers, and those who use their surroundings as the podium from which to address themes of universal importance. She wrote, "The Southern writer has certainly been provided with a variety of riches, but if his vision goes no farther than these materials, then he would have been as well

off without them. . . . Those people become regional writers who don't reveal any hand" element of mystery in the rich material they have at (1957, p. 3). O'Connor admitted, though, just how difficult it was for her to articulate the theological sense of mystery in discourse, and this admission gives the reader more appreciation for why she would resort to fiction as the best means of depicting mystery. She once apologized to Maryat Lee that she had not been able to respond adequately in correspondence to a point of theological debate: "You are of course entirely right that the reply was inadequate and cliche-ridden.

approach" It always will be. These are mysteries that I can in no way (Lee, 1976, p. 57). The challenge to the fiction writer is especially pressing because, as O'Con nor noted, the modem world is "a generation that has been made to feel that the

mystery." aim of learning is to eliminate For readers loath to confront mystery, disturbing," "fiction can be very because a writer like O'Connor will be looking Modernity versus Mystery in Flannery O 'Connor 1 89 for every opportunity to present mystery through the matter of everyday life,

experience" "the concrete world of sense (1969, pp. 124-25). In searching for the best material to place upon her literary palette, she found writing about the "irresistible" rural poor because the "mystery of existence is always showing lives" through the texture of their ordinary (1969, p. 132). She explained that education may make it more difficult for one to appreciate this existential mystery, apparently because the overeducated mind is impatient with the mundane character of everyday life, finding it commonplace. She said, 'The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the edu cated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by

mystery" contact with (1969, p. 79). Elsewhere she spoke of "those depths of mystery which the modem world is divided about part of it trying to eliminate mystery while another part tries to rediscover it in disciplines less personally

religion" demanding than (p. 145). She argued, "For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the

man" view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of (p. 158). O'Connor endeavored to use literature to urge the reader toward the mys tery that lies behind the everyday facts and events of life, the mystery that inheres even in custom and prejudice. She admitted, 'The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there al ways has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for formula" by any human (p. 153). Even Catholics, she admitted, "are very much Answer." given to the Instant But "[fjiction doesn't have any. It leaves us .

mystery" with a renewed sense of (1969, p. 184).

Woods" In her short story "A View of the O'Connor offers one of her harsh est warnings. Through the story, she admonishes the reader that mystery is an inexpugnable part of the human condition, and it is most acutely felt in the face of human suffering. If one should attempt to eradicate human suffering without some thoughtful respect for the mystery with which it is shrouded, the conse the quences may be more tragic than the suffering itself. In addition to forcing Woods" reader to face the mystery of human suffering, "A View of the also exposes the reader to the mystery of human nature that makes the prediction and control of human behavior so difficult, given the conflicting angelic and

bestial elements of man's internal makeup. Most importantly, through an in triguing use of metaphor, O'Connor argues in this story that the proper response to the mystery of human nature and suffering is recourse to another mystery the mysterious redemptive work of Christ. Finally, in keeping with the Thomistic view that evil is the absence of good, with life's if rashness re this story suggests that when one is faced mystery, create the vacuum places proper consideration, such injudicious conduct can helpful in into which evil may rush. Jacques Maritain is especially explaining how it might be this element of the teaching of St. Thomas and, by implication, 190 Interpretation illustrated by O'Connor's story. More specifically, Maritain shows how human thoughtlessness first creates the vacuum that is filled later with evil action. Mari tain further suggests that the neglect of proper moral consideration is a kind of

"nothingness," and as such is a dimension of the moral nihilism so characteristic of the modem age.

Woods," O'Connor told a friend that upon the completion of "A View of the she sent the story to Harper's Bazaar which previously had published other of her stories. Referring to the women who would read the magazine at the beauty

set." parlor, she cautioned, "it may be a little grim for the dryer On the other

set" hand, she concluded, those ladies are "a pretty grim themselves (1979, p. 175). She warned her friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, with whom she lived while in graduate school, "I enclose a little morality play of mine for your Christmas cheer but it is not very cheerful, I'd advise you to leave off reading

season" it until after the (p. 186).

THE STORY

This is a tragic story of an old man, Mr. Fortune, and his granddaughter, Mary Fortune. Mary Fortune's father, Pitts, who is son-in-law to the grandfa ther, also plays an important role as a foil to his father-in-law. The elements of the story are as mundane as those of any story that O'Connor has written, but she fashions out of this ordinary material one of her most artistic and philosophi cally unsettling short stories. As the story opens, a backhoe is clearing an area of rural pasture; throughout the story, O'Connor describes the machinery in baleful language. Mary Fortune sits on the hood of her grandfather's car watching "the big disembodied gullet gorge itself on the clay, then with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a

out" slow mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it (1988, p. 525). In the back ground are a lake and "a black line of woods which appeared at both ends of

fields" the view to walk across the water and continue along the edge of the (p. 525). This description of the woods appearing to perform the miraculous Christ like miracle of walking upon water is an early hint that the woods possess divine symbolism, a symbol that will be developed throughout the story, and especially at the end.

Fortune has no respect for anyone in the family except his granddaughter. His daughter, Mary's mother, "had married an idiot named Pitts and had had

Fortune." seven children, all likewise idiots except the youngest, Mary The fam ily lives on the grandfather's land, and he uses the land to control them, regu larly reminding them that it is his, and occasionally vexing them by selling a parcel of it to outsiders. He has reduced his eight-hundred-acre tract by selling "five twenty-acre lots on the back of the place and every time he sold one, Pitt's

points" blood pressure had gone up twenty but only because, as the old man Modernity versus Mystery in Flannery O'Connor -191 explained to his granddaughter, her father "would let a cow pasture interfere future" with the (p. 528). The grandfather always had thought that Mary Fortune was like him rather than the rest of her family, who "are the kind that would let a cow pasture or a mule lot or a row of beans interfere with progress"; but, he

adds, "People like you and me with heads on their shoulders know you can't

cow" stop the marcher time for a (p. 528).

What the old man cannot control are the regular beatings that Pitts inflicts

on his daughter: "Time and again, Mr. Fortune's heart had pounded to see him

rise slowly from his place at the table . . and abruptly, for no reason, with no

me.'" explanation, jerk his head at Mary Fortune and say, 'Come with

A look that was completely foreign to the child's face would appear on it. The old

man could not define the look but it infuriated him. It was a look that was part ter ror and part respect and part something else, something very like cooperation. (P. 530)

Mary's father would then take her in his truck out of earshot and beat her. In this lies his revenge upon, and his only control of, his father-in-law, who feels as frustrated as if he himself were doing the beating. Pitts defiantly tells Fortune,

me." "She's mine to whip and I'll whip her every day of the year if it suits Mary Fortune, for her part, will never admit to her grandfather that her father beats her and in this she reflects her grandfather's obdurate pride. When he demands to know why she submits to the abuse, she denies the obvious and

me.'" retorts that "'nobody beat She also ominously predicts, "'Nobody's ever him'" beat me in my life and if anybody did, I'd kill (p. 530). In this familial duel between grandfather and son-in-law, the elder plans a new move sure to grieve the younger. Whereas previously it was only land to the rear of the tract that had been sold, Fortune is about to close negotiations to sell a parcel to Tilman, a local storeowner who will construct a gas station directly in front of the family home. To the family, this two-hundred-foot lawn," stretch of field is "the and it provides a play area and a grazing field for the few family cows. Most importantly, it allows a view of the woods across the highway. Even though Fortune plans to use the proceeds to build a bank account for his granddaughter, she fiercely objects when he divulges his plans, and he finds incomprehensible her insistence on retaining "a view of the

woods."

road," "We won't be able to see the woods across the she said.

road?" "The old man stared at her. "The woods across the he repeated.

view," "We won't be able to see the she said.

view?" "The he repeated.

woods," "The she said; "we won't be able to see the woods from the porch. (P. 532) 192 Interpretation

The old man fumes at her senseless objections and, referring to her father, asks,

calves?" "Do you think I give a damn hoot where that fool grazes his Mary Fortune portentously warns, "He who calls his brother a fool is subject to hell fire." Fortune retaliates with a reminder of her meek acquiescence in her fre

me,' quent whippings. She retorts, "'He nor nobody else has ever touched measuring off each word in a deadly flat tone. 'Nobody's ever put a hand on him'" me and if anybody did, I'd kill (pp. 532-33). Shortly thereafter, at the dinner table, Fortune alarms the family by announc ing his plans, and Pitts makes it an occasion to abuse his daughter again. He him." "had stopped eating and was staring in front of He looked at Mary Fortune

us.'" and said, '"You done this to As the old man watches his son-in-law take

sick." his granddaughter away, her submission "made him physically He con demns his daughter for not intervening, in response to which she indicts him for the same passivity. But he excuses himself with, '"I'm an old man with a heart condition'" (pp. 533-34).

Fortune's relationship with his granddaughter begins to degenerate in ways that he does not understand and that he cannot control. During a trip to see Tilman, the prospective buyer of the front lot, Fortune instructs his granddaugh ter to wait in the car, but she leaves him and walks back home. He finds her on

" the porch, looking out across the yard, and asks why she left. T toljer I was

went,' going and I she said in a slow emphatic voice, not looking at him, 'and

alone.'" now you can go on and lemme Fortune hears something "very final, in disputes." the sound of this, a tone that had not come up before in their As she speaks, Mary is gazing at the skyline, and by describing Mary's gaze in this manner, O'Connor means to focus the reader's attention on the story's unfolding moral drama. Mary sits "staring at the sullen line of black pine woods fringed on top with green. Behind that line was a narrow gray-blue line of more distant woods and beyond that nothing but the sky, entirely blank except for one or

clouds." two threadbare O'Connor explains that Mary Fortune "looked into this him," scene as if it were a person that she preferred to and by this the author suggests symbolically her grandfather has threatened something more sacred than their relationship, in spite of her obvious affection for him. But Mr. Fortune cannot comprehend what troubles Mary: "There's not a thing over there but

woods,'" the he protests (pp. 535-37). That evening at dinner, "nobody addressed a word to him, including Mary Fortune," and he spends the remainder of the evening alone in his room again, justifying to himself his plans. He reasons, 'They would not have to go any distance for gas. Anytime they needed a loaf of bread, all they would have to door." do would be step out their front door into Tilman's back Tilman's gas station would bring more traffic, more stores. Selling the lot would "insure the future" (pp. 538-39).

The next morning brings no improvement in Mary Fortune's mood, and her disposition reflected in the weather: is The sky "was an unpleasant gray and the Modernity versus Mystery in Flannery O'Connor 193

out" sun had not troubled to come (p. 540). Fortune finds Mary on the front porch again, gazing straight ahead, and once again, it was "apparent that this

woods." morning she preferred the sight of the He is able to entice her into town to visit the boat store, but once there, she is so despondent and indifferent that Fortune "could not believe that a child of her intelligence could be acting field." this way over the mere sale of a The offer of an ice cream cone elicits no more interest, nor does a subsidized visit to the ten-cent store. She finally responds to his queries, again insisting, '"We won't be able to see the woods

more.'" any The old man is so irked with her attitude that he storms into a nearby office to have a deed drawn up for the real estate transaction. At this point, O'Connor uses the weather yet again, this time to warn the reader of impending disaster: "The sky had darkened also and there was a hot sluggish

possible" tide in the air, the kind felt when a tornado is (p. 541). As the pair are en route to close the deal with Tilman, O'Connor's description of Mary Fortune also transmits a warning of imminent calamity. She has become "with drawn," and "he might have been chauffeuring a small dead body for all the

got" answer he (p. 542, emphasis added). At the precise moment that Fortune and Tilman shake hands over the sale, Mary Fortune goes berserk. She hurls a bottle at Tilman that he barely avoids and begins to wreck the store. She is "screaming something unintelligible and

reach." throwing everything within her Fortune finally subdues her when "he

store" caught her by the tail of her dress and pulled her backward out of the

whimpering" and then lifts her "wheezing and into the car. He drives down the highway for five minutes in silent fury and Mary Fortune is "rolled into a ball

seat" heaving." in the comer of the and is "snuffling and He is stunned that a child of his relation would behave so violently and embarrass him so severely. He concludes that he has been overindulgent. "He saw that the time had come,

her" that he could no longer avoid whipping and so, when he reaches his own property, he turns off a side path and drives down into the woods to "the exact her." spot where he had seen Pitts take his belt to It is a widened place in the clay road where a car could turn around, "an ugly red bald spot surrounded by long thin pines that appeared to be gathered there to witness anything that would

clearing" take place in such a (pp. 543-44). Only at this point does the adolescent realize why they have stopped: "Where a few seconds before her face had been red and distorted and unorganized, it

drained now of every vague line until nothing was left on it but positiveness, a

certainty." reached She then re look that went slowly past determination and

me,' ever beat she peats her warning to her grandfather, '"Nobody has said, him'" warns her not to give 'and if anybody tries it, I'll kill (p. 544). Fortune

sass," him "no but his "knees felt very unsteady, as if they might turn either forward." remove his glasses. backward or Mary responds by instructing him to

"'Don't' orders!' give me he said in a high voice and slapped awkwardly at her

belt" ankles with his (p. 544). 194 Interpretation

The gesture unleashes a violent fury in Mary Fortune for which the incident in Tilman's store had been only an omen. The young girl is over her grandfather so quickly "that he could not have recalled which blow he felt first, whether the weight of her whole solid body or the jabs of her feet or the pummeling of her fist on his chest. ... It was as if he were being attacked not by one child but by a pack of small demons all with stout brown school shoes and small rocklike fists" (pp. 544-45).

When she pauses in her assault, Fortune finds the opportunity to grab the advantage. Now on top and looking down at her with her neck in his hands, "he lifted her head and brought it down once hard against [a] rock. . . Then he brought it down twice more."

Then looking into the face in which the eyes, slowly rolling back, appeared to pay

him not the slightest attention. ... (p. 545)

lesson,' "This ought to teach you a good he said in a voice that was edged

doubt" heart," with (p. 546). He stands up but feels an "enlargement of his and

motion." he falls again as "his heart expanded once more with a convulsive He begins to imagine that he is moving through the woods toward the lake, and even, in his fantasy, "perceived that there would be a little opening there, a little him" place where he could escape and leave the woods behind (p. 546).

On both sides of him he saw that the gaunt trees had thickened into mysterious dark files that were marching across the water and away into the distance. He looked around desperately for someone to help him but the place was deserted except for one huge yellow monster which sat to the side, as stationary as he was, gorging it self on clay. (P. 546)

MYSTERY AND EVIL

There is a similar despair that attends to the conclusion of "A View of the Woods" and O'Connor's disquieting story "The Lame Shall Enter First": neither story offers even the muted hope one finds in others of O'Connor's short stories. On the the contrary, denouement is darker, more tragic. Although in many of her stories, she often uses evil to set the stage for the introduction of grace, in these two stories the extent of evil leaves less room for the operation of grace.

It is as if the evil is more extensive in these stories than others. "The Lame Shall First" Enter is a pungent literary account of the phenomenon of evil; it Aquinas' offers an especially clear illustration of St. Thomas teaching on evil Woods" as a deprivation and distortion of good. "A View of the also suggests the Thomistic teaching on evil, and in this case Jacques Maritain 's published lecture Saint under- Thomas and the Problem of Evil is especially helpful in Modernity versus Mystery in Flannery O'Connor 195

O'Connor's reliance standing upon Thomas. Maritain begins by acknowledging the point of the starting Thomistic doctrine of evil: evil is a defect of good, not a separate entity of its own. In this instance, though, Maritain explains that this defect a can be voluntary and free defect, the consequence of an individual's

choice" evil" "free and this becomes the "root of that will come to full fruition in one's later activity (Maritain, p. 23). One must, St. Thomas explains, "lpre- consider a certain defect in the a will, certain deficiency prior to the act of deficient.' " choice which is itself Maritain offers a gloss on Thomas's passage, "defect" explaining that the occurs when one fails, before acting, to consider the principle, or rule, proper to the moral question at hand and so the evil arises from the failure properly to apply moral evaluation to the dilemma at hand (pp. 24-25).

