Katherine Hilbery of Woolf's Night and Day is introduced to the reader as a covert rebel against convention, preferring mathematics to hostessing, and dreading marriage as incompatible with her desire to think independently. Yet by the end of the novel, she has come to find marriage and independence to be quite compatible when love, not attention to social position, is at the root of the relationship. Lily Briscoe of To the Lighthouse similarly moves from frustration with those who have succumbed to the expectations of society, to accept Mrs. Ramsay's legacy: like Mrs. Ramsay, she eventually learns to give Mr. Ramsay, overbearing and unsympathetic as he is, the compassion he needs, enabling him to make the oft-deferred journey to the lighthouse. It may hardly surprise an attentive reader, then, to realize that the eponymous heroine of Mrs. Dalloway also comes to synthesize an independent, even idiosyncratic, interior life with the role society expects her to play. Clarissa Dalloway is a woman who can question her long-standing decision to marry Richard Dalloway rather than Peter Walsh. But she can as easily consider her conventional role as an integral part of her identity: her “passion for gloves,” for instance, she justifies by remembering old Uncle William's saying that “a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves” (172). She allows socially incorrect questions about death, loss of religion, and her past love for Sally Seton to mix in equal measure in her mind with her plans for a meticulously respectable evening party.
Given these divergent characteristics, Clarissa Dalloway, critics have a fiendishly difficult time explaining her apparent inconsistencies. Seeing Woolf solely in the role of the political deviant pushing a subversive feminism on her readers, most critics categorize her characters either as feminist “failures” or subversively successful in one way or another. Is her skepticism about such traditional standbys as religion or the intrinsic superiority of her class a sign of a liberated mind, or has she betrayed her individuality by accepting certain aspects of her upper-middle class existence as normal? In fact, I would argue that both these alternatives are senselessly reductive. In the final analysis, Clarissa Dalloway seems to be most simply put a lover of life: “what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab;. . .the ebb and flow” of London streets (170). Ethical implications arise from her various reactions to her social position, and I can hardly argue with these critics that an important tension exists between liberation and compromise. Yet for Woolf's characters, this tension is itself the solution to the problem of a reductive existence: her independent social workers and unthinking aristocrats come off as equally one-dimensional, and this hardly makes them attractive as characters. Her most compelling characters, rather, are those who are capable of balancing the social and independent, carried on in a series of moments that build upon one another but never define the person.
Showing posts with label College. Show all posts
Showing posts with label College. Show all posts
30 January, 2011
01 December, 2010
L'Autonomie de l'Esprit saint dans la Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette
Apologies to those who can't read French, but I'm posting this largely for the few who can; most importantly my dad, who is a great fan of Georges Bernanos.
Dans la Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, la question du sort final de l'héroïne reste ambigu. Bien qu’elle meure physiquement, la vraie question, pour un écrivain catholique comme Bernanos, c’est de savoir si elle meurt spirituellement. Son suicide est, bien sûr, un péché mortel au point de vue de l'Église. Mais la représentation de sa mort n’est pas du tout sombre ; au contraire, l'auteur utilise même des images baptismales en décrivant comment elle fixe son regard sur « le point le plus haut du ciel » (181). Ce détail n’est pas une preuve certaine de sa rédemption, mais il en indique bien la possibilité. Il faut considérer le texte dans son ensemble pour bien en saisir toutes les implications. Mais plus important que notre jugement sur l'extérieur de l'histoire est le fait que Bernanos refuse au lecteur toute information qui pourrait décider de la chose d'une manière certaine. C'est peut-être le principal procède de cet auteur par lequel il préserve l'autonomie de l'action de l'Esprit Saint.
Il importe de considérer l'action de Mouchette sous deux aspects: l'extérieur et l'intérieur. À l'extérieur, on voit se dérouler une histoire assez simple du viol et du suicide d'une jeune fille. Quant à l'intérieur, c'est-à-dire l'état psychologique de Mouchette, l'auteur nous donne à intervalles assez espaces des éclairs fugaces. Ces éclairs suggèrent qu'il y a une pureté d'intention chez Mouchette, malgré son ignorance quasi-totale des principes moraux. Sa loyauté pour Arsène, la loyauté qui le lui fait défendre contre les soupçons de la femme de M. Mathieu, empêche sa pensée de voler « vers l'homme dont elle avait subi l'étreinte » (175). Elle dirige sa haine contre elle-même, pour éviter de la diriger contre Arsène, bien qu'une telle haine soit évidemment un grand péril pour son âme. Plus importante encore, peut-être, est l'instant fugace de tendresse auquel elle faillit se soumettre quand elle veut se confesser à sa mère mourante. Hélas, cette occasion lui est retirée juste au moment où sa résistance cède à ce désir, quand « la petite tête obstinée. . .s'abandonne, avec un gémissement de fatigue, et comme au terme de son effort » (114). L'instant d'abandon vient au moment précis où, selon toute apparence, il ne sert plus de rien. La faute, si faute il y a, n'est pas à elle, mais plutôt aux circonstances. Elle est prête à se livrer, mais les circonstances enlèvent à son geste tout efficace. Ces faits nous laissent imaginer, au moins jusqu'à la quatrième partie, que sa rédemption est une possibilité.
En revanche, L’ entretien qu'a l'héroïne avec la « vieille » dans la troisième partie montre un aspect plus sinistre. Cet évènement fait partie de la matière externe de l'histoire, mais il est étroitement lié à l’évolution spirituelle de l'héroïne; donc, c'est une expérience à mi-chemin entre les deux états de l'être: l'extérieur et l'intérieur. La vieille femme mal-pensante tente la fille avec une description séduisante de la mort, de la paix et la pureté qu'apporte celle-ci: après tout, comme la vieille l'affirme, « tout ce qui vit est sale est pue » (151). Cette tentation viennent juste après les derniers mots de la mère de Mouchette, qui a bien trouvé la paix dans la mort à la fin de sa vie si solitaire, et également après le souvenir de la « paix solennelle » de la mort de son grand-père, en dépit de son « visage torturé » (105). Donc, il n'est pas très difficile pour Mouchette de la croire. En tout cas, elle n'a pas même des outils élémentaires pour clarifier toutes les idées et les images qui se mêlent dans sa tête. L'idée évocatrice de la pureté ici associe à la fois le souvenir de son premier amour pour Arsène, maintenant désacralisé, à la vision presque hallucinatoire du linceul blanc que la vieille lui offre. L'intelligence de Mouchette SE révolte contre cette association, contre l'invitation de considerer la mort comme une libération, un soulagement, et elle crie « Vous me dégoutez, sale vieille bête » (160). Mais cette révolte consciente n'est pas assez forte pour extirper l'attrait de l'idée de confesser son histoire: la vieille la convie à « parle[r] à [son] aise » (161). Inconsciente maintenant de ce qu'elle fait, elle se confesse, mais à son insu et au notre, pour ainsi dire. Comme Mouchette réfléchit à l'entretien qu'elle vient d'avoir, elle se dit que « La merveille est que [la vieille] ait réussi à [m’] arracher son secret » (167).
À cet instant-là, on comprend qu'on est maintenant complètement dans le domaine spirituel. Les gestes extérieurs que Mouchette accomplit ne lui sont plus intelligibles, à nous non plus. C’est de propos délibéré que Bernanos écrit de cette façon oblique. À cause d'elle, la conclusion de l'histoire nous laisse dans l'obscurité quant au salut de Mouchette. Même quand on a prise en considérations les détails que nous venons d'énumérer, on doit reconnaître qu'on ne sait rien de sûr. Mais pour un catholique fervent comme Bernanos, une telle connaissance certaine serait inconvenable. Alors que d’autres auteurs modernes se permettent un accès illimité aux secrets intimes de leurs personnages, Bernanos garde une très grande réserve. Si on pouvait juger Mouchette, on usurperait la connaissance des âmes réservée à Dieu (et à quelques saints). Malgré tous les indices à propos de la trajectoire que suit Mouchette, dans l'évaluation finale il y a toujours place pour la volonté, le choix ultime qui va décider le destin. Et parce que le choix n’est pas fixé, il y a également toujours place pour l'action de l'Esprit Saint dans les actions humaines. Donc, on ne peut pas protester que ce que Bernanos a fait ici nous laisse incapables de dire quelque chose de concluant, parce que c'est un élément intégral de son art. Devant « la brèche à peine ouverte du désespoir dans [cette] âme simple », il ne peut rien de plus que compter sur l'action de la grâce de Dieu et garder l'espoir dans sa bonté (176).
Dans la Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, la question du sort final de l'héroïne reste ambigu. Bien qu’elle meure physiquement, la vraie question, pour un écrivain catholique comme Bernanos, c’est de savoir si elle meurt spirituellement. Son suicide est, bien sûr, un péché mortel au point de vue de l'Église. Mais la représentation de sa mort n’est pas du tout sombre ; au contraire, l'auteur utilise même des images baptismales en décrivant comment elle fixe son regard sur « le point le plus haut du ciel » (181). Ce détail n’est pas une preuve certaine de sa rédemption, mais il en indique bien la possibilité. Il faut considérer le texte dans son ensemble pour bien en saisir toutes les implications. Mais plus important que notre jugement sur l'extérieur de l'histoire est le fait que Bernanos refuse au lecteur toute information qui pourrait décider de la chose d'une manière certaine. C'est peut-être le principal procède de cet auteur par lequel il préserve l'autonomie de l'action de l'Esprit Saint.
