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The St. John’s Review Volume 53.2 (Spring 2012) Editor William Pastille Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Deziree Arnaiz The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. ©2012 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing The St. John’s Communications Office Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online at www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml. THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW Contents Essays & Lectures Aesthetics Ancient and Modern .........................................1 James Carey Passion and Perception in Mozart’s Magic Flute ...........38 Peter Kalkavage Socrates, Parmenides, and the Way Out...........................68 Judith Seeger Rolling His Jolly Tub: Composer Elliott Carter, St. John’s College Tutor, 1940-1942.........................97 Hollis Thoms Reflections Talking, Reading, Writing, Listening .............................133 Eva Brann Caged Explorers: The Hunger for Control.....................150 Howard Zeiderman Poetry The Love Song of the Agoraphobic................................177 Elliott Zuckerman Reviews Henry Kissinger on China: The Dangerous Illusion of “Realist” Foreign Policy Book Review of Henry Kissenger’s China..........................179 Joseph A. Bosco Everything is One Book Review of Eva Brann’s The Logos of Heraclitus ......195 David Carl THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW ESSAYS & LECTURES Aesthetics, Ancient and Modern: An Introduction James Carey The phenomenon of beauty is trans-political, trans-historical and trans-religious. Whether we are believers or non-believ- ers, we can admire Greek temples, an archaic statue of Apollo, Islamic calligraphy, a Gothic cathedral, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Hindu architecture, Chinese landscape painting, a Japanese tea ceremony, and so forth. Our admira- tion of these things need not be animated by religious belief. To be sure, they mean incomparably more to those who be- lieve that they are intimately connected with the sacred or di- vine than they mean to those who deny such a connection. But the beautiful in art is accessible to all, the beautiful in nature even more so. We should not be surprised, then, to find some agreement among the greatest minds as to what beauty is. It is often pointed out that philosophical inquiry into the nature of the beautiful did not get designated as “aesthetics” until the eighteenth century. The inquiry itself is not an ex- clusive modern concern, however. It was launched by Plato. His most impressive attempt to shed light on the nature of the beautiful is not to be found in the Symposium or the Phae- drus, but in the Hippias Major. The Symposium and the Phaedrus are chiefly concerned with the erotic relation of the soul to the beautiful. The concern of the Hippias Major is, on the face of it, more limited: what is the beautiful? Hippias has come to Athens on a diplomatic mission to represent the interests of his native city of Elis. He is a well known sophist. He plays a small role in Plato’s Protagoras James Carey is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. A shorter version of this essay was delivered as a lecture at St. John’s College, Annapolis, on September 10, 2011. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Thomas McDonald, in whose soul were uniquely combined intellectual powers of the highest order with rare loftiness of spirit and refinement of taste. 2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW and he is the chief interlocutor with Socrates in another dia- logue, the Hippias Minor. He has a high opinion of how much he knows, and he boasts about it without shame. Hip- pias is, as one of the most careful students of the Platonic di- alogues notes, “the great fool.”1 There are other fools in the Platonic dialogues—Ion and Euthyphro come quickly to mind. But Hippias is the greatest fool of them all. His limita- tions in combination with his vanity keep the conversation with Socrates from ascending to the highest peaks of specu- lation. But the conversation ascends very high nonetheless, though to appreciate this the reader has to compensate for Hippias’s dullness by engaging his own thought with what Socrates has to say. There is a rather lengthy introductory exchange between the two men. It begins with a comparison of earlier sophists with contemporary sophists. It thereby brushes up against the theme of wisdom, though without explicitly exploring it. In- stead, the introductory exchange centers on the problem of Hippias’s failure to make money through sophistry on his vis- its to Sparta, in contrast to his general success in this en- deavor elsewhere. At one point, when Hippias claims to have composed a beautiful speech about the beautiful, Socrates says that Hippias has reminded him “opportunely” of some- thing.2 Someone, Socrates says, has recently been throwing him into confusion with the question, “What is the beauti- ful?” Socrates asks Hippias to help him find an answer to this question. But his expression “opportunely”—eis kalon—is not quite serious, since he has used the word kalon, the Greek word for” beautiful,” or its derivatives seven times in the opening exchange. Hippias himself used it once in the open- ing exchange, rather strangely.3 He does not, however, seem interested in elaborating what he might mean by it, in spite of the fact that Socrates tacitly invites him to do so by re- sponding with a double echo of the word.4 ESSAYS & LECTURES | CAREY 3 Unlike the conversations that Socrates has with Euthy- phro and Meno in the dialogues named after them, and, in particular, unlike the exchange at the beginning of the Re- public and the ensuing conversations with Cephalus, Pole- marchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus, Socrates himself initiates the conversation with Hippias in this dia- logue, as he also does in the Hippias Minor after being invited to do so by Eudicus. When Socrates initiates a conversation we must ask ourselves what he hopes to accomplish through it, that is, why he even engages in it. And it is especially im- portant for us to ask this question when Socrates bothers to initiate a conversation with someone like Hippias or Ion who is not already a friend or associate of his and whom he knows in advance to be limited in philosophic capacity and commit- ment. We might think that Socrates is not well acquainted with Hippias. But right off the bat he appeals to Hippias’s vanity by calling him “Hippias, the beautiful and wise” and in the same sentence he refers to a prior encounter with Hippias. Socrates may be alluding to Hippias’ role in the conversation reported in the Protagoras, where he does not make a good impression.5 Is it possible that Socrates thinks that Hippias, in spite of his limitations, might nonetheless help him achieve a bit of clarity regarding something about which he is admit- tedly perplexed? In response to the distinctively Socratic question, “What is the beautiful?” Hippias offers three answers. The beautiful is a beautiful maiden, it is ornamental gold, and it is the solemn occasion of a funeral. Socrates exposes the deficien- cies of these answers. In doing so, he couches his observa- tions in the name of a third party who is not present, someone who, Socrates says, chastises him about his thoughts on the beautiful (to kalon). It later appears that this person is Socrates himself. Socrates, then, presents himself as being in conflict 4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW with himself about the beautiful. And yet one of the very few things that he says he is an expert on is erotics.6 So, given Socrates understanding of the necessary relationship of eros to the beautiful, we find a tension, to say the least, between his uncharacteristic profession of expertise and his apparent confusion about something that falls within the purview of his expertise, to be even at the center of it. After disposing of Hippias’s answers to the question, “What is the beautiful?” Socrates himself suggests three an- swers. His first answer is that the beautiful is the fitting (or the appropriate—to trepon).7 This leads to the question of whether its presence causes things just to appear beautiful or to really be beautiful. The difficulty here is in the Greek ex- pression to kalon itself. It can mean the beautiful as we today usually use the word, the aesthetically beautiful.8 But to kalon can also mean the noble—moral nobility or nobility of char- acter. In the case of the latter there can be a great difference between being and appearance. Someone could have a noble character without appearing so, not at first glance anyway. Socrates himself is the conspicuous example. Nobility man- ifests itself most conspicuously in those situations that, as we say, exhibit one’s character. In the case of noble laws and pur- suits, the discrepancy between being and appearance is so striking and of such contention as to lead, Socrates says, to “strife and battle . privately for individuals and publically for cities.”9 In the case of the aesthetically beautiful, the other sense of to kalon, there seems to be no difference at all be- tween being and appearance. It would be strange to say that a landscape or a painting, for example, only appears to be beautiful but is not really so.

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