Accordingly, the freedom of one's will becomes, in a perverse way, the source of evil. The exercise of that will, or more accurately, the failure to exer cise the will in proper consideration, is a defective use of the will that has as its consequence evil action because one does not make use of "the rule of reason

law" and of divine before taking important and far-reaching moral action. According to Maritain, an individual is not required always to hold moral principles consciously before him any more than a carpenter must carry a ruler with him at all times; rather, what is required is that when it comes time to act, or cut as in the case of the carpenter, then attention must be given to the princi ple, or ruler, that should guide such action. As he explains, "What is required of the soul is not that it should always look to the rule or have the ruler con

rule" stantly in hand, but that it should produce its act while looking at the (Maritain, p. 27). St. Thomas elaborates,

Thus the craftsman does not err in not always having his ruler in hand but in pro ceeding to cut the wood without his ruler. The faultiness of will does not consist in not paying attention in act to the rule of reason or of divine law, but in this: that without taking heed of the rule it proceeds to the act of choice. (Maritain, pp. 27-28)

As a consequence of this defect, the neglect of proper and due consideration, the individual acts without the guidance of either reason or divine law as he "proceeds to the act of choice, which is consequently deprived of the rectitude have" it would (Maritain, p. 29). Maritain' s analysis suggests that the evil act that occurs in the simultaneous deaths of Mr. Fortune and Mary is an act that may have had its roots earlier, in Mr. Fortune's headstrong attempt to manipulate his extended family without proper consideration of the principles that should have guided his weighty ac tions. It was clear on the afternoon prior to the violent final day that Mr. Fortune did not understand the situation of which he was a part; yet, rather than hesitate until he had the confidence that a clearer grasp of the relevant principles might 1 96 Interpretation have supplied, he pushed ahead with a decision fraught with grim implications for his family.

That afternoon, Fortune retires to his room to rest but he arises several times

'lawn' to look "out the window across the to the line of woods [Mary] said they

more." wouldn't be able to see any But he sees nothing but ordinary "woods not a mountain, not a waterfall, not any kind of planted bush or flower, just

woods" (O'Connor, 1988, p. 538). Yet his bewilderment, rather than giving him pause, stiffens his resolve to sell, with the vague plan that he can compensate

something" Mary Fortune "by buying her (p. 538). He is clearly troubled that he does not understand. The third time he gets up to look at the woods, he seems to come the closest to grasping the moral dimensions of his circumstance, as he perceives, however incompletely, something more than a line of trees.

The old man stared for some time, as if for a prolonged instant he were caught up out of the rattle of everything that led to the future and were held there in the midst of an uncomfortable mystery that he had not apprehended before. (P. 538, emphasis added)

"glimpse" This suggests the existence of something vital though unknown, and for this reason he should have hesitated; but he ignores even this partial revela tion, making him all the more culpable for his later willful behavior and its horrific consequence. Maritain elaborates upon St. Thomas's principle, thereby offering the O'Con nor reader the means by which to judge Mr. Fortune's behavior. Once the indi vidual has made the willful choice not to identify and apply the rule, his choice

good," means there now exists an "absence of that while not evil in itself, will "voluntary" produce evil if left uncorrected. This choice bears all the character istics of Thomistic evil, and not coincidentally of nihilism as well, as it

is a certain nothingness, the nothingness of the consideration of the rule, it is a certain nothingness introduced by the creature at the start of his action; it is a mere absence, a mere nothingness, but it is the root proper of evil action. (Maritain, pp. 29-31)

Mr. Fortune's behavior, to use Maritain's words, bears "in itself the teeth-marks

nothingness." of The conclusion to Maritain's explanation of this dimension of Thomistic evil seems an equally apt characterization of Fortune's behavior: hiding-place" "Here we have traced evil to its innermost (pp. 33-35). By the time Mr. Fortune takes Mary to the woods to beat her, he has lost more than his control over Mary Fortune. His philosophical world view is crum bling, and he has accordingly lost his self-confidence. When he announces to his "Now you," granddaughter, I'm going to whip O'Connor describes his voice loud" "hollow" as "extra but (p. 544). But by this time it is too late to regain Modernity versus Mystery in Flannery O'Connor 197 the secure that grounding wisdom can supply, and so he blusters his way for devoid of divine or ward, reasonable guidance and propelled only by the force of his will which he vainly tries to impose upon his doomed granddaughter.

O'CONNOR ON THE MYSTERY OF SUFFERING

His granddaughter's suffering maddens Fortune because he cannot control it and because she submits to it. O'Connor implies that Fortune fails to appreciate

the mystery of suffering with its inexplicable and uncontrollable nature. He regards it as a problem to be solved quickly and forcibly, rather than as a com plex and difficult mystery requiring forethought before action. After one of her beatings, he wonders to himself,

What was the matter with her that she couldn't stand up to Pitts? Why was there this one flaw in her character when he had trained her so well in everything else. It was an ugly mystery. (P. 536, emphasis added)

O'Connor offers a correction to Fortune's attitude toward suffering, both by her writing and by her life. She was, of course, well acquainted with "mysteri

ous" suffering because of the enigmatic disease of lupus she inherited from her father that took her own life prematurely at the age of thirty-nine. The late Sally Fitzgerald reported, "When she came home to Georgia for good, it was of course under the hard constraint of disseminated lupus erythematosus, a dangerous [au toimmune deficiency] disease of metabolical origin incurable but controllable by steroid drugs which exhausts the energies of its victims and necessitates life" an extremely careful and restricted (O'Connor, 1979, p. xvi). Some of O'Connor's friends were slow to realize the seriousness of her illness because O'Connor either understated it or treated it with humor. From Rome, Italy, she wrote her friends the Cheneys regarding the pilgrimage to which she had reluc Flannery" tantly agreed, "Have endured. Cheers, (O'Connor, 1958). In the last year of her life, Brainard Cheney wrote, "I somehow can't realize the degree of live!" hazard in which you (Stephens, p. 188). A fellow lupus sufferer with whom O'Connor corresponded, DeVene Harrold, reports that O'Connor was wryly appreciative that if one must suffer a fatal disease, the more mysterious the ailment, the better. Harrold reports, "We had lengthy letters and lengthy chats about lupus. They were factual and matter-of-fact. She was of the opinion that it was a fine ailment to have if you HAD to have one simply because

mystery." it was a (Harrold, n.d.). Another of her stories sheds light on O'Connor's view of tragic suffering:

People" "Good Country involves a young woman, Joy, who lives with the suf fering of a lost leg. Even worse, she suffers from a weak heart, and the doctors had told her mother, Mrs. Hopewell, "that with the best of care, her daughter 198 Interpretation

forty-five." Joy might see Joy, who calls herself Hulga, had made it clear were it not for her physical limitations, she would be at a university "lecturing to

people who knew what she was talking about, ... far from these red hills and

people" good country (O'Connor, 1988, p. 268). Hulga' O'Connor suggests that s suffering became the pretext by which she, encouraged by her overeducation, rejects the idea that tragedy can render life richer and more meaningful. Hulga would never have imagined that one might experience joy and suffering simultaneously. Hence, the symbolism inherent in "Joy," her given name a name she rejects in favor of her ugly creation, Hulga. O'Connor, in the penultimate year of her life, writes to her friend Janet McKane,

way" "Perhaps however joy is the outgrowth of suffering in a special (1979, p. 527). Joy may be the result of embracing one's suffering, but such an experience requires one to choose the transcendent over the material. "We all prefer comfort

joy," to O'Connor once observed (1979, p. 926). By this time, the writer was intimately acquainted with suffering, although it never stole her humor.

I stayed [at Emory Hospital] a month, giving generous samples of my blood to this, that and the other technician, all hours of the day and night, but now I am at home again and not receiving any more awful cards that say to a dear sick friend, in verse what's worse. Now I shoot myself with ACTH oncet daily and look very well and do nothing that I can get out of doing. (1979, p. 24)

The ACTH treatments were a blunt instrument to alleviate the suffering of lu pus, but she once admitted, "The large doses of ACTH send you off in a rocket and are scarcely less disagreeable than the disease (1979, p. 26). She never failed, though, to find redemptive merit in her pain. She wrote to fellow writer

Robert Lowell, "I am making out fine in spite of any conflicting stories. . I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure

myself" out, you come to observe more closely, or so I tell (1979, p. xvi). One of the most poignant and insightful portraits of O'Connor's suffering was written by Richard Gilman, who came to Milledgeville to interview the author for a New York Review of Books piece on O'Connor's collection of es says, Mystery and Manners. Gilman was apprehensive about meeting the writer because he knew that by that time (four years before her death) "she was crip face." pled and that the disease had distorted her He admitted, "I found myself glancing past her face, averting my eyes when she moved laboriously about, not her." wanting yet to see But then, Gilman explained, "something broke and I was looking at her, at her face, twisted to one side, at her stiff and somewhat

hair." puffy hands and arms, and at her thinning and lusterless In a remarkable observation that articulates O'Connor's own vision for suffering, he admits that

even as he resisted ab- "an occasional spasm of pity, ... her appearance was Mysten- Modernity versus in Flannery O'Connor 199

sorbed for me into her presence and I don't use the word lightly transfigured it." He by wrote, "Tough-minded, laconic, with a marvelous wit and an absolute absence of self-pity, she made me understand, as never before or since, what be" spiritual heroism and beauty can (pp. 53-54).

"amazing," Walker Percy only met O'Connor once, but he thought she was and he seemed to perceive the connection between her suffering and the richness it lent to her work. He noted that during the entirety of her short publishing career, she was dying an untimely death. As early as the age of twenty-five, she had been hospitalized in Atlanta with a major attack of the same intractable disease that had taken her father. The occasion of their meeting was a lecture she delivered at Loyola in New Orleans. Percy recalls, "I could recognize the

chin" symptoms of advanced lupus. . She had lost most of the tissue of her

strange." and "her face was very

I remember we were going into this lecture hall, and she came in from a side en trance. Somebody was with her from the university and helped her. She had crutches and they helped her up to the podium, where she sort of hung on and delivered a

stunning lecture. .. Then she answered questions and was just extraordinary. (Percy, 1993, pp. 205-6)

O'Connor once commented on the subject of suicide in a letter to her intimate correspondent Betty Hester. She said, "My Mother said to [the wife of a suicide]

thing." that she didn't see how anybody with any faith in God could do such a O'Connor concluded insightfully, "His tragedy was I suppose that he didn't

suffering" know what to do with his (1979, p. 287). (This is a tragically ironic excerpt given that Hester herself committed suicide in 1998, long after O'Con nor's death.). Indeed, O'Connor was quick to express gratitude for her illness because it made her life more meaningful. She explained, "In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place follow." where there's no company, where nobody can She added, in a startling observation, that illness is an opportunity to experience the mercy of God. She added, "Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who

mercies" don't have it miss one of God's (1979, p. 163). Such an attitude is remarkable given the extent of O'Connor's suffering; she once added a poignant postscript in a letter to another friend, Louise Abbot: "Prayers requested. I am

sick" sick of being (1988, p. 1210). For many, though, the temptation to nihilistic or existentialist skepticism is strongest when one looks in the mysterious face of suffering. This was the rock on which the brilliant rhetorician Augustine of Hippo foundered for years. He first embraced the Manichean remedy that God and the Devil are coequal oppo nents; human suffering occurs when the fight tilts toward the latter. After St. Augustine concluded that the Manichean solution was simplistic, he converted to Christianity, accepting the Judeo-Christian doctrine that human suffering can 200 Interpretation

never be fully understood but should lead to an increasingly greater dependence upon God, not a rejection of his existence nor a resignation that life is tragic

and absurd.

C. S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain, which appears in O'Connor's personal library with many annotations, is an apologetic for a God whose benevolence is not contradicted by intense human suffering. When O'Connor read it, one might reasonably surmise that she read not with detached philosophical curiosity, but with immediate personal interest. Lewis argues that suffering is not incompati ble with a loving God because it is inextricably tied to the very dignity and complexity of human life. He explains, "Try to exclude the possibility of suffer ing which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you itself." find that you have excluded life In this regard, Lewis reinforces one of O'Connor's favorite themes: divine love is not primarily a sentimental phenome non; instead, it may be a no-nonsense reminder of the reality of the human condi tion. Lewis says, "If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness." Lewis adds, "He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us,

sense" in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable (1962, pp. 34, 41).

MODERNITY AND REDEMPTION

In his advice on dealing with uncertainty, the political philosopher Niccolo Woods" Machiavelli anticipates O'Connor's concerns in "A View of the and, more generally, introduces the modem response to mystery. Machiavelli might

have been speaking for Mr. Fortune when he advised, "I judge . that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman; and it is

down." necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her Machiavelli continues, "And one sees that she lets herself be won more by the

coldly" impetuous than by those who proceed (p. 101). Those still confident with the exaggerated rationalism that began with Des cartes hope to eliminate all mystery from life. The modem world has been riding an ever-cresting wave of technology that has emboldened man to try and con quer all human suffering and want. O'Connor warns that there will always be limits to progress, and, even more to the point, that there is a "view of the

woods" that cannot and should not be eradicated by science and technology. If this view is lost along with the humility that should attend it, one risks a disaster worse than the pain and suffering he is trying to erase. The final event of this story is darkly ironic precisely because the grandfather, in trying to force "prog ress" without regard for the mystery of human nature and suffering, confirms that mystery by perpetrating a suffering far more ghastly than that which he tried to eliminate. O'Connor's warning against overweening confidence in so- called progress is symbolized by her disturbing descriptions of the bulldozer, placed like bookmarks at the beginning and end of the story. As the story opens, Modernity versus Mystery in Flannery O'Connor 201

Fortune Mary watches "the big disembodied gullet gorge itself on the clay, then with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow mechanical revulsion,

out." turn and spit it At the conclusion of the tale, the grandfather's last view is of "a huge yellow monster which sat to the side, as stationary as he was, gorging clay" itself on (1988, pp. 525, 546) Woods" "A View of the suggests that the mystery of suffering often is inter twined with another element of life's mystery, namely, the inscrutability of hu

nature" man nature. O'Connor once noted, "Good fiction deals with human (1969, p. 126). And so, at one point in their death struggle, when Mary still has the upper hand, she pauses long enough to ask if her grandfather "has had

enough." The old man saw something of his own nature in her face but it was an element he could not understand. "The old man looked up into his own hostile" image. It was triumphant and (1988, p. 545). All through the story her grandfather has willed himself to believe that she carried only the Fortune inheritance, not the legacy of the Pitts family as well. But he is never entirely confident in this opinion, at times only hopeful. His confident belief that she lake," shared his own character is "like the gentle little tide on the new but he is also troubled that perhaps he could not completely predict or control her "Pitts," nature. He is reluctantly aware that she is perhaps a also, and this trou

undertow" bles the surface serenity of his belief as it "pulled back like an (p. 533). An unfamiliar voice emanates from Mary, threatening his confident world view with its announcement of the intractability of human nature embodied in his granddaughter's defiance:

whipped," me," "You been it said, "by and then it added, bearing down on each Pitts." word, "and I'm PURE (P. 545)