Il importe de considérer l'action de Mouchette sous deux aspects: l'extérieur et l'intérieur. À l'extérieur, on voit se dérouler une histoire assez simple du viol et du suicide d'une jeune fille. Quant à l'intérieur, c'est-à-dire l'état psychologique de Mouchette, l'auteur nous donne à intervalles assez espaces des éclairs fugaces. Ces éclairs suggèrent qu'il y a une pureté d'intention chez Mouchette, malgré son ignorance quasi-totale des principes moraux. Sa loyauté pour Arsène, la loyauté qui le lui fait défendre contre les soupçons de la femme de M. Mathieu, empêche sa pensée de voler « vers l'homme dont elle avait subi l'étreinte » (175). Elle dirige sa haine contre elle-même, pour éviter de la diriger contre Arsène, bien qu'une telle haine soit évidemment un grand péril pour son âme. Plus importante encore, peut-être, est l'instant fugace de tendresse auquel elle faillit se soumettre quand elle veut se confesser à sa mère mourante. Hélas, cette occasion lui est retirée juste au moment où sa résistance cède à ce désir, quand « la petite tête obstinée. . .s'abandonne, avec un gémissement de fatigue, et comme au terme de son effort » (114). L'instant d'abandon vient au moment précis où, selon toute apparence, il ne sert plus de rien. La faute, si faute il y a, n'est pas à elle, mais plutôt aux circonstances. Elle est prête à se livrer, mais les circonstances enlèvent à son geste tout efficace. Ces faits nous laissent imaginer, au moins jusqu'à la quatrième partie, que sa rédemption est une possibilité.
En revanche, L’ entretien qu'a l'héroïne avec la « vieille » dans la troisième partie montre un aspect plus sinistre. Cet évènement fait partie de la matière externe de l'histoire, mais il est étroitement lié à l’évolution spirituelle de l'héroïne; donc, c'est une expérience à mi-chemin entre les deux états de l'être: l'extérieur et l'intérieur. La vieille femme mal-pensante tente la fille avec une description séduisante de la mort, de la paix et la pureté qu'apporte celle-ci: après tout, comme la vieille l'affirme, « tout ce qui vit est sale est pue » (151). Cette tentation viennent juste après les derniers mots de la mère de Mouchette, qui a bien trouvé la paix dans la mort à la fin de sa vie si solitaire, et également après le souvenir de la « paix solennelle » de la mort de son grand-père, en dépit de son « visage torturé » (105). Donc, il n'est pas très difficile pour Mouchette de la croire. En tout cas, elle n'a pas même des outils élémentaires pour clarifier toutes les idées et les images qui se mêlent dans sa tête. L'idée évocatrice de la pureté ici associe à la fois le souvenir de son premier amour pour Arsène, maintenant désacralisé, à la vision presque hallucinatoire du linceul blanc que la vieille lui offre. L'intelligence de Mouchette SE révolte contre cette association, contre l'invitation de considerer la mort comme une libération, un soulagement, et elle crie « Vous me dégoutez, sale vieille bête » (160). Mais cette révolte consciente n'est pas assez forte pour extirper l'attrait de l'idée de confesser son histoire: la vieille la convie à « parle[r] à [son] aise » (161). Inconsciente maintenant de ce qu'elle fait, elle se confesse, mais à son insu et au notre, pour ainsi dire. Comme Mouchette réfléchit à l'entretien qu'elle vient d'avoir, elle se dit que « La merveille est que [la vieille] ait réussi à [m’] arracher son secret » (167).
À cet instant-là, on comprend qu'on est maintenant complètement dans le domaine spirituel. Les gestes extérieurs que Mouchette accomplit ne lui sont plus intelligibles, à nous non plus. C’est de propos délibéré que Bernanos écrit de cette façon oblique. À cause d'elle, la conclusion de l'histoire nous laisse dans l'obscurité quant au salut de Mouchette. Même quand on a prise en considérations les détails que nous venons d'énumérer, on doit reconnaître qu'on ne sait rien de sûr. Mais pour un catholique fervent comme Bernanos, une telle connaissance certaine serait inconvenable. Alors que d’autres auteurs modernes se permettent un accès illimité aux secrets intimes de leurs personnages, Bernanos garde une très grande réserve. Si on pouvait juger Mouchette, on usurperait la connaissance des âmes réservée à Dieu (et à quelques saints). Malgré tous les indices à propos de la trajectoire que suit Mouchette, dans l'évaluation finale il y a toujours place pour la volonté, le choix ultime qui va décider le destin. Et parce que le choix n’est pas fixé, il y a également toujours place pour l'action de l'Esprit Saint dans les actions humaines. Donc, on ne peut pas protester que ce que Bernanos a fait ici nous laisse incapables de dire quelque chose de concluant, parce que c'est un élément intégral de son art. Devant « la brèche à peine ouverte du désespoir dans [cette] âme simple », il ne peut rien de plus que compter sur l'action de la grâce de Dieu et garder l'espoir dans sa bonté (176).
25 November, 2010
Explanations and Excuses
The general lack of any original material on this blog of late can be explained away by a few facts.
-I have work to do this semester for what is arguably the first time in my college career. Writing twenty-five pages in French is actually a bit of a challenge. Not super-much, but it still requires a bit of time. Writing a twenty-page English paper is also something to get used to, not because it's hard to fill twenty pages (not at all), but because the usual mindless rhythm of the six page essay is no longer appropriate. One has to consider things like pacing for the first time since high school.
-Academia is not my life. Neither is blogging. If it comes down to it, I'd much prefer to spend all my free time (of which there is still quite a lot, marvelously!) cooking large dinners, having dinner parties, talking to people, drinking real eggnog, reading something for fun, or tasting wine on a Saturday evening.
Est modus in rebus, as Horace would say.
-I have work to do this semester for what is arguably the first time in my college career. Writing twenty-five pages in French is actually a bit of a challenge. Not super-much, but it still requires a bit of time. Writing a twenty-page English paper is also something to get used to, not because it's hard to fill twenty pages (not at all), but because the usual mindless rhythm of the six page essay is no longer appropriate. One has to consider things like pacing for the first time since high school.
-Academia is not my life. Neither is blogging. If it comes down to it, I'd much prefer to spend all my free time (of which there is still quite a lot, marvelously!) cooking large dinners, having dinner parties, talking to people, drinking real eggnog, reading something for fun, or tasting wine on a Saturday evening.
Est modus in rebus, as Horace would say.
02 May, 2010
The Terrible Turner Thesis
So, in 1893, at a meeting of the American Historical Exhibition at the World's Columbian Exhibition, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his famous "frontier thesis". Read it and weep at the redefinition of America. Unless you agree with him, in which case read it and rejoice to identify yourself with the progressives who are currently mandating health care. To each his own.
Basically Turner is reinterpreting what Columbus (the theme of the Columbian Exhibition, after all) means to America. In a nutshell, this is what he does in the piece:
He outlines something he calls the "germ theory of politics" (often propounded by the advocates of a Germanic peoples reading of America which is as mistaken as his is, but not associated only with these sorts) according to which American history is defined by its population, which carries "germs" of European tradition to America and allows them to germinate (ha!) here. He fails to consider (except in a slight nod to Mediterranean civilization in the closing paragraph) the possibility that America might be at its core an attempt to preserve the fundamental principles of liberty recognized by Western culture since its inception (cf. the Gelasian principle as stated in 492). Rather, America is about the frontier, about man's "unprecedented" encounter with a pure "state of nature," which conveniently strips all vestiges of tradition from the immigrants.
His declaration that to be American is not to be German--the biggest support he really offers for his interpretation--is right on enough. But he extrapolates this to mean that to be an American is to have left behind all traditions of culture and religion (despite the obvious fact that these are the root of our Constitution, no less) and to adopt instead a purely economically motivated definition of liberty as our national telos. America, he claims, is about the ability, the freedom, to move West, to gain lebensraum, so to speak. It is based upon a freedom of license rather than upon an attempt to discern the God-given natural rights of all men. Thus he objects to the "slavery question" being taken as the crux of American national development. After all, to focus on slavery and on America's response to it is to too strongly highlight the project of preserving our constitutional and natural liberties for Turner's taste. The poor fellow would prefer to see the Civil War utterly one-dimensionally, in terms only of a struggle for economic dominance via the Westward-moving juggernaut of the railroad (cf. the Lincoln-Douglass debates, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, for more on the influence of railroad building on northern political policy--and then note that Lincoln won). In other words, his interpretation of Columbus-as-ultimate-American is a picture of Columbus-as-rejector-of-tradition, concerned only with economic gain rather than with the spreading of a tradition rooted (despite its very human imperfections) in natural law.
Note that that's unfortunately the image of Columbus that somewhat prevails. And it's quite wrong. Columbus, whether you like him for this or not (and I don't agree with him entirely here, by any means), was rather a fanatical proponent of spreading religious tradition throughout the world, and rather too inclined to neglect science altogether in his attempts to do so. So that when the quite sufficiently-educated Spanish monks tried to convince him that his plan wouldn't work because the world was far too large for him to get all the way to China without dying for lack of supplies (of course they didn't believe in the flat earth: as my Am Civ teacher likes to point out, anyone who's even glanced at one of the old Spanish statues of the Christ child holding the orbis terrarum, the sphere of the earth, finds that myth knocked right off its feet, as if there wasn't plenty of other evidence to disprove it). Go ahead and read some of Columbus' letters and diaries, and you'll find a wealth of evidence pointing to a man so religiously dedicated to bringing about a quicker Second Coming of Christ that he wanted to devote his life to evangelizing the entire world as quickly as possibly. You won't find anything of the commonly fictionalized man of science, impatient with the close-mindedness of the greatest scientists of the late Renaissance, and devoted to discovery for the sake of discovery. Obviously, fanaticism of this sort is rather problematic, however sincere the man was, and I don't necessarily agree with his project, though I find it admirable in some respects.
Turner was defining him as the latter sort, merely by presenting this paper at the World's Columbian Exposition. Of course, the real practical question resulting from his paper is whether Americans in general are like this, not so much whether Columbus was. A definitive academic answer would require pages of exposition and proof. If you want an easier to come by response, I suggest talking to one or two of the more recently emigrated families you happen to know. Preferably if one of them happens to be Irish or Italian, in which case, they can probably remember the coming of their great-grandparents to this country with almost as intense emotion as the ancestors themselves must have felt. If you come away with a sense that "yes, I suppose that America is just all about becoming tabula rasa, liberated from any sense of familial or cultural inheritance, side with Turner. If the family retains a tendency to gripe about English wrongs or obsess about Grandma's meatballs, however...take your Turner with a grain of salt.