"Pitts" "Pit," The name corresponds with the the place of judgment resigned for those who follow their irrational instincts. Associating one's name with "the Pit" evokes the lower, darker side of human nature that we would all change if we could. But it is the folly of presumption that these wayward leanings that make human existence so mysterious can be erased or easily controlled. Mr. Fortune not only misunderstands the girl's nature, he is also blind to the vicious dimension of his own character. Hence the severe irony when he asserts,

me," 'There's not an ounce of Pitts in as he murders his own granddaughter by slamming her head down cruelly on a rock (p. 545). O'Connor offers another clue to the problem of human nature in this story by assigning the old man a

condition." "heart His physical ailment is symbolic of the sickness with which his humanity is afflicted. The author would most likely have been familiar with the oft-quoted verse from the Book of Jeremiah, "The heart is deceitful above all

it?" things and beyond cure / Who can understand (Jer. 17:9, New International Version). O'Connor develops her concern over the mystery of human nature in other 202 Interpretation

Own" places. Her short story "The Life You Save May Be Your revolves around the machinations of Tom T. Shiftlet, a one-armed vagabond who takes advan tage of a mother and her handicapped daughter by marrying the daughter only to abandon her after he has stolen the family's car. Shiftlet, as his name suggests, is a cunning swindler who distresses even himself by his wayward conduct. When he first meets the mother and daughter he proposes to do handyman tasks in exchange for food and shelter. At that time, he offers an inadvertent warning to the older woman, and in doing so, provides a general comment on the darker side of human nature. He explains the work of thoracic surgeons in Georgia's capital,

"There's one of these doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife and cut the human

heart," heart the human he repeated, leaning forward, "out of a man's chest and hand," held it in his and he held his hand out, palm up, as if it were slightly weighted with the human heart, "and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and

lady," he said, allowing a long significant pause in which his head slid forward and

me." his clay-colored eyes brightened, "he don't know no more about it than you or (1988, p. 174)

Shiftlet later applies the illustration to himself when he says, "If they was to

me" take my heart and cut it out . . they wouldn't know a thing about (p. 180). O'Connor embeds yet a third, and the most important, component of mystery Woods." in "A View of the She provides a fascinating gloss on this story when she answered a correspondent's misguided question regarding whether Pitts,

symbol." Mary Fortune's father, was a "Christ "I had that role cut out for the

woods," she explained. She continued by noting that Pitts cannot represent Christ because he "is a pathetic figure by virtue of the fact that he beats his child to ease his feelings about Mr. Fortune. He is a Christian and a sinner,

sins." figure" pathetic by virtue of his Accordingly, a "Christ can't be "pathetic

sins." water," by virtue of his It is the woods themselves that "walk across the she explained. Furthermore, O'Connor explained that the old man only runs to the edge of the water in his imagination, and the writer changed the verb to the "conditional" to make this clear. Hence "the old man felt as if he were being pulled, felt as if he were running as fast as he could, . [but] Fortune, in fact,

side" dies by Mary Fortune's all the while that the woods are, in his imagination, imitating Christ's miraculous feat of walking upon water (1988, p. 546; 1979, pp. 189-90, emphasis added). The woods, then, simultaneously represent "Christ" "mystery," and two mutually compatible designations, since the Church identifies both the person and the redemptive work of Christ as theological mysteries.

The grandfather's failure to grasp the redemptive symbolism of the tree line might help the reader understand why O'Connor's judgment on the grandfather is so harsh: by destroying the woods he is rejecting Christ's redemption. O'Con- Modernity versus Mystery in Flannery O 'Connor 203 nor apparently struggled over the inclusion of Mary Fortune's quotation of the scripture to her grandfather, "He who calls his brother a fool is subject to hell's fire" (see Matt. 5:22). She was reluctant to remove it, though, since the grand father's arrogant and violent rejection of redemptive mystery warranted punish ment. She concluded, "Some prediction of hell for the old man is essential to

story" my (1979, p. 187). Whereas "Pitts and Mary Fortune realize the value of

woods," the the grandfather does not. When the grandfather looks those three times out of his bedroom window at the woods on that restless afternoon, the limited insight he gains upon his third gaze suggests that the woods hold a theological mystery, especially given the obvious theological significance of the number three. By the third instance, the tree line emerges more clearly as a metaphor for "tree" Christ and his passion; he died, as the Scriptures report, upon a (Acts 5:30, New International Version). O'Connor writes that the tree line appears to the

grandfather "as if someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were

blood." vision" bathed in It is an "unpleasant for the old man because it under mines his fragile self-assurance by calling attention to his need for redemption. As O'Connor herself explains, only "the woods and the woods alone are pure is" enough to be a Christ symbol if anything (1988, p. 538; 1979, p. 190). The grandfather might have profited from G. K. Chesterton's admonition, "Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health;

morbidity" when you destroy mystery you create (p. 48). O'Connor argued many times that the human condition generates a longing, however vague, for redemption. The proper response to mystery, according to this short story, is the recognition and acceptance of man's need for another mystery, the mystery of

redemption.

REFERENCES

Man." Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologica, "Treatise on Westminster, MD: Chris tian Classics, 1981. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Edward B. Pusey. New York: Pocket Books, 1952. Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974. O'Connor," Gilman, Richard. "On Flannery September, 1960, From The New York Re Conversations with O'Connor. view of Books, 21 August 1969, 24-26. In Flannery Rosemary M. Magee, ed. Jackson: Jackson Press of Mississippi, 1987. Harrold, De Vene. P.O. Box 1622, St. Augustine, FL 32084, no date supplied. 1957." Lee, Maryat, "Flannery The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin, 5 (Autumn, 1976). 1962. Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. New York: The MacMillan Company, Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985. Univer- Maritain, Jacques. Saint Thomas and the Problem of Evil. Milwaukee: Marquette 204 Interpretation

sity Press, 1942. Maritain's reported sources for this essay, though not clearly de noted, are Summa Theologica, I, qu. 48, a.l, a. 2, a. 6; qu. 49, a. 1; I II, qu. 112, a. 3; Summa Contra Gentiles, III, cap. 7, 8, and 9; Quaestiones Disputatae, de Malo, 1, 1; 1,3. Newman, John Henry. The Grammar ofAssent. New York: Image Books, 1955. O'Connor, Flannery. Address to Georgia State College for Women. No date supplied. In correspondence given to Rebeka Poller February 1957.

_. To Mr. And Mrs. B. Cheney, 1958, no day or month supplied, from Rome. Mystery and Manners, Occasional Prose. Selected and edited by Sally and Rob ert Fitzgerald. New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. Letters of Flannery O'Connor: The Habit ofBeing. Selected and Edited by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. Collected Works. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1988. Pascal, Blaise. Pensees, and the Provincial Letters. Translated by W. F. Trotter and Thomas M'Crie. New York: The Modern Library, 1941. World." Percy, Walker. "A Novel About the End of the In The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1954. More Conversations with Walker Percy. Edited by Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Stephens, C. Ralph, ed. The Correspondence of Flannery O'Connor and the Brainard Cheneys. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Review Essay

A Triple Inquiry into the Human Center

Richard Freis Millsaps College

Eva Brann, The Ways ofNaysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), xviii + 247 pp., $35.00.

Brann' The Ways of Naysaying is the third book in Eva s "trilogy of the

center" human (Brann, 2001, p. xi), the embodied soul, which is the site of the three inter-implicated human capabilities which the trilogy explores: imagining (Brann, 1991), experiencing time (Brann, 1999), and, in the present book, nay "Naysaying" saying. means for Brann "to say that something is not what it Nonbeing" claims to be or is not there or is non-existent or is affected by (Brann, 2001, p. xiii). Brann began the inquiry into naysaying in order to clarify further the subjects of her first two inquiries: the imagination, whose images are and are not what they image, and in this respect mingle Being and Nonbeing; and time, in which a present is surrounded by a past constituted of present memory images of what no longer is and a future constituted of present anticipatory images of what is not yet. The present book not only aims to clarify the presuppositions of the earlier inquiries, it also intends to offer a comprehensive survey of the questions raised by the capacity for negation in speech, thought, and perhaps in the world. The three books are linked not only by their subject matter but also as exemplifi "inquiry." cations of a particular intellectual mode, which Brann names

Since this book completes a large and integral intellectual venture, I will consider it not only in itself, but in relationship to certain features of the whole. My object in this review, therefore, is twofold. Part I is an extended consider Brann' ation of inquiry in s sense as a philosophic mode and, more generally, the question it raises of the proper genus dicendi (literary form) for presenting philosophy. Part II examines The Ways of Naysaying itself, an inquiry into a world our world in which thought, speech, action, the imagination, time,

I would like to acknowledge my debt to the following colleagues who read this review in Robert H. Har manuscript and improved it by their suggestions: Catherine Ruggiero Freis, King, rison J. Sheppard, and Steven G. Smith.

INTERPRETATION, Winter 2001-2, Vol. 29, No. 2 206 Interpretation and human and nonhuman nature appear to be threaded through with and per haps founded in that which our most taken-for-granted experience presents as willful No, logical Not, logical Nonexistence, philosophical Nonbeing, dialec tical Negativity, and the Nihil Absolutum, sheer Nothing.

I. REFLECTIVE INQUIRY AND ITS PRESENTATION

Problems are ultimately exercises, mere means, but questions are the serious and fi nal human business. (Eva Brann, 1968, p. 379).

1. Inquiry

Inquiry as an intellectual mode is introduced by Brann in Paradoxes of Edu cation in a Republic (Brann, 1979a), as a mitigation of dilemmas in modes of thinking characteristic of the United States by reason of our enlightenment founding. The features of inquiry are confirmed and elaborated in remarks made throughout the trilogy. Brann marks out the character of inquiry by discriminating it from other modes of thinking. In the first place inquiry is distinct from a number of non- philosophic modes of thinking. These include knowhow or technique (Brann, 1990, p. 34); the appeal to the exalted or everyday opinions whose authority

tribe" arises from their unchallenged currency or the age-old "traditions of the (pp. 34-35); science, the rational, often mathematical model-making aligned with the methodical observation of experiment and frequently associated with technique for the sake of control of human and non-human nature (p. 35); and scholarship, which may seek the truth about a philosophy, but does not seek the philosophical truth (p. 35).

Brann's deeper discrimination is between contemplative and reflective in quiry and another form of philosophical thinking, a problem-setting-and-solving (or dissolving) mode, which Brann does not give a circumscribing name. I will call it constructive theory.

Perhaps neither mode, inquiry nor constructive theory, appears in any thinker pure, but there are sufficiently constant and numerous marks of distinction to constitute what Brann elsewhere calls "a kind of cloud formation, a configura

cohere" tion of features that seem to (Brann, 1997g, p. 132). These marks distin guish inquiry and constructive theory in the following respects: the instigation to thought, the character of the thinking organ, the character of the world the thinking organ opens onto, its disposition toward that world, its purpose, and its means. I will take up each of these features in turn.

Inquiry is instigated by wonder, a sudden defamiliarization of the world, because what has taken been for granted suddenly appears self-contradictory Review Essay 207 (cf. Plato, Republic, 523b-525a; Phaedo, 102b-e), or extraordinary (Brann, pp. 1997c, 102-3) or bespeaks attractive depths revealed and concealed in the shining-forth of phenomena (Brann, 1990, pp. 32-33; 1997c, p. 102). To experi

ence wonder" such depths as attractive implies that "the good is the object of

(Brann, 1979a, p. 62). Perhaps one may add that since one element of wonder is the recognition that its object exceeds our knowing, an experience of wonder is simultaneously "the apprehension of our ignorance, which is the launching inquiries" pad of our receptive and trustful (Brann, 2001, p. 188). formulation" "Philosophical perplexities are wonder given (Brann, 1997e, p. 186), formulation as questions. "A genuine question is, when still within the questioner, an expectant vacancy, a receptive openness, a defined ignorance, and, above all, a directed desire of the intellect (Brann, 1979a, p. 143). We experience such questions less as originating in ourselves than as a response to a compelling address in the moment of wonder by the world to us (Brann, 1997c, p. 115; 1997e, p. 187). In seeking an answer we remain receptively open to the world, allowing the object of the question to disclose itself to our gaze and our reflection without constraining the possible answer by imposing a preset method or delimiting a priori acceptable terms (Brann, 1968, p. 379; 1979a, p. 138). The objects of inquiry have the character of fundamental mystery: its questions can be further clarified, therefore, but cannot be resolved (Brann, 1991, p. 5). At the same time such matters have so great a bearing on our lives that we are unwilling to leave them simply as unexamined opinion. Therefore such answers as we achieve do not render the question otiose. The questions of inquiry also remain alive because even such provisional answers, such partial seeing are a relationship of the intellect to what-is. Here knowing and loving come very close together (Brann, 1997c, pp. 102-3; cf. 1990, p. 30). Brann offers a brief parable about such questions in a lecture to a group of undergraduate honors students:

That [the questions of inquiry do not go away] is because those who truly ask long for the answer not because they want to be finished with them; they want to live by its light. Let me give you a hypothetical example of what I mean. Suppose after a

life given to the quest for God you found yourself suddenly standing before His

that" throne. You would not rub your hands and say, "Well, that's and lose interest. It would be a beginning, not an end. (Brann, 1997f, p. 403)

Constructive theory, by contrast, is instigated by the will to harness thinking and human or nonhuman nature for a desired outcome (Brann, 1979a, p. 131; 1997g, p. 127; 1997d, p. 149). Its mood is not wonder, the child of adventitious occasions, but methodical doubt or suspicion or systematic putting-into-question, a will to pierce illusions and delimit beforehand what might be known with certainty: to secure a starting point which is its own evidence and from which, therefore, can be methodically constructed a well-ordered, complete system of 208 Interpretation that which can be known (Brann, 1979b, p. 93). Here belong the great philo sophical systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, constructed under the spell of the successes of mathematics and mathematical physics. And as Tarcov and Pangle point out, summarizing the thought of Leo Strauss, here belongs the modem movement toward the rationalization of the state:

The underlying unity Strauss discerned in modernity the effort to make probable, or guarantee the actualization of, the right order was also responsible in his view for the many transformations modernity has undergone. Just as the new political phi losophy of Machiavelli sought to guarantee the actualization of the right order through the natural end of man, so the new natural science of Bacon and Descartes

sought to guarantee the actualization of wisdom through foolproof method that did not depend on the natural intelligibility of the universe. (Tarcov and Pangle, 1983, p. 917)

"mystery" And much more humbly, here belongs, too, the misnamed classic

"problem" novel, which is paradigmatically a novel, in which the solution, the preconceived X, is reached by ingenious rearrangement of just the terms in which the problem is set out.

If a question is the typical expression of inquiry, a problem may be taken as "problem" the typical expression of constructive theory. By a Brann, appropriat ing traditional understandings, means a task set before one to be done, often by means of a construction, which may be a theoretical construct, and which re quires a solution within the framework of the terms in which it is set (Brann, 1968, p. 379). She suggests the powerful appeal of being able to pose a question as a problem rather than as a direction for inquiry (Brann, 1968, p. 380) by quoting the great boast that closes Vieta's Analytical Art: "Finally, the analytical art appropriates to itself by right the proud problem of problems, which is: TO PROBLEM" SOLVE EVERY (Brann, 1968, p. 377; capitals in Vieta's origi nal). This is the beginning of the sustaining modem hope that by fashioning the right method, one can turn every question into a soluble problem (Brann, 1968, pp. 377-80).

The primary organ of inquiry is the faculty of the soul named intellect, a both receptive and reflective. capacity Insofar as it is receptive, its activity is what the Greeks called theoria, the unscripted gaze of contemplation, open to its objects in its willingness to be determined by them. Insofar as the activity of the intellect is it reflective, clarifies the appearances presented to it in "the cog imagination" nitive clearing of the (Brann, 1991, p. 789) as well as experiencing "the pure absorption in beings of thought and their relations, for which the intellect is fully awake but, at least now and then, out of the world and beyond interior" even our personal (Brann, 1999, p. xii). The organ of primary constructive theory, by contrast, is the mind. Intellect is the of agency thinking understood as receptive; mind is the agency of thinking Review Essay 209 understood as poietic or fabricating. As David Lachterman has written in a different context:

[T]he contest with the ancients intrinsic to the idea of the modern is not one be

"mind," tween competing theories or conceptions of the as though this term named "Mind," a philosophically neutral agency with ancient and modern renderings. as "invention;" Richard Rorty has recently suggested, is itself a modem it is, one needs to add, tailor-made to fit the specifications required for competence in making and constructing. (Lachterman, p. 4)

From the point of view of mind, intellect is deficient, because it only receives nature and is not an instrument for the transformation of nature (Lachterman, p. 4); from the point of view of intellect, mind is deficient, because it cannot see the nature of beings. Hence Brann describes the mind as "the instrumental,

self" rational tool of the (Brann, 1979a, p. 21), whose particular rationality

self-diminution" "represents the power-charged (Brann, 1979a, pp. 143-44; cf. p. 138) of the intellect. Mind is a diminution of the intellect, because it does not recognize the intellect's contemplative power, theoria; it is power-charged, because it is itself a constructive faculty and because its constructions are aimed to effect control over internal and external nature. It is perhaps worth remarking that neither power has ever been completely eclipsed in recognition and respect, although typically premodem thinkers rated the intellect higher as modems have the mind. The following passage from Thomas Aquinas, which I confess I have sharpened in English to emphasize its contrast, shows this:

Things are related to the productive [practicus: like factum, the word embraces both doing and making, though here the productive meaning takes precedence over the [specu- prudential] intellect in a different manner than they are to the contemplative lativa = mirrorlike] intellect. For the intellect in its productive intellection is the cause of things, and thus it is the measure of those things it causes. The intellect in its contemplative intellection is the receiver of things and it is in some sense stirred to motion by them; those things, therefore, are measure of the intellect. This makes it clear that natural things, from which our intellect receives knowledge, measure

emphasis our intellect. (De Veritate, 1 .2; added)

The constructivist understanding of a problem as a task to be done (factum)

convertunter" chimes with Vico's famous dictum: "Verum et factum ("To be

true" [factum]" and "to be made are interchangeable). Vico means that what

can be transparent to our understanding is only what we ourselves have caused to be. His statement is a bold revision of the scholastic maxim: "Ens et verum

be" true" convertunter"("To and "to be are interchangeable). His restriction of

made beings rather than what can be fully known to what has been by human as such makes his work emblematic for modernity. embracing all beings 210 Interpretation

Vico himself downgrades the knowledge claimed by natural science, knowl knows" edge of the world of nature, "which, since God made it, He alone (The New Science, para. 331). And he upgrades from the low position given it by Descartes knowledge of "the world of civil society, [which] has certainly been made by men, [and whose] principles are therefore to be found within the modi

mind" fications of our own human (The New Science, para. 331). Kant accepts the same condition for the possibility of our knowing, namely, as Jacobi framed the understanding common to Vico and Kant, "that we can grasp an object only insofar as we can let it come into being before us in thoughts, can make it or

understanding" create it in the (cited by Lachterman, p. 9). Kant, however, is most concerned to certify our knowledge of nature. He sees that to accomplish this, he must be able to understand nature as made in the decisive respect by the human mind. Brann sums up the argument by which Kant justifies this understanding and its consequences for our knowing in two sharp sentences: "The account of nature and the account of the science of nature are for Kant identical. That is because the system of nature is determined by the way our Sensibility forms and our Understanding functions over the sensations that come

us" to (Brann, 1997b, p. 157). The development of modernity has been a progressive eclipse of nature knowable as a realm of beings independent of the fabricating activity of the human mind. This has been true in every branch of philosophy. Even the nature that remains for us has become unnatural. As Jacob Klein has written, "The

'exact,' nature is not something that is concealed behind the appearances, but

'evidence' rather a symbolic disguise concealing the original and the original

things" experience of (Klein, 1985, p. 84). Our belief that what can be known is only what the mind has constructed, because only in this case can the mind fully know its elements and their structure, has fostered in self-fulfilling proph ecy a reductio omnium ad opinionem (reduction of all things to opinion), which has become in postmodernism a constitutive reductio ad absurdum (reduction to the absurd).

The world onto which intellect and mind open, therefore, is understood by each in correspondingly different ways. Intellect understands itself to open onto a world that possesses its own intrinsic nature. This nature is capable of reveal ing itself to thought's receptive beholding. Its appearances, to adapt a passage by Brann, clarified by the imagination and projected back as rectifying transpar encies upon the world, captivate thought and incite it to transcend them in search of their unseen core (Brann, 1991, p. 786). To this extent for Brann the exercise of intellect depends on construction. Here the will is active not as willful deter mination of the world by thought, but as willingness for thought to be deter mined by the world as it gives itself to the inquiring intellect. Mind, by contrast, understands itself to open onto a world which mind has already shaped, tacitly or by intentional theoretical construction, in thought, political practice, and technology. Mind's disposition toward this world is in- Review Essay 211 strumental and willful, albeit often in the applauded forms of creativity (Brann, 1997d, pp. 147-49) and the transformation of nature in the service of benevo lence (Brann, 1979a, p. 26). If intellect is, in the traditional phrase, "the mirror

nature," of mind is a source of which nature is the projection, creation, or mirror. for So, example, Aristotle teaches that the very intelligible form which is shap ing the subsistent thing in the world I am understanding is also at work deter mining my receptive intellect; whereas for Kant, my shaping mind determines the world I understand and I have no access to any nature or thing-in-itself which may be beyond. It is worth observing here briefly that Brann's work implies that the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry continues in the modem period, but both transformed onto a modem common ground. Consider this on philosophy as represented by the Critique of Pure Reason: "[For Kant my 'self] shows itself as that absolute and pure original activity, which Kant calls spontaneity (B 130, 428). Spontaneity means wilfulness, radical self-determination. The activity which has this character is thought, which works according to none but its own laws. At the root to think and to will are the same, and it is this identification which makes the critical man both the theorizer of the Critique of Pure Reason Reason" and the doer of deeds of the second Critique, the Critique ofPractical (Brann, 1976, pp. 43-44). And this on Romantic poetry: "By a 'self or a 'sub ject' is meant an original source of all representations, or more simply, of all

experience . . It is therefore easily seen as the very principle of art, interpreted as the externalized play of the subject, which is carried on according to no rules itself" but those established by (Brann, 1997a, p. 71). The envisioned purpose of inquiry is commensurate with its features so far sketched: it is not to solve a problem nor to construct a theory nor to certify a solution nor add something new to the store of knowledge, characteristic pur poses of constructive theory. Nor does inquiry refuse fundamental questions because an initial critical delimitation suggests they cannot be certainly answered. Brann describes the end of inquiry in this way:

It gives to an ultimate enigma that articulation which the writer can best live with for the time being. It clears up apparently inadvertent but usually revealing con fusions, and relocates perplexities to a better place. It does away as far as possible, with intermediate mystifications, and preserves, without embarrassment, the final mystery of the matter. (Brann, 1999, p. 199; cf. 2001, pp. xv, xviii; 1991, p. 5)

In reaching this articulation, inquiry uses means which constructive theory often forgoes. Inquiry recognizes that it begins within an encompassing horizon of opinion, present and past. The results of inquiry, Brann argues, are not neces

opinion" surrounds as claimed in sarily determined by the "climate of that it, is various forms of historicism and conventionalism. But the questions from which inquiry takes its departure (and, one might add, its expression) are often pro- 212 Interpretation vided by perplexities in current opinion or the concerns of the world contempo rary with the thinker (Brann, 1997g, p. 132). But this does not fully resolve the question of the ability of inquiry to reach beyond the horizon of the climate of opinion. For the terms in which questions and alternative answers are formulated are themselves freighted with assump tions that may preempt a truly open inquiry. For this reason, a critical genealogy of the meaning of terms and of the formulation and proposed answers to a question in the textual tradition become important means in pursuing an inquiry (Brann, 1979a, p. 21; 1991, p. 33; 2001, pp. 1-2, 4-5 n 4). This turn to the tradition is a tribute to the persistence of the fundamental questions and there fore to the continued relevance of the most searching prior responses. It is also

"Traditio," an obligation imposed by the intentional history of speech. the root "tradition," of the word itself has the revealing double meaning of "handing

on," over," preservation, and "handing betrayal. Terms and positions come to us embodying the interlacement of successive insights, forgetfulness, and rein-

"sedimentation" terpretation, the strata of of meaning, in Husserl's metaphor (Klein, 1985, pp. 74-84). To avoid becoming blindly entangled in this tacit network of meanings, it is necessary to reactivate them, to trace the layers of preservation and betrayal, forgetfulness and reinterpretation of the original sig nificance, in order to turn inherited opinion into critically discriminated, reflec tive understanding and accept it or reject it in this recovered light (Klein, 1985, pp. 74-84; Strauss, 1959, pp. 73-77).

Another powerful set of opinions which the inquirer must assess are the disciplinary and professional conclusions of experts. Here the task is "develop

experts' ing the competence to gauge and use the competence with some author ity" without abandoning the open horizon of inquiry (Brann, 1979a, p. 124). Constructive theory often forgoes the philosophically open study of tradition under the spell of a vision of its philosophical autonomy. In doing so it trusts that premodem thought has been superseded in philosophy's modern maturity and that thinking can find a self-evident or simply a practically effective starting point on whose basis it can construct its projects. Brann points out the frequent paradoxical result of such an effort in her work on Kant:

For these qualities all serve to veil from view the real roots of the system the stu

pendous assumptions that are packed into its technical terms, the strange abysses that are opened up beyond its well-delineated foundations, and the human pathos im plied in its projects (Brann, 1997b, p. 154) . . . [Thus] in the name of completeness it throws open dizzying depths for inquiry. Q3rann, 1979b, p. 91)

Collecting and combining these partial and differently contextualized marks of distinction between inquiry and constructive theory may have a misleading rhetorical effect. For it may suggest that inquiry is an alternative method to "jig" constructive theory: to use one of Brann's recurrent images, a different or Review Essay 213 preset guiding-gauge. So it is necessary to point out once again that inquiry is not methodical in the modem meaning of a preset investigatory procedure: "the

method" inquiry in this sense would be as misconstrued and internally contradic

method" tory a phrase as "the Socratic in its ordinary usage or "the discussion method."

Inquiry may, however, be called a methodos in the classical sense, a path of searching, not preset, but responsive to its context and the nature of its object.

Socrates' In words from the Phaedrus, inquiry aims "to be able to cut through, sort by sort, where the joints are by nature, and not set one's hand to shatter any butcher" part, after the fashion of a bad (265e). Of course, this nonmethodical determination of the object of inquiry may also falsify that object. For example, one might mis-see what belongs and what does not belong to the naturally articulated part which is the object of inquiry, although often an original misde- termination becomes clarified and can be revised in the progress of thinking. Inquiry depends on an ever-awake prudence of the intellect in setting and fol lowing its way. Brann herself alludes to the classical provenance of many of the marks of inquiry and the modem provenance of many of the inquiry-repudiating marks of constructive theory. For Brann the preference for inquiry is not a return to the past, but a choice among modes of thinking still available. When she refers to the premodem and modem eras as "the two complementarily distinct epochs

west," of the however, she opens up a further question for inquiry (Brann, 2001, p. 49): Are these modes complementary or simply incompatible? And if comple mentary, to what extent, on what grounds, and in what hierarchy?

2. The Presentation of Inquiry

Jose Ortega y Gasset, accused of writing literature rather than philosophy, for sharply responded that the proper genus dicendi (literary form) presenting p. 86). We philosophy is a matter not yet resolved (Ortega, may accordingly ask whether some forms of speaking and writing are, and others are not, com mensurate with the understanding of philosophy as inquiry. "inquiry," Brann' s presentations of what she designates whether in the com lectures and essays of pendious The World of the Imagination or the compact she understands to The Past-Present, axe clearly intended to accord with what such be the nature of inquiry as a mode of thinking and to be a cause of inquiry "inquiry" name now also to in the reader. In this respect Brann's (I will use the designate the literary form, trusting that context will make clear whether it refers earlier attempts to mode of thinking, literary form, or both) is a cogenre of many greatest them the to shape a genus dicendi with the same aims, the of being Platonic dialogue and the Thomistic quaestio (question).

Let me list some of the common features of these (and typically other) forms 214 Interpretation shaped to present inquiry. In this context it will frequently seem more norma] to refer to the presenter as teacher and the receptive and reflective listener as learner. And this reflects the fidelity of such forms to the purposes of their Socratic origin. (1) The teacher leads the learner to recognize something to wonder at or to find something perplexing in the subject, and thus to a genuine question (Pieper, p. 96; cf. the sequence: Plato, Theaetetus, 151d-155d). (2) The teacher listens and encourages the student to listen with unforeclosed and serious attention to other participants in the conversation, including that in the world which seems to address us in the moment of wonder (Pieper, pp. 83-84, 94; cf. Plato, Phaedo, 88e-91d). (3) The teacher and learner recognize that they are members of a community of inquiry, past and present, on whose partnership they depend and to whom they are by gratitude responsible in turn (Pieper, p. 83; Aquinas, In Met., 12,9; No. 2566, cit. Pieper, p. 84). (4) In listening and in speaking the teacher and the learner under his or her guidance refuse the tempta tion to eristic ("Eristic is argument carried on under the aegis of the will to win;

response." it breaks the nexus between a question and its intrinsic [Brann, 2001, p. 18]) and, indeed, out of desire for truth seek the most persuasive statement of an opposing position before responding (Pieper, pp. 82-83; cf. Simmias and Cebes: Plato, Phaedo, 84c-91d; Glaucon and Adiemantus: Plato, Republic, 357a-367e). (5) The teacher models and demands of the student a willingness to speak, to take a position and answer for it. "Wittgenstein ends his Tractatus with the famous demand, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be si lent.' Schools must make the complementary requirement, 'Whereof one would

speak.' reasons" express oneself, thereon one must And that means giving Theaetetus' (Brann, 1979a, p. 135; Pieper, pp. 85-87; cf. willingness: Plato, Theodoros' Theaetetus, 151d-e; refusal: Plato, Theaetetus, 146b, 162a-b; Meno's resistance: Plato, Meno, passim). (6) The primary language of inquiry is ordi nary speech, used with more than ordinary attention to its multiple, perhaps even mutually contradictory, meanings and implications. Technical terminology may obscure a subject, paradoxically, just because it is univocal and therefore conceals the perplexities the subject presents (Pieper, pp. 102-17; Klein, 1977, pp. 2-3; 1965, pp. 47-52).