Basically Turner is reinterpreting what Columbus (the theme of the Columbian Exhibition, after all) means to America. In a nutshell, this is what he does in the piece:
He outlines something he calls the "germ theory of politics" (often propounded by the advocates of a Germanic peoples reading of America which is as mistaken as his is, but not associated only with these sorts) according to which American history is defined by its population, which carries "germs" of European tradition to America and allows them to germinate (ha!) here. He fails to consider (except in a slight nod to Mediterranean civilization in the closing paragraph) the possibility that America might be at its core an attempt to preserve the fundamental principles of liberty recognized by Western culture since its inception (cf. the Gelasian principle as stated in 492). Rather, America is about the frontier, about man's "unprecedented" encounter with a pure "state of nature," which conveniently strips all vestiges of tradition from the immigrants.
His declaration that to be American is not to be German--the biggest support he really offers for his interpretation--is right on enough. But he extrapolates this to mean that to be an American is to have left behind all traditions of culture and religion (despite the obvious fact that these are the root of our Constitution, no less) and to adopt instead a purely economically motivated definition of liberty as our national telos. America, he claims, is about the ability, the freedom, to move West, to gain lebensraum, so to speak. It is based upon a freedom of license rather than upon an attempt to discern the God-given natural rights of all men. Thus he objects to the "slavery question" being taken as the crux of American national development. After all, to focus on slavery and on America's response to it is to too strongly highlight the project of preserving our constitutional and natural liberties for Turner's taste. The poor fellow would prefer to see the Civil War utterly one-dimensionally, in terms only of a struggle for economic dominance via the Westward-moving juggernaut of the railroad (cf. the Lincoln-Douglass debates, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, for more on the influence of railroad building on northern political policy--and then note that Lincoln won). In other words, his interpretation of Columbus-as-ultimate-American is a picture of Columbus-as-rejector-of-tradition, concerned only with economic gain rather than with the spreading of a tradition rooted (despite its very human imperfections) in natural law.
Note that that's unfortunately the image of Columbus that somewhat prevails. And it's quite wrong. Columbus, whether you like him for this or not (and I don't agree with him entirely here, by any means), was rather a fanatical proponent of spreading religious tradition throughout the world, and rather too inclined to neglect science altogether in his attempts to do so. So that when the quite sufficiently-educated Spanish monks tried to convince him that his plan wouldn't work because the world was far too large for him to get all the way to China without dying for lack of supplies (of course they didn't believe in the flat earth: as my Am Civ teacher likes to point out, anyone who's even glanced at one of the old Spanish statues of the Christ child holding the orbis terrarum, the sphere of the earth, finds that myth knocked right off its feet, as if there wasn't plenty of other evidence to disprove it). Go ahead and read some of Columbus' letters and diaries, and you'll find a wealth of evidence pointing to a man so religiously dedicated to bringing about a quicker Second Coming of Christ that he wanted to devote his life to evangelizing the entire world as quickly as possibly. You won't find anything of the commonly fictionalized man of science, impatient with the close-mindedness of the greatest scientists of the late Renaissance, and devoted to discovery for the sake of discovery. Obviously, fanaticism of this sort is rather problematic, however sincere the man was, and I don't necessarily agree with his project, though I find it admirable in some respects.
Turner was defining him as the latter sort, merely by presenting this paper at the World's Columbian Exposition. Of course, the real practical question resulting from his paper is whether Americans in general are like this, not so much whether Columbus was. A definitive academic answer would require pages of exposition and proof. If you want an easier to come by response, I suggest talking to one or two of the more recently emigrated families you happen to know. Preferably if one of them happens to be Irish or Italian, in which case, they can probably remember the coming of their great-grandparents to this country with almost as intense emotion as the ancestors themselves must have felt. If you come away with a sense that "yes, I suppose that America is just all about becoming tabula rasa, liberated from any sense of familial or cultural inheritance, side with Turner. If the family retains a tendency to gripe about English wrongs or obsess about Grandma's meatballs, however...take your Turner with a grain of salt.
19 October, 2009
Anthony Cuda on Eliot: "T.S. Eliot's Etherized Patient"
From its first appearance in "Prufrock" to its reemergence in "East Coker" IV, the trope of the "patient etherized upon a table" is central to Eliot's poetry, Cuda argues; its development occurs in the undercurrent of conflict between passivity as a danger to the individual's spiritual progress and its necessity as a precursor to surrender to the divine. Passivity in "Prufrock" is to be feared: the image of the patient intensifies the sense of the vulnerability of the person left open to the action of random influence. Later theological development augments Eliot's awareness of the dangers associated with passivity- when allowed free reign in the conscience, pernicious influences have a disastrous effect. Yet Eliot's simultaneously growing recognition of the necessity of humble self-surrender to God, as particularly shown in "East Coker," creates a drastic conflict within his understanding of what it means to be passive. Eliot's eventual conclusion is that the terror of surrender can be accompanied by great spiritual joy if the passivity is a freely chosen acceptance of purgation; passivity is thus "transfigured in the light of the divine" (413). Cuda's argument hangs together, but is not improved by several significant departures into the realm of psychological/ biographical speculation which do no more than give a less-than-compelling recapitulation of the points which Cuda accurately proves from the poetry itself. Such digressions serve to make excessively long an otherwise creditable essay.
24 September, 2009
Some views of Venice
Gondolas: available for rent at the low, low rate of 60 euro a half hour!
Marino, the glass-blowers' island
19 September, 2009
08 September, 2009
The Fall Semester, Anno Domini 2009
My classes for this semester:
I'm most excited about that last one, in some ways, because I wasn't sure that I'd be able to do something like this until the very first day of class. Basically I went to the head of the French department (who is going on sabbatical this semester), told him that there was no way that I'd be able to get a French major with the extraordinarily limited (understandably so, since practically no one here studies what is arguably the foremost literary language besides English in the world as far as English speakers are concerned) number of course offerings in the language each semester. I mentioned the fact that T.S. Eliot is my poet for J-Po, and explained my corresponding interest in the Symbolist movement that so heavily influenced him. Then I stated my proposition for this semester: instead of taking a fascinating yet largely impractical class in Elementary Hebrew, couldn't a study the French symbolists under the guidance of one of the teachers? And surprisingly, the answer was an enthusiastic "yes"! So now I basically have the privilege of being able to spend all the free time which I am not devoting to T.S. Eliot reading about and interpreting the (very arcane) works of poets such as Laforgue, Verlaine, Corbiere, and the not-quite-symbolists-but-connected Gautier and Baudelaire. And to cap it all off, I get to randomly go and have long conversations with the magnificently erudite Dr. Dupree (who does everything from tech trouble shooting in every department, to translating volumes of French poetry, to teaching classes in Old English) about anything he finds remotely pertinent. What could be a better way to get in an eighteenth credit?
- The famous Junior Poet, probably the class most defining UD-ness both by its widespread reputation and its consummate awesomeness (and yes, the word choice there is deliberately mixed in tone)
- Medieval Lit, a requirement for English majors
- Russian Novel, a very interesting class led by two of the pillars of UD academia, Dr. Dupree and Dr. Cowan, son of Louise Cowan, and heir to some of the founders of the university
- French Literary Traditions I; this is after taking Lit Trad III last fall semester
- Elementary Russian I, taught by the Physics professor, who is fluent and makes up for our tragic lack of a Russian department in this Cold War-minded/capable of recognizing what de Tocqueville and similarly perspicacious men have always seen, ie that Russia and America share essential, and almost surreal similarities in a historical sense while differing wildly in culture school. (How's that for a tangled sentence? Basically I mean: UD should have a Russian department.)
- and finally, a special reading course in French Symbolist poetry
I'm most excited about that last one, in some ways, because I wasn't sure that I'd be able to do something like this until the very first day of class. Basically I went to the head of the French department (who is going on sabbatical this semester), told him that there was no way that I'd be able to get a French major with the extraordinarily limited (understandably so, since practically no one here studies what is arguably the foremost literary language besides English in the world as far as English speakers are concerned) number of course offerings in the language each semester. I mentioned the fact that T.S. Eliot is my poet for J-Po, and explained my corresponding interest in the Symbolist movement that so heavily influenced him. Then I stated my proposition for this semester: instead of taking a fascinating yet largely impractical class in Elementary Hebrew, couldn't a study the French symbolists under the guidance of one of the teachers? And surprisingly, the answer was an enthusiastic "yes"! So now I basically have the privilege of being able to spend all the free time which I am not devoting to T.S. Eliot reading about and interpreting the (very arcane) works of poets such as Laforgue, Verlaine, Corbiere, and the not-quite-symbolists-but-connected Gautier and Baudelaire. And to cap it all off, I get to randomly go and have long conversations with the magnificently erudite Dr. Dupree (who does everything from tech trouble shooting in every department, to translating volumes of French poetry, to teaching classes in Old English) about anything he finds remotely pertinent. What could be a better way to get in an eighteenth credit?
16 June, 2009
More JPo?
Huzzah! I'm quite excited and have good reason to be. I'm here in Chicago (long story, may be told later, if I feel like it) and was just talking to another English major from the University of Dallas. She's graduated, went on to graduate school at Christendom, and now has a masters from that school, I believe.
Anyway, I decided to ask her advice about taking six classes during the Junior poet semester. Would it be at all feasible, I wondered? A teacher and several (non-jpo taking) students had strongly discouraged it when I first signed up, so I had been second-guessing myself for a little while. But this most marvelous UD-er assured me that it might be tough, but it was definitely possible. And worth doing, too, since (and this was my reason for taking all six in the first place) they're really awesome classes which are either required for my major or won't be offered again during my time at school.
So here's the tentative list for next semester, the first one that I'm really excited about since I'm finally getting out of core classes (which are great but rather too easy) and moving on to some upper-level high interest stuff.