Brann writes throughout in accordance with these features of the presentation of inquiry. The language that she forges as medium of inquiry deserves a brief further description. It is distinct and distinguished, a flexible mode of conversa tional speech, which can modulate to incorporate technical passages as well as vivid colloquialism. It uses the resources of parallelism and metaphor, especially spatial metaphor latent or explicit, for clarity and the resources of compactness and intellectual wit for energy. The prose also easily accommodates personal experience, and it would not be wrong to call the presented inquiries personal essays, as long as one adds this: The person who engages with the inquiry and with the reader is present, not in the accidents of her individuality, but in the Review Essay -215 full range of her common human being addressing the common human being of the reader. There are two further features of these literary forms which I will touch on more fully. The first feature is this: The three cogenres we have been discussing are all addressed to beginners. This is indicated in Plato's dialogues by the frequency with which the partners of Socrates or sometimes of earthly or heavenly strang ers are youths or older men who have resisted philosophy for other reasons. Aquinas, in his turn, cites St. Paul's words to the Corinthians, "As unto little

meat" ones in Christ, I gave you milk to drink, not (lCor.3,1-2), to justify writing the Summa Theologiae as a textbook for beginners. Let me quote Josef Pieper in this matter:

[T]he teacher, insofar as he succeeds in lovingly identifying himself with the begin ner, partakes of something that in the ordinary course of nature is denied to mature men: he sees the reality just as the beginner can see it, with all the innocence of a first encounter, and yet at the same time with the matured powers of comprehension and penetration that the cultivated mind possesses. (Pieper, p. 95)

The significance of this hard-earned second innocence is captured at its core

Strauss' in Seth Benardete's characterization of Leo s manner of interpretation:

He knew how to start again, not as if he were starting for the first time, but really

. without starting for the first time. . . This experience calls for a practice of being dead" habits; Socrates called it "the practice of dying and being and identified it with philosophy. (Benardete, 2000, p. 410)

The way this is a gift for the mature inquirer is further suggested by some often-quoted words of Strauss himself:

There is no surer protection against the understanding of anything than taking for problem inherent in the granted or otherwise despising the obvious and surface. The things. surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of (Strauss, 1958, p. 13)

What is first for us is the problem (Brann might say the question-generating not be able to perplexity) inherent in the surface of things. We may or may soon as we ascend from what is first for us to what is first in itself. But as attention to the problem accept an answer as full and final, we foreclose further human wisdom which appears in the surface. If we take seriously that may fundamental questions and alternatives, simply be the ever greater grasp of the repeated return to the the surface of things is for us the heart of things. The 216 Interpretation surface required in teaching beginners may then serve to advance the mature thinker's inquiry. The claim of some teachers that they and their students remain coinquirers, a shock to the assumption of freshmen that teachers simply know and they themselves will simply know if they are diligent, is always true and in the best case recognized and acknowledged.

The second further feature of these cogenres is this: The forms in which inquiry is presented are open ended. To borrow a phrase which the poet Horace used to describe the openings of Homer's epics, the presentations of inquiry typically close in medias res (in the middle of things): "they throw open the

seeking" gates to an infinitude of further (Pieper, p. 99). And so far from trying to disguise this, it serves their function as a cause of inquiry in the reader to emphasize it. As Jacob Klein writes of Plato's dialogues:

By imitating a discussion the character of incompleteness can be accentuated: as we all know, the movement inherent in any discussion, if it does not reach an end in

complete agreement or complete clarification ... is the best inducement to its contin uation. A properly written text will have, therefore, to imitate this movement and keep it alive by stringing it along decisive questions and partial or ambiguous an swers. (Klein, 1965, p. 17)

Finally, there is a significant respect in which the dialogues of Plato differ, at least in degree, from the Thomistic quaestiones and inquiry as practiced by Brann. In order to frame it, I will refer to Brann's inquiry into questions:

For responsible questioning of traditional ways requires appreciative awareness of "presumptions" their presumptions. In the analysis of questions, such contextual are

distinguished from logical "presuppositions [Presumptions pertain to the

larger setting, the communal basis, such as the frame of rights and obligations, which make any questioning, including the questioning of authority itself, possible. (Brann, 1997e, p. 183)

Surely more than any other philosophical literary form, the Platonic dialogues place before our eyes the extended communal presumptions of their inquiries and, indeed, sometimes obliquely, make the nature and bearing of these pre sumptions a theme of the inquiry.

Strauss' Leo s writings too must be recognized as a philosophical genus di cendi governed by the aims of inquiry and an awareness of its public presump tions. First is the awareness that radical inquiry may destabilize the beliefs on which society rests; and reciprocally, the desire to protect philosophy from those who may believe that its radical inquiry has indeed been corrupting and destabi lizing to the public order. Second, his writings are intended to elucidate as fully as possible the fundamental questions of political philosophy and to evaluate the most important answers that have been given. Hence the proper literary form Review Essay '211 for philosophy must wed complete freedom of inquiry with circumspection of speech designed to protect the interests of both the public realm and philosophy and to teach young philosophical readers both circumspection and inquiry. Strauss found the model for a literary genre ministerial to philosophy in the writings largely of those premodem thinkers who present an exoteric teaching that respects the needs of the public realm and a more radical, esoteric inquiry accessible to more patient and thoughtful readers. That this has a bearing for philosophic speech even today is implied by a conclusion in Strauss's discussion Maimonides' of the literary form of Guide for the Perplexed: "Above all an esoteric interpretation of the Guide seems to be not only advisable, but even

necessary" (Strauss, 1952, p. 56). Throughout this work Strauss points to the many-plied nature of such advisability and such necessity. The quaestio, as a form, is less constituted to bring presumptions regularly before the reader. The writings in which Brann presents her inquiries occupy an intermediate position between those of Plato and Thomas. In their form they are a model of public discourse about matters of common human importance. Indeed, if one

accepts the implication of Socrates that the true statesman is most concerned with education, they are a modest contribution to political reconstruction. For the form of inquiry is reached in Paradoxes of Education in a Republic as a way to correct disbalances in the nation's characteristic modes of thinking which place before us spring from its enlightenment founding. Inquiry does, therefore, a moderated version of our communal presumptions.

II. THE TRIPLE INQUIRY AND THE WAYS OF NAYSAYING

How many victims have they claimed, South'7 The North Pole and the

Not only are they nothing, named; Such as they aren't, they each year wobble. Turner Cassity (p. 12, vv. 1-4)

1. The Book's Purpose and Structure

purposes. as I said at the The Ways of Naysaying is a book with two First, complete Brann's earlier inquiries into the opening of this review, it intends to imagination and time. forms of Second, it takes us through a critical conspectus of the naysaying, "that all sorts of have in order to discern whether there is something naysaying imagination and time in (Brann, 2001, p. 211). The treatment of re- "rings" are the conspectus of naysaying: the two earlier inquiries briefly 218 Interpretation viewed in the preface in order to show how they raise the question of naysaying and are again taken up in the conclusion, where Brann draws on the intervening examination of naysaying to articulate "the nay and yea of imagination and time" (p. 216). A third question also haunts the book: "Is there, besides the nay-saying of

nature?" persons, a non-being of things, be they objects of thought or of (p. 211). Are there inherently negative objects nonbeings or nonexistents, noth ings or Nothing? This third question makes its way into every chapter and is canvassed synoptically in section 2 of the conclusion (pp. 213-16).

speech," "[Tjhinking writes Brann, "brings its objects to a standstill even as

properties" it goes about discerning them through their (p. 64 n 22). This book is a rich expression of "the discerning of divisions [which] prepares most

conclusions" thoughtful (p. 213). Brann distinguishes the ways of naysaying into six kinds, allotting each a chapter. These chapters, in turn, are divided into as many as seven sections and the sections into as many as seven subsections. Each subsection offers a concise presentation of the gist (or, better, the heart for thought) of the matter it takes up. Brann uses the approximately eighty segments of the two hundred and twenty-six pages of text to structure an articulated display of the forms and questions of naysaying rather than as stages ofa single, developing argument. This diverse multiplicity makes the experience of reading the book sometimes like wandering through the mazy forest of an Italianate Renaissance epic, in which a succession of individual marvels absorbs our atten tion. The diversity, however, is not simply the indulgence, in Isaiah Berlin's

things," famous distinction, of the fox, who "knows many but signposts along

thing," the hedgehog's path to come to "know one big in this case what may be common to all the forms of naysaying. This compact, differentiated multiplicity offers one of the main challenges to the reader, who must be ready to move flexibly among comprehensive, particu lar, and in-between perspectives; philosophical and technical horizons; exposi tion, explication, and argument; and an array of disciplines of varying familiar byways" ity for each reader. Brann is well aware how many "highways and constitute the ways of naysaying (p. xiv) and is always supporting the reader with previews and reviews, reminders of relevance, very explicit transitions, and other orienting remarks. A second main challenge inheres in our ordinary relationship to the negative appearing in our thought and speech, in our imagination and sense of time, and perhaps in the structure of the world. It is so variously present, so familiar, that it is difficult to step back and recognize it as questionable. It takes an effortful re-envisioning of the world, a complete shift, to awaken to the strangeness of the evidences of nothingness we live among and in some imperfectly graspable way are, and an even greater effort to remain in that far-reaching strangeness and unknowing. Review Essay 219

2. The Conspectus of the Kinds of Naysaying

What are the ways of naysaying? Brann distinguishes them into six kinds. I believe it will be most helpful if I straightforwardly summarize them with an occasional comment.

"no" The first kind of naysaying is the that is an expression of the will (chapter 1). This kind of naysaying appears conspicuously in the future-laden achievements of infants and toddlers: in the willed use of the semantic content

"no," of negation in the gestural and verbal in the cognitive distinction between

"no" self and mother accompanied by the of independence, and as an aspect of the negation-threaded activities of imagining, pretending, and lying. Willful Socrates' naysaying also appears in ill-willing devils, in well-willing guardian daimonion (divine thing); and in such imagined naysaying human beings as Turgenev's nihilist, Bazarov, and the hero of Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, our greatest poet of the various forms of naysaying. Brann catches

Bartleby's persistent fascination for subsequent readers and writers exactly:

prefer" Bartleby's "I is a screen that hides behind a polite pretense of agreeable op tions (for preference is a choice among positives) his fully determined will to make

to" life leave him alone, and that failing, to become null and void. His "I prefer not is the mild ripple on the implacable undertow of his naysaying will. (P. 17)

"no" And finally, and perhaps most ominously, willful appears in eristic and lying speech as the intentional subversion of reason. The second kind of naysaying is the negation that belongs to logic (chapter 2). Brann begins with a succinct reflective primer of the founding questions and principles of negation in classical logic: she defines negation and its kinds,

"not" examines the different possible positions of the negative particle in a statement and the implications of these different positions for just what is being denied, and explores whether, or rather, why, the positive is always prior to the negated. She then introduces those contrasting developments of symbolic logic 'true' 'false' which form an entering wedge for the question: "[W]here [do] and

themselves?" statements (p. first appear . . . in the world, in speaking or in the 43). This brings the reader naturally upon a characteristic fissure between classi

cal and modem logic:

For [modem] philosophical logicians truth comes from the world, and negation is in around: propositions. For traditional philosophy it is just the other way Negation is the beings the and truth is in the in the world of appearances and in of intellect, propositions. (P. 48, italics original)

Brann follows with three more loosely connected sections devoted to special

issues of logical negation: double negation, negative self-reference, and negative 220 Interpretation numbers and zero. The section on negative self-reference, especially, stays strictly within the bounds the book sets for itself, turning aside from the issues of postmodernism. But Brann does make observations that glance at them:

Although such simultaneous self-contradictions [as appear in the Cretan Liar para dox] are out of the context of working reality, they may thus well mirror an ineradi cable negative capability of our thinking: that of enmeshing itself in infinities of in decision, a kind of neurosis of the intellect, a loss of self-control compounded of self-reference and self-contradiction. A sound mind [one hears behind this phrase

the Socratic virtue whose name it translates: sophrosyne] seems to crave periodic positivity, the setting of thought in definite affirmation or determinate denial. (P. 54)

The third kind of naysaying is speaking about nonexistents (chapter 3). Brann's most engaged concern is with a particular set of nonexistents, the per sons and places of fiction. She leads up to the discussion of fictional entities by showing how the question of their character is raised by a larger concern with nonexistent objects in twentieth-century logic, however. And she frames the discussion of the logical treatment of nonexistents in turn by showing how the classical and medieval concern with being is replaced in the philosophical logi cians of the past century by existence, which pertains only to individual, con crete realities in time and space. The difficulty that appears in ordinary speech about fictive beings, which commonly affirms both that they are nonexistent and that it is possible to make true or false statements about them, is caught in a single, witty sentence:

In saying of anything that it does not exist we do not seem to be thinking and speak ing of nothing, both because we are focusing on [the nonexistent object] somewhat as we would on things that do exist and because we can say false sentences about horses," it, such as "Unicorns are winged when they are, in fact, homed horses, and only Pegasus is winged. (P. 81, emphasis added)

Russell, in his Theory of Denotation, paraphrases away the subject of the predi cate and argues that propositions about fictive beings are false; Parsons, adapt ing Meinong's Theory of Objects, distinguishes between two kinds of attribution of existence, and so allows existence of a sort to the beings of fiction. Brann subjects these and other theories to a subtle critique and finds them inadequate to our experience of the actuality of great fictional beings. More adequate, she is treat argues, to fictive beings as belonging to the realm of images:

But as formulations images, melding Being and Nonbeing, as objects in which are merged the presence and absence of the being they represent, seem to me somehow

actual . .. [Factions attain an actuality of which nonexistents are incapable. (P. 103) Review Essay 221

Brann closes the chapter with the question whether nonexistence is a predicate, and in the course of answering it offers a notably lucid analysis of Anselm's proof of the existence of God and its implications. The fourth kind of naysaying is speech about philosophical Nonbeing. Chap ter 4, in which Brann treats Nonbeing, is the center and one of the peaks of the whole book. It is constituted of explications of two decisive texts. Nonbeing appears on the philosophical scene as an unintended consequence Parmenides' of initiating vision of "unconceptualized Being, undetermining 'Isness' " thought, . . the pure experience of (p. 134). The goddess who initiates

"Is," Parmenides, in commanding him to cleave to the way of follows with the

not" injunction not to pursue the way of "Is (p. 137). This injunction and parallel Parmenides' negatives in philosophical poem seem to "[show] forth Being as infused with Nonbeing, that is, with distinctions, or alternatively as carrying

shadow" Nonbeing about as an external (p. 137). Two generations later in the dialogue Sophist Plato addresses the paradoxes that flow from attempting to think that Nonbeing is. The chief speaker in that Parmenides' dialogue, a stranger to Athens from hometown, Elea, proposes that when we speak of Nonbeing, we don't mean to say that something simply is not. Rather there are two great world- and speech-constituting forms, the Same and the Other, which allow us to say of anything that it is the same as itself and other than everything else. As Brann frames it:

[The Other] is the very principle of bonding diversity, of relationality. For each be ing is what it is by reason of its own selfsame nature, but it is related to all the oth that other's other. (P. ers by mutual otherness -it is bonded to each of them as 141)

Hence, when we speak of something as, for example, not just, we do not mean that it is nothing, we mean that it is other than just. And Brann adds a sentence about a further significance of Otherness for human life: "But whereas the universal form of mutuality, the Other, makes a it makes bond of diversity among the forms, when it descends into speech, attributions"added). possible not only true negations butfalse (p. 143, emphasis This is an oft-told tale. Brann tells it superbly. In particular her fidelity to

Parmenides' meaning, her refusal to transpose it into a subtly or not-so-subtly us into position falsifying modem idiom, and the skill she displays in nudging experienced are the so we can open toward what and only what Parmenides

fruit of rare mastery.

The fifth kind of naysaying, whose name is taken from Hegel, is dialectical

"Dialectic" here means the self-movement of thought, negativity (chapter 5). "negativity" that patterned and in Hegel's analysis, is the engine which drives

self-movement. Brann writes: "The attempt [to give an account of dialectical

'Is' unlike attempt recover the sense of in Parmenides negativity] is not the to

reason" both are experiences of human (p. 158). 222 Interpretation

Brann turns first to Hegel's rendition of negativity in his biography, or auto biography, of the Spirit, the Phenomenology. Then, after a brief analysis of Kant's static negating understanding, she turns to Hegel's Logic:

[I]n this logic the dialectic of thought can be most purely witnessed, or better, actu

ally re-performed . . . The most dramatic way to see the independence of logical con tent from embodied human subjectivity is to see it [and here she quotes from one of the most cited sentences of Hegel] as "the exposition of God as he is in his eternal Spirit." essence before the creation of Nature and finite (P. 162)

One relevance of Hegel's logic to Brann's larger inquiry is a tacit implication of Hegel's account of the origin of conceptual self-movement in pure Being: "[J]ust as Nothing has come out of Being, so, by the symmetry of the dialectical Nothing" motion, Being could come out of (p. 164). Only Hegel's prejudice, Brann argues, not the logic of the system, gives Being priority over Nothing: Hegel's thought contains in itself seeds of nihilism. The sixth kind of naysaying is Nothing (chapter 6). After a brief review of

nothing" some "appearances of (p. 170) in poetry and physics, and a glance at the serene attainment of Nothing (Brann coins a Latin phrase, nihilismus hilaris [blithe nihilism] [p. 172] to allude to it) in certain Eastern traditions, the book turns to the encounters with Nothing in the West. Brann first circumscribes "a brief account of how and when we find [Nothing] and how we manage to talk it" about (p. 175) and then, following Michael Gillespie, she traces the roots and rise of modem nihilism:

[The deep root of modern nihilism] is the evolution of the idea of God's will as ab

solute and the subsequent devolution of this will from God to man .. [but] abso lute willfulness is next to nihilism. For if the will is everything, nothing is what it is except by human fiat which is to say that existence is founded on Nothing and is affected by nothingness. (P. 181)

This tradition culminates in the existential nihilism of Heidegger, which Brann brings before us in a scrupulous interpretation of the essay, "What is Metaphys ics?" "Angst' Here in the human attunement to the world called (dread) Nothing comes to sight as the manifesting source of Being. Finally Brann turns to death, and closes with a brief word about the way awareness of death ought to shape the we live. Thus the word way last of the conspectus of ways of naysaying is ethical:

But purposes of for the daily life, I hold with the example of Socrates, with what I think of as his orthogonal mode of living: horizontally forward to the death that takes us out of time, but also vertically outward to a daily absorption in the timeless aspect of things. Of course, doing likewise that's another matter. (P 198) Review Essay 223

3. The Triple Inquiry Resolved

After the intervening inquiry into naysaying, in the attempt to answer both the questions that introduce the book: Is there something common to all the forms of naysaying? And how does negation bear on imagination and time? Brann formulates her conclusion. The conclusion sits obliquely to the conspec tus, sometimes drawing on it, but also introducing new formulations and topics, for example, the perspectival nature of ordinary naysaying and the character of privative Being, both of which I will discuss below, which are barely mentioned in the conspectus. The conclusion has three sections.

The first section of the conclusion looks at the activity of the human nay- sayer. One might image the naysaying of everyday experience as Brann de scribes it in two concentric spheres extending around each human being as cen ter. The nearer sphere embraces what is me-us-our ways, the farther sphere embraces what is him-her-them-their ways. And, before reflection, we spontane ously see the nearer sphere as good, the farther as less good or bad. Ordinary naysaying, that is, is self-centered and perspectival. It is possible, but takes great effort, to free oneself from this self-centered perspective. In human affairs empathy allows us to stand in the place of another and see ourselves as that other's other; in the realm of reason logic remains

lucidity" positionally neutral "from abstraction for the love of (p. 212) and phi losophy seeks such positional neutrality as is possible and as fosters its move ment toward wisdom.

Brann's account of the perspectival nature of ordinary naysaying has power ful ethical implications. Perspectival naysaying, for example, is the source of

"pseudospeciation," what is now named by the technical term, the cognitive act whereby differences of degree are construed as differences of kind or species. "us" When this is at work, other human beings who in some respect differ from in degree may be seen as a different species and, therefore, as not possessing the potentialities, needs and rights of a human being. Brann's account implies that the full and stable empathy, one might call it existential empathy, which

allows us to take the lives of other human beings as seriously as we take our

sensibility. rather depends on that thought-struc own is not simply a form of It ture, the thought-structure of Nonbeing as otherness, which allows us to rise other is an other's other and stably to the "panoramic view from which every negative"(p. 218). Genuine ethical growth follows and every positive is also a our human cognitive other depends on the increasing realization of capacities; action thought. wise it is mere imitation, the equivalent in of opinion in the structure The second section of the conclusion moves from of our acts of there are negations in the to which naysaying to the question whether world, intrinsic nonbeings. After review our naysaying refers: nothings, nonexistents, Brann turns first to sensible nonexistents ing her earlier treatment of Nothing, to the intelligible realm. and then to Nonbeing, which belongs 224 Interpretation

In the realm of the senses, Brann notes that we do not directly observe gaps or absences in the sensory continuum of existents. It is only because we compare the continuum of existents before us with our imagination- and memory-held images of what is distant, past, fictional or ideal and normative that we recog nize their absence from among the existents that are present here and now. "We imagination" are schooled in the absences within existence by . . our (p. 217). In the intelligible realm, she presents an image of Nonbeing as possessing two aspects. Nonbeing, is the Nonbeing discovered in Plato's Sophist, Nonbeing as the Other, the intelligible source of the principle of mutual distinction, which makes each being every other being's other. She calls Nonbeing, horizontal, because in making all beings distinct in the same way it puts them on the same level. Nonbeing2 is the complement to Nonbeing,. "This Nonbeing is not objecti fied relativity but has in it something of absolute inferiority, of defective or Being" deficient (p. 216). It is the "responsible cause . of defective or defi

cient . . which seems to fit certain objects as we analyze them Being , in

mistakes" thought: images, fictions, lies, (p. 216). Nonbeing2 puts objects in a hierarchy, their rank depending on the degree of presence or privation of Being that enters into their constitution. She calls Nonbeing2 vertical because it ranks being as higher or lower in their fullness of Being. Brann later correlates these forms of Nonbeing with the forms of naysaying which mirror them, reformulating the kinds of naysaying as two for the sake of exhibiting the correspondence. I note briefly that Brann does not spell out how the ways of naysaying are distributed over the two summary kinds. I believe it must work like this. First she recapitulates the ways of naysaying as five:

Negation has then seemed to be: [1] the human capacity for feeling and saying no [Cap. 1], [2] for having negative objectives in thought and expressing them in sentences quali fied by not [Cap. 2], [3] for entertaining negative objects of sense and thought such as Nonexistence and Nonbeing [Caps. 3 and 4], [4] for the conceptual motion of dialectical negativity [Cap. 5], [5] and, finally, for the feel of nothingness and the apprehension of Nothing [Cap. 6]. (P. 217)

Second, these ways of naysaying are redistributed into two. Of these, one, two, and four must be elements of naysaying,, the discursive, distinction-making thought and speech which expresses the mutual otherness caused by Nonbeing,. One contributes a willful, as well as a tacitly cognitive, element to perspectival naysaying. Five and three are then elements of naysaying2, which embraces those denials which are "ineradicably denigrations, recognitions of a hierarchy among beings or existents, insofar as they are infected by Nonexistence or [pri vation]" (p. 217), of which the responsible cause is Nonbeing,. Review Essay 225

One other matter must be brought back on stage before Brann is able to formulate the conclusion of her inquiry. This is her model of the embodied human soul. Brann presents this model (a "working hypothesis, nothing like a theory" [p. xi]) at the very opening of the book. It pictures the soul as having a front, a middle, and a back. "The front is where a world that impinges on us as

senses" it wills . confronts us: at the organs of our external (p. xi, emphasis added). The back is where the soul thinks. "[Thinking] is behind and beneath everything we are and do, as its prop and ground . . Naysaying originates in this most ultimate and dominating rear of our psychic territory; perhaps it is itself" coeval with thinking (p. xi). It is the area in between sensing and thinking, the "large middle space where

representations" we contain (p. xi), the imagination, that was the focus of Brann's earlier inquiries, the original inquiry into how we have images, and the second into how the images of memory and anticipation contribute to the constitution of our internal sense of time. These representations "are neither the

presence of thought nor the presentations of sense, yet compounded of both: re presentations structured by the distinctions of thought and filled with the echoes

sense" of (p. 216).

She now frames for a final time the question she will then answer in the two

closing paragraphs of the book:

Imagination and time seem to lie, in the imagined topography of the soul, between thought the negativity of thinking and the positivity of sensing. Is the naysaying of and speech recognizably related to the yea, and particularly the nay, which appear arise imagination and in to lie in the constitution of the representations that in the memory? (P. 218, emphasis added)

In short: are the forms of naysaying recognizably related to the forms of Nonbe ing which contribute to the constitution of the images of imagination and our sense of time? movement of the book Perhaps the best way to clarify the very dense final is to recognize that it continues, and sometimes reprises, the correlated dichoto argument mies initiated above. It serves both as a summation and as an from

similitude between the objects of the correlated dichot probability based on the comment on it. omies. Let me trace Brann's further analysis. Then I will Brann begins by taking up the two capacities that depend on our faculty of imagination. Capacity,, sensing time, is our ability "to live longitudinally around be" is and what might (p. the now point, preserving what no longer projecting 218). Capacity2, imagination, is our ability "to experience nonentities as vivid

present" appearances in a timeless (p. 218). mirror"the two of These two capacities "seem to (p. 218) kinds naysaying of and the articulated above. The similitude between the two kinds naysaying becomes clearer when we make two capacities of sensing time and imagining 226 Interpretation more explicit the structures of thinking the two kinds of naysaying embody. It is this similitude which persuades our belief that the kinds of naysaying underlie and structure the two inward representational capacities.

Naysaying, is discursive thinking, which is "always passing from this to not here" this, from here to not (p. 218). In terms of the model of the embodied human soul, Brann defines naysaying, as the intelligible structure which distin guishes the images of memory and anticipation so they contribute to the consti tution of our sense of time passing from here to not here, from not yet to now to no longer. Naysaying2 is intuitive thought, "which has before it beings and their subordi

nothings" nate reflections, nonbeings, nonexistents, (p. 218). In terms of the model of the embodied human soul, Brann distinguishes naysaying2 as "the

existence- thought structure . . . [which] mates with voided sensation to produce images" inward (p. 218) in the middle space between sensation and thought. I pause to note that it is not quite clear how many steps are understood in this process of image-formation. Brann's metaphor pictures it as a mating be tween the thought structure of Nonbeing and existence-voided sensation. Here is my question: If a sensation is existence-voided, must not Nonbeing already be at work? And if Nonbeing has already been at work, why must there be a second negation by Nonbeing to transform the now existence-voided sensation into an image? Or to frame the question in another way: In this process there seem to arise in sequence three objects of awareness: (1) perception or existence-attached sensation, (2) existence-voided sensation, and (3) the image. How does one distinguish (2) and (3)? Is not existence-voided sensation already constituted by the mating of sensation and Nonbeing? Why does this not already constitute it as an image?

With these similitudes established, Brann is able to write a closing sentence which concludes the inquiry of this book into what is common among the ways of naysaying and simultaneously the triple inquiry into the relationship of the ways of naysaying to the imagination and, in consequence, to time:

It is in these images at the center of our human being that all the ways of naysaying come together to deliver us from the brute positivity of existence without consign ing us to the blank nothingness of oblivion. (P. 218)

What all the ways of naysaying have in common turns out to be, not "one

meaning" ultimate (p. xiv), but collaboration in producing the images of our imagination and time in all their saying activity. There is, indeed, a slight ambiguity in this formulation. May "all the ways

naysaying" of be said to come together in the images at the center of our human being (1) because Naysaying, and Naysaying, are both considered to constitute the image as such, or (2) because in this closing formulation the foregoing emphatic distinction between the image and time is dropped and sensing time, Review Essay 227 which in part depends on the images of memory and anticipation, is embraced in the reference to the image? Both may be true, but the second is more funda mental to note in the horizon of the triple inquiry. As I remarked at the beginning of this review, Brann's book merits our atten tion because it invites us to reflect on inquiry both as a mode of philosophical thinking and as the appropriate literary form for presenting philosophy; and to reflect also on the issues that arise when we try to cope philosophically with the negative that appears multifariously in our speaking. This reflection is sometimes invited by small ambiguities or lacunae in the text, which open onto large questions. The conclusion, in particular, because of its intricate themes and lapidary conciseness, raises such questions. Let me give two examples as contributions to a discussion at the far edge of Brann's inquiry.

1. Brann remarks, "Collections and overviews and direct insights are of course also modes of thinking, but the discerning of divisions prepares most

conclusions" "but" thoughtful (p. 213). The adversative suggests that the dis cerning of divisions can occur distinctly from and prior to the unifying modes of collecting, forming overviews, and having direct insight in preparing thoughtful conclusions. This is, to be sure, a book about negation. But one must wonder whether the act of discerning divisions can be understood at all without seeing it (a) as based upon a prior, intuitive presupposition of a whole and (b) as, simultaneously with every dividing, a constituting of a new collection. a. The discerning of divisions depends on a prior, immediate, wholelike con texture of opinions, which waveringly mirrors the interwoven entities of Becom ing and, perhaps, of stable Being beyond. Thus every division occurs within an anticipatory, confused, and taken-for-granted pre-collection, which the purpo

sive division and collection aim to make more precise. In this perspective, the taken-for-granted collections that opinion constitutes may be said to prepare all thoughtful divisions. b. Because our thinking begins within and presupposes this given, always division that we make with our purpo already roughly articulated whole, every a for it sive thinking is a re-division. And it is simultaneously re-collection,

redistributes the parts within the given whole. In this perspective, to think of the discerning of divisions as separated from the concomitant constitution of consti unities is a misleading abstraction, for division and collection mutually "fittingness" the of each part with tute one another. And, indeed, if consistency,

a is one sign of a true account, the fullest every other part within whole, seeing to move toward it. of all divisions and collections together is necessary to one sort of division 2. Some of the questions that arise are intrinsic in formulations: Are the branches of the exhaus speech, dichotomous dichotomy between them? And are the two tive, dividing all of a given kind they exclusive, each other in thought or in the world? branches of the dichotomy excluding schematic correlations of the Further questions arise from the dichotomies, distinctions and correlations that be important which suppress secondary may 228 Interpretation for understanding. Such questions, for example, arise in Brann's conclusion with regard to (a) the negations that constitute an image and (b) the negations that constitute time.