Anyway, I decided to ask her advice about taking six classes during the Junior poet semester. Would it be at all feasible, I wondered? A teacher and several (non-jpo taking) students had strongly discouraged it when I first signed up, so I had been second-guessing myself for a little while. But this most marvelous UD-er assured me that it might be tough, but it was definitely possible. And worth doing, too, since (and this was my reason for taking all six in the first place) they're really awesome classes which are either required for my major or won't be offered again during my time at school.
So here's the tentative list for next semester, the first one that I'm really excited about since I'm finally getting out of core classes (which are great but rather too easy) and moving on to some upper-level high interest stuff.
- Literary Study I (i.e. Junior poet)
- Medieval Literature
- Elementary Russian I
- Russian Novel
- Irish History
- French Literary Traditions II
01 June, 2009
Junior Poet and the (crazy?) upcoming semester
So this fall I'm going to be starting the famous Junior poet project that all UD English majors must complete before moving on in their academic careers... well, I mean, they could always scurry off to some ignominious alternative if the prospect of delving into the life and works of a single major English-language poet is too daunting. We leave them that choice. Yet no self-respecting English major would do that, not even one so intimidated by poetry as I.
Yes, I hate to break it to a scandalized world, but for all my obsession with the great classics of every age, I am not a fan of poetry. As a kid I hated the lack of storyline, and even more, despised the blatant emotionalism that characterized so much of it. I'm thinking Tennyson of Byron here, really, or maybe one of those typical English didactic poets who addressed poor Victorian children about the virtues of the ancient Romans. That these characterizations are a gross over-simplification I am well aware, but my childhood experience mars my enjoyment of fine verse nonetheless.
Yet I am slowly beginning to shed this prejudice, which means that there's some hope for me in the upcoming semester. I trace the first loosening of my unflinching disdain to my sophmore year in high school when I really read and listened to "The Raven" for the first time. Yes, it's an emotional poem, but the pulsing urgency of the rhythm captivated me, appealing as it did to my fascination with the sound and cadence of language.
Literary Traditions II at UD was another important step. I had a quite brilliant English teacher for this class, whose common-sense approach to poetry helped to weaken my vague idea that most poetry people were hopelessly head-in-the-clouds types who believed - in classic Rousseauian fashion - that the words of the poet came straight from the mouth of the divine forces of nature. And we covered a remarkable variety of verse, so with my exposure to the form somewhat increased, I began again to be delighted by the variety of styles, tones, rhythms, and so forth.
But for this class I return to the one poet I really have liked through all this time: T.S. Eliot. Some dislike what is seen as a tendency in his poetry to put all human experience under a microscope to examine the most common human emotions scientifically. He does have a penchant for intellectualization, but it is not so much an emotionless intellectualization as one that rebels against the simple conventions of poetic expression: why does the subject of poetry always have to be love, for instance, and why always the same two or three well-worn metaphors, once fresh, but now seldom more than lazy imitations of the brilliant poets of the past? And why must poetry idealize emotion for its own sake, as Rousseau and his ilk would have it?
There is a certain pessimism and cynicalness in his pre-conversion poetry, it's true. He's disillusioned with the world, caught up in a vortex of questions about the impact of temporality on human life, on the effect of language on human knowledge, on the apparent meaninglessness of modern life. These are concerns he retains after his conversion, but they are approached in a different way once he turns to Anglican Christianity to find a solution. There is still a sense of dissatisfaction with the world, but it is a dissatisfaction that points to a solution, often only subtly. There's no longer a feel of emptiness in the poems, as you end with after reading The Wasteland and his repetitive, slightly ominous, yet almost forlorn invocation of the thunder at the very end.
Anyway, those are just some preliminary ramblings on the fellow's work, based on my as yet quite superficial readings of his works. Plenty more musings will likely follow, because I think I'll probably have the subject on my mind more than once in the coming six months.
Yes, I hate to break it to a scandalized world, but for all my obsession with the great classics of every age, I am not a fan of poetry. As a kid I hated the lack of storyline, and even more, despised the blatant emotionalism that characterized so much of it. I'm thinking Tennyson of Byron here, really, or maybe one of those typical English didactic poets who addressed poor Victorian children about the virtues of the ancient Romans. That these characterizations are a gross over-simplification I am well aware, but my childhood experience mars my enjoyment of fine verse nonetheless.
Yet I am slowly beginning to shed this prejudice, which means that there's some hope for me in the upcoming semester. I trace the first loosening of my unflinching disdain to my sophmore year in high school when I really read and listened to "The Raven" for the first time. Yes, it's an emotional poem, but the pulsing urgency of the rhythm captivated me, appealing as it did to my fascination with the sound and cadence of language.
Literary Traditions II at UD was another important step. I had a quite brilliant English teacher for this class, whose common-sense approach to poetry helped to weaken my vague idea that most poetry people were hopelessly head-in-the-clouds types who believed - in classic Rousseauian fashion - that the words of the poet came straight from the mouth of the divine forces of nature. And we covered a remarkable variety of verse, so with my exposure to the form somewhat increased, I began again to be delighted by the variety of styles, tones, rhythms, and so forth.
But for this class I return to the one poet I really have liked through all this time: T.S. Eliot. Some dislike what is seen as a tendency in his poetry to put all human experience under a microscope to examine the most common human emotions scientifically. He does have a penchant for intellectualization, but it is not so much an emotionless intellectualization as one that rebels against the simple conventions of poetic expression: why does the subject of poetry always have to be love, for instance, and why always the same two or three well-worn metaphors, once fresh, but now seldom more than lazy imitations of the brilliant poets of the past? And why must poetry idealize emotion for its own sake, as Rousseau and his ilk would have it?
There is a certain pessimism and cynicalness in his pre-conversion poetry, it's true. He's disillusioned with the world, caught up in a vortex of questions about the impact of temporality on human life, on the effect of language on human knowledge, on the apparent meaninglessness of modern life. These are concerns he retains after his conversion, but they are approached in a different way once he turns to Anglican Christianity to find a solution. There is still a sense of dissatisfaction with the world, but it is a dissatisfaction that points to a solution, often only subtly. There's no longer a feel of emptiness in the poems, as you end with after reading The Wasteland and his repetitive, slightly ominous, yet almost forlorn invocation of the thunder at the very end.
Anyway, those are just some preliminary ramblings on the fellow's work, based on my as yet quite superficial readings of his works. Plenty more musings will likely follow, because I think I'll probably have the subject on my mind more than once in the coming six months.
03 May, 2009
Aristotle on the soul
One of the nicest things about Aristotle is the way he takes time to explain the definitions of the words and concepts with which he deals very clearly and to carefully clarify the relationship between the various terms of the definitions. I have to go over his definitions of soul for my Philosophy of Man final, so I figured I'd try to schematize and post them, for want of anything better to say.
The first full definition of soul that Aristotle gives in De Anima II,1 calls it “a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life potentially within it”. Aristotle here understands substance in the second sense that he presents, as the actuality of a body, or as basically identical with form. The form is “that precisely in virtue of which a thing is called a this” - it gives a body its identity as what it is, actualizing its matter, which at the most basic level is purely potential. The soul is the actuality of a body having life potentially within it in the sense of the “first grade of actuality”: that is to say, it is the principle which organizes the matter in such a way that a certain activity is proper to it. Aristotle is thus presenting a distinction between two types of actuality: whereas the second, most complete, level of actuality involves the active exercise of the function proper to a body's essence, first actuality simply involves possession of and readiness to use this function. It makes sense that the soul would be the first actuality rather than second, because Aristotle would by no means want to say that simply because a person were, for instance, not actively thinking, he would somehow not have a form at that point – a sleeping person has just as much of a soul as a waking one; the person who is awake is merely pushing the first actuality of possession of knowledge in his soul into second actuality by thinking it.
Aristotle follows up this definition with a second one that ties in a few more elements of his understanding of the soul. It is, he says, “a substance in the sense which corresponds to the definitive formula of a thing's essence”. It is the “essential whatness” of a body which has life potentially within it. This formulation emphasizes the relation of actuality to essence: the characteristic act of a body makes that body what it is, just as the activity of cutting wood makes an ax an ax. Whatever function is proper and essential to an object's way of being is its actuality and thus its essence.
The first full definition of soul that Aristotle gives in De Anima II,1 calls it “a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life potentially within it”. Aristotle here understands substance in the second sense that he presents, as the actuality of a body, or as basically identical with form. The form is “that precisely in virtue of which a thing is called a this” - it gives a body its identity as what it is, actualizing its matter, which at the most basic level is purely potential. The soul is the actuality of a body having life potentially within it in the sense of the “first grade of actuality”: that is to say, it is the principle which organizes the matter in such a way that a certain activity is proper to it. Aristotle is thus presenting a distinction between two types of actuality: whereas the second, most complete, level of actuality involves the active exercise of the function proper to a body's essence, first actuality simply involves possession of and readiness to use this function. It makes sense that the soul would be the first actuality rather than second, because Aristotle would by no means want to say that simply because a person were, for instance, not actively thinking, he would somehow not have a form at that point – a sleeping person has just as much of a soul as a waking one; the person who is awake is merely pushing the first actuality of possession of knowledge in his soul into second actuality by thinking it.
Aristotle follows up this definition with a second one that ties in a few more elements of his understanding of the soul. It is, he says, “a substance in the sense which corresponds to the definitive formula of a thing's essence”. It is the “essential whatness” of a body which has life potentially within it. This formulation emphasizes the relation of actuality to essence: the characteristic act of a body makes that body what it is, just as the activity of cutting wood makes an ax an ax. Whatever function is proper and essential to an object's way of being is its actuality and thus its essence.
20 April, 2009
Update
Sorry once again that things have sort of ground to a halt out here in cyberspace. We've had several major trips: in particular our ten day long spring break and an even more recent excursion to Venice, Florence and Assisi, so I'm both recouping from those and cooperating with my professors' need to catch up on all the work we haven't done so far. To boot, I'm sick. Not much, but there's an important history paper due in two days and to my chagrin I've only written three well-edited paragraphs of the thing.
Anyway, more later on all the brilliant things that happened, and on a few of the not so brilliant misadventures of spring break. For now, I return immediately to study in hopes that it will finally be effective despite a general fogginess currently pervading my brain. (This last sentence could possibly be offensive to Gilbert Ryle, the under-publicized but incredibly perceptive 20th century philosophy whose work we're now studying in philosophy.)
Anyway, more later on all the brilliant things that happened, and on a few of the not so brilliant misadventures of spring break. For now, I return immediately to study in hopes that it will finally be effective despite a general fogginess currently pervading my brain. (This last sentence could possibly be offensive to Gilbert Ryle, the under-publicized but incredibly perceptive 20th century philosophy whose work we're now studying in philosophy.)
16 March, 2009
The Problem with Learning
At several points throughout the Platonic dialogues, the “learners paradox,” also known as “Meno's paradox,” is raised as the foremost problem any epistemological investigation must face. “How,” it queries, is learning possible if one does not know to begin with what one must learn?” (Meno, 80d). Whatever solutions have been offered since Plato's time, and whatever their merits, the paradox remains in the background of any discussion of how we acquire knowledge. Indeed, one might even say that the paradox does not merely present a problem in its own right, but rather in its own way expresses the most fundamental problem that all investigation of this sort faces: how is it possible for us to come to know the world in the face of the chasm that exists between our sensory experience and our knowledge? According to the paradox, we do not know reality, yet somehow seem to be capable of coming to know it; how can our sensory experience be any help at all to us in this endeavor if we do not already know what we seek? Unlike later philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, do not try to solve this problem by denying our ability to come to know reality: rather, they affirm despite all odds that there is a reality which exists independently of us which we can somehow come to know. Thus, if the learner's paradox really is as fundamental and problematic as it seems, judgment of either philosopher's epistemology will at some point find it necessary to examine how well they provide an answer to this puzzle.
The model for acquisition of knowledge implicit in Plato's Phaedo is in certain respects remarkably similar to Aristotle's. The discussion midway through the dialogue of the “Theory of Recollection” assumes, just as Aristotle does, that knowledge of the reality of things is reached through sensory experience of particulars through which one is able to abstract universal truths. “Surely,” Socrates remarks, “this conception of ours derives from seeing or touching or some other sense perception, and cannot come into our mind in any other way” (Phaedo, 75a). Likewise Aristotle observes that men “by nature desire to know” and thus take “delight. . .in [their] senses” which allow them to acquire knowledge (Metaphysics, I,1).
Beyond this core similarity, however, there are many obvious discrepancies between the arguments, most notably the language of recollection present in Plato but absent in Aristotle. For Socrates, it is important that his epistemology retain this language, at least in the Phaedo, because his argument is in the first place trying to prove the immortality of the soul. Thus one central motivation for using this language turns out to be incidental to Plato's actual view of the soul's learning process. But there nonetheless must be more compelling reasons to preserve this manner of speaking, as it is a common thread of multiple dialogues (Phaedo, Meno, and Phaedrus, for example), becoming, at least apparently, characteristic of Plato's philosophy. This more compelling reason is his need to answer the learner's paradox. According to a literal reading of the texts, Plato's solution to this conundrum is to deny that there is anything at all that we do not know. “There is nothing” Socrates claims, “that [the soul] has not learned”; all knowledge is present in the soul by virtue of its long experience and many reincarnations (Meno, 81c). Our seeming ignorance on earth is merely the result of our immortal soul's descent into a body, a material object which so muddles and confuses it that it forgets all its certain knowledge at birth. The solution to the paradox is in essence then, a claim that we both know and do not know everything we will experience. As a soul alone we know the forms of all things, but as a human being, we must struggle through possibly misleading sensory experience to “recall” that which we have now forgotten.
This solution is unthinkable for Aristotle. His hylomorphic view of the human person is central in his philosophy, and the belief that the soul is the form of the body makes recollection from a pre-corporeal existence is impossible. At a time when there was no body, there could have been no soul existing separately and possessing knowledge in its own right as a substance independent of the body. However, if Aristotle must reject Plato's solution, his theory of learning is faced afresh with the problem of the paradox. Nonetheless, we have examined Plato's solution only in a literal sense thus far. As it will turn out, there is a way of interpreting Plato's epistemology which brings it even closer to Aristotle's, and this reconciliation may perhaps prove useful in directing our approach to determining whether Aristotle's philosophy can present a viable solution to the learner's paradox.
Plato's literal solution relies exclusively upon the language of recollection, yet evidence from Phaedrus points to another possible interpretation of how we can understand recollection to begin with. Though he uses the image of a person remembering what he has known in a pre-corporeal state in both Meno and Phaedo to clarify his point, in Phaedrus Plato presents the object of “recollection” as “the Idea, a unity gathered together by reason” (Phaedrus, 249c). In other words, recollection perhaps is not so much remembering as the ability to recognize a thing according to its place in the universal sum of knowledge by means of the logical apparatus and capacity to recognize truth which are in man by nature. Phrased this way, in admittedly non-Platonic language, the position reveals its similarity to Aristotle's. Aristotle understands the mind as the sum of all knowledge, a concept remarkably similar to Plato's “unity gathered together by reason”. He even goes so far as to call it “the place of forms”, the forms being both for him and for Plato, the truly knowable aspect of a being (De Anima, III,4). The mind is, moreover, the single aspect of the soul which lives on after death, a point which recalls Plato's assertion that the soul, the proper knower of all things, is immortal (De Anima, II,2). Thus the two philosophers agree that the soul is the true location of all knowledge and that the soul understood in this sense is immortal: Aristotle's epistemology does not differ from Plato's in these respects, at least. Though this has taken us a long way towards reconciling the two epistemologies however, it turns out that it does not really solve our initial problem. In order to effect this reconciliation, I had to employ essentially Aristotelean language to explain Plato's position. Only when the language of potentiality and actuality is introduced and applied to this statement does it begin to sound like the full solution Aristotle's ideas can lead us to.
Aristotle's introduction to Western thought of the distinction between actuality and potentiality is the single major difference between the two philosophers that I will address here. Meno's paradox presupposes that we can be in only two states with respect to our knowledge of a given thing: one of positive knowledge or one of complete ignorance and unfamiliarity. Plato points towards Aristotle's solution by presenting a sort of “third manner” of knowing: knowing perfectly in the soul while the human person as a whole knows imperfectly but can recollect the knowledge of the soul given sufficient help. Applied to the learner's paradox, Aristotle's theory of knowledge takes the idea of a “third way” even further. All human beings, he says, are fully capable of knowing all truth. That is, we by nature are innately receptive of truth: we have the intrinsic ability to receive truth when presented with it, even if not previously knowing it in action. Actual knowledge may be absent, but it is absent in such a way that when presented with it, we are able to tell what it is and where it belongs. This is a round about way of expressing the idea that all knowledge of truth “is present”—though such language is inadequate to express the nature of potentiality—potentially in our souls. Acquisition of knowledge is simply actualization of this potential.
Thus, we see that Plato can be read as pointing towards a theory of knowledge that Aristotle later develops by introducing the distinction between actuality and potentiality. Though we cannot accept Plato's original model of the soul as a separate, all-knowing entity whose knowledge we remember over the course of a muddled lifetime if, like Aristotle, we want to preserve the idea that the soul is the form of the body, the alternate interpretation of Plato hints at Aristotle's resolution of this difficulty by altering our understanding of what recollection consists of. Knowledge is in some sense “in” the mind for Aristotle as well as for Plato. The literal answer to the learner's paradox—that we know all things anyway because our soul has already encountered them—must be discarded in light of the Aristotelean understanding of the human person. However, in establishing the language of potentiality and actuality, Aristotle in turn can provide a resolution to the problem of how to gain knowledge by expressing our potential to receive knowledge as our means of “knowing” what we don't know, and therefore as the grounds for its eventual drawing out and actualization.
The model for acquisition of knowledge implicit in Plato's Phaedo is in certain respects remarkably similar to Aristotle's. The discussion midway through the dialogue of the “Theory of Recollection” assumes, just as Aristotle does, that knowledge of the reality of things is reached through sensory experience of particulars through which one is able to abstract universal truths. “Surely,” Socrates remarks, “this conception of ours derives from seeing or touching or some other sense perception, and cannot come into our mind in any other way” (Phaedo, 75a). Likewise Aristotle observes that men “by nature desire to know” and thus take “delight. . .in [their] senses” which allow them to acquire knowledge (Metaphysics, I,1).
Beyond this core similarity, however, there are many obvious discrepancies between the arguments, most notably the language of recollection present in Plato but absent in Aristotle. For Socrates, it is important that his epistemology retain this language, at least in the Phaedo, because his argument is in the first place trying to prove the immortality of the soul. Thus one central motivation for using this language turns out to be incidental to Plato's actual view of the soul's learning process. But there nonetheless must be more compelling reasons to preserve this manner of speaking, as it is a common thread of multiple dialogues (Phaedo, Meno, and Phaedrus, for example), becoming, at least apparently, characteristic of Plato's philosophy. This more compelling reason is his need to answer the learner's paradox. According to a literal reading of the texts, Plato's solution to this conundrum is to deny that there is anything at all that we do not know. “There is nothing” Socrates claims, “that [the soul] has not learned”; all knowledge is present in the soul by virtue of its long experience and many reincarnations (Meno, 81c). Our seeming ignorance on earth is merely the result of our immortal soul's descent into a body, a material object which so muddles and confuses it that it forgets all its certain knowledge at birth. The solution to the paradox is in essence then, a claim that we both know and do not know everything we will experience. As a soul alone we know the forms of all things, but as a human being, we must struggle through possibly misleading sensory experience to “recall” that which we have now forgotten.