a. In setting up her analysis of the image and time Brann correlates, on the one side of her dichotomies, Nonbeing, (horizontal, relational otherness), naysaying, (distinction-making, discursive thinking and speaking) and capacity, (sensing time) and, on the other side, Nonbeing2 (vertical, the responsible cause of priva tion of Being), naysaying2 (denigrating denials that recognize the privation of Being, intuitive thought) and capacity2 (experiencing images in a timeless pres ent). Because of these correlations, Nonbeing2, the responsible cause that makes every image a privative or quasi-being in relationship to its original, appears as the only explicit form of Nonbeing that constitutes an image. Yet Nonbeing,, the principle of otherness, contributes to the image in at least two ways: as a picture, the image's parts are internally articulated as other than each other, and as a quasi-thing, the image is distinguished from every other thing and quasi- thing, including its original, as their other. Both sorts of Nonbeing, as the clos ing sentence implies, are essential to the constitution of the image, but the un qualified, correlated dichotomies veil the grounds to understand this. b. Parallel problems occur in determining the negative constitution of time. First, the dichotomous formulations suggest that forming images and sensing time are alternative capacities on the same level. But this is not so. The capacity to sense time in part depends on and so is derivative from the primary capacity to have images. Second, just as the conclusion explicitly correlates experiencing images only with Nonbeing2, so it explicitly correlates sensing time only with Nonbeing,. Yet as in part derivative from the experience of images the experi ence of time must already require both forms of Nonbeing. Let us extend slightly this analysis of the negative structure of time. Our experience of time mingles (1) the direct perception-cognition of what is present before us with (2) consciousness of the inner images which embody sequentially ordered memories of the past and anticipations of the yet unrealized future. Let us look first at the work of Nonbeing2 in the experience of time. Because every existent belongs to the realm of Becoming, it is always marked by a privation of Being. So the originals we perceive-cognize already embody Non- being,. And the images which constitute our memories and anticipations em

body a second degree of privation of Being. Our sensing time, therefore, as derivative from our capacity to have images, depends on two degrees of Nonbe ing^ And one could discern privations of Being of other degrees. Now let us turn to the work of Nonbeing, in the experience of time. First, it plays the double role we have already outlined in the constitution of images, articulating each part of an image from every other and distinguishing the image from other existents and quasi-existents, including its original. Then Nonbeing, cooperates with Nonbeing2 in constituting the Becoming which our experience Review Essay 229 of time reflects. The passage of time is a continuous othering. As soon as we try to conceptualize this othering we tun into all the perplexities of conceptualiz ing motion. But we can certainly say temporal passage is a continuous expres sion of Nonbeing,. And we can observe that this passage is itself inwardly artic ulated: It has different depths, tempi, articulated extents, overlapping wholes and parts. Music offers an example of this configured othering, in which aural perception-cognition collaborates with aural images as memory and anticipation to form an articulated whole. All this implies an infinite play of Nonbeing, entwined with the multiple degrees of Nonbeing2 discussed above. Only when we acknowledge that in all entities both sorts of Nonbeing collab orate, that there are degrees of privation of Being as entities more or less fully are, and that Nonbeing, sponsors otherness in infinite respects and number, only then do we get a feel for how variously the negative threads and shapes our ordinary world. We must transcend the unqualified dichotomies of the conclu sion in order to be able to extend Brann's analysis to its full explanatory reach.

4. Coda: Metaxic Inwardness

In closing let me set the concerns of the trilogy in a larger horizon. I will use the language of Plato in doing so. Plato's intellectual imagination often recurred to the figure of the mean, the

middle element which distinguishes yet bonds two extremes in a differentiated

unity. So the Timaeus, for example, represents the divine Workman as binding geometric proportion in order the primal elements together by continued (31cff.) to make the cosmos "one whole, one of all the wholes, complete and unaging

unailing" the word and (33a-b). The intermediate is often indicated in Plato by the domain metaxy, an adverb and preposition meaning between. The metaxy is and Nonbeing. Thus all of all Becoming, whose structure is a melding of Being

center" the receptivities and activities of the embodied soul, "the human (p. xi) inwardness. are, to coin a term of convenience, structures of metaxic monumental into capabili Brann's trilogy may be characterized as a inquiry the into ties that belong to the realm of metaxic inwardness. Of these, inquiry the imagination is the most compendious and, in its breadth and explicitness, the imagination and the least precedented. As Brann frames the place of its

attraction for inquiry:

faculties and between [Imagination] is placed centrally between the intermediary and connects it to the objects soul and world. Thus it both holds the soul together

great power even definitive au without. Yet the treatment given this by habitually and problematic. The thors like Aristotle or Kant is tacitly unfinished, cursory, imag acknowledgment. It so to speak, ination appears to pose a problem too deep for is,

philosophy. It was both the and its neglect that first the missing mystery of mystery drew me to the subject. (Brann, 1991, p. 3) 230 Interpretation

The subjects of the later two books, sensing time, which is derivative from the imagination, and naysaying, which structures the imagination, are equally embodiments of metaxic inwardness, constituted by the mingling of Being and Nonbeing. The features of human existence which can be rightly understood only if seen in the light of metaxic inwardness are uncountable. Almost at ran dom I mention the virtues, cardinal and theological, which themselves embody and are attuned to a world marked by presence and absence together, by Being and Nonbeing both: Temperance, Courage, Justice, and (human) Wisdom; Faith, Hope, and embodied Love.

treatise on virtue (Ennead points this out the Plotinus in his 1 .2) in analyzing ontological foundations of the civic virtues. These cannot properly be called godlike, for they cannot occur in the divine realm:

First, it is debatable whether all [virtues] belong to [the World Soul], e.g., that it have temperance, courage. To [the World Soul] nothing is frightening, for there is nothing outside it. Nor [for the same reason does] any sweetness draw near [it], a desire to have or take which might arise if [the sweetness] were absent. (1.2.1.10-13)

In short, the civic virtues take their shape from the metaxic, absence-threaded realm in which they occur and disappear as one mounts through the higher realms, where the gradations of Being are increasingly full. Here, too, in the metaxic realm belong the prayer of the believer and the reflection of the philoso pher. And here, responding in different ways to the same mysterious copresence of absence and presence, are bom inquiry and constructive theory. (I note briefly that Plotinus also introduces in this Ennead an analysis of nonreciprocal likeness, an important structure of vertical Nonbeing:

[Let us] remark that likeness is two-fold. The one kind requires something the same in the like things, those whose likeness arises from the same [Form]. Among the other kind, one thing is like an other, but the other is primary, not turning about to "likeness" ward that [secondary] thing nor being said to be like it. In this case, must be said a in different respect, not requiring the same Form [in the primary as in the secondary thing] but rather an other [Form], since it is like in an other respect. [1.2.2.4-10]

This means that objects of the same ontological order can have a reciprocal likeness, but in the case of divine Cause and nondivine effect, we can be said to be like the Cause, but the Cause cannot be said to be like us. For the influence of this distinction in Christian theology and the arts in the service of theology, see Trimpi, pp. 166-228.) One of further feature metaxic inwardness, intimately intertwined with the inquiries into im- imagination, time, and naysaying, seems notably absent. Its Review Essay 231 plicit presence and actual absence appears in an image Brann summarizes from the Republic:

soul" Thus Socrates . says that the beginning of reflection, the "winch of the from Becoming to Being, is when we see that our fourth finger embodies a contradiction since we must say that it is larger and smaller at once larger than the pinkie and smaller than the middle finger. (Brann, 2001, p. 52)

What is unmentioned here is the power that drives the winch, Eros. For Eros, too, belongs at the heart of the graded intermediations that constitute our exis tence. As Diotima tells Socrates in the Symposium, "Eros is a great daemon, . ..

for everything daemonic is between god and mortal . [I]t is in the middle of both and fills up the interval so that the whole itself has been bound together it" by (202d-e; Benardete, 2001, p. 32). Eros is as multifarious in his appear ances as the sophist to whom Diotima compares him (203e; Benardete, 2001,

things" p. 34). But as "the whole desire of good (205d; Benardete, 2001, p. 36), Eros in his most enlightened form is the desire for wisdom. Eros is that passion without which the philosopher would not open onto the whole and, indeed, through his own daemonic erotic life, bond the whole. This negative silhouette of Eros, to adapt a metaphor Brann favors, in the trilogy on the forms of metaxic inwardness seems to call for a fourth inquiry, a sober satyr play.

REFERENCES

Plato." Benardete, Seth. "Strauss on 1993. In The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Edited and with an Introduction by Ronna Burger and Michael Davis, pp. 407-17. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Plato 's Symposium. Translated by Seth Benardete with Commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Problem." Brann, Eva. "The Student's Liberal Education 54, no. 3 (October, 1968): 369-85. "An Appreciation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction for Stu

dents." In Essays in Honor of Jacob Klein. Annapolis, MD: St. John's College Press, 1976. of Chicago Paradoxes of Education in a Republic. Chicago: University Press, 1979a.

System?" "What Is a Body in Kant's The Independent Journal of Philosophy 3 (1979b): 91-100.

Philosophy?" "What Is Energeia (Winter, 1990): 32-35. Imagination: Sum and Substance. MD: Rowman & jhe World of the Lanham, Littlefield, 1991. Phaedrus." "Xhe Venetian 1971. In The Past-Present: Selected Writings of Eva Brann. Edited by Pamela Kraus, pp. 61-77. Annapolis, MD: St. John's College Press, 1997a. 232 Interpretation

Imperative." "Kant's 1979. In The Past-Present: Selected Writings of Eva Brann. Edited by Pamela Kraus, pp. 153-65. Annapolis, MD: St. John's College Press, 1997b. Ideas." "Plato's Theory of 1979. In Past-Present: Selected Writings of Eva Brann. Edited by Pamela Kraus, pp. 99-116. Annapolis, MD: St. John's College Press, 1997c.

Modernity." "The Roots of 1979. In The Selected Writings ofEva Brann. Edited by Pamela Kraus, pp. 143-51. Annapolis, MD: St. John's College Press, 1997d. Questions." "The Second Power of 1992. In The Past-Present: Selected Writings of Eva Brann. Edited by Pamela Kraus, pp. 167-89. Annapolis, MD: St. John's Col lege Press, 1997e. Is?" "Do You Know What an Odyssey 1993. In The Past-Present: Selected Writings of Eva Brann. Edited by Pamela Kraus, pp. 401-8. Annapolis, MD: St. John's College Press, 1997f. Paganism." "Philosophical 1995. In The Past-Present: Selected Writings ofEva Brann. Edited by Pamela Kraus, pp. 117-41. Annapolis, MD: St. John's College Press, 1997g. What, Then, Is Time? Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. The Ways of Naysaying. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

Abstraction." Cassity, Turner. "The Power of In The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems, pp. 12-13. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998. Klein, Jacob. A Commentary on Plato's Meno. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965. Plato's Trilogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Science." "Phenomenology and the History of 1940. In Lectures and Essays. Edited by Robert Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman, pp. 65-84. Annapolis, MD: St. John's College Press, 1985. Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. 1934-36. Translated by Eva Brann. New York: Dover, 1992. Lachterman, David Raport. The Ethics ofGeometry: A Genealogy ofModernity. London: Routledge, 1989.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose. The Origin of Philosophy . Translated by Toby Talbot. New York: Norton, 1967. Pieper, Josef. Guide to Thomas Aquinas. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Pantheon, 1962. Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1952. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. What Is Political Philosphy? Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959. Tarcov, Nathan, and Thomas L. Pangle. "EPILOGUE: Leo Strauss and the History of Philosophy." Political In History ofPolitical Philosophy. 3d ed. Edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, pp. 907-34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Wesley. Trimpi, Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis ofExperience and its Conti nuity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Vico, Giambattista. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. 1744. Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968. Book Review

Benardete' s Odyssey

Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), xiv + 175 pp., $29.95.

Will Morrisey Hillsdale College

Philosophy asks questions of tradition, then spins tradition of its own. A

tradition' 'philosophic must be some tradition that builds questions of itself, and of tradition generally, into itself. One such tradition interrogates the Odyssey, seeking philosophy in Homer's poetry. Few modem philosophers have taken up this tradition, such philosophers having judged the learning needed to do so unnecessary to the philosophic quest as they conceive it. Seth Benardete has acquired that learning, and with it the strength to follow the tradition. He departs from modem philosophers, renewing an old voyage. His book, as the phrase goes, resists summary. But it encourages insight, and listing some insights Benardete offers may invite consideration of his argument. He recalls the acknowledged wisdom of poets and philosophers and asks readers

to wonder if and how philosophic wisdom diverges from poetic. Does the ratio

dialectic" nal dialectic of argument differ fundamentally from the "poetic of speech and action, or plot (p. xiii)? father," 1. "Whereas the Iliad begins with the names of Achilles and his the Odyssey begins with a man in whom anonymity is coupled with knowledge, a fatherland" much-traveled man separated from "father and (p. 3). Odysseus de

One," and his the feats the Cyclopes by calling himself "No by using mind,

'rooted,' least the most anonymous human characteristic.

voyage his father In so doing, and yet also in so doing as part of a back to 'roots,' land, back to his Odysseus radically alters the conditions of his rule of right" 4). Before the fatherland, the rule he had won by revolution or "natural (p. used his mind to understand his voyage, he ruled by natural right but had not power and natural right. "[W]hat was originally an accidental coincidence of effort put them wisdom will have to be replaced by the conscious to together;

effort" but the terrible consequences of that (the slaying of the suitors) "would

coincidence. Homer seems to have re seem to deny the desirability of their 4). The Olym flected on the Platonic possibility of philosopher-kings (p. Odys- cosmic and pian gods are the ones who overthrew their fathers, the gods,

interpretatton, Winter 2001-2, Vol. 29, No. 2 234 Interpretation

seus imitated them. Associated always with the Olympians (while his men remain pious respecting the Sun), Odysseus understands the world as nature not cosmos, understands political rule as founded upon natural right not paternity,

and rules accordingly.

Any monarchy must concern itself with succession. A natural right monar chy, one that sees mere paternity as inadequate, presents its ruler with a problem beyond the usual worry that the legitimate heir to the throne may prove a dunce. The people of Ithaca are restless, understandably: the brothers and cousins of Penelope's importunate suitors had been led to violent death by her husband the king. The Olympian gods of natural right instruct Odysseus on how to found a

world" new regime in the "postheroic in which son Telemachus must live, an iron age ruled by Athena or mind (p. 13). Telemachus consults Athena but

out" advice" imprudently "blurts her "private in front of the suitors (pp. 14-15), a failure that puts his own natural right to rule into question. 'The Odyssey is

events" remarkable for the light touch with which Athena guides the course of (p. 15); for the ancients there is no very tight connection between the rule of 'history' 'history' reason and the slaughterbench of (that is to say, there is no conceived as a dialectical course of events). This is so, even if Athena occasion ally commends the use of the slaughterbench to rulers. 2. In the Odyssey the person who most closely resembles a historicist is Nestor, who believes human events to be explicable in terms of "a strict theod icy" or moral tale in which everything that happens happens because wise and just gods cause it (p. 19). Those slaughtered are rightly slaughtered; only the good survive. Nestor is no poet; his speeches lack both simile and dialogue. Simile and dialogue bring duality in, and with it moral ambiguity. Poetic dialec tic yields no grand synthetic end and raises questions more insistently than it

evil," sets down answers. Poetry brings with it "a perspective beyond good and 'moralizing' at least in any narrow or sense of the phrase (p. 21). The Nestorian account leads in the end not to piety but to the disappearance of the gods, who are relativized to certain places and times.