This solution is unthinkable for Aristotle. His hylomorphic view of the human person is central in his philosophy, and the belief that the soul is the form of the body makes recollection from a pre-corporeal existence is impossible. At a time when there was no body, there could have been no soul existing separately and possessing knowledge in its own right as a substance independent of the body. However, if Aristotle must reject Plato's solution, his theory of learning is faced afresh with the problem of the paradox. Nonetheless, we have examined Plato's solution only in a literal sense thus far. As it will turn out, there is a way of interpreting Plato's epistemology which brings it even closer to Aristotle's, and this reconciliation may perhaps prove useful in directing our approach to determining whether Aristotle's philosophy can present a viable solution to the learner's paradox.
Plato's literal solution relies exclusively upon the language of recollection, yet evidence from Phaedrus points to another possible interpretation of how we can understand recollection to begin with. Though he uses the image of a person remembering what he has known in a pre-corporeal state in both Meno and Phaedo to clarify his point, in Phaedrus Plato presents the object of “recollection” as “the Idea, a unity gathered together by reason” (Phaedrus, 249c). In other words, recollection perhaps is not so much remembering as the ability to recognize a thing according to its place in the universal sum of knowledge by means of the logical apparatus and capacity to recognize truth which are in man by nature. Phrased this way, in admittedly non-Platonic language, the position reveals its similarity to Aristotle's. Aristotle understands the mind as the sum of all knowledge, a concept remarkably similar to Plato's “unity gathered together by reason”. He even goes so far as to call it “the place of forms”, the forms being both for him and for Plato, the truly knowable aspect of a being (De Anima, III,4). The mind is, moreover, the single aspect of the soul which lives on after death, a point which recalls Plato's assertion that the soul, the proper knower of all things, is immortal (De Anima, II,2). Thus the two philosophers agree that the soul is the true location of all knowledge and that the soul understood in this sense is immortal: Aristotle's epistemology does not differ from Plato's in these respects, at least. Though this has taken us a long way towards reconciling the two epistemologies however, it turns out that it does not really solve our initial problem. In order to effect this reconciliation, I had to employ essentially Aristotelean language to explain Plato's position. Only when the language of potentiality and actuality is introduced and applied to this statement does it begin to sound like the full solution Aristotle's ideas can lead us to.
Aristotle's introduction to Western thought of the distinction between actuality and potentiality is the single major difference between the two philosophers that I will address here. Meno's paradox presupposes that we can be in only two states with respect to our knowledge of a given thing: one of positive knowledge or one of complete ignorance and unfamiliarity. Plato points towards Aristotle's solution by presenting a sort of “third manner” of knowing: knowing perfectly in the soul while the human person as a whole knows imperfectly but can recollect the knowledge of the soul given sufficient help. Applied to the learner's paradox, Aristotle's theory of knowledge takes the idea of a “third way” even further. All human beings, he says, are fully capable of knowing all truth. That is, we by nature are innately receptive of truth: we have the intrinsic ability to receive truth when presented with it, even if not previously knowing it in action. Actual knowledge may be absent, but it is absent in such a way that when presented with it, we are able to tell what it is and where it belongs. This is a round about way of expressing the idea that all knowledge of truth “is present”—though such language is inadequate to express the nature of potentiality—potentially in our souls. Acquisition of knowledge is simply actualization of this potential.
Thus, we see that Plato can be read as pointing towards a theory of knowledge that Aristotle later develops by introducing the distinction between actuality and potentiality. Though we cannot accept Plato's original model of the soul as a separate, all-knowing entity whose knowledge we remember over the course of a muddled lifetime if, like Aristotle, we want to preserve the idea that the soul is the form of the body, the alternate interpretation of Plato hints at Aristotle's resolution of this difficulty by altering our understanding of what recollection consists of. Knowledge is in some sense “in” the mind for Aristotle as well as for Plato. The literal answer to the learner's paradox—that we know all things anyway because our soul has already encountered them—must be discarded in light of the Aristotelean understanding of the human person. However, in establishing the language of potentiality and actuality, Aristotle in turn can provide a resolution to the problem of how to gain knowledge by expressing our potential to receive knowledge as our means of “knowing” what we don't know, and therefore as the grounds for its eventual drawing out and actualization.
04 March, 2009
Cucumber Melon
I always get a kick out of the general tenor of people's reactions when I touch on anything we study here at UD. Ancient literary classics, Euclid, Aristotle, Church Fathers. . .'how boring!' Well, not really. It doesn't take an excessive amount of natural astuteness, really not even a grand degree of nerdiness, to begin to find these texts vastly amusing.
You perhaps don't believe me. Perhaps you mutter to yourself various epithets describing me as an excessive nerd. Perhaps you think my testimony is unreliable.
Read this.
Just for a bit of background, this is an excerpt from the writings of St. Irenaeus' massive work Against Heresies. He's attacking the absurdity of the Gnostic myths explaining the creation of the world, and in so doing uses this hilarious example.
You perhaps don't believe me. Perhaps you mutter to yourself various epithets describing me as an excessive nerd. Perhaps you think my testimony is unreliable.
Read this.
Just for a bit of background, this is an excerpt from the writings of St. Irenaeus' massive work Against Heresies. He's attacking the absurdity of the Gnostic myths explaining the creation of the world, and in so doing uses this hilarious example.
Iu, Iu! Pheu, Pheu!— for well may we utter these tragic exclamations at such a pitch of audacity in the coining of names as he has displayed without a blush, in devising a nomenclature for his system of falsehood. For when he declares: There is a certain Proarche before all things, surpassing all thought, whom I call Monotes; and again, with this Monotes there co-exists a power which I also call Henotes,— it is most manifest that he confesses the things which have been said to be his own invention, and that he himself has given names to his scheme of things, which had never been previously suggested by any other. It is manifest also, that he himself is the one who has had sufficient audacity to coin these names; so that, unless he had appeared in the world, the truth would still have been destitute of a name. But, in that case, nothing hinders any other, in dealing with the same subject, to affix names after such a fashion as the following: There is a certain Proarche, royal, surpassing all thought, a power existing before every other substance, and extended into space in every direction. But along with it there exists a power which I term a Gourd; and along with this Gourd there exists a power which again I term Utter-Emptiness. This Gourd and Emptiness, since they are one, produced (and yet did not simply produce, so as to be apart from themselves) a fruit, everywhere visible, eatable, and delicious, which fruit-language calls a Cucumber. Along with this Cucumber exists a power of the same essence, which again I call a Melon. These powers, the Gourd, Utter-Emptiness, the Cucumber, and the Melon, brought forth the remaining multitude of the delirious melons of Valentinus. For if it is fitting that that language which is used respecting the universe be transformed to the primary Tetrad, and if any one may assign names at his pleasure, who shall prevent us from adopting these names, as being much more credible [than the others], as well as in general use, and understood by all?
26 January, 2009
Let the classes begin!
I'm not sure, having just completed the first day of class, how regularly I'll be able to keep up this blog. I should at least be able to write once a week, but as for more than that, I'm not sure.
The reading assignments are rather heavy, UD-style, but I'm not particularly concerned about the academic side of things by itself. Rather, I'm rather worried that all the mandatory meetings in which people regal us with hours of marvelously boring information that any one of us to keep our ears open over the past few days would know by heart already. I write satirically, as I know there is an unfortunately high rate of people who don't listen at most universities. But such hours of fidgeting make the ability to bilocate particularly appealing.
With that bit of complaining out of the way, I must say without reservation that the three classes we began today promise to be a blast. We have nearly 15 books for English, some of which (collections of Greek plays, for instance) we will not be reading in their entirety. Nonetheless, our English program for the Rome semester should cover quite a lot of material indeed, ranging from Greek to Shakespearean drama and focusing on the genres of tragedy and comedy as lenses through which we can approach a literary study of reality. The Philosophy of Man class is also exciting, partly because it will probably address one of the subjects that has been on my mind recently, namely, the relationship of Plato's and Aristotle's epistemologies. An Art and Architecture course is also required for this semester, and one of the fun things about this class is that a great many of the meetings will be held on site in Rome or in various locations around Italy.
I'm really psyched about getting a deeper understanding of a coherent view of the nature of reality and the meaning of life from this semester. I mean, come on. . .the meaning of life! What could jolly well be cooler?
The reading assignments are rather heavy, UD-style, but I'm not particularly concerned about the academic side of things by itself. Rather, I'm rather worried that all the mandatory meetings in which people regal us with hours of marvelously boring information that any one of us to keep our ears open over the past few days would know by heart already. I write satirically, as I know there is an unfortunately high rate of people who don't listen at most universities. But such hours of fidgeting make the ability to bilocate particularly appealing.
With that bit of complaining out of the way, I must say without reservation that the three classes we began today promise to be a blast. We have nearly 15 books for English, some of which (collections of Greek plays, for instance) we will not be reading in their entirety. Nonetheless, our English program for the Rome semester should cover quite a lot of material indeed, ranging from Greek to Shakespearean drama and focusing on the genres of tragedy and comedy as lenses through which we can approach a literary study of reality. The Philosophy of Man class is also exciting, partly because it will probably address one of the subjects that has been on my mind recently, namely, the relationship of Plato's and Aristotle's epistemologies. An Art and Architecture course is also required for this semester, and one of the fun things about this class is that a great many of the meetings will be held on site in Rome or in various locations around Italy.
I'm really psyched about getting a deeper understanding of a coherent view of the nature of reality and the meaning of life from this semester. I mean, come on. . .the meaning of life! What could jolly well be cooler?
18 November, 2008
Slavery's Destruction of the Family
This small paper begins to get at some of what I was talking about previously, though it's not in any sense complete. I'm only focusing on the family here, and even my treatment of that is quite restricted due to length limits. It's a good pre-exercise for the real thing, though. The prompt here was "What role does the cabin play as the dominent image in Stowe's argument against slavery?"
Given the title of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic protest against slavery, it is not surprising that Uncle Tom's cabin plays an important symbolic role in her argument. This cabin, as the center of Uncle Tom's family life, represents the most sacred and fundamental unit of human society. However, in a slave-owning society, both Uncle Tom and his home are no more than pieces of property, vulnerable at any moment to separation. According to Stowe, the social and moral ills of slavery are rooted in the destruction of the family, in robbing human beings of the capacity to create a safe and secure home.
Physically present for only a few brief pages towards the beginning of the book, the cabin nevertheless acts as the dominant image of slavery's catastrophic effect on family life, particularly in its later conspicuous absence. First presented as a neat, welcoming sanctuary of family life, with its "neat garden patch" and good food, the position of this "snug territory" is nonetheless insecure (Stowe, 32). Its status as center of life for the small community of relations and friends on the estate is legally subordinate to that of the master's "close adjoining" house (Stowe, 32). The preceding scenes in which the master and trader plan to sell Tom, the spiritual and familial head of this small community, make the reader aware that the most attentive efforts of a slave to create a happy, peaceful household are in vain if the master finds it convenient to break up this state by selling a member of the family. Tom is sold, removed from his home and family in order to satisfy the debts of a relatively decent master. He has no right to defend his home; no liberty to fight for himself and the welfare of those he loves. Not only is his lifestyle insecure, but he has no freedom to secure it.
The motif of the breaking up of familial relationships continues from the time Tom is sold to the end of the narrative. George and Eliza Harris' desperate bid to preserve their family in a free land, Topsy's lack of a good and loving upbringing, and Cassy's bitterness at having been robbed of her daughter and of the chance of a stable family demonstrate how this legal and societal lack of respect for the home of a slave plagues those who live in such a society. Thus, even in the best of circumstances where a kind master and mistress allow the foundation of such a community among the slaves, the home cannot truly flourish. The system of slavery destroys the essential characteristic of security in family life by viewing people as property, liable to be sold to satisfy a good master's debts or a bad master's whims. As another decent slave owner, Augustine St. Clare puts it, the heart of the evil of slavery does not lie in its "abuses": "the thing itself is the essence of all abuse" (Stowe, 262).
During Tom's absence, his cabin is "shut up" (Stowe, 301). He is robbed of it and it is robbed of him. Not until the very end is this break in some sense healed. George Shelby—himself a former honorary member of Uncle Tom's family, though the master's son—frees the slaves and removes this insecurity from them "in case of [his] getting in debt or dying" (Stowe, 509). The cruel fate of Uncle Tom had caused Shelby to resolve "that nobody, through me, should ever run the risk of being parted from home and friends, and dying on a lonely plantation" (Stowe, 509). His final exhortaion to his former servants serves as an exhortation to Stowe's readers as well. "Think of your freedom," he says, "every time you see Uncle Tom's cabin"; this simple house will be a reminder of the evils of slavery that tear apart the family and uproot a loving household (Stowe, 509).
Given the title of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic protest against slavery, it is not surprising that Uncle Tom's cabin plays an important symbolic role in her argument. This cabin, as the center of Uncle Tom's family life, represents the most sacred and fundamental unit of human society. However, in a slave-owning society, both Uncle Tom and his home are no more than pieces of property, vulnerable at any moment to separation. According to Stowe, the social and moral ills of slavery are rooted in the destruction of the family, in robbing human beings of the capacity to create a safe and secure home.
Physically present for only a few brief pages towards the beginning of the book, the cabin nevertheless acts as the dominant image of slavery's catastrophic effect on family life, particularly in its later conspicuous absence. First presented as a neat, welcoming sanctuary of family life, with its "neat garden patch" and good food, the position of this "snug territory" is nonetheless insecure (Stowe, 32). Its status as center of life for the small community of relations and friends on the estate is legally subordinate to that of the master's "close adjoining" house (Stowe, 32). The preceding scenes in which the master and trader plan to sell Tom, the spiritual and familial head of this small community, make the reader aware that the most attentive efforts of a slave to create a happy, peaceful household are in vain if the master finds it convenient to break up this state by selling a member of the family. Tom is sold, removed from his home and family in order to satisfy the debts of a relatively decent master. He has no right to defend his home; no liberty to fight for himself and the welfare of those he loves. Not only is his lifestyle insecure, but he has no freedom to secure it.
The motif of the breaking up of familial relationships continues from the time Tom is sold to the end of the narrative. George and Eliza Harris' desperate bid to preserve their family in a free land, Topsy's lack of a good and loving upbringing, and Cassy's bitterness at having been robbed of her daughter and of the chance of a stable family demonstrate how this legal and societal lack of respect for the home of a slave plagues those who live in such a society. Thus, even in the best of circumstances where a kind master and mistress allow the foundation of such a community among the slaves, the home cannot truly flourish. The system of slavery destroys the essential characteristic of security in family life by viewing people as property, liable to be sold to satisfy a good master's debts or a bad master's whims. As another decent slave owner, Augustine St. Clare puts it, the heart of the evil of slavery does not lie in its "abuses": "the thing itself is the essence of all abuse" (Stowe, 262).
During Tom's absence, his cabin is "shut up" (Stowe, 301). He is robbed of it and it is robbed of him. Not until the very end is this break in some sense healed. George Shelby—himself a former honorary member of Uncle Tom's family, though the master's son—frees the slaves and removes this insecurity from them "in case of [his] getting in debt or dying" (Stowe, 509). The cruel fate of Uncle Tom had caused Shelby to resolve "that nobody, through me, should ever run the risk of being parted from home and friends, and dying on a lonely plantation" (Stowe, 509). His final exhortaion to his former servants serves as an exhortation to Stowe's readers as well. "Think of your freedom," he says, "every time you see Uncle Tom's cabin"; this simple house will be a reminder of the evils of slavery that tear apart the family and uproot a loving household (Stowe, 509).
16 November, 2008
Jolly exciting, all this!
Going back to what I was saying last night:
Essentially, Stowe's argument is that slavery dehumanizes people by treating them like "isolated selves", as though they were individual pawns to be separated from ties of family and friends at the whim of their masters. There is no recognition in law of their personal identity in terms of their family or larger community. You see this in her constant centering of the plot around various types of homes: we start in the "ideal" slave-owning household where the slaves are treated with incredible kindness by their owners. The lack of respect in law for their community however results in Uncle Tom and Eliza (for her son's sake) being torn from this community in order to satisfy his master's debts. The first dozen chapters end with Eliza arriving safely at the idyllic Quaker home in the north. The second dozen follow Uncle Tom south to where we find Eva, a sort of symbol of purity in the midst of the deep south, saddened by the sin of her own home and longing for an eternal one. Finally we have the tragic scene where Uncle Tom is killed yet dies a freer man than any of his murderers because he has held on to the one community - the Christian (real Christian) community that no earthly law can rob him of.
This is all pretty evident from even the most brief summary. The real controversy remains whether this is at all what Douglass and Jacobs are trying to say. (Fortunately we only have to deal in detail with Douglass for the paper - if we had to treat Jacobs too, this really could get to dissertation length.) Just as with Stowe's book, Douglass's argument becomes much more apparent if you start by looking at it from a more architectonic standpoint. Chapter 1 opens with Douglass' regrets that he knows neither his birthday nor his father nor his mother. Chapter 2 centers around his lack of a home and on the slaves' innate attraction to the idea of the "Great House Farm" which will be not just their master's but theirs as well. In chapter 3 we get an account of his inability to live the way he wishes to - not just of his lack of independence to do whatever he feels like, but of his freedom to live well: he speaks of how slavery creates a disjunct between the "thoughts of the heart" and one's moral obligations, and what the slaves must in fact say and do. They are forced to lie, to ignore familial bonds, to keep their own self-interest at the forefront of their minds if they are to survive at all. The introduction of the overseer in the fourth chapter and accounts of killings perpetrated by him and his ilk for which the slaves have no hope of legal redress emphasize the lack of protection in law for their community. (Isn't this cool stuff?) Finally, in chapter five and following, Douglass learns to read. This reintroduces him to a community, gives him a notion of it that in turn gives him the courage to claim his freedom. Once able to read he has "reached the period in [his] life when [he] can give dates"; he receives a new set of "fathers" in the figures of the Founding Fathers and others whose writings educate him in a sense of his humanity; in the language of scripture, he receives a new mother tongue. When he finally has this new sense of community (sense of time, forebears, church), of where he belongs as an individual in relation to other people, he fights to preserve it.
So that's the idea, more or less, from an architectonic point of view. Seven pages will leave plenty of room for explicit quotations and so forth, which will be fun.
Essentially, Stowe's argument is that slavery dehumanizes people by treating them like "isolated selves", as though they were individual pawns to be separated from ties of family and friends at the whim of their masters. There is no recognition in law of their personal identity in terms of their family or larger community. You see this in her constant centering of the plot around various types of homes: we start in the "ideal" slave-owning household where the slaves are treated with incredible kindness by their owners. The lack of respect in law for their community however results in Uncle Tom and Eliza (for her son's sake) being torn from this community in order to satisfy his master's debts. The first dozen chapters end with Eliza arriving safely at the idyllic Quaker home in the north. The second dozen follow Uncle Tom south to where we find Eva, a sort of symbol of purity in the midst of the deep south, saddened by the sin of her own home and longing for an eternal one. Finally we have the tragic scene where Uncle Tom is killed yet dies a freer man than any of his murderers because he has held on to the one community - the Christian (real Christian) community that no earthly law can rob him of.