Duality also inheres in the distinction between appearance and reality, a dis tinction that would bedevil the thinkers of the Enlightenment, who said they wanted to bring reality to the surface and make it publicly authoritative. But the harshness of reality would make its publicity a source of endless vengeance, or of despairing listlessness; political life, impossible without memory, is only pos sible if memory is limited by wise forgetfulness, as when Helen drugs men,

sorrows" making them "forget their malignant thoughts and (p. 27). By selecting some memories and covering others, poetry in its doubleness acts like the drug mixed by the beautiful, Argus-eyed, transpolitical Helen. Founders must plan thoughtfully like gods and the best poets; they must also understand that the plans and even the planning, the work of the mind, also affect (at worst infect) the workings of the heart or spirit (thumos). "Helen seems to have all the traits

of the poet, from the coolness with which Homer depicts the most terrible things Book Review -235 to his mimetic capacity to make things appear in all their vividness and his insight things" into the hiddenness of (p. 29). But Homer's Odysseus excels even her; unlike her, he "seems never to have fallen under the spell of Aphrod ite" and so exhibits a strong moral character. Why then does he choose mortality instead of godly immortality? Odysseus' 3. choice of mortality occurs during his stay with Calypso, a stay that the wise Athena (not Aphrodite) arranges so that the natural softening of democratic Odysseus' resentments in Ithaca may take place, and King potential successor, Telemachus, may mature both in the course of nature, over time. In choosing mortality, Odysseus rejects the mindlessness of paradise, where

man" "there seems to be no place for (p. 35). It is a wise choice, especially given the suspicion that Calypso's offer was empty, and Odysseus would have been killed, not deified, had he accepted it (p. 37). This non-choice points to the frustration of life, the anger of thwarted desires

'double' themselves,' that cause minds to by 'talking to or to the gods. 'Odys

seus' may be a pun on odussamenos, the anger of someone against someone else. At the founding stage of his new regime, the natural-right rule of the angry but not mindless man will be terror (p. 34). If the gods withdraw, human reli ance upon mind and force, but at the same time human self-opacity and the need for caution and questioning, all intensify. 4. After a long stay with Calypso, Odysseus has a short stay with the Phaea-

suffering" cians, who live in a sort of human paradise "without pain or (p. 47). Having chosen the human, Odysseus will induce the Phaeacians to make the same choice. Odysseus is the humanist evangel. A human life, in its doubleness, longs for the reconciliation of legal right with natural right. This can be done, but only at the expense of eros (p. 59), and therefore it cannot be done satisfacto rily, once and for all. 5. Centrally, Homer goes along with human duality by having Odysseus tell his own story, at the prompting of King Alcinous ("Brain") of the Phaeacians.

Odysseus' curiosity" In telling his story, "morally neutral is on display, along Odysseus' with his considerable moral virtues. The two come together in will

knowledge" ingness "to run risks for (p. 69). Participating in the siege of Troy, an act of dubious justice, Odysseus want to know more about the conflicting wander' (alao- ways of men, and so voyages. 'There are forms of the verb 'to

'true' (alethes)" mai) that are indistinguishable from (p. 72). From the orderly but cannibalistic, insular, and doltish Cyclopes he leams that "law and order can

apart" be (p. 72). Odysseus outwits them, using the universal-anonymous mind, Odysseus' which at the crucial moment overmasters anger. From his disastrous encounters with incestuous Aeolus and cannibalistic Laestrygonians he begins to see the natural limitations of the rule of the mind, namely, the bodily and the democratic.

These adventures and misadventures prepare him for the education he re

Odyssey" ceives from Hermes, "the peak of the (p. 84). After committing his 236 Interpretation

first act of justice that does not serve himself (embarking on the rescue of his men from Circe) Odyssey sees the revelation of Hermes, who not only tells him about, but shows him the nature of the moly, a plant that protects him against

the witch's spells. Knowledge of nature "lets Odysseus share in the knowledge

being" gods' of the gods without his having to share in their (p. 85). "[T]he knowledge" power arises from the of the nature of things, especially of human beings. The human body is the true home of the human mind: this discovery reconciles the quest of the rootless mind with the longing for home, for rooted- ness. A plant that has both flower and root, it is two and it is one. "It now seems that Homer was the first, as far as we know, to have come to an understanding of

'nature.' this philosophic principle, to which he gave the name The experiences that had to precede its discovery are the measure of the difficulty of its discov

ery" Odysseus' (p. 87). odyssey represents the philosophic quest. The philoso pher is both human, an embodied mind, and divine, insofar as he knows himself (as an embodied mind). The philosophic life suggests "a humanity that, though it belongs to man as man, is not open to every man, since what he is necessarily he is is not necessarily unless he knows that that is what he is necessarily.

rule" Without that knowledge he can be enchanted and made subject to perfect (p. 87). How then could a philosopher live (as he must, given human limitations) among fellow men who are not philosophic? Unphilosophic men "must have a

man" version of the knowledge of what constitutes (p. 88). That knowledge is the story of Hades, which teaches all men that soul and body are separable, and Odysseus' that mindlessness is to be feared. Hades is "a lawful equivalent of

nature" knowledge of his (p. 88).

Odysseus' knowledge requires moral virtue before and after receiving it. Hu man being, anthropos, is intelligible and invisible; manliness and womanliness are visible, bodily, necessary. Odysseus must resist the temptation of Circe; "there is in man some capacity to resist, a strength of soul or whatever we knowledge" choose to call it, that can be lost or diminished regardless of (p. 89). This thumotic virtue encompasses not only self-control but sympathy for other men, the unphilosophic ones; political life remains necessary for the phi losopher, and that life includes a measure of piety. The suitors ignore the wis dom that begins with the fear of Hades, and this is the real reason why they must be so forcefully punished, for the good of both philosopher and city. Itha- cans need to be re-minded. The philosopher, for his part, needs to learn that he can know, but not know all, that he can resist but not finally defeat evil, and that he can persuade, but only to a point. Self, gods, and other men "stand in

way" fate" his (p. 100). He must in this sense "submit to his (p. 100).

6. The limited freedom Odyssey enjoys may be seen in his lies. Upon return ing home, he would rule, but ruling after the experience of philosophic noesis differs from ruling before it. Odysseus will soon push off for another voyage, a

son" second sailing. To leave his kingdom safely "in the hands of his (p. 104), Book Review 237 he must employ both force and fraud. Having employed them, getting out of town will be both the philosophic and the politic move to make. Force and fraud combine in the killing of the suitors, which is not merely a punishment but an exemplary punishment "designed to illustrate the principle, 'Fear the gods and

men'" the future indignation of (p. 106). Liars, including poets, can philoso phize and side with the gods.

withdrawal" 7. Once the gods "have completed their (p. 120), eyewitnesses of divinity will give way to prophets who hear the divine. Such hearsay, at least

thoughts" in Telemachus, "seems to be nothing but his own (p. 1 17). The noetic experience will become more internalized in the twilight world, the iron age.

The twilight of the gods and heroes also brings democracy. Telemachus will rule the future Ithaca, but will share power with Eumaeus and even a cowherd. As for Odysseus, his political character comes to dominate his philosophic

reason" character. Homer takes care to show "how closely anger can pose as (p. 126), distinguishing the bow from the lyre, and both from the liar. The anger Odysseus' built into name comes to the surface in the end. Philosophy does not 'take,' always even after one experiences it. Philosophy is for the rarest natures; perhaps one should not suppose oneself to be a philosopher.

Laertes' 8. Penelope's weaving and unweaving of shroud enchants the suit ors, distracting them from their most prudent political course, which would have been to form an oligarchy and ignore the woman. Odysseus, responsible for the deaths of so many Ithacan men, will kill most of the remaining ones who are Odysseus' spirited. The soft-spirited survivors will feel guilty, because one of

allies tells them that the gods favor Odysseus and punish them for failing to

oppose the suitors through Odysseus. Guilt enables the gods to withdraw, to

'works' become invisible; guilt only with the base. All others must be killed, if they have rejected the gods. It might be noted that in coming generations, new spirited ones will arise. Regimes change, therefore. Men will need Homeric

wisdom until there are no men. 9. The Enlightenment wanted to substitute knowledge for belief. The final

support project. Odysseus stands episodes of the Odyssey might seem to that consignment of the souls of the revealed as himself at last, and he rules. The with whatever heroic world to Hades also seems consonant with Enlightenment, embourgeoisement. The Enlighten would be the ancient-world equivalent of the philosopher who wanted ment made much of recognition, and in this Hegel, is its culmination. The end of a political world animated by mutual recognition, the restoration of the Odyssey seems full of acts of recognition, and of authority founded upon recognition. that Odysseus grants Penel Benardete looks more closely, however. He sees and indeed "from the first book on ope little or no recognition for her sagacity,

protected" son she fostered and (p. 150). she is pushed aside in favor of the be expected to recognize Odysseus teases his old father, who cannot seriously and tear on both of them. In so doing, his son after twenty years of wear 238 Interpretation

Odysseus aims at two things at once, which he believes to be somehow connected: he wants Laertes to know him as he is, but he does not want Laertes to know him if he does not genuinely miss him. Only if his grief is real should be recognize the real Odysseus. These are competing demands unless the standard is doglike devotion; but no human being can be like Argus, and Laertes fails the test of loyalty with knowledge. Loyalty and knowledge are as far apart from one another as the unques tioned is from the result of questioning, or as Odysseus the homeward-bound is from Odysseus the wanderer. The entire Odyssey seems to have strained from the start to assert their togetherness in Odysseus, who first chose memory and then pro fessed to represent the anonymity of mind. (P. 152)

Odysseus' knowledge" "destiny is to establish belief and not (p. 152). He is poetic-dialectical proof of the impossibility of political enlightenment, of straight forward antitraditionalism. The rationalist dialects of Hegel and Marx are taller tales than Homer's. With a dialectic both rational and poetic, Benardete shows here that one may reject the dialectic of Enlightenment without falling into antiphilosophic obscurantism. The definitive commentary on Husserl's Ideas I.

Belief and its Neutralization

Husserl's System of Phenomenology Marcus Brainard in Ideas I Marcus Brainard fry /

1 .

Presenting the first step-by-step commentary on Husserl's Ideas I, Marcus Brainard's Belief and Its Neutralization provides an introduction not only to this f*jk-\ central work, but also to the whole of transcendental

' phenomenology. Brainard offers a clear and lively ''^'^^'iCil') of account each key element in Ideas I, along with a Belief and its | novel of one which well reading Husserl, may cause Neutrali2ati(^ scholars to reconsider many long-standing views on Husserl's System of his thought, especially on the role of belief, the effect ;j in / and scope of the epoche, and the significance of the Phenomenology & universal neutrality modification. "This book articulates Husserl's phenomenological

system within the context of its guiding intentions. The result is an overpowering work of scholarship, allowing it to be unquestionably ranked as the best discussion on Husserl's Ideas I, future." now or in the foreseeable Burt C. Hopkins, editor of Husserlin Contemporary Context:Prospects and Projects forPhenomenology "Brainard's achievement is not to have merely written about Husserl, but instead to have let Husserl speak for himself.The author has worked his way into the philosopher's thought so well that he has been able to grasp and discuss the various steps of Husserl's thought from within. To grasp a thinker in this way, the interpreter must himself be animated is." by a philosophical eros,and Brainard most certainly Walter Biemel, editor of several volumes of Husserl's collected works (Husserliana) Marcus Brainard is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carl Friedrich von

Siemens Foundation in Munich. He edited, translated, and provided the introduction to Heribert Boeder's Seditions: Heidegger and the Limit ofModernity, also published by SUNY Press.

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the critical edition of all of Strauss's known writings (many of which are published here for the first time) before his emigration to the United States ofAmerica in 1938. In addition, a substantial philosophical correspondence with four key figures in Strauss's intellectual career is presented. Both the writings and the letters are published in the original languages. This critical edition will be indispensable to any se rious study of Strauss's philosophy in the future.

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Die Religionskririk (subscription price: 39,90). ISBN 3-476-01856-3 Spinozas und Contains the critical editions of Die Religionskritik zugehorige Schriften Spinozas Cohens Analyse der Bibet-Wissen- Zweite Auflajre (1930), schaftSpinozas (1924), Zur Bibelwissenschaft Spinozas und seiner Vorlaufer (1926), Das Testament Spinozas (1932). The second, revised, and enlarged edition includes three previously unknown early essays j-aMFrau* by Strauss from the years 1925-1929, among others on Freud's The Future of an Illusions

Volume 2: Philosophie und Gesetz - Friihe Schriften

1997. xxxiv, 635 pp., cloth with dust jacket, 44,9o(subscription price: 39,90) ISBN 3-476-01212-3 Contains the critical editions of 29 essays from the years 1921 to 1937,

more than a quarter of which are published here for the first time: Quelques remarques sur la science politique de Mai'monide et de Farabi (1936), 0n Abravanel's Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching (1937), Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis (1921), Der Konspektivismus (1929), Religibse Lage der Gegenwart (1932), Eine Erinnerungan Lessing (1937), and more. The marginalia from Strauss's personal copies of these writings are published here for the first time. Hobbes' Volume 3: politische Leo Wissenschaft Strauss undzugehorige - Gesammelte Schriften Schriften Briefe Band 3 2001. xxxviii, 799 pp., cloth with dust jacket, 49,90

Hobbes' (subscription price: 44,90). ISBN 3-476-01213-1 politische Wissenschaft und zugehorige Contains, among other writings, critical editions of the

- Schriften Briefe Hobbes' German manuscript of politische Wissenschaft (1935) along with the variants of the English translation

from 1936, as well as the book-length manuscript Die Religionskritik des Hobbes (1933/1934), published here for the first time. In addition, 320 letters, over 400 pages of philosophical correspondence with Jacob Klein, Gerhard Kriiger, Karl Lowith, and Gershom Scholem, in the original languages (German and English).

Volume 4: Politische Philosophie - Studienzum theologisch-poUtischen Problem Contains the first publication of two key essays, Reason and Revelation* and The Living Issues of German Post-War Philosophy, along with numerous German translations.

Volume 5: Ober Tyrannls Contains the German translation along with the correspondence between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojeve (1932-1965) published here for the first time in its entirety in the original languages (German and English).

Volume 6: Gedanken uberMachiavelli

Each volume contains a foreword by the editor of the Gesammelte Schriften which introduces the reader to the circumstances surrounding the composition of each text as well as its central concerns. Each volume may be purchased separately, but subscribers pay approx. 15% less than list price per volume. Choosing the subscription price for the first three volumes obliges one to purchase all six volumes. Subscribers receive the following at no extra charge:

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^VERLAG J.B. METZLER

P.O.Box 10 32 41 D-70028 Stuttgart (Germany) Fax (++49 7 11) 21 94-249 www.metzlerverlag.de Modern Enlightenment

and the

Rule of Reason

EDITED BY JOHN C. McCARTHY

An extensive examination of the historical and philosophical CONTRIBUTORS: character of the Enlightenment. Paul J. Bagley Nicholas Capaldi

The essays in this volume pose the question: F. J. Crosson

Enlightenment" was "the truly enlightened Richard Kennington or enlightening? Alan Charles Kors The collection seeks philosophical clarity Pamela Kraus of modernity's enlightenmentbybeginning Robert P. Kraynak with Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes. Terence E. Marshall Consideration of Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, John C. McCarthy Hume, Rousseau, Lessing, and Kantall Philippe Raynaud philosophical critics, or reformers, of the Kenneth L. Schmitz Enlightenmentfurthers the study of its JohnR.Silber legacy by displaying its diversity. Finally, the book assesses the Enlightenment's vitality by outlining ways it continues to hold philosophical sway in this century. and the "The book as a whole displays both a Studies in Philosophy History Volume 32 breadth of focus and a depth of critical ofPhilosophy Series, exposition. It contributes significantly to pp. ISBN 0-8132-0904-1 Enlightenment studies, and in turn to the 1998 / 308 / $59.95 cloth current discussion concerning the nature and foundations of modernity."Timothy Sean Quinn, Xavier University

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