This is all pretty evident from even the most brief summary. The real controversy remains whether this is at all what Douglass and Jacobs are trying to say. (Fortunately we only have to deal in detail with Douglass for the paper - if we had to treat Jacobs too, this really could get to dissertation length.) Just as with Stowe's book, Douglass's argument becomes much more apparent if you start by looking at it from a more architectonic standpoint. Chapter 1 opens with Douglass' regrets that he knows neither his birthday nor his father nor his mother. Chapter 2 centers around his lack of a home and on the slaves' innate attraction to the idea of the "Great House Farm" which will be not just their master's but theirs as well. In chapter 3 we get an account of his inability to live the way he wishes to - not just of his lack of independence to do whatever he feels like, but of his freedom to live well: he speaks of how slavery creates a disjunct between the "thoughts of the heart" and one's moral obligations, and what the slaves must in fact say and do. They are forced to lie, to ignore familial bonds, to keep their own self-interest at the forefront of their minds if they are to survive at all. The introduction of the overseer in the fourth chapter and accounts of killings perpetrated by him and his ilk for which the slaves have no hope of legal redress emphasize the lack of protection in law for their community. (Isn't this cool stuff?) Finally, in chapter five and following, Douglass learns to read. This reintroduces him to a community, gives him a notion of it that in turn gives him the courage to claim his freedom. Once able to read he has "reached the period in [his] life when [he] can give dates"; he receives a new set of "fathers" in the figures of the Founding Fathers and others whose writings educate him in a sense of his humanity; in the language of scripture, he receives a new mother tongue. When he finally has this new sense of community (sense of time, forebears, church), of where he belongs as an individual in relation to other people, he fights to preserve it.
So that's the idea, more or less, from an architectonic point of view. Seven pages will leave plenty of room for explicit quotations and so forth, which will be fun.
Another seven page paper!
Well, I've got another 7-page paper assigned in American Civ. The prompt is even more exciting than the last one. Seriously, you could write a dissertation on the thing. The actual prompt is only a sentence long: "Does Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin betray or convey the slaves' own argument against slavery." Ok. Maybe on first reading it doesn't sound all that enthralling (or maybe it does). But if you've been doing the reading, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, if you know even a bit about the virulent controversy revolving around the question of the proper way to interpret the slave's demand for freedom and the black Americans' demand for civil rights (Martin Luther King vs Malcom X, anyone?), and if you've just been bowled over by the realization that Uncle Tom's Cabin isn't just a silly, sentimental novel but has a valid and well-structured argument at its base, you probably will reconsider.
Add to that the fact that Dr. Hanssen handed out several very cool readings - one from Cicero (De Officiis) on how we can understand man's natural rights in terms of his moral obligations, one from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, an excerpt from John Paul II's "Veritatis Splendor" which discusses intrinsically evil acts, part of an address from Pope Benedict, and a very interesting chapter from a book about women's experiences in slavery by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese - and you can see how this paper has the potential to be very fun indeed. I'm going to argue that Uncle Tom's Cabin, contrary to the ideas of more recent literary criticism ("more recent" being the '60s), does in fact convey the Douglass' and Jacob's main argument against slavery. How does it do that? Well, that's where everything should get so interesting, of course.
I shall post about it tomorrow.
Add to that the fact that Dr. Hanssen handed out several very cool readings - one from Cicero (De Officiis) on how we can understand man's natural rights in terms of his moral obligations, one from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, an excerpt from John Paul II's "Veritatis Splendor" which discusses intrinsically evil acts, part of an address from Pope Benedict, and a very interesting chapter from a book about women's experiences in slavery by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese - and you can see how this paper has the potential to be very fun indeed. I'm going to argue that Uncle Tom's Cabin, contrary to the ideas of more recent literary criticism ("more recent" being the '60s), does in fact convey the Douglass' and Jacob's main argument against slavery. How does it do that? Well, that's where everything should get so interesting, of course.
I shall post about it tomorrow.
02 November, 2008
A Practical Religion
“I fancy,” Benjamin Franklin muses in discussing his famous decision to run away from his apprenticeship, “[my brother's] harsh and tyrannical Treatment of me, might be a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro' my whole Life” (Franklin, 69). This is only a side comment – no more than a note to the main text, in fact – yet it succinctly summarizes the spirit of Franklin's legendary bid for independence. Preceding this symbolic break with the convention of apprenticeship, he had already broken with his family's conventional Puritan religion in favor of a temperate liberal deism, but it was not until several years later that he codified his personal beliefs. The thirteen precepts he outlines focus entirely on moral issues and he refuses to favor any specific doctrinal teachings. Franklin's approach underscores his independence and practicality in all spheres of life. He “conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral Perfection” in a spirit of self-sufficient practicality which led him to renounce the authority of church dogma in favor of the natural virtues which could be ecumenically agreed upon and which a man of any religion could follow to become a model of “Probity and Integrity” (Franklin, 148, 158).
His moral code is marked above all by an ethic of tolerance which stems in part from a laudable desire to respect individual freedom, but also from a distorted definition of humility. In his list of virtues, humility stands at the end as a sort of addendum expressing his overarching concept of religious tolerance. “Imitate Jesus and Socrates” he instructs himself (Franklin, 150). The dichotomy in this instruction, obvious to anyone who understands Jesus as the Answer which Socrates stubbornly denies knowing, seems unapparent to Franklin. He strove for the classic Socratic modesty of “knowing that he knows nothing” and gains “at least the Appearance” of such humility, but it is not the humility of a Christian which arises from actual though unmerited knowledge of the Truth (Franklin, 157). Franklin's definition may indeed suffice for most practical purposes, and his primary concern was “the Utility and Excellency of [his] Method” (157). Through it he hoped to encourage human virtues among all sects. Reserving declarations of knowledge would promote respect for individual freedom with regard to beliefs about God and the nature of life, and adoption of a non-doctrinal code of virtue would, he believed, be in “every one's Interest... who wished to be happy even in this world” (Franklin, 158).
In evaluating the benefits of Franklin's purely moral religion, one must distinguish between its application in the sphere of government versus its application in the individual. Reducing religion to moral precepts discoverable by reason may be justified in the public sphere. Indeed, in a world where the religious turmoil of the 1500s and 1600s still reverberated throughout the West, removing governmental attachment to any “particular Sect” would be wise (Franklin, 157). However, within a church or an individual soul such tolerance becomes no more than false humility. Assuming that churches typically claim to be qualified to lead their members to the truth of Christ (or whatever else they hold to be ultimate truth), they must have certain convictions in context of which other beliefs are considered wrong. The human person, moreover, created for the truth as he is, will (like Franklin) be incapable of attaining true victory over pride, that “one of our natural Passions [most] hard to subdue,” if he does not recognize that there is a truth much deeper than the moral rules man can discover through unaided reason (Franklin, 160). Franklin's ethic of tolerance, then, is a useful guide for the government's approach to religious matters, but it cannot on its own produce the breed of upright citizens he hoped for (Franklin, 162).
Franklin was not alone in his distrust of arbitrary religious authority, this spirit having been predominant to some extent among the early colonists who had been driven from England by the new monolithic state religion. Principles of religious liberty as outlined in the First Article of the Bill of Rights underscore our Republican government's historic attachment to Franklin's Socratic humility with respect to religion. As long as churches have flourished within the consequent atmosphere of tolerance the tendency of this spirit to undermine individual citizens' prerogative to devote themselves to the Truth has been held in check. Today, however, as tolerance becomes more and more an autonomous religion in America and across the world, the Socratic mindset threatens to overwhelm Christian certainty of Truth. Franklin's style of tolerance is now many people's sole “religion” and the morality Franklin so valued, robbed of any firm foundational doctrine, is weakened to the point of collapse.
His moral code is marked above all by an ethic of tolerance which stems in part from a laudable desire to respect individual freedom, but also from a distorted definition of humility. In his list of virtues, humility stands at the end as a sort of addendum expressing his overarching concept of religious tolerance. “Imitate Jesus and Socrates” he instructs himself (Franklin, 150). The dichotomy in this instruction, obvious to anyone who understands Jesus as the Answer which Socrates stubbornly denies knowing, seems unapparent to Franklin. He strove for the classic Socratic modesty of “knowing that he knows nothing” and gains “at least the Appearance” of such humility, but it is not the humility of a Christian which arises from actual though unmerited knowledge of the Truth (Franklin, 157). Franklin's definition may indeed suffice for most practical purposes, and his primary concern was “the Utility and Excellency of [his] Method” (157). Through it he hoped to encourage human virtues among all sects. Reserving declarations of knowledge would promote respect for individual freedom with regard to beliefs about God and the nature of life, and adoption of a non-doctrinal code of virtue would, he believed, be in “every one's Interest... who wished to be happy even in this world” (Franklin, 158).
In evaluating the benefits of Franklin's purely moral religion, one must distinguish between its application in the sphere of government versus its application in the individual. Reducing religion to moral precepts discoverable by reason may be justified in the public sphere. Indeed, in a world where the religious turmoil of the 1500s and 1600s still reverberated throughout the West, removing governmental attachment to any “particular Sect” would be wise (Franklin, 157). However, within a church or an individual soul such tolerance becomes no more than false humility. Assuming that churches typically claim to be qualified to lead their members to the truth of Christ (or whatever else they hold to be ultimate truth), they must have certain convictions in context of which other beliefs are considered wrong. The human person, moreover, created for the truth as he is, will (like Franklin) be incapable of attaining true victory over pride, that “one of our natural Passions [most] hard to subdue,” if he does not recognize that there is a truth much deeper than the moral rules man can discover through unaided reason (Franklin, 160). Franklin's ethic of tolerance, then, is a useful guide for the government's approach to religious matters, but it cannot on its own produce the breed of upright citizens he hoped for (Franklin, 162).
Franklin was not alone in his distrust of arbitrary religious authority, this spirit having been predominant to some extent among the early colonists who had been driven from England by the new monolithic state religion. Principles of religious liberty as outlined in the First Article of the Bill of Rights underscore our Republican government's historic attachment to Franklin's Socratic humility with respect to religion. As long as churches have flourished within the consequent atmosphere of tolerance the tendency of this spirit to undermine individual citizens' prerogative to devote themselves to the Truth has been held in check. Today, however, as tolerance becomes more and more an autonomous religion in America and across the world, the Socratic mindset threatens to overwhelm Christian certainty of Truth. Franklin's style of tolerance is now many people's sole “religion” and the morality Franklin so valued, robbed of any firm foundational doctrine, is weakened to the point of collapse.
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